Resurrection, Inc.
Page 14
The nurse/tech looked at him with a puzzled, astonished expression. Dried blood from Francois Nathans stained the front of Danal’s jumpsuit, and the Servant’s own colorless synBlood darkened the fabric around his ragged wound. She spoke with a thin voice he would not have expected from her matronly body. “What do you want here, Servant? Has there been an accident?”
Danal placed a blank mask on his face and answered her calmly. “I was told to come here to be healed.” He used the last of his mental strength to wrench himself back to awareness of his surroundings.
Still not sure what to do, the nurse/tech refused to move. Then she clutched at her usual routine and stepped back behind the counter to reach a Net terminal. After hitting a few burst keys, she called up an input screen and looked at him with detached professionalism.
“Okay, how were you injured?”
Danal responded automatically with the self-programmed answer he had pounded into the front of his brain. “A riot in the streets. A stray projectile struck me. The Enforcer told me to come here.” His Servant programming rebelled, trying to deny the lie and state the bald facts, but Danal managed to control the other self.
“What’s your ID number? And who is your Master?” she asked in a flat voice, routine questions to her.
Danal balked and covered his momentary hesitation with a sigh of pain. Vincent Van Ryman was not his Master. Vincent Van Ryman was not even real, not anymore. An imposter now had the name and the physical appearance, but the real Van Ryman was dead, living again only as a simulacrum of disguised flesh, resurrected memories. Danal couldn’t give out his ID number. That would be like a beacon for anyone trying to track him down, a signal for the Enforcers and the Guardian Angels to locate him, to terminate him once and for all.
But the black dizziness swam in front of his eyes, like shark fins cutting the water of his consciousness. His synHeart labored, ready to burn out, his blood vessels running dry. Danal couldn’t worry about the future if he didn’t survive the present.
“Vincent Van Ryman. My Master is Vincent Van Ryman,” he said weakly. He stated his ID number a few digits at a time until the nurse/tech had all the information. Danal’s joints began to go haywire. For some reason his knees wobbled in and out, and he slumped against the countertop. He was oddly reminded of the moment of his rebirth, as he had emerged dripping from the vat and unable to control his own reflexes, and Rodney Quick standing there taunting him.
But Rodney Quick is dead. I killed him.
An accident.
Danal became partially aware again as the nurse/tech bellowed for one of the human orderlies. He felt a man’s ungentle grip on his waist and his uninjured arm. Their words drifted around his ears, and he was only vaguely able to comprehend them.
“Help me get him to one of the sterile rooms. Then go to the trauma chamber and find some of the extra bottles of synBlood.” (Nurse/tech.)
“Can’t he go to a repair center or something? I thought we didn’t fix Servants here.” (Orderly.)
“Consider it good practice, then.” (Nurse/tech: with cold sarcasm.)
But when Danal tried to move his legs, tried to help carry his own weight, the blackness in the air reached out to swallow him up. He reeled, and lost control of the door in his mind.
Unchecked, all the dead memories swooped after him as he fled undefended down into unconsciousness….
“I’d like to start a religion. That’s where the money is,” Francois Nathans had said.
It was just the start of a conversation, an exchange of ideas. But it altered the lives of Vincent Van Ryman, his father Stromgaard Van Ryman, and Nathans himself.
Young Vincent was eighteen years old at the time. He went to answer the door signal, but he knew it was Nathans even before he opened the door. Outside, the muscular and ever-watchful Servant bodyguards kept their strategic positions around the Van Ryman mansion. The bodyguards would have excluded most people—except Nathans.
With the growing blue-collar opposition to Servants and Resurrection, Inc., several terrorist attacks had been directed at the mansion itself. Perhaps the single private dwelling stated too blatantly how much wealth and success Stromgaard Van Ryman had achieved by putting blues out of work. Nathans, on the other hand, kept several dwellings, none of them elaborate and all of them very secret.
Vincent’s mother had been killed five years before, assassinated while she walked with her son on the streets. She’d fallen next to him, still trying to walk but with a half dozen projectile holes in her body. The thirteen-year-old boy realized how lucky he was to survive, and wondered if he’d be a target as well. He experienced anger and shock, but it was hard to feel deep sorrow for her. His mother had always treated Vincent as a burden, much as Stromgaard now did.
Vincent let Francois Nathans into the well-lit front hallway of the mansion, smiling as the tall man clapped him on the shoulder. “Hello, Vincent.”
Though it was dusk, they had several hours yet before Nathans would worry about the Enforcers’ curfew. Silhouetted in the dampening stillness of sunset, the Servant bodyguards stood motionless and threatening around the house.
Nathans had chosen to wear a silvery hairpiece this time; the older man wore silvery hairpieces only when he had something important on his mind.
“Where’s your father?” Nathans asked him, as if he didn’t know.
“In the study, playing Net games.” Vincent tried to keep his unconscious sneer in check. He hated how Stromgaard wasted his time, and wasted the capabilities of The Net, by using the entertainment directories and nothing else.
Vincent had watched his father slowly drift deeper into the background of running Resurrection, Inc. As the work grew more complex, it required a special kind of mind to manage it all, more than just a competent resource organizer (which, Vincent believed, was all his father could really be).
Nathans had shouldered more of the burden. While Stromgaard sulked and grumbled to himself about how Nathans was taking over what was rightfully his, the elder Van Ryman basically ignored his son.
Vincent had grown used to it over the years and trained himself to find his own means of entertainment. He had grown quite proficient in searching the databases and in doing programming. He became more and more impressed with The Net itself, finding little he could not do once he set his mind to it. He created several false identities on the electronic-mail network—not a difficult task, since some members of special-interest groups operated under pseudonyms, keeping their private lives anonymous. Vincent then carried on five different fictitious lives, all of which allowed him to look at society from different angles.
Nathans shrugged off his jacket and threw it over one arm as he strode down the hall to Stromgaard’s study. In the background, Vincent could hear some of the electronic sound effects as Stromgaard played his idiotic games. He heard a rapid succession of bleeps, then a whoosh, and then a quiet curse from his father.
Nathans waited outside the study door with a half smile on his face. He flashed Vincent a conspiratorial grimace, then entered the room.
Stromgaard did not condescend to acknowledge the other man’s presence. The elder Van Ryman always seemed to be searching for a way to annoy Nathans, but Nathans blithely ignored it, which perturbed Stromgaard even more. Sometimes his father’s childish attitude embarrassed even Vincent.
Vincent made ready to go back upstairs, where he spent most of his time. He never took part in their discussions, but this time Vincent paused on a whim and moved closer to the study as he heard Nathans’s opening gambit.
“I’d like to start a religion. That’s where the money is.”
Stromgaard greeted the proposal with silence, but Vincent could sense that Nathans had captured his father’s attention. The elder Van Ryman waited for him to continue.
“As the saying goes, the first priest was the first charlatan who met the first fool. We could cash in on that.”
“Why?” Stromgaard asked. “You don’t have enough mone
y? You don’t have enough to do lording over Resurrection, Inc. all by yourself?”
Nathans smiled, sidestepping the implied accusation. “It’s not actually the money, Stromgaard. I was thinking more along the lines of something for you to do. You’re… phasing out of your duties at the corporation. You obviously need something else to occupy your time.” He pointed to the Net screen on which Stromgaard’s game score still flashed. “Annihilating alien invaders? You’re more talented than that.”
“I’m not interested in religion,” the elder Van Ryman said. “And I’m not feeling much like a messiah lately.”
“No,” Nathans countered, pacing the room, thinking out loud. “Messiahs are… boring. They’ve been done so many times, you know. I had something more in mind like… well, something new.”
Stromgaard let out an incredulous laugh. “Something new? In a religion? Have fun trying to come up with an idea.”
Nathans sat down in the overstuffed chair and poured himself a glass of the Glenlivet Stromgaard always drank. Vincent occasionally sipped a small snifter of the scotch himself, mainly when trying to be part of someone else’s conversation, but he personally disliked its pungent taste and the way it lingered for hours in the back of his mouth.
“Well,” Nathans continued, “that’s what I was hoping to discuss with you tonight. A brainstorming session, like the ones we used to have when you weren’t moping around all the time.”
“I’m fresh out of ideas. Come back some other day.” Stromgaard punched a few keys on the Net keyboard, initiating another game.
Vincent stepped into the study, and spoke up before the two older men could see him. “You could run a computer model on The Net. Have the system design the most viable new religion, given an up-to-date analysis of current events and social trends.”
His father turned away from the screen and scowled at him. “Vincent, go to your room.”
“No,” Nathans interrupted. “I’m in the mood for ideas.”
Giddy at what he was doing, Vincent continued. “I was listening, sorry. But The Net could analyze all the world’s religions, correlate the main theses that seem to have the most impact, the greatest chance of hooking new followers, and then we can put it into the context of modern-day society—create something new, but with all the good parts of the old.”
Nathans grinned at him with bright eyes. Vincent felt a warm flush, but kept his pride in check. Stromgaard turned away from the Net screen and let the video spaceships play by themselves for a moment before they all annihilated each other.
“You can’t do that,” his father said. “It’s much too complicated. We’d need an army of superhackers and programmers.”
“Give me ten minutes,” Vincent said and took his place at the keyboard. He canceled the game and stepped his way down through the menus. He paused and couldn’t resist turning to his father. “The Net is good for more than just games. You’d see that if you spent more time exploring it.”
He set a few datastrings in motion, building a broader relational file. “I’m going to run a lot of the tenets through a logic routine, and have it discard anything that really makes no sense at all.”
“Ah no, Vincent, you’re missing the point,” Nathans said. “I don’t want it to be believable, not believable in the least. There’s a larger plan at work here. I want to make our religion ridiculous, because I don’t want to mislead any intelligent people, the ones with even a modicum of potential in their cranial chambers. I want to lay a selective trap, something that only the terminally stupid will fall into. Intelligence is the only thing we’ve got that sets us apart from other animals, you know.”
Vincent blinked and nodded, but Nathans seemed to have launched into a well-rehearsed speech. “The popular religions are at the root of the problem, teaching people not to think for themselves on pain of losing their Eternal Salvation. ‘The world holds two classes of men—intelligent men without religion, and religious men without intelligence.’ A tenth-century Syrian poet wrote that.”
“Nobody will believe you,” Stromgaard said in a confident voice.
“Mankind’s track record says otherwise. Think of all the people who, despite utter and overwhelming proof to the contrary, still believe in magic apples and talking snakes to explain the creation of the world?”
“Oh, don’t even start, Francois,” Stromgaard sighed. “You’re going to give me a headache. And we’re not interested.”
“Let me make my case! I’ve done my homework because I intend to do something about this. If you’re going to help me, you have to understand my rationale.”
“Who says we’re going to help you?”
“Doesn’t it bother you that, just because the Bible happens to say the Sun goes around the Earth, the religious fanatics feel it’s their right to go out and burn astronomers at the stake for proving otherwise? It’s been done. Would you swallow a story about a fish swallowing a man, then spitting him out safe and sound three days later, never mind that the hydrochloric acid in gastric juices would eat through a tabletop in a few seconds?”
Vincent paused at the keyboard to listen, but then continued with his work, eager to show off his skill with The Net.
“It goes on and on, but let’s not just pick on Judeo-Christians,” Nathans continued. “What about Islam? One God omniscient and omnipresent, yet He seems to have a fine-tuning problem—He can’t hear your prayers unless your head points toward a particular latitude and longitude? How could anybody believe such things?”
“Like believing a man could rise from the dead?” Stromgaard retorted to the head of Resurrection, Inc., with a glint of triumph in his eye.
“Not without due process! Besides, it takes us a little longer than three days. Religion is like a wet blanket to the thinking man. In Seventeenth-Century Russia, the Eastern Orthodox Church went to war with itself over whether the faithful should make the sign of the cross using two fingers symbolizing God and Man, or three fingers for the Holy Trinity—thousands and thousands of people died in the struggle! It’s pathetically funny in a way.”
Stromgaard sighed. “That was centuries ago, Francois. It doesn’t matter anymore.”
“But it hasn’t changed! The Vatican just released an announcement that people no longer need to be actually present at the Pope’s Christmas Mass to receive his blessing, because ‘improvements in technology now allow us to transmit God’s forgiveness electronically.’ And the Moslems are all excited because they’ve developed a new selective disintegrator ‘for Allah’ that’ll let them remove the fingers and hands of thieves according to Islamic law, keeping the pain but doing away with all the mess.”
Nathans shook his head wearily, as if in despair. “Progress doesn’t enlighten people—it just makes them stupid in new ways.”
Stromgaard snorted, narrowing his eyes. “You’re going off on another one of your crusades, Francois. Years and years ago you were trying to solve the world’s crime problem, and what ever became of that? Now it’s religion. Next, you’ll be working on the world food shortage. You storm ahead and argue a lot and leave us all in the dust. Why not just give it a rest?”
Nathans looked at him with a sour expression. “You must have a problem with grandiose ideas, Stromgaard. I’m giving you something to think about. Mull it over. Expand your mind. It looks like you’re getting out of practice.” He glanced around the study. “Do you have something to eat?”
“No,” Stromgaard answered flatly.
Vincent turned while The Net continued to labor. “But if you want people to expand their minds, Mr. Nathans, what’s wrong with having them ponder metaphysical things, like religion?”
“Ah, Vincent, thinking about such questions is fine, but when philosophy becomes a religion, then people stop considering the ideas and pay more attention to following ritual. Once you’re convinced that you have The Word Of God, you stop bothering to think about the details. How could a Supreme Being ever be wrong? Then your brain begins to atrophy.”
“Consider some, like Orthodox Judaism, that have stagnated in their rituals and symbols. They may as well just videotape their services and play them back year after year, generation after generation. Nothing ever changes. It’s always just the same mechanical gestures, the same memorized phrases. Nothing has been brought into the context of the modern world—do they think we’re all still shepherds in the Middle East? Are we still supposed to placate the old things that used to go bump in the night?” Nathans sat down, exasperated.
“‘Religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis,’ Sigmund Freud said. And he was right.”
“Got it!” Vincent interrupted, turning away from the Net terminal. Nathans looked up at him, and Stromgaard regarded his son skeptically. Vincent continued, “It’s a little bit unexpected, though. It looks something like Satanism, in an updated form.”
He pointed to the screen and listed out the results of the relational search. “You want something that the people will find exciting, something that seems slightly forbidden, which I take to mean something dark. You’ll want it to be titillating, so throw in a little racy symbolism, some suggestive rituals, maybe even sex during the high ceremonies. And you want your deity to be bigger than life, very powerful but within reach—not some ethereal, all-pervading god spirit that never interferes in the affairs of mortals. We want an Old Testament-ish dictatorial entity that rewards the faithful but does all sorts of unpleasant things to unbelievers. Try the popular conception of Satan—it all fits.”