The Resurrected Man

by Sean Williams

  “Huh?” Jonah shook his head. “I didn't mean to fall asleep.”

  “Well, you didn't miss much, believe me. I remember now why we stopped using these things. Travelling is such a waste of time. In a civilised country, we could've been there hours ago.”

  Jonah didn't want to be drawn into an argument. He sat upright in the seat and straightened his clothes. The palm of his left hand was stiff where the EJC hologram had finished growing. His mouth was dry and he felt flushed. His overseer contained a detailed flow-chart that represented a d-mat user's path from transmission to reception booths. He glanced at it long enough to realise how complicated it was, then dropped it into a corner for later inspection. They would shortly be driving an unknown distance into Quebec; maybe then there would be time for him to examine the information QUALIA had given him.

  The plane came to a halt, and ramps were locked in place. The MIU contingent was allowed off first, this time by the front exit. Jonah limped as best he could along the crowded aisle, with Fassini's hand ready to support him if he stumbled. He was halfway along before realising that he hadn't seen Marylin yet.

  The wheelchair was waiting for him in the corridor. He slumped gratefully into it and let himself be pushed up the gentle slope into the airport. Small windows allowed him brief glimpses of the outside world—his first sight of Quebec. It was early evening under a clear sky. At this latitude, despite being the middle of summer, the night would be cool.

  They entered the concourse. He directed his attention forward and finally found Marylin. She was standing near Whitesmith, her black and grey uniform matching those of her superior and the other officers nearby. A large pistol, holstered, hung at her side. Her head, the only part of her directly visible, was bare. She was looking at him.

  One of the local field agents was talking loudly in French to an official. The official looked apologetic but adamant.

  “What's the problem?” Jonah asked.

  “Red tape,” said Fassini from behind him. “They don't adhere to EJC freedom-of-movement guidelines and want us to go through customs. Under normal circumstances that would be fine, but we have a special exemption because we're in a hurry. We should be able to walk through. There are cars waiting.”

  Jonah looked for a water fountain and found one on a nearby wall. “I need a drink,” he said. “Do we have time?”

  “Of course.” Fassini moved him closer. “We can probably swing a toilet stop if you need that as well.”

  “No, I'm fine.” He drank thirstily, wincing at the water's bitter, metallic taste. His lack of hunger surprised him. Just how thoroughly had KTI riddled him with nanos? Agents designed to break down waste and return it to his digestive tract could have accounted for his seemingly halted metabolism, but that seemed unnecessarily indulgent.

  When he was done, Fassini wheeled him back. The argument had been settled. The official waited for everyone to gather their bags then led them down a long, wide corridor. The airport was busier than Jonah had expected—as busy as Ottawa, despite the lack of d-mat booths. He felt as though he had been transplanted into a parallel universe, one that he knew was fundamentally different to his own yet seemed identical. The view through the window could have been of anywhere on Earth.

  They passed through a security checkpoint before being allowed into the airport's main foyer. Blue-uniformed guards kept a close eye on them as they lugged their grey cases through the checkpoint with the official beside them guaranteeing passage. Jonah's new ID was examined along with the others, and passed inspection. Within minutes, they were through.

  Three unmarked vehicles awaited them outside: one grey van and two white four-seaters. Most of the cases went into the van, along with Whitesmith and two of the MIU officers. Marylin, Fassini, Jonah and a local field agent bundled into one car, while the remainder took the other. Without a word spoken aloud, Marylin tapped a destination into the dash, then turned the seat around to face the back. The wheelchair had folded into the spacious trunk, along with her case and his hand luggage. The four of them watched each other in silence as the car moved away, the second in the convoy, tailed closely by the van.

  Still conscious of being excluded, Jonah caught the eye of the plain-clothes field agent and held out his hand. “Jonah McEwen.”

  “I know. Lon Kellow.” The agent's handclasp was polite but brief, just like his smile. Square-jawed and solidly built, he looked the part of an EJC agent. A bland accent left his origins a mystery.

  “You're from Ottawa?”

  “Toronto.”

  “Ever hear of someone called Villette van Mierlo?”

  “No.” The agent's eyes glanced uncertainly at him, then away, as though he wasn't supposed to be talking.

  Jonah gave up. “Does anyone intend to tell me where we're going?”

  Marylin looked at him. “Northeast. That's where we were instructed to head.”

  “I don't suppose you know how long—?”

  “No.” Her face was wooden, tense. “If you'll excuse me, I have work to do.”

  Her gaze drifted away, and Jonah let her go. No doubt she would be in constant, close contact with the others around her, waiting for some sign from WHOLE. He wondered how long they would wait before such a sign came, whether they would drive all night if they had to.

  The convoy swung onto a four-lane freeway and merged into a thick stream of traffic. Night was falling rapidly, but electric lights burned away the stars. All he could see were cars, buses and trucks; thousands of them surrounding him, reminding him—with more than a hint of irony—of his earlier thought about Quebec being a nation surrounded by cars. It was more the other way around. He could smell and hear them even within the airtight confines of his car, but he couldn't see the faces of the people who drove them. They might have been nonexistent, the mirrored, depersonalised windows hiding nothing but empty interiors.

  The rest of the world had left such scenes behind when it had embraced d-mat ten years earlier. It was slightly shocking to be reminded firsthand of what things had been like, before.

  Either that or the movement of the car beneath him made him feel nauseous. He let the seat embrace him, but knew that he would be unable to sleep this time. Calling up the flowchart, he began to trace the path of data through the KTI network.

  The d-mat process, at its most simple, followed three stages: analysis, transmission, and synthesis. Both analysis and synthesis took place within booths, and involved sophisticated technologies about which Jonah knew little. It was enough for him to know that analysis started with an object to be transmitted and resulted in nothing, whereas synthesis worked the other way around. The transmission phase in between was more familiar territory, involving multiple redundancy, security checks, complicated compression techniques and smoothing functions. The last were sometimes referred to as “fudge factors,” and were one of the numerous reasons why WHOLE and the Quebec government disapproved of the d-mat process. Fudge factors allowed the synthesis algorithms to assume a certain number of givens about a human form, provided the initial analysis had revealed no great deviations from the norm. KTI insisted that they did not allow smoothing functions to alter an individual in any perceptible way, but WHOLE feared that people who used d-mat regularly might risk becoming smoothed themselves, that multiple fudging would result in gross discrepancies from the original. They called this “The Chinese Whisper Syndrome” despite the fact that, to Jonah's knowledge, no one had ever been found who had been disadvantaged by it.

  The transmission path was tortuous, especially when it left the KTI network and entered the Pool. The mass of data representing the d-matting object was broken down into packets that were sent individually through the network of supercomputers. Here was where delays often occurred, for although analysis and synthesis were processes controlled to the femtosecond by KTI's AIs, the Pool, much like the Internet that had preceded it, was an anarchic web that had tendrils beyond the planet. Packets could be delayed, lost or even destroyed between
one point and another; too many such failures could result in the process being aborted entirely, although usually a simple repeat of after segments of the data was all that was required. Ten percent of all transmissions required a request for such repeats, and each request added several minutes onto the total d-mat transmission time. Only one in ninety thousand was aborted and begun all over again.

  On an obscure branch of the transmission tree, Jonah found a data feed that seemed to lead nowhere. He followed the schematic diagram through several times, making certain he hadn't missed any termini or junctures. He ended up where he had started, with a bleed from the transmission line that led away from the terminus of the jump. Where, though, he couldn't tell. All there was at the end of that line was an arrow containing the letters “LSM” in bold print.

  “QUALIA?”

  He waited for a moment, but the AI didn't reply. Communication with the outside world was obviously more difficult than Whitesmith had expected.

  “Does anyone know what LSM stands for?” he asked aloud.

  Even to himself his voice seemed to boom. The cab was in complete darkness, lit only by the headlights of vehicles around them. The traffic had thinned, as had the suburbs. No one had spoken for at least half an hour.

  Fassini stirred, distracted, beside him. “No. Should I?”

  “It'd help.”

  “Sorry.” Fassini's teeth glinted in the variable light but his eyes remained in shadow.

  “Then how about answering another question.” He leaned forward in his seat. “What the fuck am I doing here?”

  Fassini shook his head as though coming out of a dream. “What?”

  “What's the point of me being involved in this little day trip if no one's going to tell me what's happening?” He wanted to get angry, but he held the urge tightly in check—as tight as the muscles in his jaw and throat. “And what's the point of trying to investigate if anything I say is just ignored?”

  “Jonah, look—”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know. You're off your turf and you have to be extra careful. But, jesus, at least give me something to do. I'm going out of my mind just sitting here!”

  Marylin stirred. “What's going on?”

  “Ah, it speaks,” Jonah said, through gritted teeth.

  “Can this wait? We don't have time right now.”

  “We have too much time. That's the problem.”

  “Believe me, it isn't.”

  “Then tell me what you're doing. I thought I was part of this. Don't cut me out now, just when it's getting interesting.”

  Marylin and Fassini exchanged glances.

  “QUALIA's off-air—” the agent began.

  “Don't I know it.”

  “—and the raw satellite images we're downloading suggest that we have a tail.”

  Jonah blinked; that was interesting. “What sort of tail?”

  “Three medium-sized cars, possibly vans; one ahead of us, two behind. They've kept with us since we left the airport. Now we're leaving the city the chances of it being a coincidence are minimal.”

  Jonah nodded. Suddenly he felt bad for bothering them. But he wasn't going to apologise. “Cut me into your channel. I want to watch.”

  “You don't have the MIU encryption software.”

  “So what happens if you need to talk to me?”

  “Then we'll call you direct.” Fassini leaned forward and his face slid into view. “I'm sorry, Jonah. Bear with us. You never know; it might not be for much longer.”

  Jonah grunted and fell back into his seat. “I'm not sure what's worse: doing nothing when there's nothing to do or when there's nothing I can do.”

  Fassini smiled. “Exactly.”

  Before Jonah could reply, something in the front of the car went bang and he was thrown forward onto the floor.

  The babble in Marylin's head was continuous and urgent in tone.

  “We've got a visual fix on the brown van.”

  “ID?”

  “Lines to ACOC still down.”

  “Down or scrambled?”

  “Impossible to tell with this equipment.”

  “Fuck ‘impossible.’ Find a way.”

  “Odi,” she broke in, “we've got a problem with Jonah.”

  “Fuck him too. What now?”

  “He's restless. Can we give him a passive feed?”

  “Do what you want. Just don't let him get in the way.”

  Before Marylin could enable the feed, there was an explosion behind her and half the voices in her head were silenced in a howl of static. The car lurched. She opened her eyes and caught a glimpse of something white scraping down her side of the car. The navigation AI screamed collision-avoidance jargon at her overseer. She flinched as momentum pulled Fassini towards her. He caught himself in time on a handle.

  Jonah wasn't so lucky. He slid off the seat and into Lon Kellow's legs.

  “Pic!” Fassini gasped as the car shuddered, steadied, and continued along its way.

  Whitesmith was shouting at her, asking if she was okay. At first she wasn't sure, and wouldn't be until she had worked out what had happened. Half the lines were still dead, but the burst of static she'd heard was gone. The car still seemed to be running. She looked over her shoulder. The bonnet was newly dented. The sound she'd heard hadn't been an explosion, she realised, but an impact. More tellingly, the leading car was gone.

  “What the—?”

  “Hang on,” she said to Jonah's spoken question. She gave him what he wanted: enabled the feed to his overseer to avoid having to repeat everything. “Odi, we're battered but fine. You?”

  “AOK. The wreck missed us, luckily. It looked like you copped a hefty whack.”

  “The car's damaged, but the engine's fine. What happened?”

  “I don't know yet. We've lost contact with the others.”

  “Likewise. What do we do now?”

  “We can't stop. I've notified local Law Enforcement. The LEOs'll see what happened, look after any injured. We have to keep moving, get our speed up, try to break away from our shadows.”

  “They're still with us?”

  “Yes. I'm taking the van on solo for the time being. Maybe—”

  There was another burst of static.

  “Odi!” Through the rear window she saw the van slew across lanes of traffic. It dropped behind too rapidly for her to tell what happened to it.

  “Shit.” She patched into the car's navigator to request an immediate acceleration to twenty kilometres an hour above the freeway speed limit.

  “This is an emergency?” the car asked her.

  “Yes, dammit.”

  “At this speed, it is advised that you and your company don safety harnesses.”

  “We're aware of the risks. Just do as I ask—now!”

  The engine surged. She reached for the harness that had slid out of a niche behind her seat. The car changed lanes to overtake a taxi in their path. The voices in her head were silent apart from those belonging to the people in the car with her.

  “The shadows are accelerating with us,” Kellow said.

  “Maybe we should go faster,” Fassini suggested.

  “No,” said Jonah. “They'd be expecting that. At least one of their vehicles will be capable of outrunning us.”

  “Then, what?”

  “We have to out-think them.” Jonah tilted his head as though a thought had struck him. “Or not.”

  Before Marylin could ask him what he meant, another voice intruded:

  “Marylin?” The voice was fuzzy, barely audible.

  “Odi? Is that you?”

  “Only just. We were hit from behind by an EMP ram. Killed the engine, the navigator, the lot. The car's dead, although the interior's shielded, thank god. I'm wet-wiring, using the chassis as an antenna.”

  “What—”

  “Be ready. It'll be you next.”

  “Keep your hands away from anything metal,” she said to the others in the car. The thought of thousands of watts of pulsing micro
waves surging through their implants made her stomach turn. “Odi—”

  “The tails are moving again,” Fassini interrupted her. “One of the ones behind us is coming closer.”

  “Car? Take us up another fifteen klicks.”

  “Marylin—”

  “Not now, Jonah.” She dug the fingertips of both hands into her scalp, trying to think.

  “It's only us they want,” he persisted. “We should stop the car before they stop it for us. Before someone gets hurt.”

  She looked up at him. It went against all her instincts to give in. But he was making sense. Trying to outrun the people they were intending to contact was counterproductive; better to meet them on her own terms, at her own instigation.

  Out of the corner of her eye she saw a brown, windowless van edge up alongside them.

  “Car? Pull over.”

  “You wish to stop?”

  “Yes. I don't care where. Just make it somewhere safe, and soon.”

  Jonah nodded but said nothing as the car began to decelerate. His expression was uncertain.

  “Lon,” she said, “give Jonah your weapon.”

  The field agent looked startled. “What? But—”

  “Just do it.”

  The car moved to an inner lane, its speed dropping rapidly. Kellow removed his pistol from its holster and handed it to Jonah, who checked that it was fully loaded and keyed to his UGI, then stuffed it into a jacket pocket.

  “Thanks,” he said, eyes darting between her and the agent. “Here's hoping I don't need it.”

  The car drifted onto the shoulder, tyres crunching on loose stone. The brown van swung in behind it, keeping a safe distance away. Their speed had dropped to below twenty kilometres an hour

  Then, with a bang that made her ears pop, the car's brakes locked and they began to skid.

  Fassini cursed again as they all hung onto their harnesses. “They hit us anyway!”

  “Just to be sure.” Jonah didn't sound surprised. “Guess they don't want anyone following them, later.”

  The car slid to a juddering halt, accompanied by an almost gentle crunch. They came to rest against a guide rail, battered but none the worse for wear. For a moment, all Marylin could hear was the ticking of overstressed alloy, then, faint through the walls of the car, the roar of the van's engine as it pulled up behind them. Its headlights were dazzling. Shapes moved through the light.