Playing God

PLAYING GOD

What if death were no longer permanent?

Dr. Larry Schmidt is a brilliant but deeply neurotic genetics professor at Yale University who has spent years pursuing the impossible: a way to bring the dead back to life. His research combines experimental genetics, regenerative cells, and microscopic technology capable of repairing the human body from within. After countless failures-and plenty of doubts-Larry finally has his breakthrough.

There is only one problem.

Someone has to be the first human experiment.

When Larry successfully resurrects Minton Kane, a troubled young man who died from an overdose, the scientific world is thrown into chaos. What begins as a secret laboratory experiment quickly becomes an international sensation. Larry has accomplished something humanity has dreamed about for centuries, and suddenly governments, corporations, religious leaders, journalists, activists, and ordinary people all want a piece of the discovery.

But Larry soon realizes that bringing someone back from the dead is much easier than deciding whether they should have been brought back.

Every resurrection creates another impossible question. Who deserves a second chance? Should murderers and tyrants be resurrected alongside saints and victims? What happens when someone who died by suicide is suddenly forced back into a life they deliberately abandoned? If death can be reversed, does mortality still have meaning? And who gets to decide who lives?

As Larry's invention spreads beyond the laboratory, his scientific achievement becomes a political and moral crisis. His personal life begins unraveling alongside the world around him. Burdened by guilt, family problems, exhaustion, ambition, and the crushing realization that millions of people now see him as something greater than human, Larry struggles to understand what he has actually created.

Then the impossible happens again.

The dead begin returning-not simply as scientific specimens, but as people with unfinished lives, unresolved relationships, memories, regrets, and their own ideas about what they have been given.

Among them is one of the most unexpected figures imaginable: comedian Robin Williams, whose resurrection forces Larry to confront the emotional consequences of his discovery in a way no experiment ever could.

And somewhere above it all, God is watching.

With the irreverence of a dark comedy, the imagination of classic science fiction, and the moral anxiety of Frankenstein, Playing God asks what happens when human beings finally acquire the power they have spent thousands of years attributing to the divine.

Because creating life may be a scientific achievement.

But deciding what to do with it is something else entirely.

PLAYING GOD is a contemporary speculative novella about science, mortality, ambition, guilt, faith, second chances, and the dangerous human desire to solve every mystery-even the ones that were never meant to have answers.