Resurrection, Inc.

by Kevin J. Anderson

  Rikki made a sarcastic little grin, but then his eyes looked wistful and distant. “My dad had just taught me how to play chess. I wasn’t very good, but I understood it, and it was an adult game. It was interesting because we used a real board, and pieces you moved one at a time with your hand. The game seemed so much more real than the computer versions of chess. I think this is the way they used to play it a long time ago.” Then he bit his lip and looked back at Danal. “No, I haven’t told them I’ve awakened. It would be like killing myself all over again.”

  Danal looked at him helplessly. “But what do you expect me to do?”

  Rikki was shocked that he would even ask the question. “You’re important enough—with your scandal, with Francois Nathans and the imposter, we can get public interest long enough to tell our stories. It’ll distract them before someone, say, from Resurrection, can use the Command phrase and silence us all.”

  “Nathans is still alive,” Danal said, clipping his words short.

  “Yeah, we found that out yesterday. We were going to let you know.”

  Danal saw his chance and did not hesitate. “I need you to do something for me. And then maybe I can help you.”

  Rolf sat up from his terminal and blinked, dazed. Upon seeing the other two Wakers, Rolf snapped himself back to his surroundings. He nodded, and Danal returned his greeting.

  “I’ll be going in. Just a second,” Rikki said.

  “Don’t wait too long.” Rolf seemed cursorily confident in Rikki’s abilities. “I found no queries this time.”

  “There usually aren’t,” the boy Waker mumbled.

  As if in a conspiracy between themselves, neither Danal nor Rikki spoke again until the other Waker had walked briskly away along the narrow wooden catwalks.

  “Shouldn’t you go in? Watch The Net?” Danal asked.

  Rikki brushed the question aside as if it didn’t matter and whispered to Danal in eager fascination, “What are you going to do? How can I help?”

  “I need to find someone.”

  “Who is it? Is this part of a plan? I knew you’d do something to help us!”

  Danal frowned, but considered the question. “Well, I think it’ll solve some of the questions Gregor’s worried about. Then maybe he’ll do something. But at the moment, this is for me alone.” Danal swallowed, uneasy, but forced himself to push ahead. “Her name is—was Julia. I… loved her.”

  Rikki’s eyes lit up. “You mean the Julia?”

  “You know?”

  “Yes, we all know the story! This is Julia, the one—the one Nathans killed.”

  Danal stared at the terminals, wishing that he could do everything himself without having to open up to someone else’s questions.

  “Yes. He said he wiped her from The Net, and then he brought her back. As a Servant. I saw her on the streets—that was what finally brought all my memories back.” Danal fell silent, and Rikki waited for him to continue. “But of course she couldn’t recognize me, not with the surface-cloning of my face. I don’t look like me anymore. But I know she’s out there, and I have to find her.”

  Danal was afraid to have Julia back, but he had no choice but to locate her. “I don’t know if you’ll be able to track her down, if Nathans has deleted everything about her from The Net.”

  With a glint in his eye Rikki said, “Nothing is ever really gone.”

  “Can you do it?”

  The young Waker shrugged and drew a deep breath, considering. “It’ll take a lot of time, and I’m on assignment here as a guardian. See, we don’t really have the manpower to watch The Net more carefully, so I can’t let everyone down. If I track down Julia for you, I’d have to put aside those duties.” He looked uncertain but anxious to help.

  “Well, how often do you really need to divert a database search? How many queries do you get when you sit there in a trance for hours and hours?”

  Rikki absently scratched the side of the keyboard. “Not very many. I could—yes, I will try to find Julia for you.” He took it as a personal challenge.

  “Should I get someone else? Or you can do it when you’re not on guardian duty.”

  “No. I want to do this.” Rikki lowered his eyes, then spoke more quietly. “But don’t let Gregor know about this. He won’t approve, I’m sure of it.”

  “What’s there to approve?”

  “Reliving your past.”

  Trying to avoid Rikki’s gaze, Danal glanced up at one of the fuzzy green patches of holographic grass far above. Actual sunlight filtered through the image. Before he could look back to Rikki again, a transparent plastic beverage bottle, nearly empty, fell through the hologram, bouncing and pinging on the girders.

  “Listen, and I’ll tell you everything about her.”

  Then Danal spilled the story, all he could remember, every facet of Julia’s personality, every eccentricity, every unusual detail. Rikki sat back, transfixed, absorbing it, not needing to write anything down. Danal told how he had once communicated with her under the identity of Randolph Carter through electronic mail; he described where she had lived, what she had done. He tunneled backward to find every offshoot of information that Rikki might be able to use.

  Danal described her physically in intimate detail. He described her business dealings, described all the things they had done together. Nathans had probably set up a cumulative Delete program, a virus function to track down and destroy all interconnected paths of the person Julia. But Danal hoped feverishly that some line of information had not connected with the others.

  Taking a different tack, he described when she would have been killed, which implied the time frame for her resurrection. He carefully described everything he could recall of the Guildsman who had been escorting her down the street when he’d seen her recently—the indigo-dyed lines of crow’s-feet around his eyes, the square-cut graying hair.

  Rikki’s eyes were bright but distant, already contemplating ways to attack the problem. “I’ll do what I can. I might have to give up a couple days of guardian duty. But I’ll find her.”

  “Don’t jeopardize the Wakers for me,” Danal cautioned and continued, to himself, “I need to see her again, either to bring her back or to say goodbye.”

  Danal sat alone down by the edge of the water while the structures holding up the Metroplex loomed above him like a cosmic cathedral. Listlessly, he ate a handful of vegetables grown in a hydroponic garden the Wakers tended under a long bank of sunlamps. Three days he had sat in an agitated patience, avoiding Rikki, letting the young Waker work in peace.

  Now someone slipped up to him quietly, startling Danal in his distraction. He turned and saw Rikki clad in a tight-fitting Servant jumpsuit; the boy Waker would never grow, and his twelve-year-old Servant body would remain locked in its appearance of youth.

  Danal swallowed his mouthful so quickly that he nearly choked. “Shouldn’t you be on guardian duty?”

  Danal knew, before the freckle-faced Waker said anything, but still the response sent his synHeart pounding.

  “I found her!”

  A whirlwind of rose-tinted images flooded past his mind’s eye—the first meeting in the cafeteria, the hovercopter trip to Point Reyes, making love on the beach, tearing down the stone gargoyles, drinking iced tea in the sauna.

  Julia.

  “Now what are you going to do?” Rikki said.

  Danal stood up and grasped the rope ladder leading upward, more to steady himself than to go anywhere.

  “I’m going to go take her back.”

  32

  “Are you commanding me not to do this?” Danal challenged Gregor. They had not called an actual gathering, but Rikki had made certain that a good many Wakers—mostly the impatient ones—came forward to watch.

  Taken by surprise, Gregor looked uncomfortable and awkward, but Danal pressed him before he could respond. “Remember when you said you weren’t really a leader here, that we can follow your advice as we see fit? Were you just kidding, or what? All the time you wrest
le with your morals and your questions, but your questions aren’t any more valid than mine!”

  “That’s not what I said, Danal. I want you to think about what you’re going to do. Is it wise? Answer that yourself.” His eyes were wide and dark. Gregor folded his hands clumsily together, as if he didn’t know what to do with them.

  Danal tried to be more compassionate. He didn’t like acting a showman in front of a crowd, but he needed to clear the air between Gregor and himself before he could do anything else. “I have to know, Gregor. If she’s there, or if she’s gone forever. I have to find her again.”

  The leader mumbled under his breath. “It’s no secret what you intend to do afterwards.”

  Rikki interrupted, and the other Wakers stood by the boy, eager, expectant. “Gregor, we’ve got to start answering all those questions about… us. No one’s going to give away the answers. We don’t get a prize for just standing around.”

  In the pause that followed, Danal bent closer to Gregor. From above, the sounds of creaking and settling emanated from the girders and pilings. “Francois Nathans murdered her, Gregor,” he said, feeling pain. “I may have changed a great deal because of you, but I still need to know whether to hate him or not.”

  Gregor looked defeated, and Danal was the only one who saw his slight nod. “Just remember Danal, we’re not the same anymore. She won’t be the same, not after what we’ve experienced. Even if Julia remembers her past, things can never be as they were.”

  “That doesn’t mean I have to be satisfied with the way they are,” he whispered in reply.

  “I’m Guildsman Drex, you blasted thing!” he shouted at the doorway voice-receiver. “Drex! I live here. Do a voiceprint check. How the hell was I supposed to know a glitch would change my own password?”

  Reluctantly, it seemed, The Net allowed him to enter, and as he scramble-sealed the entrance, Drex considered himself safe and protected in his own rooms, mercifully away from the pressures of the Guild for another day. Tension headaches and gastric disorders—fringe benefits of a management-level salary.

  The work ran over and over again in his mind, muddled together in columns of names and numbers. Instant statistics, keeping track of the locations and assignments of over a hundred Enforcers, making sure that his section of the Metroplex was given its quota of protection. Drex would not last as Guildsman very long if his sector showed either a particularly bad crime month or a notably clean tally. Deviate from the norm? Never!

  Meetings that went on and on with plenty of rhetoric, ‘etting goals,’ ‘initiating studies,’ ‘interfacing’ with all his counterparts. It devoured his time and kept him from answering the long queue of electronic-mail memos waiting for him. Though he remained endlessly busy, Drex never seemed to get anything accomplished—always so many little things that made him scurry back and forth, talking to people, keeping this person happy, meeting that person’s demands.

  But in the comforting womb of his private suite, Drex was on his own time now. He wished he could lift the job from his shoulders and store it away in a closet someplace.

  He increased the wall illumination slowly; he liked the warm dimness, and he didn’t think he’d be doing any reading anyway.

  The Servant sat where he had left her in the morning. “Ah, Julia! Aren’t you going to welcome me home?”

  “Yes, Master Drex,” she answered in a flat voice and stood up stiffly. “Welcome home.”

  Julia rarely wore any clothing at all when he was home alone with her. He preferred it that way. But he realized that sometime during the day she had independently donned her gray Servant jumpsuit, as if with a last vestige of instinct. It bothered him, but he couldn’t figure out why.

  Sighing, Drex went into his sleeping area and activated the floor. The heaters began to work, and the crosslinked polymer strands altered their structure, slowly turning the hard, rubbery floor into a soft and pliant cushion on which he and Julia would sleep. Drex stepped out onto the sleepfloor, and his feet sank into the pleasantly warm floor substance. “Come here, Julia.”

  He had already eaten from a machine at the Guild headquarters, but now he wanted to relax, to loosen up, to burn off some of his restless energy. Drex began to unfasten his clothes. He didn’t think he had the patience to give Julia detailed step-by-step instructions now. That had proved awkwardly funny in the past, but tonight he wanted just some quick sex and then a long sleep. Drex barked at the walls to dim the lights further, and his suite began to feel more homelike, more comfortable.

  Julia shuffled toward him and almost lost her balance as she stepped onto the soft sleepfloor. Drex sat down casually and propped himself up on one elbow. As he smiled at her, the indigo-dyed crow’s-feet clenched together around his eyes.

  A series of muffled melodious tones interrupted him as The Net spontaneously unscrambled his door code. The entrance to his suite whisked open by itself.

  Drex sat up sharply, puzzlement outweighing his fear. Silhouetted in the reddish glow from his walls, four figures stood in the entryway and, in unison, they walked into his rooms.

  “How did you get in here! Who are you?” Drex tried to struggle to his feet, but the soft floor did not cooperate. He shouted for the lights to come on fully; the illumination dazzled him, but didn’t seem to bother the four intruders. He blinked and tried to wave the brightness away so he could see again.

  “We’ve come for your Servant,” one of them said.

  Taken aback at the ridiculous idea, Drex scowled. “Well, you can’t have her! What are you talking about?”

  His eyes grew accustomed to the light, and immediately he noticed something odd about the intruders. Two of them marched purposefully forward toward Julia, then gently took her by the arm. “Come with us, Julia.”

  Outnumbered and afraid, Drex could do nothing but stand helpless.

  Then he recognized the pale dead skin of the intruders, their hairless faces, smears of makeup, their bald scalps imperfectly hidden by caps and hats, as if they had been in a rush to throw on disguises. A numbing horror grew in him. Servants? Impossible! But the more he stared at their eyes, their faces, their actions, the more certain he became. It couldn’t be possible. Servants did not act as vigilantes to free their own kind. It was absurd.

  “Command: Release her!” he shouted in an authoritative tone.

  As if they had grasped a hot iron, the two Servants escorting Julia jerked back their hands and stood paralyzed. With some amount of self-satisfaction Drex watched their faces fall.

  Then, before he could think of something else to say, before his lips could shift themselves into a smile, one of the other Servants launched himself at Drex with dizzying speed. The Guildsman couldn’t move his eyes fast enough as the intruder flew forward to clap his hand across Drex’s mouth, stifling further words. The force of the Servant’s hand crushed his lips against his teeth, smashing his gums. A crunching pop and a nauseating pain told Drex that two front teeth had broken free of their sockets. He tasted a mouthful of blood. He tried not to whimper.

  Drex collapsed to his knees as the Servant released him. “Not another word from you,” he said coldly, “or I’ll pluck out your vocal cords!”

  Blood dribbled from between Drex’s bruised lips. His skin crawled at the dry, cold touch of the Servant’s dead flesh. His eyes were bright with infuriated and helpless tears; his body shook as he fought back sobs.

  Without looking at Drex again, the leader of the Servants went over to Julia and lovingly, it seemed, ran his pallid fingers along her cheek. The male Servant’s face shone with childlike awe. “Julia…”

  The four intruders hurried her out the door. She followed them without resisting. They even had the maddening courtesy to close his door and scramble-seal it behind them.

  Now Drex’s tears of rage burst forth, and he spat out blood and teeth. Squatting, he pounded on the floor, but its soft, warm texture absorbed the blows and tried to comfort him.

  33

  Blank slate. />
  Julia gazed at him, not moving, as if someone had awkwardly positioned a rag doll. Danal stared back, trying to lock eyes with her, until he finally looked away. His fists clenched. Damn, it had to work! He shook his head, ignoring exhaustion, and stood up, realizing how sore and stiff his knees had become. He wanted a drink of water; his throat felt dry.

  The other Wakers left them undisturbed at the water level. “Don’t you remember anything?” he begged. With the harsh sunlamps shining down on Julia from far above, Danal pictured himself as an evil interrogator in a room. Turning his back, Danal avoided looking at this caricature of Julia—it hurt him too much. Julia had gone away and left only this puppet behind.

  “I remember everything I have been told,” she answered.

  Danal jumped, then frowned at himself. “I mean about your first life, with Vincent Van Ryman?”

  Her voice had a numb, prerecorded quality to it. “No. I don’t remember anything.”

  Danal took a deep breath, closed his eyes for a moment, and continued.

  Dangling cords swayed from above as he pulled a high-resolution terminal toward him—the kind intended for home use, much like the one his father Stromgaard had long ago used to play electronic games. Danal called up the protocol of images he had compiled.

  “Look at these again, Julia. I want you to give it your full attention.” It was the sixth time he had shown them to her, but he gritted his teeth and forced himself to keep trying. “I’ve already explained why I need you to remember. You’re a real person named Julia who was killed and brought back to life. I want you to find those memories. I did it—I know you can.”