Resurrection, Inc.

by Kevin J. Anderson

  Rodney finished the synHeart operation on the pre-Servant and sealed the dead man’s chest, taking care to make certain the skin seams matched. He then rigged up a slow-pump that began the long and delicate process of refilling the blood vessels with synBlood.

  Rodney clasped his hands behind his back in a Napoleonic pose and walked away from the pre-Servant on the table, leaving the pumps to do their work. He inspected the entire resurrection room like a commander surveying his troops. Occasionally he had other human sub-technicians to assist him in some of the inspections and operations, but most of the time Rodney remained the only human on the floor, with only a few other Servants to handle the uninteresting tasks.

  Seventy different vats rose from floor to ceiling, dispersed in perfect geometrical order around the room. Some of the vats were for the initial bath of scrubber bacteria; others were for the solution of genetically volatile bacteria to perform the finishing touches before reanimation. Intermediate holding chambers of mud-thick silvery paste were sunk into the floor between some of the vats. At any one time Rodney could prepare over a hundred different Servants for resurrection.

  While grooming himself for a position at Resurrection, Inc., Rodney had reached out through The Net, uncovering the scattered history of Servants and the corporation. After many abortive attempts to build a serviceable, human-looking android, researchers had given up in despair at the incredible task of manufacturing something as sophisticated as the human body. Even the few almost-successful android attempts would have been prohibitively expensive to mass-produce—and if android labor was going to cost more than even Union workers, why bother at all?

  But fifteen years before, Francois Nathans had realized that a nearly inexhaustible supply of almost-androids lay waiting to be used: the perfect machine of the human body, discarded at death but often still completely serviceable with only a few minor repairs. Rather than trying to recreate out of inanimate materials, and then mass-produce, the delicate interconnecting mechanisms of neurons and muscles and bones and tendons and sensory organs, Nathans argued that it made more sense to find a new “engine” to put into these already built—but no longer functional—machines, instead of doing everything from scratch.

  The sophisticated microprocessor embedded in a Servant’s head linked into the existing contours of the brain, simulating life. Attached to the proper ganglia, the microprocessor acted as a controlling motor, a new engine for the discarded machine. A special “Command” phrase bound all Servants and made them obey, humans, locking their reflexes and forcing them to follow instructions.

  As far as Rodney was concerned, Servants weren’t real people; the tech couldn’t possibly think of them as such. Sure, the bodies moved, and Servants could respond when you talked to them, but no real person lived inside. Servants retained their language skills, and some basic knowledge—pretty much anything that happened to be residing on the surface of the temporal lobe when they died. Servants varied—some were like blundering zombies who needed explicit instructions for almost everything, but others held a residue of intelligence and could actually respond almost conversationally.

  But no Servant had a memory of its past life—all of that had been erased either in death or in the resurrection process… or maybe the microprocessor just couldn’t reach deep enough to catch hold of those memories. It didn’t matter—despite the artistry Rodney Quick put into the creation of his Servants, they were all just pieces of equipment, machinery, appliances.

  Certainly not people.

  Rodney stopped and gawked at the body of a well-proportioned young female floating in one of the final baths, weighted down by heavy spheres tied to her waist, wrists, and legs. The front panel of the vat was transparent, and she hung suspended in the thick golden-colored solution, but Rodney could imagine all her details to perfection. She had already been shaved and trimmed, but Rodney still remembered when she had come in, dead from self-inflicted poison. She’d had thick red hair, beautiful, almost the color of blood. Rodney kept records of all such details.

  It seemed that every time he tried to start a relationship with a woman, an honest-to-goodness human being, she always broke it off. Handlers of the dead had been despised and shunned throughout history, though in modern times men had claimed to be enlightened about such things. Undertakers and morticians, sextons during the Black Death, gravediggers, the eta in Japan, “resurrectionists” in the nineteenth century illicitly providing dead bodies for medical research…. How the hell was he supposed to fight against leftover cultural sentiments?

  Rodney sometimes wondered if spending his teenage years sweating over a Net terminal, trying to escape from the other jobless blues and into a real job, might have left him socially inept… not quite able to relate to others in a meaningful way. He dressed stylishly, according to illustrations in all the Net periodicals. He tried to be funny, compassionate, interesting—yet women seemed so volatile, so unpredictable, with so much capacity for hurting in them.

  On the other hand, Servant females never said a harsh word. Rodney placed his fingertips against the warm glass of the finishing vat, staring at the naked body of the once redheaded female, watching as she moved slowly in the gradual convection currents of the amniotic fluid. His own breath began to condense fog on the side of the glass.

  “What, exactly, are you doing, Mister Quick?” A woman’s voice: deep and thick, uninflected but carrying a symphony of overtones that made Rodney’s blood congeal.

  Supervisor crossed her arms over a deep-purple sleeveless tunic edged with random lines of silver thread. She stood nearly Rodney’s height, built somewhat stockier, but seemed immensely tall in her own personal presence. Her long bluish-blond hair had been pulled into three even braids, neatly splayed and pinned to the back of her purple tunic. A primary Net keypad had been tattooed on the palm of her right hand. Supervisor’s eyes had a pearly, distant look to them, but hard lines on her brow and around her lips quickly destroyed any dreamy look she might have worn. Though she stared directly at him, Rodney felt as if Supervisor watched him with many more eyes than just the two on her face.

  One of the few humans who could act as a walking Interface with The Net, Supervisor lorded over all the lower levels of Resurrection, Inc. Her brain carried a remote gateway processor, implanted so that she could directly connect to The Net. Interfaces were rare and highly valued, so Francois Nathans had arranged to effectively own Supervisor, protecting her and doing everything to keep her happy. Consequently, Supervisor encountered no interference when she acted out her managerial fantasies on her human underlings.

  She enjoyed harping on Rodney in particular, or so it seemed to him.

  “I asked what you are doing, Mister Quick.” The flatness of her voice didn’t change, but Rodney could hear a thread of surprise that he had not immediately answered her question.

  “I am inspecting the vats, madam. To be sure the Servants haven’t made mistakes in their tasks.”

  “Servants do not make mistakes if their instructions are clear,” she said.

  “You’re right, madam. I was making sure my instructions were clear.” Rodney clenched his fingers into a fist.

  “Why aren’t you keeping careful watch on the pre-Servant in Vat 66? Everything is routine?” Supervisor’s voice had the barest lilt at the end, only enough for him to guess that she had posed a question.

  “Yes, um, everything’s routine, Madam. I’m pumping the synBlood in right now, and then he’ll go to the secondary vat. You’re welcome to inspect my surgery—you can see I took great precautions while installing his new cardiac pump. I’m sure you’ll find everything satisfactory.”

  “Since you are involved, Mister Quick, I expect nothing more than ‘satisfactory.’ You are incapable of better.” She huffed, then continued. “The pre-Servant in Vat 66 now has a new designator, a name. You will henceforth refer to him as ‘Danal.’ “ She paused, and then spoke again; her gaze bored into him. “I will give you a warning, Mr. Quick. Franc
ois Nathans himself has expressed an interest in this particular Servant. After resurrection is complete, Danal is to be presented to Vincent Van Ryman.”

  “Van Ryman? But… isn’t he the neo-Satanist priest?”

  “That is his business, not yours,” Supervisor snapped, raising her voice only a little, but the relative difference was enormous. “Your point of concern is that Mister Nathans is extremely interested. Therefore your performance on this resurrection will have a direct bearing on your own future existence. Think on that carefully, Mister Quick, before you become distracted by female anatomy.”

  Rodney swallowed. “Yes, Madam. I, um, understand perfectly. I won’t let you down.”

  “I have no confidence in you whatsoever. You cannot let me down.” Supervisor turned curtly and walked across the room to the elevator shaft, seeing yet not seeing with her pearly Net eyes.

  Shaken, Rodney retreated from the female’s vat and hurried back to the inspection table, where the slow pump droned as it continued to exchange the inert saline solution with artificial blood. Rodney used his magnifying goggles to recheck for any minute leaks around the seal of the chest wound. Satisfied, he removed the goggles and stepped back to look at the pale and motionless body stretched out under the harsh glare of the overhead lights.

  He hated this place, but he couldn’t think about leaving. Sometimes, though, he had to unleash his rebellion in little ways. Smirking, Rodney patted Danal’s cold cheeks in mock paternal affection. He muttered to himself, “Such tender loving care for a corpse!”

  He swallowed in a dry throat, looking around to see if Supervisor had seen him. She always moved silently, maliciously, spying. He didn’t see her, but that meant nothing—when linked to The Net, she had all the ears and eyes of the entire network.

  The other Servants moved about their mindless tasks. The vats bubbled and the slow-pump hummed, but everything else was quiet. Lower Level Six seemed suddenly alien to him, and Rodney felt vulnerable and alone.

  3

  Jones carefully arranged the pieces of his Enforcer armor on the spongy bedroom floor, and then aligned all his weapons on the bed-unit. He yawned and stretched before beginning the laborious daily process of assembling his uniform.

  He slipped the torso guard over his shoulders and mounted the pelvic plate, making sure everything fit properly before fusing the seams. Then came the arm guards and several segments of leg shielding. The armor was made of lightweight flexsteel fibers, dura-plated around the joints, making for a flexible and comfortable suit that was completely protective.

  Last, Jones picked up the high-impact fiberglass helmet and stared for a moment at his reflection in the polarized black visor. The visor could withstand even a laser strike full in the face, but it didn’t allow so much as a glimmer of feeling to show through. Jones narrowed his dark eyes, trying to make himself look tough but not quite succeeding. His thin moustache had never grown quite full, though he hadn’t shaved it in years. Jones was tall, well built but not massive—yet every Enforcer looked the same behind all that armor.

  He picked up his weapons in order, slipping them into the appropriate sockets on his armor. Heater-knife, club, grenade, smoke bomb, two projectile weapons, a fully charged scatter-stun, and a pocket bazooka. Bristling with death, every day: instead of filling Jones with power and confidence, it made him feel small and dependent. Not a policeman, according to the official description, but one of the “conformance assurance personnel,” or perhaps even “a modern-day knight against the dragons of social unrest.”

  His personal Servant Julia stood at the doorway, watching him, waiting for him to speak.

  “Good morning, Julia.” He consciously gave her a warm smile.

  “Good morning, Master Jones,” she said, like a recording. She still wore the long blond wig he’d bought for her, but then he remembered with some sadness that he had just never told her to take it off. It meant nothing. According to the scant information he had been able to get from Resurrection, Inc., Julia had had blond hair during her life; and apparently Julia had indeed been her real first name. But they told him nothing else about her.

  She was small and trim, and would have been attractive—though not beautiful—if it hadn’t been for her baldness and the unnatural pallor of her skin. The transparent synBlood did nothing to give a flush to any Servant’s skin. Servants didn’t need to sleep, though they could sit motionless and pass hours without flinching. Julia’s hair would never grow, nor would her fingernails.

  Jones strode to the door of his quarters. She didn’t move. “Wait for me, please, Julia. You can do whatever you want during the day, and I’ll see you when I come back home.” He spoke gently, as if it mattered to her.

  Julia sat down on a chair facing the doorway. “Yes, Master Jones.” Her blond wig had shifted on her head, but she made no attempt to fix it. He knew full well that she’d be there, unmoved, when he returned in the evening.

  He was trying so hard, hoping, but he began to confess that nothing would make her seem more human, like a real companion. Jones had bought her the wig and some real clothes in place of the gray Servant jumpsuit, but the clothes made her look pathetic—she wore them like chains, though perfectly willing to oblige. Somehow Jones felt as if he had tried to dress up a dog or a monkey in some ridiculous costume. Julia was not meant for a dress, or for any sort of human trappings, because she was not—he knew he would eventually admit it to himself—she was not human.

  Jones rarely went out even to entertain himself, and he made almost no effort at all to join the camaraderie with others in the Enforcers Guild. He just didn’t remember how to make friends anymore, and all he had to comfort him were the scars of an earlier friendship.

  People felt intimidated by Enforcers, and Jones suspected that the Guild itself fostered that attitude. He doubted if anyone would want to have an Enforcer as a true companion. Even female Enforcers were few compared to the males, and any Guildswoman snapped up a male companion of her choosing.

  A month before, everything had finally reached its peak, but Jones had covered it up well. He had become completely exhausted from staring at the walls, the ceiling of his apartment, alone, blinking at the vapid Net entertainment channels. Enough. A few more nights like this, and he would have to squeeze back tears, or else run yelling through the empty after-curfew corridors.

  Jones had surrendered most of his merit earnings to purchase a Servant, compulsively, before he could think too much about it. Though only an inexpensive, marginally responsive Servant, Julia had brought him to his knees in debt. For what? He didn’t know. Few people like him ever had a Servant; he wasn’t so sure he even wanted one. Ever since his transfer to become an escort for Resurrection, Inc., Jones had been required to guard and protect emerging Servants against the angry people on the streets. But he himself had a knee-jerk reaction of dislike and uneasiness toward Servants. Why in the world did he want one for himself? What was the point?

  Sure, he had convinced himself he needed someone to sweep the floors, to cook and clean and do other routine things a Servant would be expected to do—but Jones also wanted someone to talk to, a companion, a friend. Okay, so he was lonely—bring out the violins, he thought bitterly. It wasn’t his fault, but he just didn’t have it in him to lay his friendship on the line, to risk everything. Friends were unpredictable—they died…. And it was easier to buy a Servant, a surrogate companion—that’s me, he thought, good old path-of-least-resistance Jones.

  With unrealistic expectations and barely restrained hope, Jones always treated Julia as an equal human. Though Julia rarely responded with more than mechanical gestures or words, still he talked to her, asked her if she would do things. He wanted to be a friend, and have a friend in return. He wanted to console himself by having someone else around. He talked and she listened attentively, apparently interested regardless of the subject matter, and Jones felt relieved just to have his bottled-up words falling on open ears, Servant or otherwise. But he knew deep i
nside that Julia was not interested, and he doubted if she even understood what he really felt.

  Jones had tried to make love to her, once. She had been fully cooperative, even though he found himself reluctant to give her the explicit step-by-step instructions she required. He sensed absolutely nothing spontaneous in their lovemaking, no feeling and no compassion on her part—Julia had been simply doing a task, like any other—and Jones had abhorred himself afterward.

  Often, when he couldn’t sleep, he told himself over and over that he had purchased a Servant, not a friend, barely even a pet—an appliance. But still he couldn’t abandon hope completely. Jones continued to search for something, a flicker behind her eyes, or something responsive to his words and gestures, something to let him know she was aware of him as a person rather than as “Master.”

  It was probably an echo of that hope that had damned him, that had forced his punishment and transfer to Resurrection, Inc. He had hesitated a moment too long on the streets when a renegade Servant had come running down the thoroughfare marked for pedestrian traffic only. Jones was in full armor, patrolling the streets, keeping the numerous sidewalk vendors and craftsmen cowed, watching the vagabond singers, the jugglers. Then the female Servant had gone running by, her eyes glazed with fear, her skin looking almost flushed. Her loose gray jumpsuit fluttered with the speed of her flight—Jones had never in his life seen anyone run so fast.

  But something traveled through the crowd even faster, an almost telepathic warning that passed from person to person, sensing something amiss with a flash of mob insight. Their tinderbox mentality ignited upon seeing something unusual, something alien—a Servant with fear on her face, with life in her eyes, fleeing from shouting men. The rest of the crowd began to converge, blocking her way.