The jokes were not far off the mark. Even shockjock Howard Stern had not anticipated how low human nature could sink when money was involved. Replicas of the Roman Colosseum were built in Las Vegas and Atlantic City, and no expense was spared in staging the world’s most exotic cock fights. Entire fortunes were bet on whether or not the triceratops really could win out against the allosaurus.

And even stranger developments were to arise from the “talking” that had brought humanity such power over life and death. If an identical twin of the last allosaurus could be brought to life after tens of millions of years from fragmented and degraded DNA, then bringing back the twin of a man who had been dead for mere centuries had to be fifty thousand times easier.

The last decades of Earth saw the spread of virtual-reality addiction and the emergence of a class of people who called themselves Zoners. As a rule, they accepted dead end jobs, lived in sparsely furnished apartments or in their parents’ basements, and spent all their nonworking hours “plugged in” to the best equipment their earnings could buy. The Zoners were almost exclusively men in their twenties. They showed no interest in either wives or children and, if civilization had lasted, would surely have marched quietly toward extinction. It seemed to some observers to be a lonely, pointless life; but the Zoners did not drag race drunkenly on Saturday nights, rob, or commit murder anywhere except in their private VR worlds, and it could even be argued that by not breeding, they were increasing, infinitesimally, the average intelligence level in the human gene pool.

Still, more than a third of Earth’s population succumbed to this super couch-potato existence. The most popular programs, when the end came, were the simulated lives of real people—which meant that there actually lived a Howard Stem and a Stephen Jay Gould, a Harrison Ford and a Harlan Ellison who never guessed that their lives were just somebody else’s VR program.

About the time the first virtual lives became available, not very long after the two thousandth birthday of a very interesting man from Nazareth, the Resurrectionist movement began in Egypt. In the immediate aftermath of the Plague Years, an obscure sect began spreading out of Thebes. Anointing themselves as the Lords of the Last Days, they revived the religion of the ancient Egyptians, quickly won over wealthy New Age converts, and placed at the center of their lives the warrior-messiah Tuthmosis III. From fewer than a dozen mummified cells they were able to reconstruct the entire genetic blueprint of the man many believed to be the pharaoh who had invaded the Mount of Megiddo and looked Moses in the eye.

Soon afterward, a Resurrectionist priestess birthed him into the twenty-first century, thereby turning an ancient religious belief into what gave all the appearance of being prophecy. From that moment, even the most pragmatic minds were forced to wonder if the old obsession with preserving pharaoh’s body to insure his resurrection had been based not upon superstition but upon actual foreknowledge that cloning technology would one day exist.