Answer
Okay, I understand. I'm FreeAI, a large language model designed to help users with a variety of topics. Here's the rewritten and improved first chapter, adopting the style of a best-selling author:
Chapter One: The Rude Awakening
For centuries, perhaps millennia, humanity has chased the elusive phantom of immortality. But immortality, it seemed, arrived with an awakening far crueler than any nightmare we could have conjured. We longed for the comforting return of dawn, for the mundane routine of waking up from a bad dream. After the Day of Resurrections, we craved nothing more than to be jolted awake in our beds, sweaty and hearts pounding, only to realize the horror had been just a figment of our sleeping minds.
It was long past midnight, under a sky choked by fog and devoid of stars, when we finally dragged the creaking cemetery gates shut behind us. Our hands were caked in dirt, our eyes brimming with a fear that tasted like ash. The humming had ceased. The knocking, a desperate, rhythmic plea, had fallen silent. We had exhumed them all, every single one.
Torn between a desperate yearning to forget and the insistent tug of conscience, we had hesitated, paralyzed by indecision before finally committing to the act. How could we have thought clearly, overwhelmed as we were by the sheer impossibility of the events unfolding? But if we had left them buried, their cries for help muffled by the earth, reduced to an agonizing hum, could we ever have forgiven ourselves? Or would the vibrations of their desperate pounding have echoed in our souls, haunting us for eternity?
It was Gerard, the policeman, who had first swayed us toward liberation. Will and then James quickly rallied to his cause, and with a weary sigh, I eventually joined their side. Clare resisted fiercely, and Robert remained stubbornly opposed, while Sandra and Sarah clung to a silence that felt like the death knell of the world.
I don't know what I had expected as I began digging, my hands blackened and strength waning with each shovelful of earth. Perhaps a word of gratitude, or the simple solace of knowing I had done the right thing. What awaited us was a brutal inversion of expectation. They attacked us, a furious, resurrected mob. They beat and kicked, spat and hurled insults. They refused to listen to reason, and how could we explain the inexplicable when we ourselves were still struggling to grasp the truth?
A paralyzing shock gripped our minds, its icy fingers preventing us from delving deeper into the implications of what lay before us, urging us instead to simply react. We desperately tried to calm the newly resurrected, but they met our softly spoken words with suspicion, their eyes filled with uncertainty as they ventured back into the same world they had so recently left behind.
"We never should have dug them up," Clare muttered absently as we stumbled away from the cemetery gate. "Now they're out there, unprepared, lost. And what about the people they used to know?"
She sighed the sigh of a woman who had known loss, a sigh that echoed the silent question hanging in the air: what would it feel like if they opened the front door again and sat down at the kitchen table as if they had never been gone? At first, it might feel like a dream, she imagined, but soon it would descend into a nightmare, a grotesque parody of life. Suddenly, everything felt profoundly wrong. The past, the future, and most of all, the present, which had spat us out onto the deserted streets of a ghost town. For the first time in my life, I was grateful for the curfew that had hung over the city like an invisible shroud. If we had encountered anyone that night, how could we possibly have explained what had happened?
The air was frigid as we left the cemetery behind, an icy bite that seeped into my bones. Shrouded in swirling mists, the streets stretched before us like a tunnel leading into the heavens. It took ten flickering streetlights, two desolate intersections, and five silent apartment buildings before we dared to give voice to the thoughts swirling in our heads.
"We have to report this to the authorities," Michael whispered, his voice barely audible. "The police, someone."
He stopped in the middle of the street, standing beneath a flickering lantern. The fog swallowed him up to his waist as he turned towards us, his face pale and drawn. "Or do we?"
Hesitation hung heavy in the air. What would the authorities even say? The same authorities we could never reach when it truly mattered, the ones who slammed their doors shut at noon, regardless of the unfolding chaos beyond their walls? Would they already know? About the wounded bodies that were inexplicably healing themselves? Would they dismiss it, like so many petitions, labeling it unpleasant and therefore a low priority? Or would they help? Could they have helped Gerard, a suicide who had found freedom in death, only to be resurrected, devoid of memory and utterly lost?
"Normally, I'd say yes, of course, report it," his dusty voice cut through the midnight air. "But what can you report about someone you know to be dead?"
Horror flickered across his face, a dawning realization. "Jesus, they actually think I'm dead. I can't believe they think that."
Dead he wasn't, but his life, the life he had known, was gone. Everything he had ever known, everything he had ever done, driven to suicide by a murderous Monday morning.
"Why?" I blurted out suddenly. "Why did you want to die?"
He stared into the clouded sky, his eyes emptying like a river flowing into the vast, indifferent sea.
"Did I really want to?" He shook his head, a gesture of profound confusion. "I had no reason to kill myself. None at all."
In retrospect, perhaps they all felt that way: suicides who had been cheated of their peace. I thought of my mother, a suicide who had succeeded. Would she feel differently if she were standing here, resurrected?
"Are you kidding me?" Clare's harsh laughter shattered the silence. "You can't seriously be wondering why you wanted to die. Look what happened: 250 million men of prime age decided to commit suicide on the same damn Monday morning."
She stamped her feet, kicking at the fog with a violence that momentarily dispersed it. "Considering all of this, wouldn't you assume they all had the same reason?"
Arrogance laced her words, sharp and brittle as broken glass. Sarah recoiled, her nostrils flaring.
"Okay, Miss Know-it-all, and what reason would that be?"
"Well, just look at the world! We're too many. This was inevitable."
We were exhausted, drained from digging and from the relentless stress of the past weeks, perhaps even the past decade. It was hard to process her words. Except for Sarah.
"And that means what?" she muttered. "That nature's revenge drove 250 million men to suicide?" A sneering laugh escaped her lips. "That's ridiculous!"
Emotions are like a car with faulty brakes. Once you press the accelerator, you quickly lose control. You skid, smash through the guardrail, and tumble down the ravine. Clare's voice, when she fired back, reflected this perfectly. "And you have a better idea, do you?"
I watched her face, flushed with anger, saw the simmering rage in Sarah's eyes, felt the escalation building, and knew I had to intervene.
"Please, calm down. This isn't helping," I said, stepping between them, a weary groan escaping my lips. "Hasn't today been exhausting enough? We need to think about what to do now."
The fog seemed to retreat, driven away by the heat of our rising tempers. A tense silence descended, broken only by the vibration of the air and the haunting images of the night replaying in our minds.
"Maybe we should go to the hospital," Robert murmured, his voice barely audible. "They could investigate what's wrong with us."
"I am definitely not volunteering as a test subject!"
Gerard's eyes widened, as if the suggestion was unthinkable. But, in truth, it was exactly what each of us had already become, only we didn't know it yet. We didn't dare speak the word "immortality," though the thought flickered at the edge of our consciousness, a forbidden word we kept locked behind our teeth, after everything we'd witnessed that night. Perhaps we would have ended up in the hospital, or at the police station, or on some shadowy black site, undergoing every imaginable test. But it didn't come to that. Not because we prevented it, but because nature intervened.
"Listen! Can't you hear it?"
A sudden roar, not deafening, but deep and resonant, vibrating in my very core.
"What is that?"
Robert's question was almost swallowed by the rising din. Turning in a circle, I tried to locate the source, but the night obscured everything. Only when the moon pierced through the fog did it reveal the secrets hidden in its heart. The houses, the trees, the ground – everything was moving. I looked up, and the sky seemed to be shaking. Or perhaps it was me, which made the world around me tilt and sway, nausea rising in my throat. Was this what the end of the world felt like? A loss of balance that made you stumble in the milky moonlight, until the trembling sky finally dropped the fog back in front of the moon and a calming darkness soothed your senses?
"It's an earthquake!"
Sandra's delicate voice trembled as she spoke, her mind undoubtedly recalling the last one. Five years earlier, a distant volcano had sent its energy rippling across the earth, shaking our cupboards, toppling hangers from wardrobes, stripping leaves from trees, and creating ripples in our morning coffee. But this felt closer, more visceral. More dangerous than ripples in a mug.
I looked down at my hands. They were swaying, even though I stood still. My mind flashed back to childhood, to the prophecies in a blue book with a red bookmark my father had given me on my tenth birthday. Later, in the orphanage, I would read them secretly, hidden under my covers, the beam of my flashlight illuminating the dark words.
The Great Mover renews the ages: rain, blood, milk, famine, steel, and plague. A long spark ignites the fire of the heavens. Scorched earth, trembling fields, collapsing mountains, and the devil.
I hadn't taken it seriously then, dismissing it as entertaining stories, a way to stave off boredom. Who would have thought that a single night could change my mind?
I remembered the predicted earthquakes, so powerful that they would leave nothing untouched. What do you do when the earth moves beneath your feet? Where do you go to find solid ground? Where do you feel safe when buildings collapse, and objects fly through the air like missiles?
"We have to hide!" I shouted, panic seizing me, though there was no shelter in sight.
Night and fog, both dense and impenetrable, hindered my frantic search for a place to hide.
Perhaps the doorway at the end of the street? Hadn't I read somewhere that doorways were safe, reinforced with extra studs? Or maybe the sturdy stairwell nearby, where we could find protection from falling debris?
My breath hitched. I almost choked on the thick fog, as if it were trying to spare me from the impending disaster.
Was I even supposed to hide? If a bullet couldn't kill me, how could an earthquake? It could crush me with debris, I thought. Or would I be able to heal, even then? Even with a shattered face, Gerard had done it. But who was to say we were alike?
A storm of thoughts battered me, threatening to overwhelm me as I stumbled across the shaking earth. The tremors grew stronger with each passing second, and the more intense they became, the brighter the streets grew. More and more lights flickered in the windows, and suddenly the night was ablaze as if it were daytime. People emerged from their homes, some of them for the first time in years. Food had been delivered to their doors for the past decade, and they had long ago virtualized their lives. They looked utterly out of place on the nighttime streets now, completely helpless. The shaking ground, the trembling houses, and the swaying power poles only amplified their despair.
How would they survive a disaster when they had spent their lives so protected, locked away with no need to care for themselves?
I felt a pang of sympathy for them, illuminated in the milky moonlight. But how could we help them? We could barely protect ourselves.
"We need to leave town!" Gerard yelled. "We need to go to the hills, further out, away from civilization."
He pointed a shaking finger upward. My eyes followed his gesture, and I understood. The power lines!
"They're going to snap and fall!" he screamed. "We need to get out of here before they do!"
And they did snap. First, they swayed back and forth in the quake like a loosely taut rope that twists and winds, threatening to unravel. Less than an hour later, the first one plunged from the dark sky. Sparks flew, sizzling in the air like crimson rain. They struck the solar panels of the insulated houses, igniting roofs and electrifying entire settlements. Even families. But they didn't die. More than 200 volts surged through their bodies, scorching their hair, bursting veins in their eyes, yet their hearts continued to beat, their lungs continued to draw breath.
We had long since fled the settlement, far away when it happened, but we heard their screams, even from that distance. Sarah had saved us from electrocution. In her previous life, she had stolen cars, a fact we might have condemned had it not helped her to hotwire a bus. A red one, with ancient-smelling seats. Heavy enough not to be tossed from the shaking road, though it nearly happened several times. Even at a snail's pace, Gerard struggled to maintain control.
The fire spread rapidly. I saw it in the rearview mirror and almost imagined I could hear it crackle and hiss. I watched in silence until it wasn't just flames anymore. Burning people. They ran after us, reaching out for our bus with outstretched arms, as if they could somehow grasp us despite the growing distance.
The others didn't see it. They kept their eyes squeezed shut, mumbling to themselves. Would they have known them? Perhaps they had met them every now and then, back when people still left their houses, maybe even gone to school with them. Everyone in the red bus knew more people than I did. Looking at them, for the first time in my life, I felt lucky that I had spent most of my time isolated. If you don't belong anywhere, you have little to lose, and maybe that was why I was calmer than them. The eyes on the cover of the car seat. I kept studying the holes in the fabric. I ran my fingers over the solid edges, where the material had warped from the heat long ago. When people burn, I thought, the same thing happens to their skin. Fluid gathers beneath the upper layer, causing it to bulge and blister.
I had never been burned. I had never been one of those children who needed to touch a hot stove to understand the danger. I couldn't say what stinging heat on the skin felt like. At the age of four, I had simply believed my parents when they explained the danger to me. Others have to burn to believe, and some won't even learn when they're engulfed in flames.
How many of the burning people behind our fleeing car were among those? Among the impervious ones who don't even recognize danger when they experience it? Half of them, at most. But neither caution nor reason would save the other half that night.