Resurrection, Inc.

by Kevin J. Anderson

  Resurrection, Inc.

  Kevin J. Anderson

  In the future, the dead walk the streets—Resurrection, Inc. found a profitable way to do it. A microprocessor brain, synthetic heart, artificial blood, and a fresh corpse can return as a Servant for anyone with the price. Trained to obey any command, Servants have no minds of their own, no memories of their past lives.

  Supposedly.

  Then came Danal. He was murdered, a sacrifice from the ever-growing cult of neo-Satanists who sought heaven in the depths of hell. But as a Servant, Danal began to remember. He learned who had killed him, who he was, and what Resurrection, Inc. had in mind for the human race.

  Kevin J. Anderson

  RESURRECTION, INC.

  For John Postovit and Kristine Kathryn Rusch, who have been with me through all incarnations of this story. And also to Neil Peart, Geddy Lee, and Alex Lifeson of RUSH, whose haunting album Grace Under Pressure inspired much of this novel.

  PART I

  Resurrection

  1

  The two Enforcers found the dead man in the street, long after curfew. The city’s night hung around them, tainted with a clammy mist caught between the tall and dark buildings. The smell of fresh blood, smoke, and the sweat of close-pressed bodies drifted upward into the air.

  The slain man was naked, spread-eagled inside a geometrically perfect pentagram drawn in blood. At each of the five corners of the pentagram burned candles of black paraffin, made to look archaic with artificially molded runnels of wax along the sides. A wide knife wound hung cleanly open in the center of the victim’s chest, like an appalled extra mouth.

  With a throb of its rear jets, the Enforcers’ armored hovercar descended to the flagstones. As the engine purred its way into silence, Enforcer Jones, a tall and thin black man, emerged from the craft. He hung back uneasily, remaining near the hovercar. “Neo-Satanists again!” he muttered under his breath.

  The other Enforcer, Frampton, agreed. “Yeah, they give me the creeps.” Belying his words, he went eagerly forward, amused and confident.

  Weapons bristled from pockets and holsters on the Enforcers’ body armor; tough helmets with laser-proof black visors covered their faces. In the mercifully brief four weeks Frampton had been assigned to him, Jones had never seen his partner’s face, yet somehow he imagined it would wear a stupid boyish grin, maybe some scattered pimples, maybe curly hair. Frampton seemed to think all this was fun, a game. It didn’t matter, though—they weren’t friends, nor would they ever be. Other Enforcers had a real camaraderie, a team spirit. But this would be Jones’s last night patrol anyway.

  “Think I should put out the candles?” Frampton asked.

  Jones moved away from the hovercar, shaking off his revulsion of the pentagram, the blood sacrifice. “No, I’ll do it. You see to his ID.”

  Frampton retrieved some equipment from the hovercar while Jones stepped forward, methodically squashing each of the five black candles with the heel of his boot. In the distance, through gaps between the massive squarish buildings, he could see the running lights of another patrol car moving in its sweep pattern.

  Frampton made a lot of unnecessary noise as he carelessly tumbled equipment onto the flagstones within the pentagram. He picked up one of the scanner-plates and pushed it flat against the dead man’s palm. The optical detectors mapped the swirls and rivulets of the man’s fingerprints, searching for a match in the city’s vast computer network.

  “Nothing on The Net about him.” Frampton double checked, but came up with the same answer again.

  “Figures,” Jones said.

  “Ever wonder how the neo-Satanists manage to get people who aren’t even in the databases, every time? Weird.” Frampton sounded breathless. He was always trying to make conversation. Always.

  Jones turned an expressionless black visor at his partner for a long and silent moment. He wanted to act cold, wanted to be gruff with the other Enforcer. It was too late to make friends now—better just to keep up the act for one more night. “How do you know they don’t just alter the data on The Net?”

  Frampton considered this in silent amazement. “That would be awfully sophisticated!”

  “Don’t you think this is sophisticated?” Jones jabbed a hand at the body, the candles, the pentagram. “Enforcers sweep this area every five minutes after curfew. You know how strict it is, how closely patrolled—and the neo-Satanists still managed to get him out on the street, draw the pentagram, light the candles, and then vanish before we could get here.”

  Only members of the Enforcers Guild were allowed on the streets of the Bay Area Metroplex between midnight and dawn. Jones didn’t fully understand the actual reasons for the curfew—he’d heard rumors of a war taking place somewhere, but he had yet to see any signs of battle. Other, more sensible people cited the occasional violent riots caused by angry blue-collars who had been displaced from their jobs by resurrected Servants.

  Jones himself had participated in some of the mock street battles staged by the Guild after dark. Nobody really got hurt—the damage usually included no more than a few blasted palm trees, a handful of scorched tile rooftops, and plenty of noise in the streets. But it all sounded terrible and dangerous enough to the general public huddled in their living quarters, that they would always feel grateful for the protection the Guild offered. Besides, it gave all the Enforcers something to do.

  Earlier in the night, Jones and Frampton had captured a chunky Asian man cowering under the overhang of a darkened business complex. The man had been trying to hide, not knowing where to go, as if he had a chance of avoiding the Enforcer sweeps.

  Frampton had pulled out two of his weapons and started toward the unfortunate man, but Jones restrained his partner and listened while the chunky man babbled an explanation. He and his wife had argued, and he had stormed out of their apartment, either forgetting about the curfew or not caring. Now his wife wouldn’t let him back in, and the man had been trying to stay out of sight until dawn.

  Sheepishly the Asian man keyed his Net password into the terminal mounted in the armored hovercar; his ID checked out.

  “You know what we have to do now,” Jones said from behind his visor.

  The man swallowed and hung his head in dejected horror. “Yes.”

  “All your Net privileges are revoked for a week. Sorry. Curfew is curfew.” The Asian man sulked behind the restraining field in the back of the hovercar while Jones and Frampton escorted him home.

  Without The Net recognizing his identity, the man would effectively be a non-person for an entire week: he would not be able to buy anything, make person-to-person video or voicelinks, call up entertainment, or even enter his own home unless someone else let him in.

  The man’s wife looked frightened but not surprised when the Enforcers arrived to escort her husband back into the dwelling; she didn’t look pleased to see him, and the prospect of having to do everything herself for the next seven days seemed to make her even angrier yet….

  “Give me a hand here?” Frampton opened the refrigerated, airtight compartment in the back of the hovercar and returned to the slain man in the pentagram.

  Jones bent to take the body’s cold, naked feet while the other Enforcer tightened his handhold under the man’s armpits. Jones could feel the rubbery dead flesh of the victim’s ankles even through his flexsteel-mesh gloves.

  Frampton pursed his lips and grinned at the mouthlike wound in the dead man’s chest. “Well, it’s off to the factory for you, my boy. I bet you’re going to miss all this excitement, Jones.”

  Transfer generally equated with punishment in the Enforcers Guild, and Jones had screwed up several days before, during a daytime stint on the streets. He had frozen for a moment, let his con
science whisper a few words in his ear, when he had seen a rebel Servant break from her routine and run.

  All Servants were reanimated corpses, dead bodies with microprocessors planted in their brains to make the bodies move again, to let them walk and talk and do what they were told. It was much cheaper than manufacturing androids from scratch for doing menial and monotonous tasks.

  But even with her head shaved, the lifeless pallor to her skin, and the gray jumpsuit/uniform of all Servants, Jones had difficulty convincing himself that the rebel Servant wasn’t human, that she was already dead and merely reanimated, that she didn’t matter.

  The Enforcer found his reprimand ironic: Starting tomorrow, he would be taken from his easy post-curfew beat for full-time service at Resurrection, Inc. to escort newly resurrected Servants to their assignments.

  But at least it would get him away from Frampton and his constant inane chattering.

  They placed the slain man in the back compartment of the hovercar, folding his arms and legs to fit him into the cramped space. Frampton stood with a miniature Net keyboard in his hand, punching in data about the discovery. “Verify cause of death,” Frampton said. “Single wound, no other apparent bodily damage, no identity information on The Net.”

  Jones glanced at the wound in the man’s chest. “Concur.”

  “To Resurrection, Inc., right?”

  “Yeah.”

  Frampton dropped his voice slightly. Because of the dark visor, Jones could read no expression on his partner’s face. “Man, I hope that never happens to me.”

  Jones closed the compartment and set the controls for quick-freeze. A hissing noise filled the air. He knew exactly what Frampton meant, but he asked anyway, “What? Being a neo-Satanist sacrifice, or becoming a Servant?”

  “Neither one.”

  2

  On the sixth underground level of Resurrection, Inc., the technician placed the body from Vat 66 onto a clean inspection table. The body’s arms moved loosely, still dripping, almost cooperating, as the tech rearranged them. Four days of conditioning had left the muscles free of rigor and the dead brain ready for imprinting as a Servant. The room smelled strongly of chemicals, making the tech’s eyes and nostrils burn, even after his two years of working there.

  On the pocket of the tech’s non-porous lab smock, he had carefully stenciled his name, “RODNEY QUICK,” so no one would steal it. Yet Rodney Quick was generally the only human to spend an entire shift on Level Six anyway; the rest of the workers were Servants—bald and dressed in their characteristic gray jumpsuits—and certainly no Servant would dream of stealing his lab smock. But the stenciled name made Rodney feel important and easily recognized by anyone who might take notice of his work.

  Rodney straightened the body’s pliant limbs while drops of vat solution trickled into drainage grooves cut in the polished table surface. The tech hummed to himself as he found a roll of shredded duo-sponges and dabbed the remaining solution from the body.

  Thick but limp brown hair hung straight down from one side of Rodney’s head, while on the other side the hair had been tapered drastically back, leaving the area above his ear shaved clean. He stood a few inches shorter than anyone who had ever tried to intimidate him, and his watery blue eyes flicked too often from side to side. The gold-plated stud in his left nostril and the two silicon fingernails on his right hand should have been stylish.

  Adjusting the bright overhead lights, Rodney let the glare wash down on the naked body, illuminating the open sacrificial wound in the center of the man’s chest. Beneath the inspection table, sharp-angled shadows crowded on the floor, responding with grotesque exaggerations to Rodney Quick’s every move. He was reminded of the monsters he had imagined under his bed-unit when he was a child.

  The pre-Servant from Vat 66 had finished several days of initial prep for resurrection, soaking in a solution of scrubber bacteria that removed all the lactic acid from the muscles and purged the dead body of waste and undigested food. As a last step before bringing the body to the inspection table, Rodney had drained all the blood vessels and refilled them with saline solution in preparation for the synBlood.

  Rodney slipped a pair of magnifying goggles over his eyes and bent down to inspect the wound in the man’s chest. His own shadow lurched across the prone body, but Rodney didn’t notice with his drastically reduced field of view. The tech could see that the wound was clean; the tissue had been hacked and the veins and arteries roughly severed, but Rodney didn’t think it would be difficult to make repairs.

  He measured the chest cavity and, leaving the table unattended, went searching for an appropriate synHeart. In the resurrection room other Servants wandered about, performing pre-programmed tasks, checking dials and monitoring vats, meticulously jotting down information. Rodney always felt the irony of having Servants assist him here on Level Six—it seemed like having cattle help out in a slaughterhouse.

  The technician stopped at the door to the organ-supply room, keyed in his request to the Net terminal mounted by the door. Moments later, in a puff of cryogenic mist, the door slid open and a flashing light indicated the location of an appropriate cardiac pump. Rodney removed the synHeart and, as he walked out of the clammy-smelling storeroom, he was tempted to toss the organ up in the air and try to catch it when it came back down. But he restrained himself—as always, Supervisor might be watching.

  “Out of useless death, we create Service to mankind,” said the inscription above the elevator doors—a quote attributed to Francois Nathans, the magnate of Resurrection, Inc. Rodney suddenly noticed the quote again after two years of working in the lower levels, and he wasn’t quite sure whether to take it with a liberal dose of seriousness or irreverence.

  Certain criteria had to be met before Rodney could even begin the resurrection process, and the Enforcers didn’t always know what they were doing when they brought the bodies in. Rodney rejected some of the pre-Servants if they had been too badly mangled, or if rigor had set in too firmly. A potential Servant generally had to be the victim of a sudden death—if a person died from a debilitating disease or old age, the machinery of the body would already be damaged. And Rodney Quick was not about to spend all his waking hours restringing ganglia, growing compatible muscle fiber, popping in a junkyard of synEyes, synLivers, synLungs—no thank you, the company wasn’t quite that desperate for pre-Servants. Besides, the whole process had to be cost-effective or it didn’t make good business sense.

  Any death from an accident, or poisoning, or even cardiac arrest was fair game, though. The Enforcers brought in even marginally adequate bodies, anyone they found dead, whether after the curfew or during the daytime, whether dead in bed or killed during one of the street riots. Sometimes Rodney wondered what kind of hold Francois Nathans had on the Enforcers Guild to make them cooperate so easily, especially when Nathans publicly despised the Guild for forcing its “protection” on all of them.

  The inadequate pre-Servants, along with other discarded bodies, were shipped off to be converted into animal feed for the great Midwestern agricultural wasteland. Oh, sometimes the family whined about not having the body of their loved one for whatever funeral rites they desired, but Nathans and his partner Stromgaard Van Ryman had won a major victory by battling—both legally and morally—to convince the public that the dead were a major resource to be used for all mankind. What a terrible waste, they campaigned, to stick a body uselessly into the ground just so a few family members could cry over it.

  Rodney brought the synHeart back to the table and, adjusting the local room temperature to keep him from perspiring, took a deep breath. He lowered his magnifying goggles and arranged his tools, then set to work. He used arterial sealants, capillary grafts, cellular cement to lock the cardiac pump firmly in place. Every half hour or so, a parade of pain marched up and down his stiff back.

  The technician worked alone, in silence, and when he finally eased the tiny battery pellet into the synHeart’s chamber and made ready to close the chest w
ound, he mused to himself, amazed at how easy it had been for him. His spine ached, and his fingers felt stiff, but he felt proud at proving his skill again. Let Supervisor try to deny that he was one of the best damned technicians in all of Resurrection, Inc!

  Though both of Rodney’s parents had been blue-collars, he himself had fought above all that. It could be done, if you had the ambition and the drive. He had spent his teenage years in terror, knowing that he was doomed to follow in his parents’ footsteps of manual labor, tedious blue-collar work that required no brains, no skill at all. Then even that bleak future had been stolen from him by the Servant revolution.

  But Rodney had had enough years ahead of him to plan a little, to realize how he must adapt to survive in a rapidly changing new world. He had pored over the resources of The Net, isolating himself, focusing his teenage world on the bright pixels. He expended all his effort to climb a few rungs higher on the ladder of success, finally reaching a position where he could feel important—Main Technician on Lower Level Six of Resurrection, Inc.

  But now, with Servants rapidly replacing many blue-collar jobs, all the lower rungs in the ladder of success were also disappearing—and Rodney Quick found himself back near the bottom again through no fault of his own.

  Rodney’s father, who had worked in a factory that manufactured shampoo and soap products, was killed in one of the early anti-Servant riots, receiving the full force of an Enforcer’s scatter-stun. Rodney’s mother, tossed out of her job as a dishwasher at the Sunshine cafeteria, now lived off the blue allotment, a special fund garnered from a tariff on the purchase price of Servants. His mother now wandered the streets with the other aimless and apathetic blues who had no training and no hope for any other type of employment. Competition was vicious for the remaining jobs, and Rodney’s mother didn’t have the stamina or the enthusiasm to fight for something she had always thought would be hers by default. Nor would she have anything more to do with her son, claiming that the stink of Resurrection clung to him and that it reminded her of her husband’s blood.