Kitabı oku: «Resurrection Inc.», sayfa 2

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, but 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 on The Net, 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. 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 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 had not 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 inside 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 abhorred himself afterward.

Often, when he couldn’t sleep, he repeated to himself 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, 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.

Momentarily Jones felt his body freeze with shock and surprise. The female Servant seemed to have stolen some small pieces of equipment—a Servant had stolen something, and Jones’s amazement grew even greater. He mechanically pulled out his scatter-stun.

The people saw the Enforcer and seemed to hesitate for a breathless moment. They wanted to see blood. Jones could feel it.

The female Servant knew she was trapped. Jones was appalled and did not look directly at her as he pointed the scatter-stun; he had the setting turned low. The Servant looked at him for a microsecond, pleading with her eyes, as if she could understand something in his flickering hesitation. But she could never have read anything through the black polarized visor that covered most of his face.

Before he could fire, the Servant leaped to the side of the street in three great strides, still clutching her precious equipment. Too late, Jones saw the KEEP OFF THE GRASS patch like many others scattered at random places on the city streets—a square of lush green lawn bounded by a low barbed fence; everyone knew that the patches of greenery were covered with a disintegrator blanket to vaporize anyone who dared to step on the perfect grass.

Jones knew immediately what the Servant intended to do, and fired a burst of his scatter-stun, catching and stunning a few others in the crowd standing too close to him. The Servant leaped gracefully over the barbed fence and plunged without a ripple through the green grass, vanishing instantly. A thin smell of ozone drifted upward, but Jones only stared. The disintegrator and the lush grass had swallowed her up completely. A Servant who perhaps had somehow awakened to her own humanity again … but now he would never know.

Then the crowd had turned ugly, deprived of their entertainment for the moment. Other Enforcers eventually arrived, subduing the disturbance; a dozen people had died. Jones felt invisible fingers pointing at him.

But the Enforcers Guild didn’t punish its members openly, didn’t believe in public disgrace—the Guild protected its own. But there always remained transfer—yes, the Guild protected its own, all right. And he had been pulled from his curfew beat to the much more unpleasant job of guarding Resurrection, Inc.

Now he wondered if it had been worth his mammoth effort to get into the Guild six years before. Jones had to either buy his way in, or be chosen by someone important in the Guild—or he could be sponsored.

Jones had been sponsored by a friend, Fitzgerald Helms. Actually, the word “friend,” with its flat single syllable, was completely inadequate to describe the complex and trusting relationship he had had with Fitzgerald Helms. It was the sort of thing that happened no more than once in a lifetime—a friend who made you know what it would be like to have a clone, because only a carbon-copy counterpart could be so much like yourself.

Jones and Fitzgerald Helms had been on the streets together during their teenage years, when they could look at the jungle of the city with exhilaration rather than confused fear. Helms was a mulatto, pale enough that he could disguise himself if he wanted to, but he never wanted to. He let his reddish scouring-pad Afro grow out in wild directions, while Jones himself kept his wiry black hair trimmed tight against his skull. Neither one of them could grow much of a moustache, but both had tried relentlessly since they were fourteen.

Both Jones and Fitzgerald Helms avoided their listless parents, business and technical people so wrapped up in their jobs that they had no ambition to do anything. Jones and Helms had not been interested in education or the rat race of the corporate world. They blithely accepted a blue-collar future without qualms, confident that they would find a job working in one of the larger manufacturing plants, or as gardeners, mechanics, whatever—the possibilities seemed endless. But then had come the Servant revolution, and the two young men found themselves in a generation slice that was too old to learn the new tricks necessary to cope with a changed world.

The younger kids—the smart ones, at least—had nearly enough time if they wanted to launch themselves into feverishly learning Net skills, or some profession that required mental ability rather than just movable arms and legs. But Jones and Fitzgerald Helms both found themselves out of that game. They had been athletic and active outside, surviving more than their share of street fights, but neither one of them was good enough to fantasize about a career at athletics or the other violent entertainment modes. After nearly a year, they could no longer avoid facing their only remaining option, a dark option they both hated to consider. Enforcers. The Guild would take care of them. If they could pass the incredible tests required of outsiders before they could be allowed to join the Guild.

He and Helms had primed themselves for weeks ahead of time, training, fighting, running, even studying various weapons capabilities as described on The Net. First Fitzgerald Helms would beat Jones, then Jones would beat Helms. They were perfectly matched, reflections of each other.

But on the day of the brutal, real tests in front of the Guild echelon representatives, Helms had succeeded, and Jones had failed—both of them by a hair.

Fitzgerald Helms immediately designated himself as sponsor for Jones, but neither one of them wanted to contemplate that as a possibility. Jones could only admire the shining armor, the weapons, the confidence his friend gave off even behind his polarized visor.

A year later, Helms was killed at the end of a vicious game of Dodge the Enforcer. Some out-of-work blues driven nearly insane from the boredom, the frustration, the hopelessness, became almost suicidal. They made a game of provoking an Enforcer to the point of outrage, and then tried to escape before the Enforcer let loose and killed them. Helms had been caught up in a surprisingly elaborate plot staged by several starving former restaurant workers; the ringleader, a thin and wild-eyed dishwasher, proved to have a brilliantly logical and manipulative mind—a mind that would surely have gotten him a job working with The Net if he had so much as tried.

He had directed a game that looked so childishly desperate and simple, but Fitzgerald Helms had fallen prey to its complexity and found himself trapped in a cul-de-sac with the laughing wild-eyed dishwasher. The dishwasher had looked on the point of orgasm when he detonated the chunks of explosive taped to his own body, leaving no portion intact to resurrect as a Servant, and not much of Fitzgerald Helms either.

The other accomplices in the game were immediately rounded up, cleanly executed, and shipped off to Resurrection, Inc. Before killing each accomplice, the Enforcers took great pleasure in informing them that, as Servants, they would be used exclusively for Guild labor.

And, according to the rules, Jones took the place of his sponsor in the Guild when Fitzgerald Helms was killed in the line of duty. Jones had not looked forward to the day when he could claim the benefits of sponsorship, but he had known it would happen sooner or later. Rumor had it that Enforcers on the street didn’t live long, despite their weapons and armor.

Jones was even offered a reduced-price option on the Servants resulting from the executions, but he had declined. He hadn’t even considered purchasing someone like Julia until much later.

And now he was in the Guild, comfortably set for life. He had to do his best, make a clean effort, in honor of Helms. All he could do was sit and hold the memories, over and over again. Jones knew he could never find another friend like Helms, and he didn’t bother to try.

He stood at the doorway of his living quarters and took a last look at Julia, sitting on the chair and watching him with rapt attention. She hadn’t moved a muscle.

The dawn light cast deep shadows from the buildings onto the street, throwing everything into an exaggerated black-and-white relief. Beneath his visor Jones could catch the faint damp tang of salt in the air. Pigeons and seagulls had begun to stir, looking for any scraps of garbage they had missed on the streets the previous evening.

Jones stood in front of the mammoth headquarters of Resurrection, Inc. The towering gray structure looked like a tombstone for all humanity—and the unseen underground complex below was several times the size of the administrative offices above. Two sets of revolving doors waited to receive the visitors and workers. A great marble plaque engraved with the words “Servants for Mankind—Freeing Us from Tedium to Pursue Our True Destiny” stared from the front of the building.

People had just begun to venture outside, freed from curfew for another day. The streets were quiet now, but they would start to get ugly later on. They always did. And Jones would have to march back and forth, escorting Servants to their assigned labor, making certain nothing got out of control.

Francois Nathans, the head of Resurrection, apparently professed a great dislike for the Enforcers and their Guild; but he was forced to keep a pool of Enforcers around his corporation due to the very nature of the work he did and how much the public disliked it. Jones tried not to think about it, afraid he might somehow get into trouble, but he found it ironic that the one man in the Metroplex powerful enough to seriously damage the Enforcers Guild had his hands tied, forced to use the services of the Guild more than almost any other private corporation.

Jones stopped for a moment, staring at the huge poured-stone building, the one structure that was almost single-handedly reshaping society. “First the discovery of fire. Then the Industrial Revolution. Then Resurrection, Incorporated.” That had been one of their more successful slogans.

“And then what?” Jones thought.

Several people pointedly avoided Jones as he pushed his way through the gleaming revolving door.

4

The body named Danal hung suspended in the final purging bath of amniotic solution. Faint smells of chemicals wafted up from the open vents at the top of the vat. Rodney Quick wished his nostrils would become desensitized once and for all.

A long, colorless scar ran down the center of Danal’s chest where Rodney had implanted the synHeart, a scar that would never fade because a Servant could not heal itself. Danal’s body had been shaved and his nails trimmed back; he hung in the amber nutrient bath, drifting, held submerged by weighted spheres attached to his arms, legs, and waist. The pre-Servant’s eyes were closed beatifically, as if enjoying his last peaceful taste of death.

An involuntary shudder traced itself down Rodney’s spine, but he managed to hide it from any invisible spying eyes. Seventy other vats functioned in the large room, creating Servant after Servant. Each day new pre-Servants arrived, and resurrected bodies walked out under their own motor power. Have microprocessor, will travel. The entire system was too efficient to be openly ugly, and perhaps that was why it had fooled him for so long.

The bright harsh light of Lower Level Six seemed colder every day. Death surrounded Rodney, and the stink of resurrection chemicals hung about him like a cloud, a breath from the Grim Reaper, clinging to him even when he walked away from work and tried to slip into a normal life of his own.

The odd feeling of low horror had been growing steadily within him for days now, making it difficult to do his job. Only now, after all the time of working for Resurrection, had he finally come to face his own mortality, the very real possibility of his own death. The knowledge slowly turned his nerves to jelly.

Supervisor breathed down his neck like a vampire, making his job a nightmare. She seemed to have singled Rodney out for career destruction, just at a whim. Rodney knew of other humans who had worked for her, filling various jobs—including the one he himself now held—and those others had disappeared, with no explanations and no excuses offered by management. As a living Interface with The Net, Supervisor knew full well how valuable she was to Resurrection, Inc. She seemed sickeningly confident that no one would call attention to anything she might do. Rodney felt trapped in a cat-and-mouse game, unable to do more than panic. He continued to do his job, hoping that it wouldn’t be today, not today. But he didn’t know how much longer he could grovel and use excuses to fend off Supervisor’s increasingly more elaborate accusations.

The worst part had been recognizing some of the new pre-Servants that came in just after the unofficial disappearances, Supervisor’s previous victims. The records claimed that these cadavers were other people entirely, and The Net denied any correlation with the missing humans. But Rodney never forgot a face. Not even a waxen grimace of a death could make him doubt the identities of the bodies going into the resurrection vats.

And being turned into a Servant must be worse than dying in the first place.

What alternative did he have? When people died clean deaths, they ended up as Servants; Rodney, of all people, knew the criteria for acceptance. Was he supposed to hope for a long, debilitating disease to ruin his body … or a messy enough death that no technician would bother to reassemble the pieces?

The more he thought about it, the more Rodney felt a gnawing helplessness—he could do nothing to save himself if Supervisor finally chose to destroy him, and he could do nothing to protect his own body afterward. What option did anybody have?

Yes, he did know of an option, but he barely dared to whisper it in his own thoughts. Cremators. Even the idea frightened him, but he knew it had to be true. He believed in the Cremators. The need was too great for it to be just another rumor.

More than ever before, people had become preoccupied with, and terrified of, death—caused in great part by the brooding and listless presence of Servants. But Rodney had heard of a mysterious group of militants—the Cremators—who, if you formed a contract with them, would do everything in their power to destroy your body after death, guaranteeing that you could never become a Servant. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, with all the ritual. Real information about the outlaw Cremators was hard to come by, though, and The Net swallowed up any actual reports of their activities.

Francois Nathans himself had frequently publicized enormous rewards for any information about the Cremators. Nathans seemed to be nervous, perhaps even frightened by them—and if it was all just a fabricated rumor, why would such a powerful man care? The Enforcers Guild turned every suitable dead body over to Resurrection, Inc.; Rodney didn’t know for sure if the law required it, or if the corporation paid well for them, or if Nathans just twisted the thumbscrews on the hierarchy of the Guild. But if the Cremators were snatching suitable pre-Servants out from under Nathans’ nose, then the man would be hard pressed to ignore the challenge.

Rodney didn’t know if he dared attempt to contact the Cremators, but it would have to be soon. Would they even meet with him, knowing that he worked for Resurrection, Inc? He became jittery again. Rodney didn’t have the slightest idea how to begin his search. What if someone found out?

“I like to see a man contemplating, thinking.”

The man’s voice seemed to echo off the walls, and Rodney whirled, looking for its source. For a terrified moment he was disoriented and did not notice the three others standing in the maze of vats and tables.

“That’s one of the reasons why I worked so hard to create Servants,” the man continued. “To free more of man’s time for philosophizing.”

Then Rodney saw Supervisor’s purple sleeveless tunic and her cold, half-focused stare, but he realized with some relief that she seemed cowed by the two men standing beside her. The taller of the two men was much older, thin, but with a fire of knowledge behind his eyes that made even Supervisor’s gaze seem harmless. The older man was immaculately dressed, and his steel-blue hair had not a strand out of place. The other man seemed much younger but he carried himself with an uncharacteristic weariness and uneasiness. The younger man had gleaming dark hair and a shadowy complexion that spoke of possible Asian or Indian ancestry deep in his genes. He stood a few inches shorter than the older man, but his shoulders were broad and he radiated an animalistic strength.

The older man arched his eyebrows as he looked at Rodney, and he spoke again without taking his gaze from the technician. “Don’t be rude, Supervisor. Please introduce us.”

“Yes, sir,” she said, looking surprised. “Mister Nathans, this is Rodney Quick. Rodney, this is Francois Nathans, and the gentleman with him is Vincent Van Ryman.”

Neither man reached forward to shake his hand, and Rodney had all he could do to keep his own composure. He had never before seen either of the two men: the head of Resurrection, Inc. and the supposed High Priest of the neo-Satanists. What did they want with him? What had Supervisor accused him of now?

Rodney became suspicious again. He didn’t know what Nathans or Van Ryman looked like. He felt his heart beating harder, hammering the blood through his veins with such force that it squeezed cold sweat out of his pores. This could be a trap. This could be some twisted trick for Supervisor to make him drop his guard in awe at the distinguished visitors … and then she would do something to make him cause his own downfall.

But what if these two were the real Nathans and Van Ryman? Then Rodney would probably act like an idiot and cause his own downfall with no help from Supervisor whatsoever. He had no way of telling. Rodney knew little more than a scattered collection of half-truths and legends about famous people. He did have a sixth-level Net password, but that didn’t allow him access to the most confidential databases.

Rodney knew, though, that Francois Nathans had founded Resurrection, Inc., as a junior partner to Stromgaard Van Ryman—Vincent Van Ryman’s father—who provided most of the financial backing for the new corporation. Stromgaard Van Ryman had apparently shown an adequate business sense, but Nathans was far superior in vision, charisma, and political savvy. Eight years after the formation of Resurrection, Inc., when Servants had begun to make major inroads on the work force, Nathans had assumed his role as head of the corporation, and Stromgaard Van Ryman had sold his portion of control. About the same time, Stromgaard was apparently involved with the inception of the neo-Satanist movement, but two years after the new religion had taken root, Stromgaard mysteriously disappeared. Rumor said he was sacrificed by his own cult. His 21-year-old son Vincent had emerged as the High Priest of the neo-Satanists shortly thereafter.

That had all happened several years before. And now Rodney knew the Servant from Vat 66—Danal, he corrected himself—was somehow special. Vincent Van Ryman supposedly had something important in mind for him. But why was Nathans interested, too? Just out of camaraderie with the son of a friend? Or just to make certain his important customer went away satisfied? Or did Nathans have something to do with the neo-Satanists, too?

“Mister Nathans and Mister Van Ryman would like to see Danal now. They want to make sure everything is satisfactory.” Supervisor’s flat voice held many subtle overtones, and Rodney heard each one of them like an icicle on his eardrums. Van Ryman still had not spoken.

“I saw you inspecting our Danal as we came in,” Nathans said. His voice was rich and friendly but somewhat distant, as if he spoke through a mask over his own personality. “It’s good to find such diligence, especially in one of our own workers.”

Rodney finally found his own voice, using instinct to switch into a self-defense mode, smoothing the stutter from his words before he spoke them. “Yes, sir. Supervisor hinted at how important this Servant is to you, and I’ve been watching him very carefully. I’m sure you can see that everything is perfect. The surgical work installing his synHeart is the best I’ve ever done.”

Nathans smiled. “I’m very pleased to hear that, Mr. Quick. May I call you Rodney?”

He nodded quickly, feeling terribly conscious of his hair, wondering if it was out of place, if his gold nose stud was tarnished, if the beads of sweat were showing on his forehead.

Van Ryman went close to the tank, fascinated by Danal’s body submerged in the golden solution; he seemed unable to tear his eyes from it. The dark-haired man pressed his face up against the glass to see more clearly.

“Supervisor, leave us,” Nathans said abruptly.

Supervisor looked surprised and rebuffed at the dismissal, but she turned without a word and left. The simmering noises of the vats swallowed up the rustle of her clothes. Rodney could barely contain his satisfaction as he watched Nathans’s offhanded manner with her. Rodney felt important, raised back up to the level of a human being again. He had to consciously restrain himself from strutting like a bird.

Nathans reached out and placed a paternal hand on Rodney’s shoulder. The tech stiffened a moment, but allowed himself to be turned aside as the older man began to walk slowly along the row of resurrection vats. Rodney followed closely, and Francois Nathans began to speak to him in a hypnotic voice, making him feel warm and confident in himself, saying all the right things, pulling all the right strings.