Resurrection, Inc.

by Kevin J. Anderson

  The Guards had let him throw a robe over his shoulders, but Jones still carried his white Enforcer boots in his hands. They marched with muffled footsteps to a private hovercar that had been painted a dark flat blue to be invisible against the night sky.

  For a moment Jones thought they were going to lock him in a segregation chamber in back, but instead they made him sit close between them in the main cabin. As the craft rose into the air and banked sideways, Jones looked down at the Enforcers’ dormitory he had called home for two years, thinking it might be the last time he’d ever see it.

  Probably, if the Elite Guard were involved, something terrible was going to happen to him.

  Jones swallowed so hard he felt his Adam’s apple plunge down and up again in his throat. He had no chance. Nothing would help. Maybe he could reason with them. “I still don’t understand.” His voice had a thin, whining quality to it. “Why can’t you tell me—”

  “No,” one of the Elite Guard said brusquely. The other Guard continued to pilot the hovercar, paying no attention. As they soared onward, Jones looked down at the lights of the intricate but deserted arteries of the Metroplex. For a moment he was struck by the fact that of all those people cowering down there, no one would miss him. He had made no real friends—Jones had festered with the death of his comrade Helms even after two years, and it was his own damned fault. That’s right—wasn’t one supposed to wax philosophical while being led to an execution? He was out of uniform—would they just jettison him here, high above the Metroplex? Or would they dress him up as a gang member, someone supposedly killed in the violent after dark street battles?

  The hovercar homed in on the mirrored monolith of the Enforcers Guild main headquarters. Jones’s stomach tightened and his breath came in shallower snatches as they neared the tower.

  The hovercar cruised to the private landing dock reserved for the Guild’s highest management personnel. Jones managed to tug on his boots, at least, but his uneasiness grew. His brain churned over and over, trying to comprehend what he had done that was so terrible to warrant such special punishment. He had lost the Servant. He had started a riot, but that wasn’t his fault. He had discarded his armor—he had made major mistakes, certainly… but by the book, by his Enforcer training, hadn’t he done what he was supposed to do? What was he supposed to do now?

  The pilot powered down the hovercar’s engines and disengaged the door. At the top of the tower the wind whistled around the walls, bearing an oppressive dampness with an oncoming spring storm. His white armored boots stood out garishly against his dark skin, his black skin-pants. He cautiously emerged from the hovercar and then nearly tripped down a set of access stairs as the second Elite Guard hurried him along. His legs were shaking.

  At the bottom of the stairs they reached a sealed doorway The first Guard typed in a long and complex access code; a silent moment passed, then answering flickers of light came from the screen by the door. The Guard entered a responding password, and with an ominous, cobralike hiss, the door slid open into the highest levels of Guild headquarters.

  “In you go.” Blindly, without thinking, Jones stumbled forward. Darkness clung everywhere, and he blinked his wide eyes, trying to see. He realized after he had gone several steps that the two blue-armored Elite guard remained motionless outside the door on the steps. Would they kill him here? Why had they even brought him this far?

  Jones looked around himself in a vast penthouse office that covered an entire quad rant of the building’s top floor. The air stuck in his throat; gooseflesh crawled up his arms. From the towering vantage of the headquarters he could see the lights of the Metroplex strung out.

  Warm light glowed from an aquarium covered with a wooden tabletop, as if it were some odd sort of furniture. He could hear the bubbling of the tank and see the colorful forms of the fish trapped inside their glass cage as they pointlessly went back and forth, bumping up against the unseen walls….

  Behind a huge semicircular clonewood desk, Jones finally saw a darkened figure waiting for him.

  “Former Enforcer Jones,” a biting voice spoke from the shadows, “you’ve caused me a great deal of trouble today.”

  Jones cringed and froze. He didn’t dare turn around, but he thought sure he could sense the two Guards each drawing a projectile weapon, aiming at him—

  With a melodramatic twist the figure behind the desk brought up the lights from rosy banks around the rim of the room. Jones concentrated on the man at the desk, puzzled; he had black and oily hair that looked oddly out-of-place slicked back behind his ears. Then Jones recognized the man’s face after all.

  Francois Nathans.

  “I planned everything so carefully. It was so intricate. Too complex, I guess. Plenty of spots where a stupid mistake could drastically alter the outcome. I didn’t count on you acting like you did.”

  Nathans shook his head and made a distasteful noise. “Hell, I can’t do anything about it now. I can grill you, reprimand you, shout my lungs out at you, Jones—it might make me feel good for the moment, but Danal is still dead. My only chance to see if it would work—thank you, Jones, for making me feel so helpless!”

  Jones swallowed again at the man’s bitterness and finally found his voice. Would it help to be submissive? Would anything help him now?

  “What are you going to—” He paused, then suddenly bridled at the audacity of this man, the head of Resurrection, Inc. “Hey, wait a minute! I’m a Guild member. You have no right to threaten me like that. You might run your own company, but you have no right to be here, at Guild headquarters!”

  He was appalled at his own outburst, but he realized nothing he said or did would change things. Jones had never felt a particular pride in or allegiance to the Guild, but it did have its own sort of honor, its own code. As questions piled up one after another in his mind, he turned to the two Elite Guard for support. But his voice simply did not carry the confidence or tone of authority to make them pay attention. One of the Guards held an electronic sweeping device, scanning the outer stairway. The second Guard stood at attention as the first stepped outside, still scanning, and closed the door. The second sealed it tightly from the inside. “All clear, sir.”

  Nathans folded his hands behind the large desk and smiled petulantly. “And just who do you think runs the Guild, Mr. Jones?”

  Jones stopped as a lump of ice snowballed in his stomach. “I… have no idea.”

  Nathans smiled. “Well, now I think you do.”

  Jones consciously closed his mouth. “May I please sit down?”

  “By all means.” Nathans turned up the lights another notch. His smile held many different undertones, and it looked almost artificial.

  Jones suddenly wondered if Nathans might be taking his revenge. Maybe it made Nathans feel satisfied if he could rub Jones’s face in a secret he would have no opportunity to divulge.

  “Oh, I was behind the Guild when it started, years before I conceived of Resurrection, Incorporated. I hope you like stories, Mr. Jones? Good. You see, I decided that private security forces might be more effective and more motivated for maintaining law and order than any state-run, unionized police system. I won’t bother you with the details, but it turned out I was absolutely right.

  “Working behind the scenes, I slowly managed to consolidate all the private security systems and conformance-assurance personnel into the Enforcers Guild. Collectively, the Guild edged out the cumbersome state-run police departments.”

  Nathans’s voice carried a nostalgic tone. Restlessly he stood up from his desk and walked over to stare out the darkened windows. He pressed his face close to the glass; the lights from the room stretched his reflection into odd forms.

  “It was all so easy that, frankly, I was a bit suspicious. So I decided to push a little harder, to see just how much we could get away with. But if it didn’t work, you see, if it backfired—I knew heads would roll. That’s why I kept my own involvement secret, at first. Fame and notoriety are the most useless f
orms of success mankind has yet invented.”

  Nathans interlocked his fingers behind his slick black hairpiece and turned to face Jones again. “We put Enforcers all over the place. Their presence was unmistakeable. Escorting people to make them feel important. We even had them guarding things like statues and fountains and KEEP OFF THE GRASS patches—” He cringed for a moment, and then continued.

  “But the crime rate dropped. Incredibly. We had to make up new laws just to give all the Enforcers something to do. We started street tension of our own, simulated gang wars after curfew so the people would keep thinking they needed us. We even made up the bloody curfew!” Nathans shook his head. “And the poor bastards bought it—hook, line, and sinker!”

  Jones sat stiffly in the chair, sweating. Everything he had followed, all the training, the patrols—the ethics for which Fitgerald Helms had been killed—all because Nathans wanted to play power games. He kept his mouth shut, but Nathans must have been able to interpret the sickening distaste on his face.

  The man slapped both palms on the mahogany-attribute desk. “Don’t you see! I didn’t do it! You think this is a police state? No! Because the people allowed it to happen. They didn’t do a damn thing to stop it, because they convinced themselves it was a Good Idea! There’s simply no excuse for apathy like that. I hoped that by pushing and pushing, it would finally spark their social consciousness, get someone involved. Our society has to change by itself, of its own choice, not have change forced upon it.”

  He let out a long and heavy sigh. “Sometimes I’d like nothing more than to be caught at my own tricks. Even if they threw me out, at least that would prove people are paying attention out there! I thought this would be an electric shock to stimulate our stagnant culture. Teach them a lesson, so that they never get caught sleeping again.”

  He cracked his knuckles and looked at Jones.

  “So far, though, I’m deeply disappointed. All they’re interested in is the path of least resistance, letting me do whatever I want, no matter how much damage it causes.” Nathans spoke through gritted teeth and pounded his fists on the table for emphasis, then stopped and lowered his voice. “Sorry for the outburst. I’m having a particularly unpleasant day.”

  Jones sat rubbing his temples and asked haltingly, with his eyes closed, “But if you’re Francois Nathans, the Resurrection man, I don’t… how can you possibly be running Guild headquarters? Resurrection, Inc. hates the Guild.”

  “Ah.” Nathans briskly rubbed his palms together and then stopped himself, embarrassed. “That’s a perfect example of creating a perceived need for the Enforcers Guild. You see, if I set it up that Resurrection hates Enforcers, but it still needs Enforcers for protection, then that gives the Guild an incredible legitimacy, doesn’t it? Call it clout. Then other corporations won’t hesitate to engage the services of Enforcers, if even Resurrection, Inc. has to.”

  Jones let the convoluted logic sink in until it finally made an appalling kind of sense. And when it all made sense, he began to grasp just how much Nathans had told him—far too much. The terror came yammering at his ears again.

  Should he try to run? While Nathans had his attention elsewhere? Could he get past the two Elite Guards, take the hovercar, and fly off—go somewhere? Someplace outside the Metroplex? He’d never been outside before.

  His heart pounded from just considering the idea. Sweat prickled on his forehead, and he knew it was going to trickle into his eyes at any moment. Jones tensed, felt his muscles tightening up, knotting.

  The sweat dropped into the corner of his eye like a tear, and everything drained out of him in an instant. No. He’d never make it past the two Elite Guards. After all the incredible Enforcer training Jones had endured, honing his body, his reflexes, these two blue armored Guards had been through ten times more, and would be that much faster, better.

  Jones swallowed. It was a waste of time to put it off any longer. “You’re going to kill me, aren’t you? For telling me all this.”

  Shocked, Nathans stared back at the black man. “Let me tell you one very important thing, Mr. Jones. I value my life very much, and I certainly don’t look forward to dying. Life is what allows me to accomplish things—life is our one chance at everything. Consequently, I respect life, yours or anyone else’s. I don’t believe any crap about a ‘fate worse than death’ because, as the cliché says, while there’s life there’s hope. I do not kill, except in the most extraordinary circumstances. And I do not plan to kill you.”

  “Then why are you telling me all this? I didn’t want to know it. I didn’t ask.”

  Nathans’s response came back at him like an electric shock. “Because you are the newest member of the Elite Guard, Mr. Jones. Welcome to the Club.”

  Jones blinked in astonishment. He felt yanked in a completely different direction, leaving him disoriented. “But what if I don’t—”

  “You have nothing to lose, Jones. Come log on, see for yourself.”

  Haltingly Jones went to the large semicircular desk and bent closely over the Net terminal. He punched in his logon name and his password and got to the first-level menu. “Now what?”

  “Check your user status. It’ll take the Net accounting people a month or so to delete your old password.”

  Bafffled, Jones requested a biographical update. His fingers shook, and he made several errors before finally entering the right command. He stared as the pixels formed themselves into his own obituary.

  ENFORCER, CLASS 2.

  KILLED IN MOB UPRISING WHILE PURSUING REBEL SERVANT

  OUTSIDE RESURRECTION, INC.

  SECONDARY NOTATION FOR DISTINGUISHED

  SPECIAL SERVICE TO THE GUILD

  ABOVE AND BEYOND THE CALL OF DUTY.

  Jones saw the date and continued to stare, unable to move. Nathans blanked the screen. “It’s a trick,” Jones whispered.

  “Yes, and a very good one. But you can try it on any terminal in the Metroplex. Once The Net’s been fooled, you may as well be dead anyway. Welcome to the Elite Guard.”

  His head spinning, Jones walked back to the chair and sat down, almost missing the cushion. He didn’t have the capacity for anger in him—he still didn’t quite grasp what had happened.

  “Mind you, Jones, this is a singular honor. Very few people are chosen for this. Congratulations.”

  Jones wondered if he should feel proud of himself. He had never dreamed of becoming an Elite Guard. A slow, tentative feeling of amazement began to replace his sick terror. An Elite Guard? Had he done a good job after all?

  “Does that mean you captured the rebel Servant, then? The one who caused all this? The one I was trying to chase?”

  Nathans soured and turned his back angrily, looking out the wide windows. Jones saw the man’s back stiffen as he kept clenching his hands. “No. He escaped. He is dead.”

  “I thought you wanted him alive.”

  “I did! But he somehow got the help of a nurse/tech—they both killed themselves by jumping into a KEEP OFF THE GRASS patch. They even took another Enforcer with them! In full view of dozens of people! Now there aren’t even any damned atoms of him left!” Nathans abruptly stopped shouting. “I had a lot at stake with that Servant, and now it’s all gone.”

  But Jones frowned, distracted, and pursed his lips as he sat back in the chair. The Servant had jumped into a KEEP OFF THE GRASS patch? This bothered him, nagged him even after everything else that had happened.

  Nathans saw the expression and stopped abruptly. “What is it, Jones?”

  The black man looked up, afraid again. “Nothing,” he mumbled.

  Nathans rose to his feet and strode closer. His eyes looked at Jones intensely. “You look like you just thought of something.” His voice became warm and smooth. “I’m your superior now, Jones. I’m interested in any fresh ideas you have. Show me I didn’t choose wrong to pick you for the Elite Guard.”

  Jones’s head spun, and he reluctantly answered in a low voice. “You probably don’t remember the
reason I was sent to be an escort at Resurrection, Inc., Mr. Nathans. In my previous assignment I was trying to stop another rebel Servant”—he looked carefully at Nathans—“and she escaped by jumping into a KEEP OFF THE GRASS patch, too. As if she knew something about it the rest of us don’t know.”

  He heard Nathans’s sharp intake of breath. The other man turned toward him, and Jones could see his eyes glistening with surprise and fascination. “That’s… very… interesting.”

  28

  Danal jumped down from the thin crosswalk, perfectly coordinated, and landed with barely a sound on Gregor’s enclosed platform. Under the harsh light of the sunlamps the leader looked up, rubbing his fingers along the pages of his book. He slid a yarn bookmark in place and snapped the cover shut.

  Gregor waited in silence, holding his squarish chin between the thumb and forefinger of one hand. Danal finally spoke in an abrupt burst of words. “I’ve spent the last day with your Wakers—”

  “Your Wakers, too,” Gregor interrupted smoothly.

  “The Wakers.” Danal paused, considering a tactful way to proceed. He saw a pile of neatly folded clothing in the corner, as well as an assortment of hats, wigs, false facial hair, and various flesh-colored creams and pigments. “I’m impressed with the organization, the brotherhood, you’ve put together. The Wakers seem to be a very close-knit group.”

  “They are.”

  “But—” He paused, troubled. Waiting, Gregor drifted back and forth on the hammock and motioned for his guest to sit. Danal squatted on his heels. “But what are you… doing? You’re all living from day to day down here, but it’s just hiding. You have the power to take some action. Why don’t you flex your muscles?” Danal focused his gaze on the leader’s face. “You strike me as too conscientious a man to sit back and do nothing.”

  Gregor let out a long sigh, and Danal watched him. “I’m glad you think that way. We should be doing more than just sitting around and patting ourselves on the back. But we just don’t know enough. I’m wrestling with ambivalence—that’s the main snag.”