THERE IS A NARNIA, and death or near-death was the wooded nexus that made travel there possible. Not through a magical wardrobe, nor the fantastical creation of the mind, but by way of an induced near-death state of cryptobiosis, generated in the Amaranth. However, in this case the metabolic activity in the Dewar wasn’t just reduced to an undetectable level—the person was dead as a doorknob. The name Amaranth was chosen because the color represented immortality, derived from the name in Greek mythology of a flower that was believed to never die that grew in the abode of the Greek gods on Mount Olympus.

     It was complicated, if not morbid sounding, but Innovations Technology Laboratory (ITL) became proficient in art of death and dying. They now had the phenomenal power to freeze Colonel Steven Scott solid and then thaw him back to life in their cryogenic Dewar. This type of impending Near-Death Experience (NDE) wasn’t new to the world, but trying to evince and harness the powers of the soul and record its disembodied ventures was unheard of. It was an extremely intricate project, but was the only way that Dr. Mark Starr, the director of ITL, believed he could validate the presence of a soul and its abilities.

     “It’s a gordian challenge that we will solve,” Dr. Starr posited, to his eager and receptive staff, “and demonstrate the deftness of mind over matter. I believe that our experiments will conclusively demonstrate that there is a soul that it is the possessor of human experiences.” He believed that it stood behind, over, and above its experiences and yet remained the same throughout life, and endured beyond the life of the body.

     To him, Narnia wasn’t an imaginary land ruled by a tyrannical White Witch, but a reality conceived by a maximally great being, where perfected bodies may actually dwell symbiotically with conscious souls, and life wasn’t described merely in the language of the typical neuroscientific, physics, or chemistry, but in abounding wonder and fascination. 

     The notion was thoroughly scrutinized but—no one could bring about imagination of this magnitude. Not yet.

     Even thinkers who denied this sort of view admitted that it was common religious lore—but actually visiting the abode of God was an absurd, scientifically implausible hypothesis. It was glibly dismissed with, oh I see (I’m speaking to a religious nut) you’re on your own, if you want to believe in imaginary friends.

     Up until now, Dr. Starr had mostly agreed, “The answers are best found in philosophy and theology, but…if the afterlife is a legitimate realm like Narnia, as I believe it is, and can be accessed…it is indeed an extraordinary project, in the truest sense of the word.”

     Even those who thought it was a ludicrous quest acknowledged the daring of such a venture.

     “I’m not convinced that we cease to exist when the ‘lights go off’,” Mark said to his undaunted staff. “The real questions are who turned the lights on in the first place—and is there a way out?” It was a conundrum that he had pondered since childhood.

     Dr. Starr was confident that a robust case could be offered for the soul and the view that it is an immaterial thing different from the body and brain—and NDEs seemed to count in its favor.

     “The previous one-hundred years have uncovered highly evidenced cases of souls who had, by all accounts, traveled beyond the physical realm, interacted with the dead, and at times revealed themselves to other living persons—I can show you the extensive records.”

     The testimonies were disclosed by ostensibly sane, educated, and professional people who had entered a disembodied state upon death or near death and had somehow returned to tell their phenomenal stories to experts in the field. Even though the average person might see them as delusional, they had nothing to gain by sharing their experiences.

     In addition, the metaphysical studies didn’t, for one minute, settle the issue of whose religion was right, nor was it meant to. But by nearly all accounts it confirmed the idea that humans were body (brain) and soul (mind) —and that there was indeed something to life after death. A real place or realm that could be traveled to. Dr. Starr’s suppositions were bolstered by The Journal of Near-Death Studies, a peer-reviewed academic journal devoted to the psychology and psychiatry that studied the physiology, phenomenology, and after-effects of near-death experiences.

     “I’ll keep a copy in the lab for anyone interested,” Starr said. The testimonies in the magazine were far beyond anecdotal third-party hearsay and became the catalyst for his more advanced Mind-Body Problems projects.

     There was excitement as well as few indifferent nods.

     Initially those involved in the Mind-Body Problem projects, at Innovations Technology Laboratory, were researching and developing telepathic technologies and a synthetic intelligence designed to match wits and ultimately beat the no-win scenarios presented by an artificial super-intelligence on the battlefield. The Department of Defense showed great interest. They had already spent millions of dollars on the promise of a national defense weapon. If it ever came to fruition, the secret project was designed to investigate extrasensory phenomena and whether or not the sheer power of the human mind could be harnessed for acts of espionage and war.

     Most of them failed.

     Early on, ITL had leaned into their projects and used up vast sums of money on their own research and development. They soon discovered, through a happy accident, that there was a perceptible science to the supernatural. The self-evident lines which looked to separate the disparate fields of study were seemingly erased when ITL unexpectedly detected an immaterial mental substance, that they classified as PSYCHON radiation. It was thought by some to be the soul and it showed the promise of working with their bionics. Unlike Steven Hawking’s speech processor of the past—this bionic machinery didn’t seem to require physical interactions, like eye movement or facial cues, to communicate with the PSYCHOLOGICAL BIONICS (PSYCHONIX) technology. What they discovered was that we’re all uniquely coded with an unusual mental radiation, a fine-tuned fingerprint or personality that can be read and amplified.

     “Our supreme challenge,” Dr. Mark Starr’s said, “has been how to separate and harness this cognitive power source. It has been time-consuming, if not nearly impossible to chart the full range of the Holt spectrum that we’re defining it by.”

     “We’re about one-tenth of the way through, doctor,” one of the primary inventors said, “but with AI we’re picking up the pace rapidly.”

     “Thanks Brad.”

     “The tiny module of hardware to be tested and, in due course, used for this metaphysical exploration is a high-level AI duplexer with a MDSL-1 (Multi-Dimensional Spatial Lattice) microchip and Psychomorphic Interface (PI) that we predict will both remain with the corpse and simultaneously dematerialize and bind to the soul.”

     “If indeed there is such a thing,” Dr. Gus Kahn strenuously interjected. 

     The device was encased in nanoscopic amorphous metal glass to be worn in newly developed glasses or implanted into the brain or any number of applications. It was fascinating, but theoretical.

      “Keep your fingers crossed,” Dr. Starr said, having postulated earlier in the project that it was feasible to tether the soul as it leaves the body and allow for a peek beyond death. “If our calculations are correct, the gadget should aid the central nervous system and track the person as they transition.”

     Bringing about death, of course, would be the easy part.

     Preserving the body and bringing the person back to life would be the grand finale. 

     It, no doubt, highlighted the beyond imagination Innovations part of ITL, although to some the word Insane was more apropos.

     Eventually, with the new advancements, the Mind-Body Problem projects at ITL were fully funded by the government to set the innovative pace for their mental discoveries, giving them time to truly debate the source of consciousness, and traverse potential metaphysical bridges. The evidence needed to be substantiated, and they were certainly mindful of short-sighted variabilities and biases. Experience reminds us, Dr. Mark Starr thought, that when we ignore reality, it sooner or later comes back to bite us in the rear.

     The Federal Government of the United States was in an Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI) race and there were radical benefits and serious dangers associated with these types of transhuman developments. The cybersecurity was sealed tight, and nothing could be divulged without potentially causing grave damage to national security. If the AI was hijacked or explicitly designed to kill or destabilize nations, it could be weaponized by the enemy, and a viral AI could easily be one of the next significant Manhattan Project scenarios. As the project evolved it became more and more consequential to national security and was vaulted to the political forefront.

     There have always been those programs and weapons that were so highly classified that public hearings and budgets were deemed inappropriate by the Director of National Intelligence.     

     This was one of them.

     The Black Budgets would handle it. That entailed operating funds for intelligence, CIA, global listening posts of the National Security Agency, the super-secret satellites of the National Reconnaissance Office, and NASA. All of these—and only God and the President of the United States knew what else. This beyond Top Secret / Sensitive Compartmented Information (TS/SCI) clearance was sitting on the President’s desk now, identified on its cover with a black: P.

     In the privacy of the Oval Office, he put on reading glasses, leaned back in his leather chair behind the Resolute Desk, and leisurely read through it—invariably blown over by the astonishing technological advances and our ability to adapt and transform faster than our enemies. The new PSYCHONIX proposal that the President read argued, ad rem, for more research and development and to ramp up a more progressive technology, which could integrate and enhance the brain and, for all intents and purposes, probe deep consciousness. It was something state-of-the-art AI couldn’t do alone.

     Yes, this is the future.

     It was a brilliant combination of a technology that not only knows what’s what, but what it is.  Sure, a computer can recognize all the dogs faster than a human, the President thought, but my five-year-old granddaughter knows what a dog is and that it is soft and fury and likes her.

     If there was indeed a cutting-edge device that could overcome and enhance human limitations, transcend physical reality, and harness the faculties of a soul, then they wanted it before the Russians, Chinese, or some other economic superpower got their hands on it. The Chinese were already syncing a monkey’s brain with a computer in their experiments, but it made the Space Race seem slower than a herd of snails traveling through peanut butter.  

     It was a matter of life or death, maybe the only way for humans to maintain control. 

     The hard problems of locating and agreeing upon exactly what constituted a mind and how consciousness existed had been debated by science and religion for millennia. But now, to all appearances, science, or Dr. Mark Starr more precisely, had cut the Gordian knot, and more fully understood the metaphysical entanglements of mind and matter. He led the vision, and the ITL staff exhaustively tested PSYCHONIX, driven by the newly developed MDSL-1 that some began to call a modem for the soul.

     It was truly the final frontier.  

     One man, Colonel Steven Scott, U.S. Army Special Forces (Retired), had a dormant mental ability that was blossoming. He had had it since childhood. If unleashed it could have double-edged consequences, for good and bad—but it was a veritable unknown. He was chosen for the Mind-Body Problem project due to his struggles with PTSD and familial ties to the director. The doors were opening, and a special opportunity provided. He took it. If the experiments were successful, Steven would become the first person to explore and capture all that the human mind sees, believes, feels, thinks, and loves in this world and the next. He and his stepbrother Dr. Mark Starr were persuaded by the words often attributed to C.S. Lewis: You do not have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body. 

     If Steven Scott can overcome his dysfunctional childhood, mental health issues, espionage, and induced near-death experiences in a cryogenic Dewar, called the Amaranth, it’s then that he may ultimately find healing, happiness, and hope—provided it doesn’t kill him first.