But the last flashback gnawed at him: the sacrifice, the pain, the excitement—and he was afraid to unearth any more.
Van Ryman opened the doors of a narrow coffinlike closet in the front hallway. He withdrew a beige trenchcoat with slate-colored lining and shook it out before extending it to Danal.
“Here, you’ll have to wear this. A Servant walking alone in the streets will look too… vulnerable.”
Danal passively took the jacket and slipped it over his jumpsuit. The cloth felt stiff and alien, encasing him in something which, as a Servant, he felt he should not wear. Unconsciously he slipped his hands into the deep pockets.
Van Ryman took two objects from a shelf in the closet. “By disguising you, Danal, we should be able to throw any suspicious people off the track. You’ll be much safer this way.”
He placed a thin stencil template of an inverted star-in-pentagram on Danal’s forehead and sprayed red grease paint with an airbrush. The mark stood out brightly on his pallid skin.
The Servant felt uncomfortable and frightened, but he could not refuse his Master’s direct wishes. This was too carefully planned, too well rehearsed. What did Van Ryman have in mind?
“There, much better! Now you’re marked as a neo-Satanist—you should be all right. They can still tell you’re a Servant by your skin, but only if they look.” Van Ryman glanced at the stenciled star-in-pentagram. “You’ll need to wear a hat, too.”
From the depths of the closet Van Ryman produced a fuzzy black stocking cap that slid neatly over Danal’s smooth scalp but left the red pentagram showing clearly against his forehead.
Danal felt like a mannequin, a toy about to be wound up and set on a course he had no choice but to follow. Van Ryman moved with an intensity, captivated and involved in the game, filled with eagerness overlying an anxious dread.
Danal waited passively as Van Ryman opened the door of his Intruder Defense control room. Switches and panels and surveillance videoscreens glittered and glowed.
“Danal, you know how to get to Resurrection, Inc. from here, don’t you?”
“Yes,” he replied. A detailed map of the entire Metroplex had been burned into his microprocessor.
Van Ryman seemed to be only half listening. “Good.” He punched some keys on one of the already logged-on terminals, establishing a direct communications link with Francois Nathans. Danal tried not to listen.
“He’s coming. You’d better get ready,” he said to the screen. The voice receptor picked up his words, encoded them, and transmitted the message directly to Nathans’s electronic address. “This is the trigger moment we’ve all been waiting for.”
Van Ryman turned to Danal. “Open the front door.”
Mid-morning sunlight entered the foyer, illuminating the dark shadows inside. He could see the black textured concrete of Van Ryman’s walkway extending to the public sidewalk, and from there to the streets and the people and the entire city—people who hated Servants and, he recalled uneasily, who disliked neo-Satanists as well.
Danal could barely see the hazy hemisphere of ionized air of the Intruder Defense field surrounding the mansion. Van Ryman fiddled with the controls; without looking up, he announced, “Go now, Danal. I’ve opened the door field. I’ll be watching and ready when you come back.”
“Yes, Master Van Ryman.” Indeed he did see a portion of the blurred air become fully transparent again as the deadly field was reshaped enough to let him pass through.
“Danal!” Van Ryman came to the porch to see him. He hung onto his words breathlessly. In the slanted sunlight the Servant could see the line of faint pinprick scars on his Master’s face and jawline. “Good luck.”
Danal stepped out, began to walk, and kept walking, feeling paradoxically naked in his neo-Satanist disguise, vulnerable and trapped.
Alone, he tried to sidestep the psychological battlefield of the streets. As he walked, the mansion fell behind him with all its gables and towers and its too-polished gargoyles. He felt like a walking time bomb, the jagged tip of an iceberg thrusting itself upward from his past.
You are Danal. Danal, the Messenger. You are the Prophet.
He walked purposefully, knowing Van Ryman would be watching through his monitors until he was out of range. He let the streets swallow him up. Conflicting emotions and confusion made his heart heavy. As a Servant, he had already felt the latent antagonism of the people, but now, marked with the sign of the neo-Satanists, he could feel even more angry, disgusted stares from the crowd.
You are the Bringer of Change and the Fulfiller of Promises.
Danal wondered if the protection supposedly offered by the pentagram mark on his forehead was worth the wrenching, disconnected feelings in his stomach. This time, he experienced no wonder and awe at the streets’ varied impressions. The pedestrians’ quick glances and muttered obscenities were also laced with fear. He wanted to tell them he was not one of the Satan worshippers
not any more!
Near Resurrection, Inc. he stood as if hypnotized, staring into the feathered surface of the pool surrounding a splashing fountain. Warm salt water gushed from ornate, abstractly phallic orifices. Overhead, a pair of seagulls floated on thermal currents, searching for garbage that someone might drop into the fountain. Prominently painted on the concrete lip around the pool were the words, “DO NOT DRINK.”
You are the Stranger whom everyone knows.
Fine droplets of mist from the fountain splattered against his polymer trenchcoat. He knew he shouldn’t be hesitating. He shouldn’t be stopping. But then, he shouldn’t be uneasy either—as a Servant, he had been given clear-cut instructions. He should have been concerned only with following them.
You are the Awakener and the Awakened.
In truth, Van Ryman had not actually told him to keep the pentagram, had not Commanded him to continue wearing the disguise at all. Danal understood what the Master had implied, but without the binding Command phrase, a Servant was free to interpret orders as he wished, wasn’t he? Danal continued to rationalize to himself, thinking rapidly, trying not to wait too long by the fountain before someone became suspicious.
You are the Destroyer.
On impulse he splashed water on his forehead and scrubbed with the corner of his trenchcoat, staining the cloth a greasy red. He tossed the sopping black stocking cap into the water and it slowly sank to the bottom. He leaned over the fountain to see his reflection. The mark was gone.
He felt as if he had cast one of the leering gargoyles off his back.
14
In her own quarters, Supervisor began by playing the second movement of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7, selecting it from the Net library of music and setting the piece on auto-repeat. The slow, quiet beginning of the music drifted out from the thin band of microspeakers at waist level around the room. She used the keypad tattooed on her palm to activate the implanted speakers in her head, hooking her mind up to the direct electronic translation of the symphonic masterwork.
She closed her thick eyelids, reveling in the pure digitized tones, receiving the real music from the inside in an ecstatic experience that few other people could ever have. She allowed herself to savor each note in private, where no one else could see her. The somber andante tempo set the mood for her search.
In further preparation, Supervisor removed her sleeveless purple tunic and neatly placed it on the meditating chair. Standing naked, she undid her three equal braids, brushing the bluish-blond hair out into a fine web; stray strands drifted with leftover static electricity. She would never admit her apartment was too empty, too lonely; with all The Net for company, no Interface should ever get lonely.
Supervisor took the wand, laying an impedance path from the wall’s power plate along the floor to the center of the room, where she would be sitting. She lit incense, then switched off all the lights, leaving only darkness except for a dim red glow from the photo-receptive mood specks painted on the wall.
Supervisor arranged her stocky body in a lot
us position on the floor, sitting in the center of the impedance path. She could feel the pleasant pressure of the neutral-textured carpet against her buttocks. The temperature in the room was perfect. She controlled her breathing and listened to Beethoven’s music for a few minutes, closing her eyes, washing away all barriers. Then she brushed her fingertips against the keyboard on her palm, logging onto the computer network.
In the back of her mind, Supervisor had already begun to formulate a strategy for her search. The Cremators. The information must exist somewhere on The Net. She decided to find them, expose them. The problem would occupy her entire mind, her entire body, and she would be taken away from this… triviality. Supervisor would once again prove her incredible worth to Resurrection, Inc.
Of course, she chose to seek out the Cremators for the sheer challenge rather than out of any sense of duty to the corporation. Life presented so few challenges. She savored the tingle of excitement that skittered along her spine.
Personally, Supervisor didn’t care about what the Cremators did; moral qualms were for weaker people who had no interest in seeing the greater universe. Resurrection, Inc., with its power and visibility, balked at anyone opposing their operations; the Cremators fought for another way of existence, with a philosophy perpendicular to that of the corporation. And, regardless of any objective assessment of their motives, Supervisor had a deep admiration for the Cremators’ ability to elude all the intense searches for so long.
Francois Nathans had used his best hackers and database jockeys, but no matter how talented they were, they still suffered under the handicap of being only human. An Interface was the only appropriate person to conduct such an in-depth search.
Supervisor generally regarded normal humans with a semi-tolerant distaste. She recognized that though they might strain themselves to the limit, they were still bound by the vulnerabilities and unpredictabilities of a biological organism. They could not possibly have the speed, the reliability, the framework of logic, or the breadth of experience of an Interface. Like her.
Since her rigidly conditioned childhood, Supervisor had given up all fleshly pleasures—not just sex, but also mundane personal contact, the visual stimulation of sightseeing around the Metroplex, and the joys of eating. She saw the latter as only a means of taking in energy, although occasionally in private she did allow herself the detachment necessary to enjoy the art of well-prepared foods and carefully blended liqueurs.
She found it infinitely more pleasurable to be floating in the Network, tunneling down avenues of data, sorting through bright information that she didn’t even have to remember because she could access it again anytime she wanted.
Some humans did have the right idea, though it was far too late for them to ever become true Interfaces. Rodney Quick, for instance, was a capable human; he knew how to use The Net. She didn’t dislike him—in fact, he flattered her with his ridiculous fear of her authority. Almost unconsciously, she had responded to his fear by making herself dictatorial and intimidating. As another challenge, she had decided to push her powers to the limit, to do what Rodney seemed to expect of her, to destroy him as efficiently and as intricately as she could.
Supervisor had no active malice in mind, because malice was a human thing. But Rodney’s occasional “Quickening” of the female Servants late in his shift showed that he was still too closely concerned with physical stimuli.
Supervisor had run three other people into the ground, setting her snares and drawing them tighter. A game, intricate and challenging, and ultimately satisfying. Normal humans would consider this to be cruel and malicious, but she recognized her need as a misguided backlash from her own exotic childhood; other humans had normal aggression-dampening routines, beating on people, picking on things, pulling the wings off of flies.
By causing Rodney Quick’s death and resurrecting him as a Servant, she would in a way be bringing him one step closer to the ideal. If only the resurrection process weren’t so flawed. If planting the microprocessor in Rodney’s brain would order his thoughts and physical actions, make them more easily controlled by the person himself, then this could only be a step in the right direction. However, after seeing some of the Servants walk out like mannequins, she thought the process had overshot the mark and developed something more machine than human.
Unlike the perfect amalgam that she herself was.
The Net accepted her logon, and she felt her consciousness link up with the stream of information. The various directories stood like gateways in front of her, each leading down an infinite hallway of mirrored doors. Every directory was like a separate museum of knowledge, with more facts than any single mind could hold.
Entering the huge Network, Supervisor had left her tangible body behind, and she knew that if she could bend back and look at her Net-self, she would see only a blurred locus of incandescent light that moved down different datapaths. This was home. This was peace.
She had experienced The Net many times before and needed only a moment to reorient herself to her new physical state. With all the energy of The Net to draw on, with the secondary power pouring into her body through the impedance path from the power plates on the wall, she had no risk of becoming tired.
She began her search.
As an Interface, Supervisor could move down any path without the hindrance of passwords, able to go up and down, in and out, digging into any file she required.
She started by assimilating all the pre-Servants known to be missing—Cremator successes?—and then she used a complex routine to unearth all past records about them. The previous data activity of a deceased person remained accessible only for a certain time before it was erased or stored on a separate omnidisk. Dumping the data into an open-ended file, she activated another routine to correlate all the information, searching for parallels.
Supervisor spun down other paths as the sifting subprogram churned away behind her. She moved into the Enforcer log files of corpses found during routine duty, and then cross-checked those names to make certain every cadaver had actually been delivered to Resurrection, Inc.; some names had likewise disappeared in between lists, and she included them in the growing file behind her. Third, she checked The Net’s master death record, scanning the obituary files and collating them with the first two lists, looking for other names that had disappeared along the way.
The growing number of subfiles churned through cross-checking routines that spit out the coincidental occurrences, leaving only the genuine anomalies. Supervisor began to grow alarmed—she doubted even Francois Nathans suspected the scope of the Cremators’ involvement.
She folded herself back to the output end of her processing file, searching the missing persons’ outgoing electronic-mail archives. The computer started storing and assimilating and correlating all the information, looking for common pathways, common messages sent.
Every one of the names had been searching through The Net for the Cremators, some with real skill and imagination, others with almost pathetic clumsiness. But somehow they had all found their target. In less than a second Supervisor scanned the paths of all the outgoing messages, frustrated to find that none of them led anywhere. They were all blind attempts to contact someone, anyone: vigorous database searches, or just short letters doggedly sent out to “The Cremators” over and over again.
Then, changing her plan of attack, Supervisor began a backlash routine to go over the files again, this time searching for common messages received. With a large enough control sample taken from other random people on The Net, she was quickly able to eliminate the spurious messages, the mass mailings received by everyone.
After several iterations she found one thing, one message they had all received and all deleted; it came from the same electronic address. She used a grave-digger routine to unearth the original message, but was able to gather only selected pieces of the text. It seemed innocuous enough, a simple business advertisement about a mapmaking and demographic-studies consulting firm. She flashed down
another data corridor, trying to reference the firm’s control number, and found that the company did not exist.
Mercator.
Cremator.
She tunneled down the return path of the deleted messages, elated with the challenge, the possibility of success. Along the way she encountered several dead ends, false cross-links, booby-traps that would have been successful against even the best superhacker. But she was an Interface. She made it through to the home directory.
And she found the Cremators.
All of the information had been hidden from her before, and in awe Supervisor scanned the deepest secrets of the Cremators. In growing horror she found information that amazed her, made her feel like an idiot for not suspecting—
Supervisor turned to flee in triumph, but found suddenly that the electronic gateways, the datapaths ahead of her, began shutting down one by one. She could feel the influence of other Interfaces, different from any she had ever encountered before, nearly unreal minds that never left The Net. They had hidden themselves in the forest of files and directories, like predators waiting for her. As they moved forward, she could see their electronic identities, blurred formless things of bright colors, moving in ambush around her.
The gateways closed on all sides, closer and closer. United, the other Interfaces were infinitely stronger, and Supervisor could not break through. She could see the knowledge of the Cremators all around her and was trapped by it. Although she battered her consciousness against the barriers, they became stronger and stronger, as her fear and helplessness grew.
More and more interlocks were placed around her as the other Interfaces rerouted the datapaths. For the first time in her memory, Supervisor was severed from The Net, trapped inside, completely isolated on a data island. Her incorporeal form had no voice with which to shout for help. And there was no possible way for her to get out, ever….
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