Amortals

by Matt Forbeck

  "Can you please confirm your order, Dooley Nine?" asked Minder. "You do realize that this will result in my dissolution?"

  "No!" Patrón said. "Stop it, Minder! It's suicide!"

  Minder said nothing.

  Patrón brandished his empty pistol at me. "Don't you dare," he said to me. "Don't you damn well dare! I'll make this death of yours the worst of all."

  I gave him a pitying look. "If you could do that, you would have already."

  Horror dawned on Patrón's face as he realized I had seen through his bluff.

  "Minder?" I said. "I hereby–"

  Before I could complete the sentence, Patrón came screaming at me at the top of his lungs as his carrier robot lurched forward. Determined to stop me by any means necessary, he hurled his empty pistol at my head.

  I batted it out of the air with one hand as I raised Querer's gun with the other. Then I shot him right through his twitching eye.

  The carrier robot hauled up short as its rider tumbled backward off it and into the open air beyond the platform's edge. This time, he fell without any noise but the sickening crunch he made when he landed.

  I got on top of the carrier robot, and Querer leaped on behind me. I looked out at the crèches beyond and saw countless copies of Patrón leaving their now open crèches behind. Some tried to hail other carrier robots. Others had already given up and started climbing down from their crèches on their own.

  "Dear God," Querer said. "What do we do now?"

  They couldn't touch us now, but if we gave them a chance – if we gave any one of them the chance – they'd kill us both. With my face splashed across the newsfeeds as the man who'd tried to assassinate the President, I'd have the entire nation lend the Patróns a hand in trying to hunt me down.

  Whether someone was holding a gun to my head at the moment or not, there was only one choice.

  "Minder?" I said. "I hereby confirm my orders. Release the clones. Set every last one of them free."

  Minder didn't say a word.

  I grabbed the robot's saddle and tried to direct it toward the exit. With my nanoserver fried, though, I had no way to communicate with it. I couldn't get it to do anything. I slapped the top of it in frustration. I hadn't come all this way to be stuck here now.

  Then the robot started moving. When it slipped forward off the platform and zoomed toward the exit, I turned back to grin at Querer, who I knew had set the robot on its current course for me. She hugged me like she might never let me go.

  When we got halfway to the elevator doors, the lights on every crèche in the room turned from blue to red. And then countless slumbering people, unaware even that they had been asleep, awoke for the first time in their lives, at once.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Matt Forbeck has worked full-time on fiction and games since 1989. Frankly, he is a creative machine, and thus utterly perfect for Angry Robot. His many publishers include Adams Media, AEG, Atari, Boom! Studios, Atlas Games, Del Rey, Games Workshop, Green Ronin, High Voltage Studios, Human Head Studios, IDW, Image Comics, Mattel, Pinnacle Entertainment Group, Playmates Toys, Simon & Schuster, Ubisoft, Wizards of the Coast, and WizKids. He has written novels, comic books, short stories, non-fiction (including the acclaimed Marvel Encyclopedia), magazine articles and computer game scripts. He has designed collectible card games, roleplaying games, miniatures and board games. His work has been published in at least a dozen different languages.

  Matt is a proud member of the Alliterates writers group, the International Association of Media Tie-In Writers, and the International Game Developers Association. He lives in Beloit, Wisconsin, USA, with his wife Ann and their children: Marty, and the quadruplets: Pat, Nick, Ken and Helen. (And there's a whole other story.)

  www.forbeck.com

  AUTHOR'S NOTES

  Amortals has been a long time coming. I first came up with the idea way back in 1994 after I learned about snuff films, movies in which real people are killed. This was back in the days before the Internet, and these illegal shows used to be passed around on VHS tapes, supposedly giving viewers a real look at the horrors of death.

  I never saw any of these films – never wanted to – but the idea of them stuck with me. I wondered what would it be like to see your own snuff film, and what would you then do about it? The first chapter of Amortals charged into my mind and stomped around the place, demanding that I write it down.

  The title popped into my head along with the opening bits of the story. Ronan Dooley, who would play both the victim and the detective, would no longer be mortal, but since he could be killed he wasn't exactly immortal either. No, he was amortal.

  After that, I came up with the basic framework for the story, including the first three chapters and an outline of the first book, plus a couple sequels. I pitched it to Ace Books and White Wolf Publishing and collected a matched pair of rejection letters for my efforts. Then I set it aside for many years while I concentrated on starting up a roleplaying game company – Pinnacle Entertainment Group, which published the western horror game Deadlands and my own dystopian superhero game, Brave New World.

  Once I left Pinnacle at the end of 1999, I wanted to take another shot at writing novels, but I was too busy working as a freelance writer and game designer to manage it. This is one of the great paradoxes of being a working writer. When you depend on your writing to bring in regular money from contract work, it's nearly impossible to set aside several months of your life and income to write something that has no guarantee it will ever get published.

  I solved that problem by starting to write tie-in novels instead. The publishers of these books commissioned them ahead of time, giving me an advance up front along with a guaranteed sale. My first, CAV: The Big Dance, was a short, small-press novel that came out in 2002.

  I used that as a crowbar to open up other doors, and Wizards of the Coast published my first mass-market novel – a middlegrade Dungeons & Dragons fantasy called Secret of the Spiritkeeper – in 2004. I followed that up with another 10 novels based on various games, including Blood Bowl, Eberron, and Mutant Chronicles.

  Still, I had that itch to write Amortals, and while I could ignore it for long stretches of time, it never went away. I pitched it to Solaris back in 2005, and while the managing editor there – one Marc Gascoigne, now the head Angry Robot himself – liked it, he couldn't get the rest of his team to sign off on it.

  When I first pitched the book to Marco, he said, "That sounds an awful lot like Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan." To which I said, "What by who?"

  I bought the book and read it right away. It's excellent. If you like Amortals, go get it. You'll love it.

  Altered Carbon is set in a future in which you can have your mind backed up to an onboard storage system and then reloaded into any available body set up to accept it. The hero is brought back into a body and has a limited amount of time to solve a murder. If he fails, he's sent back into a virtual prison to finish his sentence for previous crimes. Sound familiar?

  When, in 2009, Marco started up Angry Robot books, he invited me to pitch him some novels. I sent him a stack of them, each only a couple paragraphs long. He pulled out the one for Vegas Knights, and said, "I like that one. Do you have any more?"

  I went back to my pitch for Amortals and polished it up. Remembering that Marco had mentioned Altered Carbon after reading the pitch before, I told him that Morgan's book may feature many of the same notes as Amortals, but they're entirely different songs.

  He agreed, and by now you've hopefully already enjoyed the results.

  Extras

  A LOOK UNDER THE HOOD: The Original Pitch For Amortals

  As a published author, I'm often asked how one gets a book accepted by a publishing house. Here's the pitch for Amortals that convinced Angry Robot to pick up the book. You may notice that several things changed in the process of writing the manuscript. For instance, I melded Morton North and Amanda Querer into a single character.

  Amortals

  A
novel proposal

  By Matt Forbeck

  High Concept

  In a not-too-distant future in which scientists have solved the problem of mortality by learning how to backup and restore a person's mind into a vat-bred clone, a Secret Service agent wakes up and is put to work solving his own murder.

  Set-Up

  Biotechnology has evolved to the point that the wealthy or important can have their memories electronically backed up. Upon their death, these memories can be loaded into an identical clone prepared for this purpose. Or so it seems.

  The wealthy can pay for this procedure and have stopped funding medical research. The life expectancy of the poor plummets, creating a canyon between the haves (who continue to amass wealth without even the abatement of death) and the have-nots (who can't afford even their shortened lives).

  Amortals explores the nature of identity, the fallibility of memory, the disposable world in which we live, and the malleability of history, both personal and otherwise. It's dark and gritty and filled with political commentary veiled by the pseudo-distance that SF provides.

  Main Characters

  Ronan "Methuselah" Dooley: The best Secret Service agent in the country – and the oldest man in the world. He was nearly killed saving the President, and he underwent the first test of the amortal procedure to save his life.

  Morton North: Dooley's new partner in the field, the latest in a long line. He's still in his first body and can't afford his next.

  Amanda Querer: Dooley's last partner, a career agent with no hope of amortality.

  Winston Patrón: The head of the Secret Service and a close advisor to the President.

  Sharma Patil: Leader of the Kalis, an Indian mob that dominates organized crime in DC.

  Plot

  The story opens with Ronan Dooley's vicious murder. We pull back to see North and Patrón, discussing the case with a Dooley who's very much alive. It's been several weeks since Dooley's last backup, and he's missing all of his memories of that time – and his partner Querer along with them.

  With North's help, Dooley must reconstruct his missing past and learn what he was up to so that he can determine who killed him. He suspects he got too close to the Kalis, and they murdered him for his efforts. They filmed his murder to send him a message to back off.

  As Dooley delves further into the plot, he figures out that his last case involved a plot to assassinate the President that he foiled. He follows the trail all the way up to Patil, who denies everything. He's in charge of organized crime, not anarchy. He's learned to milk the system for everything it's worth, and he has no interest in tearing it down.

  Soon enough, Dooley discovers that Querer is still alive – and apparently has gotten involved in the assassination plot. Believing that she's gone into deep cover, Dooley argues with Patrón that they need to give her the space she needs. Patrón gives Dooley 48 hours to prove that Querer hasn't gone rogue.

  The deadline comes and goes, and Dooley must throw the rest of the Secret Service off Querer's trail while he finishes tracking her down. Once he catches up with her, he discovers that she has gone rogue but that she's not the leader of the plot. He is.

  Investigating the assassination plot, Dooley's last self realized that the conspirators were right. The government had been carving up his memories to make him more pliable – and presumably they'd done the same with every other amortal on the planet.

  The current Dooley must decide whether to help his old self, bring him in, or kill him to cover up the fact that he seems to have gone mad. It's then that the older Dooley reveals that the plot against the President is only one part of the scheme. Killing an amortal doesn't do any good – unless you destroy the facility with all of the spare bodies as well.

  THE ORIGINAL SYNOPSIS

  I wrote this back in 1994 for when I started pitching it around for what I hoped would be my first novel. I tossed this away before I started in on the version that became the book you hold in your hands.

  The Amortals

  A World Synopsis

  The world of The Amortals is our own in the year 2126. The story is set mostly in Chicago, the third largest city in USA, Inc. In order to keep up with the economic world pressure and to pay off its skyrocketing debt, the United States incorporated itself in 2026, on the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The new government bears a great deal of resemblance to our own, but instead of a Constitution, USA, Inc., is based a document known as the Articles of the Incorporation. Most other nation-corps have similar documents upon which they have been refounded.

  Under the new system, one share equals one vote. Only residents of the US can own stock in their nation, and every citizen is awarded one share at birth. Other shares can be purchased or awarded over the course of a stockholder's life. State and local borders no longer exist except as convenient means of referring to an area. Due to the fast and cheap means of communicating available in the future, USA, Inc., is single, undivided entity.

  Every four years, a general election is held to choose the President. All other governmental offices (like those of the five hundred district representatives, each with a constituency of one million stockholders) are filled by employees. Open interviews are established for each position, and the most qualified applicants are awarded the positions.

  The current President of the Corporation has been in power for fifty years. He is an amortal, of course, and barring any horrible scandal, he is likely to remain in power for the foreseeable future.

  The process of granting amortality was developed in the years before the Incorporation. It has had a profound effect on the entire world.

  Once it became clear that they had the potential to live forever, people in power started to take a more long-term look at their world. It was decided that the biggest problem facing the world was a lack of resources. Since the supply side of the equation was uncontrollable, simple economics dictated that restrictions would have to be made on demand. To that end, world-wide birth control was instituted by introducing massive amounts of birth control drugs into all of the planet's drinking water treatment plants.

  The only way to have a baby is to get a license. These are only given out to those prospective parents that have completed parenting courses and a battery of physical and genetic exams. Those lucky enough to win a license (or rich enough to simply purchase one) are then given an antidote to the birth control drug and permitted to have a single child.

  Amortality is a rare thing in this society. Only one in a thousand people is either wealthy enough to have purchased it or fortunate enough to have been awarded it as part of a compensation package (like our protagonist, Ronan Dooley). At first, only the rich ever became amortal, but it soon became apparent that some people were simply too valuable for those in power to allow them to die. They were irreplaceable, and so steps were taken to ensure they would never be gone.

  Those who have "earned" their amortality are stuck in a kind of indentured servitude. If they want to keep living (at least beyond the natural life span of the incarnation they're currently on), they have to keep working for their employer. There is no retirement plan.

  This upsetting of the natural order has made many people extremely angry, particularly those that are doomed to die working for the same people their great-grandparents worked for. A resistance movement known as the Underground has arisen to try to put an end to amortality and bring things back to the way they were. They are supported by a number of religious organizations that have always claimed that it was only God's prerogative to cheat death.

  It is this organization that Dooley and his wife Miranda get involved in. It's a powerful group, but it's hampered by the fact that it must remain secret to avoid persecution, as well as by the fact that its members are all "short timers".

  One of the main reasons the Underground has formed is because of the staggering gap between the haves and have-nots. The rich have all of time stretching out before themselves in which to grow even ric
her. The poor can look forward to nothing but a timely death. This dichotomy has made the rich even more jealous of their position than they are today. After all, to fall from on high in this world means not only to be poor, but to lose your amortality. People are willing to fight even harder to preserve for themselves not one, but several lifetimes.

  Correspondingly, since they no longer have any real fear of death, the rich have horribly neglected the poor. Diseases like AIDS kill large portions of the population. After amortality became available, funds for researching for a cure for such illnesses became a low priority. If an amortal was mortally ill, the solution was as simple as a new body. Those in poverty don't have that option, but they haven't enough power to make those capable of doing anything about it care.

  The cities are in decay, having been long since abandoned by most rich. One exception to this is downtown Chicago, in which the wealthy have simply raised themselves above it all. No mortals are allowed to live above the fiftieth floor in any of the city's skyscrapers, and most are forced to suffer in quarters so cramped as to make the housing projects of the twentieth century look roomy.