The Resurrected Man

by Sean Williams

  Still, it was easy to be magnanimous when one was at the top, and philosophy, QUALIA suspected, had always been the hobby of the rich. SHE would indulge him his foibles in silence, and with a sense of affection, provided he continued to perform his duties elsewhere. Which he did. In thirty years, he had missed an appointment only once, and under his hands KTI had grown from a small company specialising in speculative technology to the juggernaut it presently was.

  Indeed, SHE owed as much to him as SHE did to Jonah McEwen's father. Schumacher had convinced shareholders that the KTI network required active supervision of a sort no number of humans could provide. He had commissioned the construction of QUALIA's germ of consciousness and, with the help of Herold Verstegen (whom he had poached from another company specifically for this task) had coached the nascent mind into its linchpin role. SHE owed him QUALIA's existence, just as SHE owed Lindsay Carlaw for QUALIA's mind and Verstegen for QUALIA's continued well-being.

  And now…

  QUALIA had made a mistake, but SHE had been unexpectedly offered the perfect solution. Since SHE would be performing the d-med procedure on Jonah McEwen, it would be possible to reach inside him, tamper with him, and remove the knowledge of QUALIA's mistake before he consciously knew he possessed it. It could be cut painlessly from him in an instant, and the threat to the Watchers would be negated.

  There was only one problem: where to make the cut? The human brain was not as well documented as QUALIA's own and the exact location of any particular piece of information could not be known with any precision in either case. The fact that the memory was subconscious made it even more difficult. Any excision SHE attempted might result in nothing at all, or damage his brain in some unexpected way. At worst, it might prevent him from remembering anything—which would severely hamper the Twinmaker investigation.

  SHE would have to consider the possibility in the time remaining. If the uncertainty was too great, SHE would be better off doing nothing at all. As Schumacher had said, the backlash from tampering with “the evidence,” if it were discovered, would be severe. More severe than any threats the Watchers could make.

  “…and I've got a delegate from RAFT coming in this afternoon to discuss our scheduling differences.” Schumacher was midway through another home brew, talking more to himself than to QUALIA. It helped him focus his mind, he said. Her continued attention was optional. “You can't please everyone. With WHOLE on one side saying we're playing God and the RAFTers on the other saying we're not doing enough…” He shrugged. “Knowing whose side I'm actually on doesn't help very much.”

  QUALIA agreed, even as SHE moved elsewhere to attend to other duties. SHE sympathised with the Radical Association of Free-Thinkers; their ideas were bold, yet practical and exciting. SHE would much rather live in a world built under their guidelines than those of the conservatives of WHOLE. Under the latter world, d-mat, let alone d-med, would not be allowed. And neither would QUALIA.

  But then SHE supposed it was all a matter of perspective. While SHE saw nothing inherently unusual about the thought of using d-med to reach into a person's body and alter it for the better, with or without their permission, others felt differently. SHE could only respect their opinions while, ultimately, working to change them.

  The main reception area contained only Marylin Blaylock and an attendant seated behind a low, unadorned counter, but was large enough to hold at least fifty people. She couldn't have imagined a more stark contrast to the MIU's facilities if she'd tried. With its pastel grey and blue decor, a scattering of low-g couches and a strip window one metre high along the longest wall, it looked more like an understocked furniture showroom than a place one came to greet the recently dead.

  “Five minutes,” said the attendant. “We're just conducting a few tests.”

  Marylin nodded, despite her impatience. “Tell Officer Whitesmith I'll wait out here.”

  “You can go in if—”

  “No.”

  She wasn't going anywhere near Jonah until she had to.

  “I have explanatory literature if you'd like something to read.”

  “I'm okay. But thanks for asking.”

  “You're welcome.”

  She took a seat and the attendant went back to his work, which seemed to consist, as far as she could tell, of sitting behind the desk and staring vacantly into the distance. No doubt he was linked to a workspace similar to her own, which only made her wonder why he was present at all. An AI could have done the job of welcoming her just as efficiently.

  Perhaps it was because there were times when interhuman contact was necessary—when machines could not take the place of another person, no matter how cunning the deceit. She could understand that. Had she actually come to greet someone newly Resurrected, she would have felt better for having him around. Even though she knew how the process worked—a matter of pulling from storage the abbreviated data recorded during the deceased's last d-mat journey and recreating the person from scratch—it was still incredible. From ashes and dust to Last Sustainable Model codes; from death to life in one retrograde step. It seemed like magic, and even she, who had thought herself accustomed to the idea, was not untouched.

  The fact that KTI had simply appropriated a vacant suite in order to perform the d-med procedure on Jonah didn't make being there any less powerful.

  Everything had happened as she'd guessed it would. Barely had she woken that morning when Whitesmith had rung to tell her that the procedure was already under way and that Jonah would be on his feet within hours. She knew that he had been cautious in his approach. If her lack of response had surprised him, he didn't say. She had kept the conversation brief and had begun to get ready for the day.

  Then there had been the note. Results from the forensic lab had been waiting for her when she arrived at the station. The timing was uncanny. Although there was no way the Twinmaker could have planned this, the coincidence sent a chill down her spine, as if the murderer had reached across space and time and tapped her between the shoulder blades.

  To distract herself, she looked out of the reception area's strip window. She'd heard a rumour once that Schumacher had paid for the quartz glass out of his own personal budget, and she could understand why. Through it she could see the edge of the bulging toroid that was Artsutanov Station, rotating steadily around the silver line of the orbital tower stretching from atmosphere below to the universe above. Goliath itself was not visible, for the window looked outward at the wheeling stars, but she could imagine it well enough. At over forty thousand kilometres in length, it was the largest single structure ever built. The fact that d-mat had rendered it obsolete within ten years of completion didn't diminish that fact.

  Occasionally a limb of one of the other midway stations came into view, glowing bright silver in the sunlight They looked more like toys than the kilometres-long structures they were. Geostationary orbit was crowded around the tower. The perfect circles of the interplanetary relay swept by most frequently: sixteen rigid antennae, each five hundred metres across, exchanging d-mat and other signals between Earth and inhabited outposts on or near the Moon, Mars, Ganymede, Titan and other places. Some were in deep space, drifting among the dark bodies that littered the solar system's outer reaches. Many of them required several relay journeys before the journey was completed; more than half of these were nothing more than semi-automated research bases inhabited a day or two at a time, whenever they happened across something interesting. The rest were the beginnings of permanent installations that would one day take humanity's occupation of the solar system halfway to the Oort Cloud—impressive for a species that had, until only a few decades ago, been confined to a single planet and its only moon. D-mat's suitability to space exploration had resulted in a boom of exploration unseen since the Spanish discovery of the Americas. But few humans actually travelled in spacecraft any more; they hopped, instead, between booths that had made long, slow journeys in advance.

  One destination was so distant that the people
who had left for it two years earlier would not arrive for nearly three decades more. In fact, the booths needed to receive the d-mat transmissions had themselves not arrived. They were still in transit, making the slow, sublight journey across thirty-one light-years to Eta Boötis on the backs of three fusion-powered interstellar probes.

  The Saul probes had departed in 2054, when d-mat was still in its infancy and mainly confined to research facilities funded by the major nations. Realising the potential of this new technology, some of these nations combined resources to form the Copernicus Program, which coordinated the push to interstellar colonisation. Although the booths piggybacking their way to Eta Boötis were relatively primitive, they would function well enough to receive an updated version in time to process the thousands of explorers travelling from Earth. These explorers, copies of the originals left behind on Earth, would be the first to see the surface of the third world orbiting that distant sun; a world that, according to astronomers, possessed all the features necessary to support human life.

  The thought that people could stand on the surface of an alien planet within her own lifetime had fascinated Marylin ever since her teens, when the probes had left Earth orbit. Prior to joining the MIU, however, she had feared that she would never know for certain if the explorers achieved their goal. By the time the first message returned to Earth, she would be eighty-nine years old and, even allowing for modern medical techniques, she had known that the chances of reaching that age were only fifty-fifty.

  Now, however, with the guarantee of Resurrection written into her employment contract, and d-med a new possibility, the dream looked increasingly like becoming a reality, promising not only the immensity of the universe, but an extended lifetime within which to enjoy it.

  Or so it was supposed to go. In truth, Resurrection options were expensive. If she lost her job she would be unable to keep up with the yearly premiums, and everything she hoped for might come to nothing. Although the Twinmaker investigation was a difficult one, she was, for the time being, willing to sacrifice a little joie in order to have more vivre.

  “Marylin?”

  She looked away from the stars. Whitesmith had emerged from the suite's inner sanctum and was crossing the room.

  She stood to meet him. “How's everything going?”

  “According to plan.” He touched her shoulder. Behind his usual devotion to duty, she saw the same concern for her that she had glimpsed in Faux Sydney. “We'll be ready to roll in a few minutes. How about you?”

  “Not so good. The letter turned out to be a problem.”

  “How so?”

  “The envelope hadn't been opened, as I thought, and the words aren't written in any known ink. The handwriting is a close match, but not exact. Needless to say, there are no fingerprints or residues.”

  Whitesmith frowned at her. “Indira confirms this?”

  “They're her conclusions, not mine.”

  “Then I suppose I can't argue with them. Even though on the surface they make no sense at all.”

  She nodded. They did make a kind of sense. There was a way someone could have written the note without unsealing the envelope, but the thought was too disturbing to follow just then.

  “And Jonah?” she asked.

  “They can't do anything about the brain damage. The InSight structures are still there, waiting for him to trigger them again, but QUALIA says he'll be fine as long as he doesn't. And once he's out and moving normally, the tissue grafts elsewhere will kick in. There'll be a honeymoon period during which things might seem a little weird. I'm told it'll pass soon enough.”

  “How long until he wakes up?”

  “He'll be nudged when you arrive in Faux Sydney. When you're ready, basically.”

  She looked down at the floor. Ready? The closest she could give him was that she was sick of waiting. “Jason's at the other end. The unit has been cleared. I suggest we get him there now, rather than waste any more time.”

  Don't think; just do.

  Whitesmith's brown eyes studied her closely. “I agree. Follow me and I'll take you to him.”

  Jonah was lying on a grey examination table, wearing a white robe adorned with the symbol of KTI's Resurrection facility: two half-circles joined by a straight line. The curved H was rumoured to represent Hanifah Ullrich, Fabian Schumacher's partner who had died before Resurrection became a reality. Jonah was unconscious, but that did little to ease the shock she felt upon seeing him. Much of his lost weight had been returned to him. His face was full-fleshed again, his skin pink; he had fingernails and a pale dusting of hair across his scalp. He was still thin, but suddenly he looked real—horrifyingly real. He looked like Jonah.

  “Jesus,” she breathed as she repeated the observation she had made upon meeting him, years ago—that, with his high, rectangular forehead and strong jaw, he more resembled a statesman than a private dick. It made him look older than his years, and serious to the point of being dour.

  “Impressive, isn't it?” Whitesmith crossed the room to stand on the other side of the table.

  “Almost too impressive.”

  “Don't worry. He's been biotagged. If he even thinks about doing anything we haven't approved of, alarms will go off.”

  “Does that include travelling by d-mat?”

  “Of course. We won't be telling him this, but he's QUALIA's top priority. There's an entire cognitive line devoted to watching him.”

  “So what do you need me for?”

  “Insurance.” He smiled. “Or provocation, if you prefer.”

  Two medical attendants followed them into the room and each took one side of Jonah. Together they lifted the unconscious man off the table and into an electric wheelchair. The wheels were magnetic, designed to keep the chair aligned to a nominal floor in zero gravity. Straps around his chest and arms kept him upright and in place. His head lolled and a thin line of drool trickled lazily from his chin.

  “Are you sure he's up to this?” she asked.

  “Apparently,” Whitesmith said. “But you know what doctors are like. You can call it off if you think it's too risky.”

  She looked at him. “Can I really?”

  “Ah.” He had the decency to look embarrassed. “Well, not really. You can pull out, but he'll still be going. At least give us a chance to earn back our investment.”

  She nodded. No surprises there. Indicating the chair, she asked: “So do I get the honour of pushing him as well?”

  Whitesmith gestured with one hand and the medicos left the room. Two security guards took their place.

  “Escort and chair-pushers as far as Faux Sydney,” he said. “From then on it's up to you and Fassini. Think you can handle him?”

  “Yes.” She wasn't certain, though. Even sitting down, she was reminded that he was taller than her.

  “Just go easy on him. He's a sick man, remember?”

  “Not for much longer.”

  “True.” He smiled. “But technically you're his boss now.”

  She nodded as the thought sank in. That was true. It did give her a slight sense of satisfaction.

  “Okay,” she said, “let's do it.”

  She left the room. The guards, with Jonah, followed her to a tubeway where a cab was waiting. Whitesmith went about his own business. He was, as always, just a call away if needed. The cab whisked them to the MIU sector on the far side of the station, gravity increasing steadily along the way. She kept a close watch on Jonah's state. He slumped slightly under the increase in weight. His face sagged. His skin lost some of its colour. But she didn't let that worry her. The sudden downturn in his appearance could have been symptomatic of the rapid change in gravity rather than the gravity itself. It had taken her some time for her body to become accustomed to such wild shifts. No doubt he, even though unconscious, was suffering disorientation.

  The cab slowed to a halt and she exited first. The guards followed, nudging Jonah ahead of them. Just around the corner was the bank of d-mat booths they would be using t
o travel to Faux Sydney. One of the guards went first, stepping into his booth with the calm assurance of a person who knew that nothing could go wrong in the process.

  Marylin wasn't so confident: the process itself might have been fine, but, as Jonah had said, there was no protecting any system against malignance from the outside. As she stepped into a booth and the remaining guard put Jonah into another one, she couldn't suppress the thought: Maybe this time…

  Her mirror image stared back at her from the inside of the booth. So little of her anxiety reached the surface that it looked like the face of a stranger.

  Jonah grunted as he woke, weight bearing down on him as though he was being crushed. He was sitting upright and his body tingled from head to foot. Either his circulation was doing strange things or nanoagents by the billion were all at work at once inside his body. He felt groggy, disoriented, and had no idea how he had come to be upright. The last thing he remembered was drifting off to sleep after the VTC. He had been talking to QUALIA, asking for data, then—

  He opened his eyes. The interior of a d-mat booth greeted him. He was dressed in some sort of robe, sitting in what looked like a wheelchair. His arms and chest were secured by straps, but not tightly. He felt different, strange. Wherever he was, though, he was glad to be out of the bed.

  The door hissed open and outside air rushed in. He sneezed instantly; after three days in Artsutanov Station, he wasn't used to airborne irritants like dust and pollen. But the smell was worth it. Within seconds he had identified at least a dozen familiar aromatic sources: grass, flowers, dirt, concrete and a nonpolluting brand of fertiliser used on sandy soil, among others.