The Resurrected Man

by Sean Williams

  “I don't see anything unusual in here,” he said.

  “Neither did I,” Marylin said, “but it's best to have you confirm it.”

  Jonah moved past her, systematically exploring through the house. The bathroom was clean and empty, the maintenance gel either removed by the MIU or drained by the housekeeper. His room was cluttered, preserved in its final state by an AI that could clean but not tidy beyond certain guidelines. None of his clothes appeared to be missing. Lindsay's possessions had been packed away, so his room looked even neater than normal. Someone must have made sure all his affairs were in order after his death; it may have been Jonah himself, but he couldn't remember doing so.

  Lindsay's study lay on the far side of a shut door leading from the bedroom deeper into the hill. Jonah went to palm the lock and was surprised to find the door ajar.

  “You opened this?” he asked Marylin.

  “No. That's how it was found.”

  “Are you positive of that?”

  “It's in the report. I've no reason to doubt it.”

  “You need a catch-up lesson in paranoia, Marylin. Lindsay's work was worth millions, maybe billions, of dollars, and this room is where he coordinated most of the research. The cost of the equipment alone could buy Faux Sydney a couple of times over.” He edged into the study. “Believe me, he always locked the door.”

  “You have the master codes.”

  “Yes. Are you implying that I left it open?”

  “There's no one else.”

  He grunted. The room was as large as two bedrooms combined and crowded with equipment in shielded boxes. He'd never known exactly what they contained, but he had a rough idea. Standard Human Equivalent AI processors, scanners, flatscreens and 3-D tanks; the sort of things required by someone who built high-tech minds for a living. The only people who would know exactly what the equipment was used for were in SciCon—and SciCon didn't tell anyone anything about their work. Rumours abounded as to how far SciCon would go to protect its secrets; it was occasionally compared to the now-defunct US Central Intelligence Agency.

  The air in the study was dry and cool; a dozen different hums combined to give the room an industrious atmosphere.

  “Director Trevaskis thought you might be using this setup to infiltrate KTI,” Marylin said, running her finger across one of the anonymous boxes. It came away clean.

  “I wouldn't have the first idea where to start.”

  “That's what I said.” She looked at him. “Do you even know how Lindsay made it work?”

  “Vaguely. Sometimes he'd call if he needed me to do something manually. Not very often, though; it was designed to be self-sufficient, or teleoperated at worst.”

  “See if you can bring it online.”

  He approached the central work-station, a U-shaped desk heavily loaded with complex paraphernalia. On his left was a simple hand-reader designed to pick up the motions of a user's fingers. He waved once to get its attention. The screen-saver, which he presumed had been running continuously for three years, cleared, revealing an empty green screen.

  Above the screen there had once been a hand-carved wooden sign that read: There is no such thing as unnecessary death. It had been Lindsay Carlaw's dream to make that statement true. Where the sign currently was, Jonah didn't know. Presumably the MIU had moved it while trying to activate the setup.

  “Hello, NAHI,” Jonah said. “Access Code 3834.”

  He waited a second for the core AI to respond. When it didn't, he repeated the command.

  “Access Code 3834.” He snapped his fingers directly in front of the hand-reader. When nothing happened, he tried typing the command on the keyboard. It appeared on the screen as alphanumeric text, but hitting Enter provoked no response. Within thirty seconds, the screen-saver returned.

  He leaned back in the wheelchair and looked up at Marylin. The smell of her was still strong in his nostrils, a hint of musk coming from beneath the body armour. Reality was much more disconcerting than VTC. “Is that what you expected?”

  “We had a tech run over it yesterday,” she said. “There was nothing he could do. Even rebooting from scratch made no difference. The core program's been erased, apparently.”

  “So why ask me to get it working?”

  She shrugged. “I was hoping you might pull something like you did with the housekeeper. After all, it resisted everything we threw at it to get those maintenance files, and you just asked it politely—”

  “It's no ordinary housekeeper.”

  “Obviously not.”

  “Lindsay designed and installed it himself, just like this.” He waved at the hand-reader again. It still didn't respond. He swivelled to study the bank of unmarked boxes, feeling completely out of his depth. He might as well try to find a hardcopy book in the Library of Congress with his eyes closed.

  The incessant hum was hypnotic, suggestive.

  “It's running,” he mused.

  “Part of it is a node in the Pool,” she said. “We can tell that much. It's ticking over nicely, no problems, but doesn't contain anything we'd be interested in.”

  His attention was sparked by that. “A node. Do you have its address?”

  “It's not ACHERON.”

  He grunted again. “Worth a try.” Confronted by the unresponsive screen, he was filled with a sense of futility. “I can't understand why Lindsay would've done this.”

  “It might not have been him,” she said. “Could you have erased the core program?”

  He thought about it. “Maybe. I don't know. I've never had cause to try.”

  “Our tech thinks you could've, if you'd got in.”

  “I didn't get in.”

  “But you thought you could. You've been in before. If nothing had changed and you had the know-how, this wouldn't be beyond you.”

  “Thanks a lot. But I've already told you I don't have the know-how.”

  “Unless you learned it in your blank spot—the week after Lindsay died.”

  He looked away, unable to pursue the thought. Everything in the room reminded him of his father. Or, more importantly, of his father's work. The quest for immortality, for an end to unnecessary death, had been such a driving force that it was hard, even now, to separate the man from the dream. He could feel the grief building, strong and irrational, like a bubble of blood behind his eyes.

  “I'm sorry,” Marylin said, her voice much softer than before.

  He turned back to her. “What?”

  “I'm sorry about Lindsay.” Her expression was hard to interpret. “I know I haven't said it before, but—” She shifted awkwardly on her feet. “His death must've come as a terrible shock.”

  He didn't know how to respond at first. It had been a shock, yes. But what did she care about his feelings? It jarred with the image she was trying to project—of a cold, professional EJC officer just doing her job. He was amazed that she had even noticed.

  “Thanks,” he ventured, “but I really don't need your sympathy.”

  She stiffened slightly. “If that's the way you want it—”

  “No.” He raised a hand, immediately regretting what he'd said. Wrong, wrong! “You misunderstand me. Losing Lindsay was a shock, yes, but not for the reasons you think.”

  She stared at him. “I know he wasn't your natural father. Is that what you mean?”

  “No. Where my genes come from was irrelevant to both of us.”

  “Then what? I don't understand.”

  “It's hard to explain. We were never particularly close. He took me into his custody so he could watch a child grow. I was an experiment in developmental cognition. By studying me, he hoped to learn more about growing his own AIs, which is what he was really interested in. By the time I grew up, he'd lost interest in me. We just lived together out of habit.”

  She moved away to lean against a stack of equipment. “I guess that explains something,” she said, not really looking at him. “You talked about what he was doing a lot—his latest projects and so on—bu
t never about him. It always seemed a bit strange. That, and the fact that I never met him.”

  “There was never an opportunity,” he lied. “He didn't get out much, unless he had to. He never used d-mat—”

  “I know, and that only made me wonder why he moved out here.”

  “He liked the quiet, the privacy.” Jonah felt a familiar frustration at justifying the actions of someone he himself disagreed with. “There's a small airstrip not far away where he kept a private plane. If he really needed to travel, it took him only a few hours to get to Perth or Darwin, and from there to the rest of the world.”

  “Did you fly with him much?”

  “No. You know I had no problem with d-mat. And prior to that we flew on commercial jets like everyone else.” He turned the memory over in his mind, savouring its bitter-sweet taste. The bubble was growing again. “I miss the planes, sometimes.”

  She nodded and shot him a sharp glance. “You're changing the subject, aren't you?”

  “Yes.”

  “It bothers you?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I don't know what to think, Jonah. You've just told me more about Lindsay in five minutes than you did in all the time we knew each other.”

  “I've got nothing to hide, Marylin. And there's nothing I wouldn't tell you, eventually.” The words came like a confession, from the deepest part of his soul, and his irritation flared at being so vulnerable. “Besides, you never told me about your parents.”

  “I didn't think you were interested. And it's not relevant, anyway. We're here to discuss you.”

  “True, but I'll be damned if I'll let you suck me dry. If you want me to help you, how about helping me along the way?”

  “How?”

  “Give me some answers. You said you'd show me the file on Lindsay's death if I helped you, but you haven't even mentioned it yet. I presume I'll only get it when you're good and ready, or when I have something concrete to bargain with.”

  “You think we're playing games, hanging onto the file to guarantee your compliance?”

  “Are you telling me you're not?”

  “No, I'm not telling you that.”

  “Is that what you're doing?”

  Her stare didn't waver, but she said nothing.

  “I thought so,” he said, his voice bitter.

  “It's not that simple, Jonah.”

  “No? What is it you're hiding, then?”

  “Nothing, I swear. We just want answers.”

  “Maybe you should look somewhere else.”

  He turned the chair and wheeled it out of the study. She followed him, startled at first, then alarmed.

  “Jonah. What are you talking about?”

  “I can't help you like this. That's what I'm talking about.”

  “I don't get it. Will you stop and talk to me!”

  He didn't slow down. “This case. It's too big, too complex, and it's been going too long. There's so much data I'd need a year to sift through it all.”

  “It's just a matter of starting somewhere—”

  “Bullshit. It's a matter of teamwork. You and your buddies work together just fine, but I'm an outsider; I'll never fit in. That doesn't worry me in itself, but it will be a problem in an investigation this size. It'll always be a case of me versus you—even if you do trust me completely, which I'm sure you don't. It's a sham.”

  He stopped at the entrance to the lounge, not sure where to go from there. He'd initially planned to leave looking in the study till later, but that forced him to confront the rest of the unit. The only other place he had left to go was back to the KTI medical centre.

  “Jonah, you can't just give up on this.” Marylin came to a halt behind him. “We can work together if you try.”

  “Exactly. If I try. What about you? How are you trying?” Frustration made him lash out. “Spare me the crap about being professional and having a job to do. If you really gave a shit about wanting to catch the Twinmaker, you'd give me the file on Lindsay's death and let me get on with it instead of jerking me around like a kid with a bag of lollies. Share, Marylin—that's all you have to do. There wouldn't be situations like this if information was disseminated freely.”

  “Now you're talking rubbish,” she shot back. “That freedom of information spiel is just rhetoric. It's a justification for being a voyeur—and a pretty flimsy one at that. No matter what you call yourself, you've always been a petty, prying little person. It's about time you woke up and took a good look at the rest of the world. You might get a surprise to see that it works just fine without your little crusade to keep it going.”

  He couldn't suppress a low, bitter laugh. “Jesus, you can tell who works for the government now. What a fucking waste.”

  “You're one to talk about waste. Who's spent the last three years vegetating in a vat of jelly? And who's the one who accused me of running away?”

  He clenched the arms of the chair and opened his mouth to retaliate. But before he could utter a word, the memory hit him hard.

  Someone had been standing in front of the d-mat booth, holding a pistol.

  He turned to stare at the booth, willing more to appear. The angle was almost right. He had been in roughly the same position, except standing; the light was the same. And he had been angry then, as now. But nothing else came. Just the certainty that the memory was correct: there had been someone in the room with him, someone he didn't know very well, and they had been fighting over something. The pistol had been aimed at him.

  Marylin followed his gaze. “What now? Jonah?”

  He couldn't tell her. It was too vague, too fleeting. She would think he was baiting her, making up leads in order to obtain the data he wanted. But he couldn't ignore it. He needed to pursue it. It was all he had.

  “We're doing it again,” he said, forcing himself to look at her.

  “What?”

  “Arguing.”

  “Yes.” She tapped the back of the wheelchair with the toe of her shoe. “Occupational hazard, I guess.”

  “You have to wonder if there's any point in doing this at all.”

  “The point is that we don't have much choice.”

  “Of course we do.” He sighed. Feigning exhaustion had never been easier. “Maybe we should take a break for a while, come back to it when we're feeling more relaxed.”

  She looked uncomfortable at the suggestion, but said: “Sure. If you want to. What exactly do you have in mind?”

  “A few hours. There are some things here I need to sort out. I'm sure you've got plenty of work to do elsewhere.”

  “I'm not leaving here without you.”

  “I need some time alone, Marylin.”

  “That's not an option, Jonah.”

  “Why not? You can't force me to do anything.”

  “And you can't do anything without us.”

  “Crap. I have contacts.”

  “Had, Jonah. You've been out of touch so long most of them assume you're dead. Any favours you might have been owed have long since been forgotten. And let's face it, you didn't have many actual friends.”

  He winced involuntarily, and she caught it.

  “Sorry to put it like that,” she said. “But you know how it is. Three years is forever in this business.”

  “But money is everything.” He resented her attitude. It made him callous. “Lindsay's estate was considerable. I presume I inherited?”

  She shrugged. “There was no one else.”

  “Well, there's a possibility. At the very least, you can let me try to do it my way.”

  “I'm sorry, Jonah. I can't. And you can't stay here alone. You're not fully recovered; you still require treatment.”

  “I'll manage.” As if you give a shit. “I'll bring a doctor in—a whole team, if I have to. Maybe that way I'll find out what else you've done to me without my consent.”

  Her expression tightened at that, but she still didn't relent.

  “Look, it's really not that hard—”


  “Don't patronise me, Jonah.”

  “Me patronise you? I'm just having trouble seeing the problem. What are you so afraid of? That I'll get away from you?”

  “Partly—”

  “So tag me, disable the booth, have QUALIA keep an eye on me—”

  “Who's to say we haven't?”

  That stopped him for a moment. “Haven't what?”

  “All of the above.”

  “Jesus christ. And still you won't leave me alone? Not even for three hours?” He shook his head, abandoning the pretence of surprise and letting the real thing flow free.

  “I know where you're coming from Jonah,” she said. “And I sympathise, really. But you have to see it from our point of view. We're in a very tricky position. It's not in our best interest to set you free, or to lock you up. Likewise, we need your help but we can't reciprocate fully. The law is vague on the matter of guilt in the case of duplication; we don't want to be seen to be aiding a potential felon. Yet you're our best lead. We can't let you go just yet. Don't you realise that? Don't you see what that means?”

  For a split-second he thought she was trying to tell him something quite different: Don't you see what sort of power that gives you over us? But what use was power like that if it couldn't gain freedom?

  And, besides, he doubted that that was what she was really trying to say. It didn't sit well with her new image.

  “It means I'm trapped,” he said.

  “Yes. For now.”

  He felt bad, briefly; she did look as though it bothered her. “All right then, I'll make it easy for you.” He wheeled the chair closer to her and used its mass to force her backwards, shepherding her through the dining area. “You're on my property. Get out now, before I call security, and don't come back until three hours have passed, or you have that file. Or a warrant.”

  “Jonah—”

  “Go on. Fuck off.”

  Fassini tensed as they approached. He reached for his taser, but Marylin cut him off with a single, sharp gesture.

  “Jonah,” she said, making a stand by the inner door.

  “Marylin, listen to me. I don't want you here.”

  “You don't mean that.”