Resurrection, Inc.

by Kevin J. Anderson

The grayness of the screen dissolved into a view of the isolated oceanside of Point Reyes, not exactly the spot he and Julia had once visited, but the closest file image he could find. “We went there, you and me. It was your first time in a hovercopter.” Vivid memories flooded into his own mind, so bright, so clear; his eyes took on a faraway look, and he smiled.

  The scene changed to a full-detail image of Vincent Van Ryman’s face, lifted from one of the Net periodicals. “That was me. This was you.”

  The next image showed a graphically massaged photo of Julia; Rikki had processed a new image of the Servant Julia, adding hair, expression, life, to make her look as she had once been, with high cheekbones and pointed chin, pretty features, bright eyes ready to disagree or to laugh, depending on her mood.

  Next came the inverted star-in-pentagram logo. Summary files lifted from the current-events databases, describing how Vincent Van Ryman had challenged the neo-Satanists. “Do you remember these? The neo-Satanists? What we did together?”

  “No.”

  With Rikki’s sophisticated Net skills, they had been able to recreate on screen the white-light hologram of the beach, which had rested above the mantel in the Van Ryman mansion. “Do you remember this picture?”

  “No.”

  Danal searched for the slightest hesitation in her voice, the slightest hint of doubt or uncertainty, but found nothing.

  “We made love on the beach.”

  He fell silent and swallowed. His throat felt thick, as if it contained a despairing sob waiting to be released. His synHeart was heavy enough to have been molded out of lead. Danal reached out tentatively with his hand, extending his fingertips. He traced a line from her eye, brushing down her cheek, wiping away an imaginary tear. How he wished she would shed a tear! Her skin remained dry and cool, her body temperature carefully regulated.

  Danal reached out with his other hand, cupping her chin. He ran his fingers down her cheeks, over her lips. She lifted her head up with his gentle pressure, but her eyes remained empty. Danal found himself breathing rapidly, deeply. A smear of tears covered his eyes.

  “Oh, Julia…” he said softly. His lips moved, but no words came out. “I’m so sorry.”

  He raised her chin a fraction more, then bent forward to kiss her on the lips. The kiss was cold, and Julia did not participate. Danal turned away, hanging his head and trembling.

  He heard a jingling, sloshing sound and looked up to see Laina making her way down the rope ladder. Ice cubes tinkled against the sides of a pitcher she carried.

  “I brought you two something cold to drink,” she said brightly, but then looked at Danal, lowering her voice. “Were you ready for it?”

  He sighed. “Yes, let’s try it.” He turned to Julia. “Do you like iced tea?”

  “Whatever you wish.”

  Danal restrained himself from making a frustrated outburst. Laina removed two tall glasses from pockets in her gray apron. He poured Julia a glass and handed it to her; she accepted it but did not drink.

  “We used to drink iced tea. Especially in the sauna. On the day we tore down all the gargoyles.”

  He paused after each phrase, listening and watching. Laina observed the two of them for a few moments and then left without making a sound.

  Nothing.

  Danal stood out in the open air; the light rain spattered against his thick layers of flesh-tone makeup. He had been impatient before, careless, the night they’d gone to recover Julia. Drex usually worked late, and Danal had not wanted to take the time for more than quick disguises. He’d been eager to go from Gregor after their argument, eager to get it over with, but even the clod Guildsman had seen through their disguises—it almost cost him, and all of the Wakers, everything.

  Listlessly he held an umbrella, but paid little attention to whether it blocked the raindrops or not. Beside him Julia stood in her gray jumpsuit, soaking wet but uncaring. Danal drew his red-checked jacket closer around him.

  Somehow the Gothic Van Ryman mansion looked right with black clouds looming behind it. The cockeyed weathervane spun one way and then the other, ignoring the direction of the breeze. Runnels of rain trickled off the wings and fangs of the gargoyles lurking in the eaves. The black wrought-iron fence looked like a line of spear points barring their way. Danal stared at the house himself with helpless anger still gnawing at him. Someone claiming to be Vincent Van Ryman relaxed inside, enjoying a stolen life.

  Tiny flashes of light blinked in a half-dome around the house as raindrops struck the deadly field of the Intruder Defense Systems—the protection systems he had installed primarily for Julia’s safety… for all the good they had done. A strong ozone smell hung in the air.

  “Just look at it a while longer,” he said hoarsely. “Please.”

  Danal had taken her to the same cafeteria where they’d first met. They sat in the same red plastic booth; they drank their coffee, listened to the clatter of dishes on the conveyor belt. Danal even tried to start the same conversations. Julia lifted her cup and swallowed the hot coffee, staring ahead. People began to look sideways at him, and Danal realized that he shouldn’t have brought a Servant into the cafeteria. He didn’t want to call attention to himself. They left.

  Other people walked blithely past the Van Ryman mansion in the rain. “April showers bring May flowers,” Danal said to Julia; she did not respond.

  They could not stay much longer—the imposter could be watching him through the video monitors. Did he even suspect Danal was still alive? Danal had fallen through a KEEP OFF THE GRASS patch—would the imposter be worried at all anymore? Would he think he had gotten off, successful and free? Or might he recognize a disguised Danal and a Servant Julia loitering in front of his mansion?

  Danal reminded himself that the imposter was “Joey”—a man disguised as a Servant, along with his partner Zia—whom Vincent and Julia had welcomed into their home. Danal found it ironic, now that he was a real Servant disguising himself as a man.

  His last hope lay in showing her the looming mansion. Julia obediently stared at it in the rain, looking up at the gables and windows. Water ran down her bald scalp, beading on her pallid skin. She blinked rainwater out of her eyes and continued to look.

  “Well?” Danal finally lost his patience. “Does this seem familiar to you? At all?”

  “No,” Julia answered with flat but brutal honesty.

  “It’s no use,” Danal said quietly.

  Laina looked at him, understanding, but with a scowl. “You’re giving up hope, then?” She refilled his glass with the last of the iced tea, but now it tasted bitter.

  “Her memories are dead and buried. They’re completely gone, wiped clean.” Danal hung his head. He could no longer even look at the walking husk of Julia. He had sent her with Gregor through the levels of the underground world where she would be occupied with menial tasks such as keeping the persistent repair-rats from undoing the constructions of the Wakers.

  Laina reached up and patted him on the shoulder. He looked at her and realized that she had dressed in her white nurse/tech uniform. She wore it for her own comfort, since it no longer did her any good in the medical center, but she wore none of the excessive makeup, letting her bland Servant face stand on its own.

  “You know, if it helps any, we’ve done quite a bit of research for ourselves. Rodney Quick got us more than a liter of a mutated batch of the final resurrection solution—that helped a lot. Apparently, the mutated solution weakens the barriers holding our memories back. But it takes something else, repeated shocks to our memories to break them open. You’re giving Julia the shocks all right, but if the barriers were never loosened in the first place…. Well, there’s nothing you can do about it. The mutated solution is really the key, and her resurrection was probably routine.”

  Danal’s jaw muscles tightened, masking a sea of inner turmoil. He sat up to look Laina straight in the eye, and she seemed startled by the expression on his face. “I can’t kid myself any longer.” His voice came out sh
arp and cold. “And now I don’t have any reason in the world to forgive Nathans.”

  Danal leaned back on his hammock and stared into the swallowing darkness. Laina looked as if she wanted to say something to him, but maintained her silence. He didn’t look at her. His burning anger seemed to feed on itself, leaving him motionless.

  From below, Danal heard the gentle creaking of cross-beams as someone climbed up to where he and Laina sat together.

  “Careful, now.” Gregor’s voice came from under them, then the leader hauled himself up to the main platform. The Servant Julia mechanically followed him up the ladder; as her hands appeared at the topmost rung, Gregor bent to help her up. Gregor dwarfed the silent Servant woman, but she seemed barely aware of his presence. Though Danal had begun to lose patience, Gregor still treated Julia with full courtesy and respect.

  “Gregor, I’ve decided to stop trying,” Danal sighed, as if confessing. “I’ve done everything I can think of, but still Julia’s memories won’t come back.”

  “For that, I’m glad,” Gregor said carefully, watching Danal and not wanting to start an argument, respecting the other’s decision. “I’m not sure it would be a kindness to give her memories back, to pull her away from… wherever she is.”

  Danal closed his eyes for a moment. He once again ran through the visions of his death experience, rapidly now—the chimes, the tunnel, the light, the familiar welcoming presences around him. He was suddenly struck by something he had not realized before. While he could no longer remember the identities of those other gathered spirits, his escorts, he was convinced that Julia—the real Julia—had not been there. This perplexed him, for surely she would have come to welcome him into death?

  Breathless, young Rikki dropped to the platform from above with a loud thump, too agitated to use the ropes. His face lit up when he found Danal. “I’ve found her! Again! There’s another Julia!”

  Danal lurched off the hammock and landed on the balls of his feet. “What?”

  “It’s hard to explain, but I’ve found another Julia!”

  Gregor interrupted, keeping a serious expression on his face. “How could you have found someone else? You’re supposed to be on guardian duty.”

  “Oh, I gave up some of my time for the searches,” he answered curtly and turned his attention back to Danal.

  But Gregor raised his voice. “And put us all in jeopardy? All Wakers?”

  “It was only for a little while. Nothing happened.”

  Danal stopped any further argument with his own impatience. “What are you talking about, Rikki?” He looked at the Servant Julia who stood motionless beside them.

  The boy Waker shrugged. “My search routines kept churning away, deeper and deeper into The Net. See, after we had located her”—he indicated the Servant Julia—“I forgot about the routines. I didn’t think they’d come up with anything different—that’s for sure.

  “But I found someone else, hidden really deep. She seems to have only the faintest hint of a correlation with this Julia, or your Julia. But it’s real. I can’t tell you anything more, but she is alive. Not a Servant.”

  “Where is she?” Danal whispered.

  “Tough security. In a quarantined hospital complex, held in absolute isolation. It’s almost as if they don’t want anybody to see she’s there, you know?”

  Danal focused his eyes off in the distance, feeling hope again. With his double-think mentality, it would be just like Nathans to have created a decoy Julia, this Servant, made to look like the real Julia through surface-cloning, just as the imposter had taken Danal’s own place as Vincent Van Ryman. What if the real Julia was still alive, locked away someplace, a final card for Nathans to play?

  What if Julia was still alive?

  His breath came in short bursts. “I have to know.” He looked around at all the faces, pleading. “But how am I going to get in, if he’s got tight security all around?”

  After a moment of silence Laina chuckled a bit. “Piece of cake.” She straightened the skirt of her white nurse/tech outfit. “After all, it’s just another medical center.”

  PART IV

  Confrontation

  34

  The polished visor hid Jones’s impatient smile as he hurried through the back passageways to the neo-Satanists’ sacrificial grotto. Some of the walls bore graffiti, most of it influenced by the cult. Reddish mood-light poured from fluorescent panels above, but the place stood empty so early in the morning. He knew Nathans would be there.

  Jones couldn’t wait to tell the other man. He’d never imagined he could discover something so important, so incredible all by himself—certainly not in the barracks, certainly not on a community Net terminal. The knowledge made him proud with a happy self-confidence he had never experienced before. He had done something, accomplished something, completed a meaningful and important purpose.

  Because of Nathans’s insistence on absolute secrecy regarding his connections to the Guild, Jones was forbidden to show his Elite Guard colors in any area frequented by the neo-Satanists, though the man’s public involvement with the cult itself was murky at best. The precautions seemed a bit extreme to Jones, but he knew Nathans must have his reasons.

  Jones wore his old white uniform, a plain Enforcer again, strangely out of place. He felt he was lowering himself now that he had earned the right to wear Elite Guard blue, but, on the other hand, the white armor brought back a spark of nostalgia. The old uniform had made him comparatively unobtrusive, even at dawn, when he’d entered the mass-trans station. The outbound cars were nearly empty, with most commuters traveling the opposite direction, streaming into the Metroplex for the workday.

  Sitting alone, Jones looked at the scratched transplastic window, fidgeting in his armor and staring up at the sky. As curfew finished for the night, one late patrol hovercar rushed silently overhead, making for its Guild hangar.

  At the destination-request terminal Jones entered the confidential code used by the neo-Satanists, ensuring that a special transport would be waiting for him when he reached the last stop on the fringe line. He sat and waited, drumming his fingers on the seat as a stream of darkness and light passed the window.

  When forming the cult, Nathans had diverted his own workers from their regular labor to the construction of a spectacular secret ceremonial chamber deep at an unknown end of the mass-trans system. Later, anyone initiated into the cult received the special destination code that allowed them to enter the grotto.

  As he disembarked, Jones’s skin crawled in unconscious reaction to his own superstitions. The Guild served a purpose, and now that he knew more he could respect that; he could see the importance of the Enforcers, especially the Elite Guard—but neo-Satanism was something else altogether. He didn’t understand why Nathans would bother with it.

  Breathless, Jones brought himself to the bottom of the stairs and stopped short in front of the doorway that led into the High Priest’s private chambers. The chronometer on the lower right-hand corner of his visor said “6:13 a.m.”; he was a few minutes late already.

  A mere handful of people knew the password to enter the private chambers, and Jones hummed the mnemonic to himself, “Roy G. Biv Deserves Fudge.” Nathans had trusted him with the password, though Jones was uneasy with his increased amount of assistance in neo-Satanist activities. In his stiff white gloves Jones punched the letters one at a time.

  The iron-studded door crawled open, protesting. Clouds of grayish-brown smoke curled upward from the doorway, reeking of sulfur. Jones automatically switched on the mask filters behind his visor and stepped into the room, baffled. Had something caught on fire? He tensed—was Nathans all right?

  Low orange lights suddenly came on, and an impossibly heavy footstep thundered down as a huge figure came into view.

  Jones took a step backward in utter disbelief. The figure was a nightmare, a demon nine feet tall with bulbous muscles and brick-red skin. Curved horns like massive construction tools rode on its forehead, and a pur
ple glow stabbed from its eyes as the creature gazed at Jones. It opened its mouth in a snarl as it stomped forward, exposing white fangs like sharpened pencils.

  Though it walked on cloven hooves and ungainly animal-like legs, it moved with frightening speed and fluidity. Blue arcs of electricity skirled up and down its swishing arrow-tipped tail.

  Jones yelped and in one liquid motion he drew a pocket bazooka in one hand and a projectile weapon in the other. He crouched and aimed—

  “Stop!”

  Both Jones and the monster froze. Nathans emerged from the shadows, laughing. He flicked on the fluorescent lights and opened air ducts to draw away the brimstone smoke.

  “Relax Jones—meet Prototype.” The man smiled with childish delight. “He’s a completely autonomous, fully functional android.”

  Astonished, the Enforcer stuttered to himself, but could not find his voice. Nathans continued, talking like a proud father, “Maybe you thought androids were impossible? That’s what Resurrection, Inc. always implied, and gave us Servants instead.” He dismissed that thought with a wave. “Never impossible, though—simply not cost-effective. It’s a hell of a tedious process to duplicate every single nerve and muscle fiber in a biological body. ‘Servants for Mankind—Freeing Us from Tedium to Pursue Our True Destiny’ and all that rot. Prototype here is just to show it can be done, although I’ve taken the liberty of embellishing his body.”

  Nathans tapped one of the curving horns. “Okay, Prototype, you can go back to the chamber and continue your inventory.” Obediently the android turned and shuffled with a strange grace out of the room and into the large neo-Satanist storage vaults. “He is, after all, still like a Servant, so I’ve put him to work back there.” Nathans adjusted his orange-red hairpiece, long and kinky this time. “Please take off that helmet, Jones—no need to keep up a charade for me.”

  Jones slipped off the lightweight helmet and blinked in the open air. Nathans watched him closely, and the Enforcer realized that his facial expressions were now exposed as he talked.