Resurrection Inc.
IT IS THE FUTURE – AND THE DEAD WALK THE STREETS.Resurrection, Inc. found a profitable way to do it. All it took was a microprocessor brain, a synthetic heart and blood, and a viola! Anyone with the price could buy a Servant with no mind of its own and trained to obey any command. But for every Servant created, Resurrection, Inc.’s profits became everyone’s else’s loss. Some take to rioting in the streets, their rampages ruthlessly ended by heavily armed Enforcers, eager for the kill. Others join the ever growing cult of Neo-Satanism, seeking heaven in the depths of hell.Only one man tries to save the world. He is the last hope for the living. His name is Danal, he’s dead – but he remembers. Everything.
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For John Postovit and Kristine Kathryn Rusch, who have been with me through all incarnations of this story.
And also to Neal Peart, Geddy Lee, and Alex Lifeson of RUSH, whose haunting album Grace Under Pressure inspired much of this novel
Contents
The two Enforcers found the dead man in the street, long after curfew. The city’s night hung around them, tainted with a clammy mist caught between the tall and dark buildings. The smell of fresh blood and the sweat of close-pressed bodies drifted upward into the air.
The slain man was naked, spread-eagled inside a geometrically perfect pentagram drawn in blood. At each of the five corners of the pentagram, candles of black paraffin burned, made to look archaic with artificially molded runnels of wax along the sides. A wide knife wound hung cleanly open in the center of the victim’s chest, like an appalled extra mouth.
With a throb of its rear jets, the Enforcer’s armored hovercar descended to the flagstones. As the engine purred its way into silence, Enforcer Jones, a tall and thin black man, emerged from the craft. He hung back uneasily, remaining near the hovercar. “Neo-Satanists again!” he muttered under his breath.
The other Enforcer, Frampton, agreed. “Yeah, they give me the creeps.” But he went eagerly forward, amused and confident.
Weapons bristled from pockets and holsters on the Enforcers’ body armor; a tough helmet with a laser-proof black visor covered their faces. In the mercifully brief four weeks Frampton had been assigned to him, Jones had never seen Frampton’s face, but somehow he imagined it would wear a stupid boyish grin, maybe some scattered pimples, maybe curly hair. Frampton thought all this was fun, a game. It didn’t matter—they weren’t friends, nor would they be. Other Enforcers had a real camaraderie, a team spirit. But this would be Jones’s last night patrol anyway.
“Think I should put out the candles?” Frampton asked.
Jones moved away from the hovercar, shaking his revulsion of the pentagram, the blood sacrifice. “No, I’ll do it. You see to his ID.”
Frampton retrieved some equipment from the hovercar while Jones stepped forward, methodically squashing each of the five black candles with the heel of his boot. In the distance, between gaps of the massive squarish buildings, he could see the running lights of another patrol car moving in its sweep pattern.
Frampton made a lot of noise as he carelessly tumbled the equipment onto the flagstones within the pentagram. He picked up one of the scanner-plates and pushed it flat against the dead man’s palm. The optical detectors mapped the swirls and rivulets of the man’s fingerprints, searching for a match in the city’s vast computer network.
“Nothing on The Net about him.” Frampton double-checked, but came up with the same answer again.
“Figures,” Jones said.
“Ever wonder how the neo-Satanists always manage to get people who aren’t even on The Net? Weird.” Frampton sounded breathless. He was always trying to make conversation.
Jones turned an expressionless black visor at his partner for a long and silent moment. He wanted to act cold, wanted to be gruff with the other Enforcer. It was too late to make friends now—better just to keep up the act. “How do you know they don’t just alter the data on The Net?”
Frampton considered this in silent amazement. “That would be awfully sophisticated!”
“Don’t you think this is sophisticated?” Jones jabbed a hand at the body, the candles, the pentagram. “Enforcers sweep this area every five minutes after curfew. You know how strict it is, how closely patrolled—and the neo-Satanists still managed to get him out on the street, light the candles, draw the pentagram, and then vanish before we could get here.”
Only members of the Enforcers Guild were allowed on the streets of the Bay Area Metroplex between midnight and dawn. Jones didn’t fully understand the actual reasons for the curfew—some rumors mentioned a war taking place somewhere, but he had yet to see any signs of battle. Other, more sensible people cited the occasional violent riots caused by the angry blue-collars who had been displaced from their jobs by resurrected Servants.
Jones himself had participated in some of the after-dark mock street battles staged by the Guild. Nobody really got hurt—only a few blasted palm trees, a few scorched tile rooftops, and a lot of noise in the streets. But it all sounded terrible and dangerous to the general public cowering in their living quarters, and they would always feel grateful for the protection the Guild offered. Besides, it gave all the Enforcers something to do.
