Resurrection Inc.. Kevin J. Anderson

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