The Resurrected Man

by Sean Williams

  “Get ready,” she said, reaching for the door handle and wrestling with the manual locks. “Here they come.”

  The door was wrenched out of her hands by someone on the outside. The interior of the car was instantly invaded by cold air, traffic noise and the sound of voices. A head enclosed in a black ski mask followed.

  “McEwen et Blaylock?” The voice was contralto, imperative. “Out!”

  Marylin leaned forward and a gloved hand took her by the elbow, dragged her from the car. Three people dressed in black from head to foot confronted her, plus the one holding her arm. A pistol butt jabbed into the back of her neck.

  “Blaylock?”

  “Yes—”

  “Shut up.” She was pushed forward and grabbed by one of the others.

  Fassini was the next to be dragged from the car.

  “McEwen?”

  “No, look—”

  “McEwen?”

  “I'm Jonah McEwen.” Jonah's head emerged from the car. The woman holding Fassini looked between them, apparently deciding whether she was being told the truth. It took only a split-second.

  The masked woman shot Fassini in the neck. The crack of the gun was loud in the night air.

  Marylin gasped as the agent's body dropped to the roadside, an expression of shock still spreading across his face. She reached for her pistol, but her arms were suddenly pinned from behind. Before Jonah could retreat back into the car, he was dragged free and likewise contained.

  The masked woman fired one more shot. Kellow, Marylin realised. Unarmed.

  “Say nothing,” said the woman, holstering her pistol. “You have Resurrection. This is not murder.”

  She spat on the body of Jason Fassini and headed back to the van.

  Jonah and Marylin were dragged after her. Within seconds, the two bodies started to scream, issuing automatic Officer-Down alerts generated by the bodies' own fading chemical reserves. The eerie double-wail followed them as the back of the van was opened and they were pushed roughly inside.

  “Odi? Can you hear me?” Marylin called with all the strength of her implants. “Odi!”

  “Marylin!” His voice was still faint. “What's going on? Where are you?”

  “They've got us!” The interior of the van was dark. She was forced onto her knees while her hands were tied and her sidearm removed. Beside her, Jonah fared only a little better. She kept a tight rein on panic. “We're in the brown van.”

  “The LEOs are on their way.”

  “Tell them to follow the O-D pulse. It'll lead them right to the car.”

  “Christ. Who?”

  “Fassini and Kellow. Odi—”

  Behind her, the door of the van slammed shut.

  “Odi?”

  The line was dead.

  “Shielded,” said Jonah, the one voice left in her head.

  “Hé, Blaylock!” hissed the masked woman.

  Marylin turned automatically. The woman's silhouette was only dimly visible in the gloom. The roar of the van's engine seemed to drown out everything as the butt of Marylin's own pistol struck her in the temple and she fell forward onto her face.

  Pain and light woke her an unknown time later. She was lying belly-down on a vibrating surface that stank of oil. She tried to move, but her hands were still tied. Rolling onto her back made her feel like throwing up. She lay still for a moment, gasping.

  “The pimbêche is awake,” said a male voice.

  Someone moved closer. “Shall I—?”

  “Leave her alone. You want her awake for le caïd, don't you?”

  The last voice was Jonah. She opened her eyes a fraction. He was sitting on a low bench along one wall of what was obviously the interior of the van. A naked globe burned down at them from the ceiling. Two men and one woman in black, their faces still carefully masked, were in the van with them. One of the men was half-upright, leaning over her. In response to Jonah's comment, he sat back down with a shrug.

  Jonah's hands were still tied. If he was giving orders it wasn't necessarily because he was working for them.

  His neutral expression didn't change as he spoke to her by prevocals:

  “Hello. How're you feeling?”

  “Awful.” She tried to sit up and provoked another wave of sickness.

  “Don't,” he said. “Just lie still and rest.”

  She closed her eyes and let the world spin around her.

  “How long was I out?”

  “We've been driving for a couple of hours, now. I can't get GPS through the shielding, so I've no idea how far or in which direction we've come. But I think we're nearly there—wherever ‘there’; is.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because they didn't knock you out again.”

  Smart-arse, she thought. “Why didn't they knock you out?”

  “The lack of uniform, perhaps. Or maybe they like the jacket.”

  “Maybe.” Dried blood made the skin of her forehead feel brittle. “You're sounding bright enough,” she said. “Why's that?”

  “I realised something.”

  “What?”

  “What LSM stands for. It hit me when Fassini and Kellow were shot and whoever-she-is said something about Resurrection.”

  She remembered all too well. The masked woman's brutal pragmatism had a conceptual sibling in the sadism of the Twinmaker. But that wasn't what Jonah was getting at.

  “To Resurrect someone, you need access to their RLSM codes. RLSM stands for Revive Last Sustainable Model, or Revive LSM.”

  “So?”

  “Good question.” The corners of his lips turned down briefly. “If I'm onto something, my brain's not telling me at the moment.”

  She sighed. “That's a big help.”

  The pitch of the engine changed and she felt the van turn a corner. She waited to see if it would stop, but a moment later it accelerated again.

  “Have they said anything?” she asked.

  “In English, no, and my French is pretty appalling. I only know le caïd from living with Lindsay. It means ‘the boss.’”

  “Mancheff?”

  “Presumably.”

  “He said he wouldn't harm us.” Even as she said that, as much to reassure herself as him, she tried to remember the WHOLE leader's exact words: You will not be harmed. Little ambiguity there. But: “He also said we could be armed.”

  “And you fell for it?”

  She said nothing. The image of Fassini's face as he dropped dead to the road wouldn't leave her. The sound of the gunshot seemed to echo in her memory. No matter how hard she tried to tell herself that he could be brought back to life, minus only a few hours, the fact remained that she had watched a colleague and a friend die violently. It was an experience she had never had to assimilate before. Despite many months of working in an environment in which she was constantly reminded of the possibility of her own violent death, she was surprised how deeply the murder of another could affect her.

  And she had personally requested that he be in the group to go to Quebec…

  “Hey. I'm sorry.” Whatever was showing on her face, Jonah's voice was genuinely contrite. “I didn't mean it like that.”

  “No, it's okay.” She quickly gathered herself together. “We were cocky. We thought we could handle anything. The shock will do us wonders in the long-term.”

  “And the short-term?”

  “I'd rather not talk about it.”

  “Exactly, and that's—” He stopped, seemed to reconsider, then said: “If our positions were reversed, you'd tell me to stop talking shit and say what was really on my mind.”

  “I would. And you were about to say, ‘That's what you always do,’ weren't you?”

  He was silent. She looked at him. The light above cast deep shadows into the lines on his long face, which was tilted forward to stare at his folded hands. The hair growing back on his scalp was gold-white in the light, and made his skin look darker, almost flushed. His eyes were invisible, but she remembered their ice-blue co
lour well, and the way they avoided hers whenever she succeeded in calling his bluff.

  “I don't know anything about the last three years,” he said, speaking slowly and distinctly, obviously choosing his words with great care. “I don't know what you've been doing, how you've been feeling, where you've been going, who you've been seeing—or why—but I still know you. You haven't changed a bit. Through it all, you're the same person who walked out on me a few days ago—and I find that fact profoundly disturbing.”

  He glanced up at her, and it was her turn to look away.

  “I'm sorry if I disturb you,” she said.

  “That's not what I said.”

  “I know, but, in some ways, that might have been easier.”

  If he had anything to say to that, he kept it to himself.

  The van took another corner, accelerated sharply up a steep rise, then began to brake. Their captors chattered in French too fast for her to translate a single word. One of them stretched his legs and tapped her boot at the same time.

  “Up,” he said. “Sit.”

  “We've arrived?” she asked, raising herself carefully to an upright position.

  “What do you think?” The van stopped with a jerk.

  “Turn around,” said the woman, bringing a strip of black cloth out of her coat pocket and rising to loom over Marylin.

  She backed away. “What's that?”

  “A blindfold. Turn around!”

  “No.” She kicked out as the woman grabbed at her shoulder. “Don't touch me!”

  The woman backed away and produced the pistol from another pocket. With a click of annoyance she raised it and pointed it at Marylin's head.

  “Go ahead and shoot.” Marylin straightened her shoulders and did her best not to look at Jonah's shocked expression. “We have Resurrection, right? See what your boss thinks of that.”

  The woman's eyes were like cold, glass marbles through the ski mask. For a moment, Marylin was sure she would shoot, then the gun came down and the woman turned away.

  Another high-speed burst of French followed. Someone banged on the outside of the van. The door opened and the interior light went out. In the sudden gloom, Marylin was grabbed by each arm and lifted out of the van. A bag went over her head before she realised what was happening.

  “Jonah?”

  “Right behind you. Oof.” There was a creak of aged suspension and a clatter of feet on concrete. The sound echoed oddly. “Rough landing.”

  “You're walking?”

  “Yes. Doing my best, anyway.”

  “Can you see anything?”

  “Looks like an aircraft hangar. We're inside. It's dark, and shielded of course. They wouldn't want us calling for help or being traced here.”

  “People?”

  “Fifteen, including the ones from the van. Some aren't masked, which is sloppy. Haven't seen Mancheff yet. Hang on.” He was silent for a second, while she fumed to herself. “There's an enclosed structure down one end of the hangar. Looks like a big freezer or demountable home. That's where they're taking us.”

  “Exit?”

  “Somewhere behind us, I assume. If you're thinking about escape—”

  Muted voices interrupted him. “What? Who's there?”

  “Here he comes.”

  The voices came from ahead, inasmuch as she could tell through the bag. They grew louder until she could pick one standing out from the others: the lush baritone of Karoly Mancheff. When he switched from French to English it was like hearing an antique fossil-fuel Porsche change gears.

  “Officer Blaylock, Jonah McEwen. Bring them through, this way.” Doors opened ahead of them. She felt herself being taken along a corridor and into a more enclosed, but still large, space. “In here. Yes, thank you. Sit.”

  She was forced into a chair. Jonah landed heavily next to her. Something cold and hard slipped between her wrists and cut her bindings. An instant later, the bag was pulled off her head and she could see again. She rubbed her forearms and looked around.

  The first thing she noticed was Mancheff himself. He was much smaller in real life than she had expected, barely as tall as she was in bare feet. His face was just as ruddy and wide, though, and his hair lost none of its dignified grey. He sat opposite them, dressed in an amber-coloured suit, with his hands resting over the back of a wooden kitchen chair. He was smiling pleasantly.

  The second thing she saw, behind Mancheff, was the sealed double-door of a mass-freighter at least three metres high and four wide.

  “That's what we're here for,” said Jonah via prevocals.

  “It'd better be worth it,” she sent back.

  “Here we are,” said the leader of WHOLE. “Five hours and thirty-seven minutes from alert to arrival. That's not bad, not bad at all. You don't look any the worse for having your atoms scrambled—but you never can tell, eh?”

  She didn't smile back. “Your psychos murdered two EJC officers.”

  “Yes. I hear the pickup didn't go as smoothly as I would've liked.”

  “There was no justification,” she said, barely able to contain her anger. “They weren't threatened in any way. My agents were shot down in cold blood.”

  “It might seem that way, Officer Blaylock, but there are always extenuating circumstances. My ‘psychos,’ as you call them, have good reasons for seeking violence against those who defend such abominable processes as d-mat.”

  “I'm not interested in hearing your arguments.”

  “No? Perhaps a visual demonstration will be effective, then. Kuei?”

  The woman who had killed Fassini and Kellow stepped forward.

  “Kuei, remove your mask so Officer Blaylock can see.”

  The woman turned to face Marylin and, raising her left hand, removed the mask with one smooth motion. Underneath was a mess of what looked like badly healed scar tissue, as though someone had made a face out of yellow-pink plasticine and rearranged it with a fork. Her nose and ears were twisted lumps, and she had no hair at all. The scarring continued down her neck and under her black windcheater. It was hard to tell, given that the woman wore gloves and was clothed from head to foot, but Marylin guessed that the scarring spread across her entire body.

  If she was in any way impaired, it didn't show. The pistol in her other hand didn't waver, and her eyes regarded the room impassively.

  Glassily, Marylin remembered thinking earlier. The woman's eyes were almost certainly artificial. She concentrated on them, not on the horror of the ravaged face.

  “You—Kuei, was it?—you're going to tell me that d-mat did this to you?”

  “Yes.” The woman's bitter contralto was all the more remarkable when heard in conjunction with her appearance. “Something went very wrong, don't you think?”

  “But you—” Marylin sought to find the right words, decided in the end that bluntness would probably be best. “You've been burned. D-mat doesn't do that.”

  The woman's chin lifted, as though daring Marylin to deny her appearance. “Are you suggesting I'm a fake?”

  “No.”

  “Good, because I'm real—and it was d-mat that made me the way I am. Tordu chienne. Exhibit A in Karoly Mancheff's travelling freakshow.”

  Marylin forced herself to confront the vitriol in the woman's stare. “No one should have to endure what you've been through, Kuei, no matter how it was caused. But that's no excuse for murder.”

  “At least murder gives me a reputation to match the way I look.”

  “What about the murder of one of your own?” Jonah said, speaking for the first time. “Can you justify that, too?”

  There might have been a frown on the scarred face, but Marylin couldn't tell. “Que?”

  Mancheff broke back in. “And who might you be referring to?”

  “Lindsay, of course.”

  “You know full well we had nothing to do with that. Why are you dredging it up now?”

  “You're saying you didn't sabotage the SciCon complex?”

  “Of course we did
n't.”

  “So who killed my father?”

  “If you're trying to provoke me, it won't work.” Mancheff stood, his body language conveying impatience. “I refuse to go through this again. It is dealt with, forgotten.”

  Marylin glanced at Jonah. His eyes were narrowed.

  “Dealt with by whom?” he asked.

  “By you, of course! Don't you remember?”

  “No, I—”

  “Zut! Enough!” Mancheff chopped the air with a hand and looked away. “Lindsay was my friend. I will not hear you slander him again.”

  “Slander how?” Jonah also stood. His fists were clenched rock-tight. “We have never met. How could I have said anything to you?”

  Mancheff stared at him as though he had gone mad. “It was three years ago.”

  “After Lindsay died?”

  “Yes.”

  “I came here?”

  “Not here. Our old head office. You tracked me down from information in Lindsay's private records. We moved afterwards.” Mancheff stopped, calculating. “You really don't remember?”

  “No. I've lost that week. What did I say to you?”

  “Marde.” Mancheff walked around the chair, then turned to face them again. “I'll tell you what you said, McEwen. You warned me that something was going on, something big. Bigger than d-mat, bigger than any battle we had ever fought before. You told me that we would have no choice but to become involved, whether we wanted to or not. That there were people who would ensure our complicity when the time came. You said we were just pawns in someone else's game, and if that game resulted in our sacrifice there would be nothing we could do to prevent it.”

  “I said that?” Jonah's expression was one of utter disbelief.

  “You did, and more along the same lines.”

  “And what did you say?”

  “I laughed in your face.”

  “I'm not sure I blame you.” Marylin shook her head. “Look, Jonah, sit down. This isn't getting us anywhere. It has no bearing whatsoever on why we're here—”

  “But it has a bearing on Lindsay!” He turned on her, his face red with frustration. “It has to. I know it. If I could only remember.”