Enki Bilal's future is a world where animals ride in the club car of trans-national trains as they pursue their vanishing natural habitats, where memory drugs leave fugues of looped time in their wakes and where brutality is the undercurrent to affection. Against this dystopian backdrop, Bilal creates a three part meditation on the nature of immortality. Horus, the immortal Egyptian diety, seeks to understand the small, febrile scrabbling of humanity. Alcide Nikopol, the "resurrected" man from the past, struggles to comprehend his place in the present in order to have a future. Nikopol's grown son, physically identical to the father he has never met, discovers a past he never knew existed and, across the desolation of the urbanized planet, father and son attempt to bridge the gap that has been forced upon them.
The corruption, decay and moral stagnation of Bilal's humanity are splashed across his gritty illustrations as he throws us into a world that has lost its evolutionary imperative. Even the threat of an alien invasion in the shape of a giant floating pyramid isn't enough to lift humanity from its own moral morass. Bilal's' question as posed through the interwoven trinity of stories is one of legacies and possibilities. Can the individual man and woman still make a difference? Can (and should) they aspire to something beyond simple survival?
"Forget love, forget procreation," Horus tells Nikopol, "these are the affairs of mortals." Horus confides in Nikopol as they sit on the balcony of a hotel, watching snow fall on a Saharan desert landscape. "I wanted to make peace with humans," Horus says, "But they're too small-minded...You don't live long enough to retain or realize the value of what's really important." Though, Horus, in his immortality, is too broad-minded to see the bright microcosm of human existence. The time of Alcide Nikopol, his son and the women they love unravels into a bittersweet epiphany. Bilal's hand crafts a vibrant and deeply textured world and it is the subtle movement of his fingers that leaves so much of the future's future to our imagination.