The Resurrected Man

by Sean Williams

  “Why not? You remember that far back, do you?”

  “No, not exactly.” He shook his head. “I'm getting flashes. It's hard to explain.”

  “You have to try, Jon. Really try. I don't think you realise what sort of trouble you might be in.”

  “Trouble?” He tried to analyse her expression, but she had retreated out of range and become a blur again. “I don't know anything about trouble.” Click “But I do know that you were blonde the last time I saw you, which was definitely less than six months ago.”

  “No, it wasn't.”

  “It must have been.” Click “A couple of weeks, at the most. We'd just closed the Banytis file and gone out to dinner.” Click “You were trying a longer length, and I said—” Click “I said that if you grew it any longer, you'd look like Monroe.” Click “I did, didn't I?”

  “That wasn't two weeks ago, Jonah.” Her voice was hard. “It wasn't even six months.”

  Click “Oh god, Mary. Oh god.” More memories fell into place, and they were worse than he could have imagined. He folded his face in his hands to hide the tears from the people surrounding him. Their blurry silhouettes looked like vengeful ghosts at his deathbed. “Oh god.”

  His father was dead!

  “The last time I saw you, Jonah, was three years ago. You've been missing ever since.”

  He hardly heard her, the sense of dislocation was so strong. His body didn't feel like his any more—so weak and hairless, so thin his arms looked like sticks—and he didn't even know how he had come to be this way.

  Had he died too? Was this how Lazarus had felt?

  Two more ghosts edged into his tomb. The woman he had been talking to backed away, made room for the others. One looked into his eyes and placed something down his throat. A new voice asked him questions he could no longer understand. His body went limp as the effort to think took its toll. His eyes slid shut, but the ghosts wouldn't let him sleep.

  He didn't feel the hands move under his back and around his legs, but he did feel himself being lifted out of the gel and into the air. There was nothing he could do to stop them. His head lolled back and he was too weak to raise it. His body no longer responded at all. All he wanted to do was drift away, leave his body behind, rest forever—

  Something cold pressed against his neck. He felt a sharp sting, and blackness enfolded him again.

  Marylin Blaylock followed the stretcher out of the bathroom, feeling sick to the stomach. As she passed through the lounge, she avoided looking at the d-mat cubicle on the far side of the room. She had already seen its contents in explicit detail, and didn't want to be reminded just yet. There would be time later, once she had assimilated the reality of Jonah McEwen's reappearance into her mind-set. It was too easy, too tempting, to associate facts that might be separate, to prejudge before all the data was in.

  Still, she had had two bad shocks that morning—one in the d-mat cubicle, the other on seeing Jonah again. It was him; she could not deny that, but at the same time she could hardly believe it.

  The skeleton on the wheeled stretcher tried to move as the medic brought it to a halt in the spare bedroom, the only space in the unit not already taken over by the MIU away team.

  “Easy.” The medic administered another injection to the skeleton's throat, pinching the skin to bring invisible capillaries to life. Vertebrae stood out like bony fists. Try as she might, Marylin couldn't see a single vein, let alone a pulse, in the waxy flesh.

  “Is he going to be okay?” she asked.

  The medic looked up. He wasn't the team's usual medic and looked too young for Marylin's liking. “I think so, if we get him to proper facilities soon.”

  “Are you sure? He looks terrible.”

  “He's lost a lot of weight, obviously, but we can fix that. His heartbeat is regular and strong. He's responding to external stimuli, so his brain is functioning on some levels at least. I've seen people worse off than him make a complete recovery within a week or two.”

  “But how did he get like this?”

  “My guess? A combination of viraemia and starvation. He's been in that bath a hell of a lot longer than he should've been.”

  Three years? she wanted to ask, but was interrupted by the arrival of Odi Whitesmith, officer in charge of the MIU away team. With him was the team's chemist.

  “The gel is a military nutrient cocktail,” said the chemist, still holding a sample of the stuff in a plastic flask. “It's loaded with waste products, hence the colour.”

  “Not dangerous?” Marylin asked.

  “On the contrary. It's probably been keeping him alive. Covert divers breathed it during the Taiwan War, to cross the Strait of Formosa.”

  “Well, he certainly wasn't going anywhere,” said Whitesmith, bending his large frame over the stretcher to take a better look. The medic glanced up at him, then went back to his work. A patch drip delivered a viscous, blue-white liquid into one bony arm, while a network of fine, black lines had begun to unfold across the fish-white scalp. The chemist grimaced and left them to it.

  “Find anything yet?” Whitesmith asked the medic.

  “I'm midway through an inventory now.” He rolled Jonah's head further back and began feeding a black nanowire into his nasal cavity. “There's something in his system apart from the usual, that's for sure. Given the nature of the gel, I'd guess it's a complementary device of some sort. There are kits designed to preserve the body through a prolonged period of inactivity. He might have used something like that.”

  “How long for?” asked Whitesmith.

  “Typically such things are recommended for six months maximum. Nanomachines can only do so much. I've no idea what would happen if used longer.”

  “Maybe you do now.” Marylin didn't realise she'd spoken aloud until Whitesmith glanced sharply up at her.

  “You think he really has been in there for three years?”

  “Well,” she said, “there's the gel and the maintenance kit—if that's what it is—and his memory-loss—”

  “He could be faking it. All of it.”

  “He could be, yes, but why go to so much trouble? We weren't expecting to find him here, remember?”

  “We were led here, Marylin. Someone knew we'd find him.”

  “Not him. You can't lose that much weight in a few hours. It would've killed him.”

  “By the looks of it, it almost did. Jesus.”

  “Now you're clutching at straws. He's pumped full of maintenance nanos, not fat-strippers.”

  He shrugged. “Too true. Maybe we should avoid jumping to conclusions until all the facts are in.”

  Marylin nodded; her thoughts exactly. Playing devil's advocate was all too easy when his suggestions were based on such scant evidence.

  But…He called me “Mary.” No one had addressed her by that name for three years. This more than anything convinced her that he had no memories of the time in between. And she had called him “Jon” in return. Old habits died very hard, it seemed.

  “There's something else,” the medic said, frowning at the results of the latest test. “His brain-scan is highly unorthodox.”

  “Damaged?” asked Marylin, her stomach roiling again.

  “It's hard to be sure with this equipment. He's in a complex, deep alpha-early beta state, beating between seven and ten Hertz measuring one hundred and twenty-five and fifteen microvolts respectively. I don't recognise it. His cortex is a mess: prefrontal, parietal and temporal lobes full of old implants, most of them dead. There are breakdown products everywhere. He was short-sighted, right?”

  She nodded, understanding the question if not the details that had preceded it. “Yes, severely. He had corrective implants installed when he was a child.”

  “I thought so. They're dead too, so he won't be seeing too well when he wakes up again.”

  “He wasn't before.”

  “There you go. His limbic system is completely out of wack, too. There's something's going on in his amygdala and hippocampi, but I'v
e no idea what. The activity doesn't correspond to anything the pathology database has seen before.”

  “V-med?” Whitesmith suggested.

  “I've compared the scan to those produced by known vegetative-meditative states. There are some similarities, yes, but nothing that quite fits.”

  “What are the closest?”

  The medic raised his eyes to consult his database. “Three inducers, all illegal: ReLive, InSight and AirBorn.”

  “When were they banned?”

  “ReLive and AirBorn almost a decade ago. InSight more recently, within the last two years.”

  Whitesmith folded his arms and bit his thumb: a sign of deep thought, Marylin had learned. “If McEwen's telling us the truth, then InSight was legal when he took the plunge.”

  “So?”

  “Just a thought. How soon can we talk to him?”

  “Give me a few minutes and I'll wake him.”

  “Good enough. Make sure we're here when you do.”

  “I don't know what sort of condition he'll be in—”

  “He was lucid enough earlier. I'll take my chances.”

  Whitesmith stepped back to give the medic room to work. Marylin followed him. They stood together in the doorway, not too far away from the noisy swarm of MIU officers examining the rest of the unit but removed enough to talk in private.

  “Interesting,” he said around the thumb. “What do you think?”

  “I think I've changed my mind. He might be faking it after all.”

  “Really? What makes you say that?”

  “Jonah wasn't into v-med,” she said.

  “Not to the best of your knowledge—”

  “Not at all, Odi. It wouldn't have been like him even to consider it.”

  “But it fits, dammit. Prolonged usage of InSight must've caused permanent side-effects, or else it wouldn't have been taken off the market. If we find that inducer's agents in his system, then that explains the odd brain scan. And to have sustained brain damage because he used InSight too long, he must've been in the gel a significant amount of time—just like the other evidence suggests. Right?”

  “Not necessarily. I knew him, remember?”

  “Sure. But we'll find the agents anyway, I'll bet. Mark me.” At her reluctance to concede the point, he removed the thumb from the corner of his mouth and jerked it in the direction of the bathroom. “Listen, what if he wasn't in there for three full years? Maybe it was only two and a half. That leaves a window of six months between the time you last saw him and him doing this to himself. A lot can change in that time.”

  “I still don't believe it. He had too much to live for to throw it all away like this.” She rubbed her eyes with one hand and leaned against the door frame, amazed at how exhausted she felt. “But I'll admit I could be wrong. We never know someone else completely, no matter how close we are.”

  “Quite. And not even ourselves, at times.”

  “What the hell's that supposed to mean?”

  He shrugged. “Air.” It was his usual reply when caught spouting aphorisms. “I guess I'm just trying to say that I know how hard this is for you. That's all.”

  She folded her arms across her chest, unhappy with herself for snapping at him. She and Whitesmith had worked together in the MIU, the Matter-transference Investigative Unit, for three months, in which time she had been forced often enough to update her opinion of him. At first he had seemed a parody of a law enforcement officer: conservative and tending to emphasise his masculinity whenever possible. His size—which, like his skin and hair, spoke volumes about his mixed Polish-African ancestry—didn't help. Gradually, she had realised that he was much more intelligent than that; he simply preferred to let his colleagues think with him, or for themselves. That made him seem arrogant at times—or caused him to be brusque when he believed people weren't reacting quickly enough—but she acknowledged that it was an effective technique overall; it kept the team on its toes.

  And now, with his career on the line, he had taken time to empathise with her own emotional state.

  “Sorry I'm so screwed up, Odi,” she said.

  “That's why you're with us, remember?”

  “It's still not very professional.”

  “Crap, Blaylock. You're the best C-2 I've had in ages, and I'll be sure to say so in my assessment. Tell me otherwise and I'll report you for insubordination.”

  She smiled, recognising the retreat into game-playing as something they both needed. “You wouldn't dare.”

  “Oh, wouldn't I? All I need is—”

  “Officer Whitesmith?”

  Both of them turned.

  “McEwen will be conscious any moment,” said the medic. “I've given him a high dose of a mix of boosters. He'll be perfectly lucid, but not for long. Ten minutes is the most I can give you.”

  “That'll do.” Whitesmith swung his massive frame closer to the stretcher. With his help, the medic raised the skeleton to a half-sitting position, arms strapped securely—and futilely, Marylin thought—to its sides. She doubted if the thing that had once been Jonah McEwen would have the strength to sit up, let alone lash out. His body was covered with a white towel from the waist down; purple splotches marked where it had been used to wipe his face free of the gel.

  “Let me handle him this time,” Whitesmith said, watching her closely from the far side of the stretcher. “I don't want him losing it again, and he might be more stable talking to a stranger.”

  She nodded. “If he doesn't respond—”

  “Sure, over to you. Just give me a chance, first. When he's told us everything we need to know, he's all yours.”

  But do I really want him? Marylin asked herself.

  Jonah's hands moved like dead leaves in a fitful autumn breeze, and suddenly his eyes were open.

  “Mary?”

  Whitesmith leaned over the stretcher and patted the skeleton on its right shoulder, his hand easily engulfing the bone standing out under skin. “Marylin's here, Jonah. I'm Officer Whitesmith of the MIU.”

  Jonah blinked and squinted up at the stranger addressing him, but displayed none of the panic he had earlier. His voice was stronger too, Marilyn noted. Whatever the medic had given him, it had had an immediate effect.

  “What's going on?” he asked.

  “I'd like to ask you some questions. Can you tell me your full name?”

  “Jonah Ran McEwen.”

  “Your address?”

  “I—uh. It's on record, isn't it?”

  “We can't access it. You're covered by the Non-Disclosure Indemnity.”

  Jonah frowned. “I am?”

  “Yes. You took the Privacy Option in ’66, paid up for five years. Don't you remember?”

  “I'm not—” Jonah blinked, translucent lids flickering across ice-blue irises. “Unit 142, North-West Isobloc, Faux Sydney. Is that it?”

  Whitesmith glanced at Marylin, who shook her head. She'd never known the address, having only d-matted to it on two occasions.

  “That's where we are now,” Whitesmith said, “so I assume that's right.”

  “How'd you get in here?” Jonah asked. “Did I call you?”

  “Your housekeeper reported an intrusion,” Whitesmith explained. “I should point out, Jonah, that we weren't expecting to find you here even though we've been looking for you for some time.”

  “Why?”

  “That doesn't matter right now. I don't want to put ideas into your head. Rest assured, though, that if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.”

  The skeletal hands clenched into fists. “That's a stupid thing to say to someone with a Non-Disclosure Option.”

  “True.” Whitesmith pulled a face, but his voice remained soothing. “I just want to talk to you for a while, to find out what you remember and what you don't.”

  “I can't tell you what I don't remember.”

  “I understand—”

  “Do you? Perhaps you can tell me, then, how I got to be like this.”

&nbs
p; “No, I can't. We're doing our best to find that out, right now.”

  “And I suppose you'll want to use the cage to make sure I'm telling the truth?”

  “If you'll let us. We need your express permission first, of course—”

  “I know. And that depends.”

  “On what, Jonah?”

  He lifted his head, fixed Whitesmith with a disconcertingly alert stare. “On what you think I've done, of course.”

  “Can you guess?”

  “If I could, I wouldn't be asking you, would I?”

  “Not necessarily.”

  Jonah blinked once, with a lizard's careful consideration, then sagged back onto the stretcher. “What the hell. Get the cage. It'll probably help me as much as it will you. Anything to work out what's gone wrong with my head. I—” Jonah stopped, swallowed. “I'm not thinking very clearly at the moment.”

  Whitesmith indicated that the medic should attach the device to the fine web of nanowire already enclosing Jonah's hairless skull.

  As the medic worked, the fleeting energy that had animated Jonah's thin frame ebbed. His half-lidded eyes drifted to Marylin, then back to Whitesmith.

  “Where's Mary?” he asked, again using the nickname she had abandoned along with him.

  “Right here, Jonah, next to you. You can't see her?”

  “No. I can't see a thing.” He gestured weakly with one hand. “In the bedside cabinet there's a pair of glasses. For emergencies.”

  Whitesmith nodded at Marylin, who crossed the room to the cabinet and began rifling through drawers. At the back of the second, she found a hard plastic case with the initials A. L. C. inscribed upon the lid. Inside was a pair of antique half-moon glasses with silver frames and imitation ivory ear-pieces. She returned to Jonah's side and showed them to him.

  He nodded. “Put them on for me, will you? I can't seem to lift my arms.”

  She did so awkwardly, avoiding looking at him too closely; the shallow rise and fall of his chest emphasised the prominence of his ribcage. She backed away as soon as the glasses were in place. They made him look old, but his eyes were piercing through the plastic lenses, almost malicious. For all the apparent dysfunction indicated by both the brain scan and his own admission, his mind seemed as sharp as ever.