Sphere of the Never-Dead

Two friends are abruptly transported from their own time into the year 3300 after a blinding, near-freeze encounter and awaken in a clinical, high-technology facility. Scientists provide actinic revival and explain the temporal displacement, while the friends react differently: one analytical and unsettled, the other flippant and restless. They discover an opaque authority called the Three Brains of Taval has decreed that one must enter a state of Death-in-Life, setting up moral dilemmas, covert maneuvering, and a struggle to defy a fate imposed by distant powers.