The Eternity Brigade

by Goldin, Stephen

  Then a woman screamed off to his right, and Hawker—along with the rest of the group—turned quickly to see what the matter was.

  At first glance there was an alien in their midst. There was no reason why aliens couldn’t be dubbed too, and Hawker was sure there were other computers doing just that—but normally each group of resurrectees was of the same race. Still, the mere sight of an alien should not have caused one of their number, battle-hardened as she must be, to scream.

  Then Hawker looked more closely at the being, and felt a chill run up his spine. It wasn’t an alien, it was a human being—but a human being so twisted and deformed it was barely recognizable as such. Its face was a putty mask left out in the sun and then attacked by a hyperactive child; the right half of the face was a runny, flesh-colored blank, with both eyes on the left side of the nose and an eyebrow arching crazily upward. The neck was twisted halfway around, so the man was constantly looking over his left shoulder. His spine was bent into an S-curve, and the limbs on his left side were perceptibly longer than those on his right. The fingers on the man’s right hand were barely warts growing out of a club-like fist.

  Hawker turned away quickly again in disgust. No wonder the woman had screamed. Something had obviously gone wrong with the dubbing process, creating a monster instead of the person who was supposed to be there. But Hawker guessed the real reason behind the woman’s scream was the horrifying thought was that this mistake could just as easily have happened to any of them.

  Officers in crisp green uniforms pushed their way through the mob of resurrectees to the side of the creature, and Hawker took a second look at the mistake. It was then that he got the second shock in as many minutes. In trying to visualize what that person might have looked like before the accident, he rearranged the facial features—and felt a chill shoot up his spine.

  That pitiful, deformed monstrosity was David Green.

  ***

  The officers hustled Green out of the room before anyone could really see what happened. No mention was officially made of the incident, and the army behaved as though nothing had occurred. But Hawker resolved not to leave this incarnation without finding some answer to his friend’s horrible transformation.

  The war was mostly being fought in space, as the aliens launched wave after wave of attack ships against Cellina’s defenses. Hawker served on the crew of a fighter ship, occasionally seeing action by boarding enemy vessels. Everything was routine; he’d seen such action a dozen times before. After two months, he received a pass to go on leave back to the planet’s surface—where, he hoped, some answers would await him.

  As it turned out, Symington was on a pass at the same time. Hawker found him in a bar, drinking with Belilo and two other resurrectees, men named Singh and Ibañez. Hawker knew the men only vaguely. He joined Symington’s party—something he would normally have avoided unless specifically asked—and forced himself to join in the usual bitch. After a decent interval of meaningless chatter, Hawker brought the conversation around to the subject of the “accident” at their resurrection.

  “Yeah, that was weird,” Ibañez said with a shiver.

  “Do you have any idea who it was, Lucky?” Hawker asked.

  Symington scratched his head. “I’m not sure….”

  “It was Dave,” Hawker said flatly. “He looked pretty horrible, but I recognized him anyway.”

  “Poor bastard,” Symington said.

  “You mean Green?” asked Singh. “He seemed like a nice guy. I served with him a couple of times.”

  “We all did,” said Belilo. There was a moment’s silence as she took a sip of her drink, and then added, “It’s a damn shame. He sure as hell didn’t deserve all this.”

  “All what?” Hawker asked. “Have you heard anything about him?”

  “Well, I spent a part of my time on the base, and I managed to get plugged into the pipeline. A few rumors were leaking around. Nothing much. They just say that something went wrong with whatever they record our patterns on. It’s a total loss, and the guy—Green—can’t ever be remade properly. From what I hear, they’re holding him for tests somewhere on the base. They’re studying him like some sort of freak.”

  “Thanks.” Hawker stood up from the table.

  “Where are you going?” Symington asked.

  “I’m going to see if I can get some answers from the people in charge.”

  The others were surprised. This was not the Hawker they knew. “They don’t want to talk about it,” Belilo said.

  “They will when I get through with them.” Hawker turned angrily to leave.

  Singh grabbed his arm. “You think you’re going to go in there like that and scare them? They won’t take any shit from you.”

  “You got any better ideas?” Hawker tried to pull his arm away, but Singh’s grip was too strong.

  “I do,” Symington said. “We all go in together. Green was our friend too, right?” He looked around the table as though daring the others to deny the fact. But there was no disagreement. The thought of finally shaking up the army bureaucracy was stimulating.

  “They’ll think twice about crossing us if there’s five of us,” Ibañez said.

  “We’d better be ready for trouble, though,” Belilo warned. “If we give them too much hassle they can just shoot us down and dub us again—and the new dubs won’t know anything’s wrong.”

  “I can break into the arms locker, no problem,” Symington said.

  “Hey, wait,” Ibañez objected. “Facing them down is one thing; armed mutiny is another.”

  Belilo stared into his face. “Oh yeah? What can they do to us they haven’t already done? Come on, Chico, make up your mind—are you in or not?”

  Ibañez looked at the four determined faces around him. “In,” he said with little hesitation. “I just wanted to make sure we all knew what we’re doing.”

  “We know,” Hawker said grimly.

  By implied consent, Symington took charge of the group. They first “liberated” a floatcar and drove it back to the base, where, as Lucky had promised, they had no trouble raiding the armory. In addition to two beampistols apiece, which they tucked, hidden, into their trousers, they took a small supply of grenades and rifles. “If we’re going to look for trouble,” Lucky explained, “we’d better be ready to find it.” The grenades were small enough to store in their pockets; the rifles would be left in the floatcar until they met bigger trouble.

  Thus armed, they began making their inquiries. They were polite at first, but their tempers grew shorter as they were bounced from office to office, being told at each step along the way that someone else had the information they wanted. Finally, though, they reached a point where the clerks began looking more guilty, and the denials were much too emphatic.

  It was Hawker who tired of the runaround first. The clerk behind the desk was a woman with feathered eyebrows and a smooth, downy head of hair. Grabbing her by the front of her tunic, Hawker informed her he wanted to speak to the officer in charge immediately. The woman looked at him, and then at the determined faces of his friends. The fighters were usually so apathetic she didn’t know how to deal with them in this aroused state. She decided to pass the problem along to her superior. She coded the door open and told them they could go in—but Singh insisted she be brought along, too, so she couldn’t give any alarm.

  Beyond the door was a spacious office. A computer display, just symbols in empty air, floated horizontally like a desktop. Behind it sat a man who was obviously used to being in charge. He was fat and totally bald, clad in a one-piece gray uniform, and his skin was a mottled green and blue. His breast plate identified him only as “Philaskut.”

  Rank as Hawker had originally known it had long ago vanished in the army, replaced by a sideways tiered system of authority so complicated he’d never fully understood it. Under normal circumstances this caused little problem. Anyone not a resurrectee or a civilian was in principle his superior, and he just obeyed orders. Hawker and his fri
ends had no way of knowing how important this Philaskut was in the chain of command—but at the moment, they didn’t care.

  “What do you people want?” Philaskut asked. He was neither angry nor indignant at this invasion of his office; if anything, Hawker would have judged him bemused.

  Hawker became the group’s unofficial spokesman. “We want to know what happened to the man who was malformed when we were dubbed two months ago.”

  Philaskut steepled his fingers in front of him. “The army would prefer not to dwell on that. In view of the process’s overwhelming success for centuries, one failure is hardly worth—”

  Symington leaned forward. While there was nothing physical there, the computer display supported his clenched fist, holding his weight. His large bulk was satisfactorily intimidating. “He’s a friend of ours.”

  “I see. That is a pity. However, as I said, there’s nothing I can—”

  “A very special friend.” Singh enunciated each word clearly and moved around to Philaskut’s other side, providing a counterpoint to Symington’s looming.

  “We want to know everything about the problem,” Belilo added, taking a menacing stance beside Hawker in front of the symbolic computer display.

  Philaskut was no longer quite so bemused. “I assure you, there’s nothing you could do about the matter, anyway.”

  “Why don’t you just let us see that for ourselves?” Hawker allowed his tone to be more reasonable.

  Philaskut leaped at the bait. “It was an accident, well beyond anyone’s ability to either predict or control. Do you know how dubbing works?”

  “I used to, a long time ago,” Belilo said with a tight smile. “I’ll bet the principles are the same. Why don’t you bring us up to date?”

  “Well, an object’s pattern is stored in crystal molecular lattices. A crystal large enough to describe an entire human is only slightly bigger than a grain of salt. The fact that we’ve kept perfect track of everyone for so long indicates how accurate and efficient our system is.”

  “Everyone but Norquist’s Rangers,” Singh muttered.

  “Shh,” Symington shushed him. “I bet the army would prefer not to dwell on that, either.”

  “But not this time,” Hawker persisted, returning to the matter of Green.

  Philaskut took a deep breath. “No, not this time. Something went wrong in the subject’s crystal—”

  “Green,” Hawker said.

  The officer’s train of thought was interrupted. “What?”

  “He’s not just ‘the subject.’ He’s a real person, probably smarter than you and me put together. His name’s Green. David Green. Keep that in mind.”

  “Uh, yes. The… the soldier Green had something go wrong with his crystal. The information in it was distorted.”

  “What went wrong?” Singh asked.

  Philaskut turned to answer the question from this new direction. “We don’t know precisely. That’s why we’ve been conducting our investigation. We think it may have been caused by a cosmic ray collision. We thought we’d built sufficient shields against them. What we think happened is that two or more cosmic rays may have hit the same spot almost simultaneously, penetrating the defenses. The high energy rays struck this one crystal and knocked it slightly out of proportion.”

  He shook his head. “Believe me, such an occurrence is so rare it couldn’t happen again in a million years.”

  “Can you fix it?” Hawker asked. “Can David Green be restored?”

  Philaskut cleared his throat. “You have to remember, it wasn’t the person who was damaged, but the complete record of him. If it were something in the dubbing device itself, or something that happened to the sub… to Green after he’d been dubbed—”

  “In other words,” Belilo said, “there nothing you can do.”

  “No. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.” The officer spread his hands to indicate how hopeless the situation was.

  “You must keep backups,” Singh said. “Everybody keeps backups. I can’t believe even the army is stupid enough not to.”

  Philaskut licked his lips. “We make exactly one backup copy—”

  “Only one? For the entire army?” Singh was skeptical.

  “For security purposes we can’t have lots of copies floating around. We don’t want them falling into the wrong hands.”

  “They’re already in the wrong hands,” Belilo said.

  “So why can’t you make a new Green from his backup copy?” Singh asked.

  “We… that is, our procedure—and it’s worked perfectly for centuries—is to dub the people, make a complete backup at once, and then destroy the old records for security’s sake. Nothing has ever gone wrong with that.”

  “Until now,” Symington said.

  “We think the cosmic ray, or whatever, affected the primary record sometime between when it was last recorded and when the dubbing was done a couple of months ago. Immediately after this dubbing, a backup was made and the old records were destroyed, as always. It took us several hours to realize that the flaw was in the record itself and not a malfunction in the dubbing process.

  “And to make matters worse, the distortion to the… to Green’s crystal caused it to shatter when the dub was made, so it didn’t even get backed up by the automatic process. That was the only copy of him there was. We couldn’t even duplicate the recreation. That’s why we must study this altered copy so thoroughly, to learn exactly how the accident occurred. When we know how the cosmic ray got through and did its damage, we can improve our shields.”

  Hawker felt ill that such a thing should happen to his closest friend in the universe. “I want to see him.”

  “Who? Green? I’m afraid that’s not possible. He’s in a classified ward; I can’t order a video linkage—”

  “I don’t want to see a fucking picture!” Hawker exploded. “I want to visit him, be beside him, give him comfort if I can. He’s my friend, goddamn it!”

  Philaskut shrank back from this outburst. “That’s even more out of the question. That ward is strictly off limits to anyone without a triple-alpha clearance—”

  “I don’t think you understand, friend,” Symington said, coming around behind the computer display so he towered over the seated officer. “That wasn’t a request.”

  Philaskut looked around the room at the five determined faces, and at the look of fright on the clerk’s face as Ibañez held her tightly. From some unexpected depths of his soul, the officer drew a tiny shred of courage. “Who are you to order me around?”

  “Just a group of people who think five to one is pretty good odds.” To emphasize his remark, Singh opened his tunic to show the butt of the beampistol tucked into his trousers.

  “What will you do, kill me?” Philaskut’s bravado was gaining momentum. “Do you think you’re the only people who can be dubbed? Do you see this little button in my neck? Everyone on Cellina has one. My pattern is being continuously broadcast to Rez Central, continuously updated. If you kill me, I’ll be dubbed exactly as I was the instant before you did it. You’d gain nothing. I’m not scared of you.”

  “Actually, we weren’t thinking of killing you.” Belilo leaned down, gently at first, on the glowing display of symbols; when it held her weight, despite its apparent lack of substance, she sat on it, and leaned over toward the officer. “Killing is so crude, don’t you think? The army’s taught us lots of things over the years. Do you happen to know how many bones there are in the human foot?”

  Philaskut blinked “No.”

  “Neither do I, exactly, but I’m told there’s a lot. Twenty or more, I think. All nice, tiny little bones. I wonder if we can set a record for the most broken at one sitting.” She looked back at Hawker. “Do you think we should do that before or after we peel the toenails all the way back?”

  Philaskut’s courage evaporated as quickly as it came. “P-please don’t. I’ll take you there somehow. But it’s all the way across the base. I’ll have to get us a floater.”
r />   “We’ve got one downstairs,” Singh said, “all ready and waiting.”

  “What about her?” Ibañez asked, bringing the clerk forward. “Do I have to drag her around with us?”

  Belilo walked over to the frightened woman. “What about it, sister? You got one of those buttons in your neck?”

  “Y-yes.”

  “Good. I’ll try to make it painless.” With a sudden blow, Belilo lashed out and snapped the woman’s neck. The clerk gave just a soft sigh, and fell to the floor as Ibañez released her.

  Belilo looked at the corpse for a moment. “Somehow it doesn’t seem so bad when you know it’s not permanent,” she remarked.

  Philaskut stared nervously at this display, and Symington had to lift him by his collar and deposit him on his feet. “Get moving,” he said brusquely. “We’ve got things to do.”

  ***

  They took Philaskut down to their waiting floater and drove to a large building he indicated on the far side of the base. Several times they were stopped for ID checks, but a beam of light scanned Philaskut’s face and they were passed on to the next checkpoint. Eventually they pulled up beside a door, got out of their floater and Philaskut’s facial scan opened the way for them again.

  Hawker and Symington walked on either side of the officer, each taking one of Philaskut’s arms and locking tightly to it so the frightened man couldn’t escape. The other three walked close behind. They wandered up stairs and through a maze of corridors they could barely keep straight, passing three checkpoints along the way. Each time, Philaskut’s facial scan gained them admittance. If he hadn’t been in such an angry mood, Hawker might have been impressed by the importance of the man he’d kidnapped.

  At length they came to a door marked “Authorized Personnel Only.” Philaskut’s facial scan worked perfectly on it, too, and the door disappeared. The group marched silently into the room beyond, and the door reappeared behind them.

  They were in a laboratory. Five people in crisp green uniforms moved about the room, checking the wealth of instrument displays, noting the readings and resetting the calibrations. The entire room was bathed in the antiseptic glow of a cool blue light. And there, in the center of the room, lay David Green.