Resurrection, Inc.

by Kevin J. Anderson

  On their last evening together, the night of Julia’s murder and the beginning of Vincent Van Ryman’s long nightmare that transcended even death, Julia had sat across from him in the formal dining room, resting both elbows on the tablecloth. It had started out as an argument, when both of them slowly let down their careful barriers of close confinement. Their mutually obsessive companionship began to wear on the nerves after a while. But for the time being they steered the conversation to more lighthearted things.

  They talked with their mouths full, savoring the meal the two new Servants had cooked for them. “I’m glad we decided to give them both gourmet programming,” Julia said as she slurped a mouthful of fettuccine. Joey and Zia stood just outside the door of the formal dining room, watching with oddly alert eyes.

  Vincent picked up the bottle of cheap pink champagne to refill both of their glasses. The bottle seemed slippery and unwieldy; he knocked it over, spilling half the contents on the tablecloth. Vincent couldn’t reach forward fast enough to catch it. The champagne foamed as it spread across the table. It all began to look blurry to him….

  Julia giggled at his clumsiness, but then stopped laughing abruptly—

  He awoke in the artificially dank chamber underneath the mansion, manacled to the walls. He recognized it as the cellar room where they had once held secret Inner Circle meetings with some of the highest-ranked neo-Satanist fanatics. But he and Julia had sealed that door, plastered over the opening. Who had torn it open again?

  As his eyes came into focus, he noticed Francois Nathans waiting there. He couldn’t see Julia.

  “Good. You’re finally awake,” Nathans said, taking a step toward him. Vincent gaped at the other man, confused, not quite ready to believe that Nathans would actually do anything to harm him. He looked at his wrists and ankles chained to the wall.

  “Manacles, Francois? You’ve got to be kidding.”

  Nathans smiled to himself. “It appealed to me.”

  Vincent became dizzy again, and a rush of confusion swirled around his head. Nathans? What was he doing in the mansion? Why hadn’t the man answered any of his messages before?

  “Julia. What happened to Julia?”

  Nathans made a wry scowl. “Oh how noble of you to think of the poor lady first, Vincent. She’s already dead—dumped on the street and deleted from The Net.” Nathans seemed to take a wry pleasure in watching Vincent’s response.

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “When have I ever lied to you, Vincent?” The man’s cool expression gave only faint hints of the anger that boiled inside.

  Vincent wanted to imagine that he had hurled himself against the chains, wanted to think that he had vengefully tried to strangle Nathans where he stood. But instead he responded as if someone had struck him in the stomach with a sledgehammer, knocking the wind from his lungs and destroying the will to live. He slumped against the stone wall like a beaten pet.

  Nathans drew a deep breath, as if not pleased with his own decision. “You, on the other hand, are a much bigger PR item. Our first ‘Traitor to the Faith.’ I couldn’t have dreamed up a better unifying force if I tried.” Nathans laughed, “Oh boy, we’re going to milk this for all it’s worth.”

  Vincent’s mind spun in circles, trying to find something to hold onto. Julia couldn’t be dead. They had just been talking and laughing together…. Nathans would never turn against him—he had taught Vincent so much, discussed so many things with him, hung so many dreams on his head. Nathans was too great a man, too sharp a thinker to stoop to childish and petty revenge games.

  Vincent saw movement out of the corner of his eye as a doctor stepped forward. Vincent noticed a star-in-pentagram logo embroidered on his white jacket.

  The doctor spoke to Nathans, ignoring the captive. “Now that he’s awake, the drug must be out of his bloodstream. We’re ready to begin.”

  “We need to take some blood samples, Vincent,” Nathans said flippantly. “I hope you don’t mind.”

  Vincent found the strength to struggle, but the manacles held him, and both men managed to grip his arm, holding it motionless. Vincent rolled his eyes downward to watch as his dark and syrupy blood bubbled up from the vein into a small sterilized vial. He breathed heavily as the doctor smeared his arm with coagulant. The medical man packed the vial of Vincent Van Ryman’s blood in a padded case, which he then snapped shut.

  But Nathans wasn’t a murderer—he wouldn’t have just killed Julia in cold blood.

  “He’ll have to hold absolutely still for the next part,” the doctor mumbled to Nathans as he fitted another hypodermic syringe with a capsule of yellowish liquid. He turned toward Vincent, and as Vincent cringed backward, the medical man injected him in the neck.

  “Sorry,” Nathans said.

  Vincent gasped, and his muscles turned cold, swallowed up in a blanket of frozen jelly. The rest of his body felt like a deadweight dangling from his brain stem.

  “A nerve paralyzer, Vincent. It’ll wear off, sooner or later. For now, we have to see about giving you a new image.”

  Vincent’s tongue thickened in his throat, but with the greatest effort of will, as if he were commanding every nerve one at a time, he managed to croak out a single word before his mouth froze half open.

  “Why?”

  Nathans’s eyebrows shot up, and his left fist clenched convulsively. He seemed to have been waiting for Vincent to ask his question. “Why? Because you told—that’s why! Don’t you realize how much damage you caused? You may have snatched away mankind’s last best hope for the future! You idiot, I trusted you! I saw promise in you, but you turned into a romantic sap instead!”

  Nathans hung his head. His eyes glistened, and his face flushed red. “By introducing Servants, I offered common people the greatest gift—an opportunity to become part of the intelligentsia, the elite, free of charge. No strings attached. All they had to do was take the trouble to learn, to better themselves, use their free time to benefit us all. But they snubbed the offer and held tight to their ignorance instead. So with neo-Satanism I shoved their own stupidity right back in their faces—and they ate it up!”

  The man’s rage continued to pour out, and he looked ready to pound Vincent’s face even as he hung suspended like a marionette on the manacles.

  “Can’t you see? Of course neo-Satanism is a sham, but the people have to realize it for themselves! You’ve cheated them out of their own realization. Prophets have been giving the public an endless string of truths since the beginning of civilization. Now, by your confession to them, by giving away our secret, you became just another debunker, just another man at a podium with another story to believe in. You’ve stolen the opportunity of self-enlightenment away from thousands of them. So many, so many!”

  The doctor lifted Vincent’s chin upward, holding his slack jaw in position. Another needle, another syringe—only this time the doctor left a thin line of pricks, one after another, along his jawline, up behind his ear. The medical man hummed to himself as he moved with the careful precision of a tattooist, jabbing with the needle, squirting a tiny amount of the milky gray substance under Vincent’s skin, and then moving half a centimeter over to repeat the process.

  Nathans calmed himself again. “You probably never heard us speak of surface-cloning, Vincent. That was something we kept under lock and key at Resurrection, Inc. While my special hotshot team worked on developing the resurrection process, one of the bioengineers stumbled upon a spinoff technique, a special type of permanent biological disguise. Your father knew about it, but he didn’t quite see its potential.

  “You see, after taking a blood or skin sample from one person, we can use the genetic information to ‘grow’ an identical face on someone else, to clone someone’s appearance. We strip the nuclei from the cells and then piggyback the genetic information on a special virus. After we’ve cultured the virus, we can inject it into many sites on the imposter’s face, beginning a ‘clone infection.’ The virus spreads, carrying with it
someone else’s genetic information.” He smiled, but anger burned behind his expression. “A new face is going to grow on you Vincent, spreading slowly. You’ll be someone not so recognizable. We can even do your hands, if we want to change the fingerprints.”

  Paralyzed, Vincent could not blink, could not cringe, could not respond—he sagged against gravity, humiliated. Preoccupied, the doctor injected a string of clone infection nodes around his hairline, pricking the scalp.

  “The whole process will take about a week. I’m told that the itching and burning sensations are almost unbearable while you’re growing a new face. But don’t worry, we can keep you pleasantly sedated until all that’s over with. Now that we have a clean blood sample from you, your own double can begin the same process of his own.”

  The doctor finished and put away his equipment. Without a word to Nathans, he packed up the case containing Vincent’s blood sample and carried it reverently up the stairs.

  “Maybe you’ve done irreparable damage to my plan, Vincent. But there might be a way to fix things, a last-ditch effort. We have someone who matches your physical build and genetic type. We’ll give him your face, your fingerprints, and when he’s completely ready, he will become Vincent Van Ryman. It won’t be perfect, because he’ll only look like you, but he’s studied your mannerisms, and his fingerprints will be identical. Only a retinal scan, voice print, or maybe a chromosomal match will tell the difference. Besides, we used drugs to get your Net password while you were unconscious, and that’s really all he needs.

  “I have already written the publicity speech for when ‘you’ make a sensational return to neo-Satanism, born again, denouncing your previous heretical babble. We could survive this after all—no thanks to you.”

  Behind his unblinking eyes Vincent saw a reflection of his own shock, horror, and bafflement. Francois Nathans was his idol, his friend, his teacher… and now his condemner, his torturer. At the same time, Nathans looked furious with Vincent, choking on righteous indignation.

  “In a few weeks, after your new face has grown and you look just like any other neo-Satanist convert—and when your replacement has fully taken his role as High Priest Van Ryman—we’ll have another High Sabbat, with you as the guest of honor at the sacrificial altar.

  “And no one will know the difference… because you aren’t you anymore.”

  23

  An hour after all evidence had been expunged from his lower office chambers, Francois Nathans received reports that the disturbance in the streets was completely quelled. He was relieved and overjoyed that the Enforcers had found only one destroyed Servant among the casualties, a female Servant—definitely not Danal.

  Danal had somehow gotten away. Now all that remained was for Nathans to find him.

  Sleepy, mentally exhausted, his stamina and his nerves stretched and frayed: Nathans dimmed his office and lit a scented candle, letting the warm, flickering illumination soothe him. Turned down so low that he could barely hear it, a scratchy tape of Fats Waller sent strains of jazz through the dimness.

  The message light sprang to life on the communications screen, and Nathans required a great effort of will to lift his finger and respond.

  A white-armored Enforcer appeared on the screen, fidgeting. Nathans opened his eyes, trying to stare the man down, but he could see no response behind the black polarized faceplate.

  “Mister Nathans?” the Enforcer asked.

  “Yes? What is it?”

  “I—I have been instructed to inform you that there has been another… that the body of the technician Rodney Quick has disappeared. We suspect it might be the Cremators, sir.”

  The news struck him like a knife in the back, an unexpected blow from a forgotten adversary. Nathans surged fully awake. At another time he would have found this exhilarating, but too much had already gone wrong for one day. He clenched his fists, whitening the knuckles as he struck the side of his desk. For a moment he could find no words, and then they all seemed to burst out of his mouth at once.

  “But how could he have been taken? He was right in our own building! Who was watching him? Where was his body taken for storage? How could someone have gotten to him?”

  The Enforcer looked ready to break down. “We took him to the resurrection levels, sir. With Rodney Quick killed, there was no other alternate tech designated for that section. We had the riot to attend to, sir, as well as trying to find your Servant. But we didn’t think there would be a problem. There shouldn’t have been. And now the body is gone, without a trace. As far as we can tell, no one entered or left the resurrection levels.”

  “Then your information is wrong!” Nathans snapped.

  “There’s another thing, too—” the Enforcer began, hesitant and uncertain.

  “What?” Nathans stared furiously for a moment, then dropped his gaze. No use frightening the man so much he couldn’t speak.

  “One of the Servant assistants in Lower Level Six seemed extremely agitated when we tried to question her about the disappearance. We had to use the Command phrase to get her to respond at all, but she dropped to the floor before she could answer. Rolled up her eyes and fell over. Apparently dead. I swear we didn’t do anything to her. It seems that she nullified her own microprocessor.”

  Nathans sat back heavily in his chair, frowning deeply. “But how? How can that be?” he mumbled, mostly to himself.

  With a backhanded gesture Nathans muted the screen and continued to mutter to himself. Servants committing electronic suicide? Rodney Quick taken from Nathans’s own doorstep at Resurrection, Inc.? Danal lost in a mob? He tried to think of a suitable curse to spit out of his mouth, but could come up with none.

  All evidence suggested that the Cremators did not take their subjects at random, only those who entered into a special contract. Did Nathans have a traitor in his own midst? It was a particularly sharp blow to think that Rodney Quick could have been involved with the Cremators. It infuriated him, made him feel blindingly impotent.

  He gritted his teeth and switched on the screen again. The Enforcer jumped. “I don’t care what you have to do, or how you go about it. But I want you to find Rodney Quick’s body.”

  With a gesture of finality, Nathans blanked the screen, watching the nervous Enforcer vanish into dark static. He paced the room, talking to himself, thinking through possibility after possibility. Some of them worked out in his favor, some of them didn’t.

  A whispered voice in the background, Fats Waller continued to sing the blues.

  He had not quite managed to walk the perimeter of the room twice before the message light signaled again. Nathans scowled impatiently at the interruption, but then he realized the communication came from a different channel, one of the more highly secured outlets.

  A blue-armored Elite Guard stared back at him as the screen came into focus. “We’ve found him.”

  Nathans felt a surge of excitement. “Who? Rodney Quick?”

  “Who?” the Elite Guard asked.

  “Never mind. Who did you find?”

  “Your Servant, sir.”

  Nathans gripped the edge of the desk, feeling his heart pound. “Where is he? Is he injured?”

  “We think he’s holed up in a medical center in another district. One of the Guild Interfaces spotted his name and ID code entered into The Net. A nurse/tech apparently processed him for physical repairs. As your receptionist implied, Enforcer Jones seems to have injured him during his escape. He’s been recuperating there most of the afternoon.”

  “Can we get him? What’s the situation?”

  “Probably. We’ll have to be careful.”

  “Damned right you will! I don’t want him damaged. He’s too valuable. I’ve got a lot riding on that particular Servant. Do you understand?”

  “Ours is not to reason why.” The dry tone from the faceless Elite Guard almost startled Nathans. “We’ll capture your Servant.”

  Nathans rubbed his hands briskly together, but then realized it was an old habit he
had picked up from Stromgaard. “I’ll wait for you to bring him to me.”

  24

  And then the ritual of the High Sabbat, viewed through a drug-fogged haze. He saw the crowded people, the altar, the symbols—

  Rah hyunn!

  Rah hyuun!

  —the imposter wearing the face of Vincent Van Ryman, holding up the sharp-bladed arthame as the real Vincent lay back, paralyzed, unable to move, unable to cringe. But perfectly able to feel the biting steel maul its way into his chest.

  “Ashes to ashes, blood to blood; fly to Hell for all our good!”

  “I remember the pain of the knife, like an explosion. And then… everything turned black, a hard black, like a polished rock. I can’t describe it,” Danal said, focusing his gaze deep into the distance.

  “Then I was blinking my eyes and looking out of the vat on the resurrection levels. Amniotic fluid was draining down into grates in the floor—I could hear it. All of that’s still very vivid to me. A tech stood in front of me.” Danal hung his head. “I killed him later on.”

  The nurse/tech didn’t seem concerned. “Nothing in between? Just the knife thrust and then waking up in Resurrection, Inc.?”

  Danal wrinkled his smooth forehead as he considered. “Nothing. It’s like a cassette tape that’s been spliced together. First my death, and then a gap, and then… coming back.”

  The nurse/tech did not seem surprised, as if she had heard it all before.

  Suddenly Danal’s own mind doubled back on him, and other questions—previously held at bay by his recurring memories—began to push forward. “But who are you? You’re a Servant! I can tell by your skin. You were a Servant… you’re alive!”

  She smiled placidly. “Just like you.”

  Her words struck him like a splash of cold water on his face. “Are there… others?”

  “Yes, others who have awakened—through some traumatic experience—and now they can access the memories of their previous lives. After you meet Gregor, he’ll explain it a lot better than I can.”