... Wonderball Apocalypse
Gerry Wong is not Dr. Frankenstein, although his story strongly echoes that once modern mythology. The monsters he has unintentionally helped to create out of crystals and light are accidentally let loose into the world. He returns from the dead as one of those monsters, not a collection of dead body parts, but a soul trapped inside a crystal ball.
Unlike the other reincarnated souls, Gerry knows where he is. He understands that the “ghost” he is partnered with is just an artificial intelligence connected to the information web of the world, and forced to do the bidding of its owners. Gerry subdues his ghost, regaining partial control of his life, and begins his journey like Orpheus into the netherworld to rescue Lucinda Tarne. The love he felt for her when alive, may have been even more than a blend of physical sensation and intellectual desire. It may have been the force that has drawn him back to life, and it gives him purpose in this afterlife.
Gerry spent his short life studying the field of embodied cognition and how it would help generate an Artificial Intelligence better than all others. He must reconnect with the physical world, to embody his own cognition. He must rebuild a body for himself, capable of sensing and functioning within the real world. As he physically travels around the world, his character functions as a means to explore the world’s reaction to an invasion of souls from beyond.
The narrative arc is a metaphysical epic journey from science run amok to an understanding of reality and the Spirit Game. The understanding arises from Gerry’s unique perspective. While alive he studied the boundary between mind and body, driven by his intellectual desire to build intelligence with the help of real world sensations. Reincarnated, he contemplated the boundary between soul and system, exploring the similarities to the Turing test Game he mastered as a member of the Shakespeareans. He becomes a bridge between life and death, realizing that the body is just an avatar of the soul, and that the players exist on a higher plane.