Resurrection, Inc.

by Kevin J. Anderson

  The computer automatically adjusted the illusory view. The victim fell twitching on the sidewalk as the other people pressed close.

  A second Servant appeared, running from the opposite side of the simulator. The crowd suddenly turned, but half of them clustered around Jones, angry because of the slaughtered pedestrian.

  Jones turned his scatter-stun toward the approaching mob and mowed down anyone blocking his shot at the second Servant. He watched his score increase again. With a clear shot, he fired once more, paralyzing the renegade Servant’s arm. The Servant dropped the metallic equipment she carried and continued to run frantically.

  A third shot, and this time the Servant pitched forward, still trying to move, but with her hips paralyzed. Jones let fly with three exploding projectiles.

  His score had soared up to a new high point. He had beaten his previous mark! The computer lingered on the images of all the dead, innocent pedestrians who had gotten in his way. Innocent? Jones relived his own nightmare visions of groping, clawing, tearing hands of the mob trying to destroy him as Danal fled into the distance. Innocents? Any of these pedestrians could become murderous, an instigator of a mob.

  Jones swept the scatter-stun around him in an arc, leveling the approaching crowds until the weapon’s charge sputtered to a halt. The other pedestrians stopped, their mob mentality quelled by his show of force.

  Jones breathed out a long and heavy sigh and surveyed the people, wondering if the simulation was over. The timer crept toward the finish. But then he noticed that six other Servants had shambled out of the alleys, out of the doorways; they stood looking at him mindlessly.

  Experimentally Jones raised his pocket bazooka and shot one of them. They were just simulations, after all. A burst of points appeared on his score. Puzzled, Jones fired again. Two more of the Servants fell, broken into large pieces of torn flesh that oozed clear synthetic blood. Again, Jones received a significant bonus of points.

  Is that what they wanted him to do? Was Nathans training him to fire at Servants? Jones lowered the weapon, resisting the obvious ploy. What sense did that make? What purpose did it serve?

  He looked at the fallen Servants. Two more had come to take their places, and the other three Servants began to shuffle away, going about their jobs. Did Nathans want him to shoot all those Servants? Jones’s score beckoned, begging him to add more points.

  Actually, Servants had been at the core of Jones’s troubles all along. The more he considered the possibility, the more valid the conclusion became.

  Jones had almost lost his life in the riot after the rebel Servant Danal escaped, and because of that, Jones was officially dead (although he had been promoted after all, so that didn’t count). Danal. A Servant.

  And Julia? He had gambled at happiness when he’d bought her, but she met his kindness, his love, his devotion, with utter and complete apathy, without a spark of humanity. Julia was a Servant, but surely with the care he had taken she could have shown something? Hadn’t Danal worn that wild look in his eyes? Why couldn’t Julia have had that? Why couldn’t she have returned his attentions? Julia. A Servant.

  And back in his curfew-patrol days, what about the other Servant, the female who had stolen equipment and tried to escape? Because of her, Jones had been taken from tolerable night patrol duties and reassigned, reprimanded.

  Servants.

  And the hatred and unrest from the jobless blues, out of work because of Servants—wasn’t that what had caused the death of his friend, Fitzgerald Helms?

  That wound struck him deeply. Servants.

  He retaliated, lifting his pocket bazooka again and firing at the holographic crowd with an accuracy born of anger and misguided revenge. All five remaining Servants fell in rapid succession. Shaking, Jones slammed the empty weapon into its armor socket as the time ran out.

  The scene froze on the walls, but still he saw the images of blasted Servants scattered about on the streets. He relaxed. He doubted he’d ever beat this score. A blinking light appeared in front of his eyes.

  GAME OVER.

  30

  Apply the flesh tone liberally to face and neck—don’t forget the ears. Cover the arms up to the elbow. Reddish-pink stain adds color to the lips. Bite down on the dye bubble to flood the inside of the mouth with red color, and then rinse thoroughly to keep the teeth clean. Eyelashes, eyebrows. Touch up with blush and darker tones to add realism, to add human flaws. Hairpiece or some other covering for the head.

  Incognito. Almost like a living, breathing person again.

  Danal waited on a park bench, looking up at the tall buildings around him. The hard metal slats of the bench were cool against his leather jacket and patched pants. Discreetly he kept his hands buried in his pockets. A leather skullcap hugged his head with flaps over his ears, making him look like an old aeroplane flyer.

  Danal knew exactly what the Cremator client would look like; he was confident the man would be on time.

  The client appeared out of a side street, lost and uncertain—a middle-aged man dressed in a perfect business suit, a thin stylish tie studded with reflecting sequins. His hair was carefully cut at just the right length; instead of contact lenses, he wore decorative spectacles with a tiny chronometer implanted in one lens. Under his arm he carried a large, colorfully wrapped box topped with a pink bow.

  “Is that for me?” Danal stood up and intercepted him.

  The man stopped abruptly and stared at him, sizing him up. “No,” he mumbled, trying to remember the right phrase, “it’s for John.”

  “Okay. I’ll give it to his wife, then,” Danal answered easily.

  Relieved, the client handed the box to the disguised Servant, then fled down the street without looking back. He tried to hide himself in the crowd, but there weren’t enough people on the sidewalk to do so. Danal watched him for a moment, calmly amused, and then sat back down on the bench.

  He didn’t need to inspect the box to know that it contained packaged chemical supplies, two books for Gregor, analytical tools, and some rope-wire—all things the Wakers needed.

  Danal considered the box and the client with a detached apathy. After Gregor had shown him how to access his death memories, Danal’s perception of reality had shifted radically. Over the past week he had come to accept his situation with an easy passivity. His other concerns, his leftover anger—no, Vincent Van Ryman’s anger—at his betrayal and at the death of Julia, all of that seemed distant now and inconsequential.

  Below in the dark, listening to the ghostly whispers of the ocean and the creaking timbers around him, Danal spent much of his time meditating. Legs crossed, he sometimes sat with Gregor, sometimes alone, journeying deep within himself, confronting the wall, the Heaven flashbacks. It all came back to him with never-ending wonder and awe—the pain, the tunnel, the chimes, the lights, the escort spirits… over and over again.

  But still he could not breach the last barrier.

  The universe had stopped being clear-cut and understandable for him, and everything held its own facet of the cosmic mystery. For the benefit of the Wakers in general, he helped with the Cremators’ activities. As Laina and Gregor had both predicted, Danal now considered himself one of the Wakers. But none of it really mattered to him. He lived from day to day, in no particular hurry to make major decisions.

  He spent many hours reviewing his old memories, dwelling—not morbidly, but with a different kind of fascination—on Death, the events leading up to his own death; how he had sacrificed his dying father; how he had reflexively killed Nathans in the lower levels of Resurrection, Inc.; how Nathans had murdered Julia—and that, in turn, brought him back to thinking about his own death again.

  He viewed his former life as Vincent Van Ryman with greater and greater detachment, as if it were someone else—and indeed it was someone else, since that person had been on the other side of death. Vincent’s problems were no longer Danal’s problems….

  The Servant picked up the gift-wrapped box and strolled
casually down the pedestrian walk. He would wander around for an hour or two just to make sure no one was watching. Besides, he felt like taking a long walk. He had used extra care to apply his disguise, and he enjoyed the freedom a normal appearance gave him. When he grew tired, Danal would find one of the other access openings to down below.

  He didn’t mind killing time. He enjoyed every moment of everything now that all existence seemed basically the same.

  As he passed an unoccupied public Net booth, Danal suddenly felt an amused fascination for his old identity as Vincent Van Ryman, a wave of nostalgia. Earlier, he had stared at the looming Van Ryman mansion for long moments before moving on. The Intruder Defense Systems effectively kept him away, even if he had wanted to approach it.

  Now, as he stared at the empty booth, Danal realized that The Net still thought Vincent Van Ryman was alive, since the imposter had stolen his entire identity. And Danal still remembered his old password.

  Curiosity tugged at him, and he stepped inside the booth, propping the gift-wrapped box up against the wall and closing the privacy screen. He entered “VINCENT VAN RYMAN” at the prompt and punched in his tenth-level password. The Net willingly accepted the logon and waited.

  He stared at the upper menu and, after a slight pause, went into his own electronic mail for a glimpse at the imposter’s activities. Still only mildly interested, Danal ignored most of the mundane business messages and neo-Satanist concerns.

  But then he saw one message that made him stop cold. It was passworded, but Danal easily remembered his own receive-mail passwords. According to the status line, the message had been sent by Francois Nathans only two days before….

  Nathans turned to show his face and smiled thinly at Danal. “Welcome, Sacrificial Lamb.” He made the neo-Satanist sign of the broken cross.

  Danal entered his mail password and read the message.

  Nathans lay on his face in a puddle of blood—

  Francois Nathans must be dead. Danal had killed him.

  A long scarlet smear emblazoned the gray Servant jumpsuit.

  Just who was the victim after all?

  Danal scanned the message as his eyes widened. One of the false eyelashes flaked off.

  “We have disposed of my surrogate. Danal killed him cleanly, and we’re leaving no other ties to this whole mess. But now that Danal is GONE, we should decide whether to find another test subject or drop the idea altogether. Without Vincent himself COMING BACK, the effect won’t be as dramatic.”

  Danal stared at the message and read it over again. Nathans’s surrogate? Who had Danal really murdered? Surrogate?

  Remembering his old skills, Danal quickly checked the Net periodicals and the news databases for the day he had supposedly committed the murder. The death of someone like Francois Nathans would certainly have appeared in all the current-events listings.

  But he searched and found mention of Nathans only in reference to Resurrection, Inc., where the riot had taken place. In growing amazement and disbelief Danal checked Nathans’s Net activity, and found that the man had used the system every day for the past two weeks.

  Nathans was not dead.

  Danal had been tricked. Once again.

  As it all came crashing down upon him, he fell abruptly back into his own existence. Like nails being hammered into a coffin: trusting Nathans as a philosophical brother, having grand schemes for bettering the world; Julia, who had tempered his zealous obsession with love and perspective, losing it all when the trapdoor of treachery made everything drop out from under his feet.

  It woke him up like a slap in the face, and Danal gripped the gift-wrapped box tightly enough to wrinkle the colored paper. His jaws ached from clenched teeth. Part of his determination for revenge returned, but it clashed with his newfound empathy of life and death. Wasn’t all this behind him now? But what Nathans had done—The conflicting emotions forced his goal sideways and changed it.

  Danal thought of his ordeal, his death, his life, his love, and with a bright fire of determination he reached a firm decision.

  Yes, he would find Julia again.

  31

  Net conduits like twisted metal straws stretched upward into the main city. Using stolen alloy-chewers, the Wakers had breached the conduit coverings and tapped in their own wires, sending jury-rigged connections down to a row of mismatched terminals, some taken from decommissioned public Net booths, others from standard home units. The glow from the screens penetrated the shadows: amber, green, and gray.

  Two Wakers sat at the keyboards. Rolf, who had masqueraded as an Enforcer, stared glassy-eyed and motionless, gripping the sides of the terminal as if wrestling with something. The other was the young freckle-faced Waker whose pale, translucent skin now looked splotched with darker marks of discoloration.

  As Danal came up to them, the boy stared at him with awe. Danal regarded the boy for a moment, then smiled. “I’m Danal,” he said, leaving the end of his sentence hanging, like a question.

  “I know,” the freckle-faced Waker said, then remembered to add, “My name’s Rikki.”

  Rikki looked to have been about twelve or thirteen at his death, but lines of concentration around his eyes made him look much older. He had been through death and back and would never be a boy again, no matter how many of his memories returned.

  “Gregor said I could come here to see what you’re doing,” Danal offered. He had something more important in mind, but he would approach that delicately.

  Rikki snapped out of his amazement and blinked. “Of course! Well, here are… our terminals, and Rolf is in guardian mode right now. My shift is about to begin. These other terminals are for doing the usual Net stuff, if you need to.”

  Rolf didn’t flinch, not even as Rikki said his name. “Guardian mode?” Danal asked.

  “He’s linked up to The Net, watching all the input and output channels. See, we have to divert queries, keep track of anyone who seems too interested in the Cremators or the KEEP OFF THE GRASS patches, anything that might get us into trouble.” Rikki stopped himself and seemed flustered. “I’m not telling this all in the right order.

  “See, with our microprocessors we can tap directly into The Net, just like an Interface. Rolf and I, and other Waker volunteers, are like Guardian Angels for the Wakers. When we… link up, we can restring databases, divert informational queries, things like that. No one suspects. Not even the real Guardian Angels, and we have to be very careful about that. The people have an incredible blind spot about The Net—they trust it too much. They don’t even think about the information they find there. And since The Net tells them the grass patches are really deadly disintegrators, they just plain don’t look for contrary evidence, though there’s plenty of it if they’d open their eyes.” He shrugged. “It doesn’t take much to think faster than they do.”

  Danal indicated the jury-rigged terminals. “But how do you tap into The Net? With a stolen password?”

  Rikki looked at him, puzzled and surprised. “Well, a lot of us still have our own passwords from before. See, it takes so long for Net Accounting to reassign out-of-date passwords, many of us still use ours. We can use chromosomal match, retina scans, or other ways to prove our identity, even if the records say we’re dead. Once a password works, we share it among ourselves.”

  “Enforcers can kill you for sharing passwords!” Danal said automatically.

  “We’ve done plenty of other things the Enforcers wouldn’t like. Besides, we’re all in this together. ‘Bound by a common tie that runs deeper than simple human trust.’ Gregor says that.” Rikki hesitated, eager and expectant, looking at Danal out of the corner of his eye. He found his voice again. “What are you going to do for all of us, Danal? We’re really anxious to know.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, you’re…” Rikki looked around, then spoke more bravely, “Gregor sits around thinking all the time. I mean, he really is worried, but I bet you’re willing to do something, instead of just sitting he
re. Now, nobody’s ready to be a better leader than Gregor, but some of us are getting tired of just waiting.

  “See, we were all nobodies—even Gregor, he was just a librarian, a historian, and no one missed him when he died. But you’re so famous. Vincent Van Ryman! Now we’ve finally got someone who might make a difference!”

  Danal pursed his lips. “It doesn’t matter if I’m famous or not. Why don’t you all just come forward? All Wakers. You’d get enough publicity to make your point, tell your story. Anybody coming back from death is enough to force people to pay attention.”

  Rikki shook his head vigorously. “We can’t just come forward. Watch this.” A grin crossed the boyish face, then he spoke in a sharp tone. “Danal, Command: Slap your face!”

  Involuntarily Danal’s left arm jerked up and he struck himself flat across the cheek. His eyes flew open in shock, but he could not stop his reaction.

  “Sorry,” Rikki said, “but anyone can do that to us. Any time. With just a simple word or two, they could shut us all up forever. If we go public now, we would have to roll over and do whatever anyone Commands us. Those aren’t very good terms for rejoining society, do you think? We’re still Servants, Danal, no matter what all we remember. We’ve been trying to deprogram ourselves, to get rid of the Command phrase, but it doesn’t do any good. It’s tangled up too deep with the microprocessor that keeps us alive.”

  Danal’s face stung from the slap, and he frowned. “Have you told anybody? I mean, real people?”

  “No,” Rikki answered.

  “How about your own family? Did you have a family? Have you gotten in touch with them?”

  “No!” Rikki cut him off. “Yes, I had a family. I had a younger sister, and a mom, and a dad. Both of my parents worked. When I died, I think it was some kind of… accident. Out in the streets people were throwing bottles, stones, cans. We were trying to run to get inside a… a café, I think, and something hit me in the throat. It hurt, and I blacked out.” He rubbed his neck, where a twisted scar showed what had apparently been his death wound. “And then I was a Servant. Boy, was I surprised.”