Kevin Anderson - Resurrection, Inc.

He went into the different parts of the house, moving slowly in the silence. Off the master bedroom he saw a sauna room with faded old boards weathered from too much steam and hot water. He hesitated at the doorway, not venturing inside. The place seemed to exude a steam of memories as well, like psychic impressions swirling out of the cracked floor.

Just to the right of the front door was the cramped control room for the Intruder Defense Systems. The crowded and intricate panels blinked like city lights, but the ominous machinery frightened him, and Danal stood outside looking in, afraid to enter in case he might touch something.

In the open sitting room at the end of the main hall, the Servant found a low door half-hidden under the stair case that led up to the loft and the other two rooms. He felt drawn to the door, but when he reached the handle, he found it locked. Danal tried to pull at the knob, but it remained fastened. A sudden fear ran up his spine, and he turned to leave the door alone, trying not to think about it.

Danal walked slowly into the study, the room where Van Ryman had first interrogated him. In the following days, the Servant had been cleaning the house, or taking care of the plants and flowers in the terrarium room. He had also been attempting to cook, using fresh ingredients and unpackaged vegetables and meats, but even though he carefully and methodically followed the proper steps, he didn’t seem to have any real finesse for cooking.

In the study he looked at the rugs on the floor, at the lacquered black Grande piano. Experimentally he ran his fingers over the synthesizer keypad, but the unit had been powered down, and no music emerged. He walked along the row of books, studying the neo-Satanist texts. Gingerly he opened one that sounded particularly sinister, the Malleus Maleficarum , and scanned across a few pages, but it all seemed like a gibberish of plastic Latin—words that were supposed to sound mysterious and arcane but had no actual meaning. Brownish-red ink sketched various shapes and symbols and things that looked like spells.

With growing enthusiasm Danal put the book back and stepped over to the white-light hologram on the mantel. The fireplace sat dead and cold, with a grayish crystal inside it. He worked the hologram’s position coordinates again, maneuvering the beach scene until he found the image of Van Ryman and Julia on the beach. He stared at the picture, haunted, drinking in the details for a long moment. His heart felt heavy inside him, but he didn’t know why.

Danal stood motionless and uneasy. Thinking, pondering, waiting. He heard his Master’s words echo over and over in his head, You may inspect anything you wish .

He listened to the silence, knowing Van Ryman wasn’t there, and stepped in front of the Net terminal. He looked at the vacant screen of glass, behind which words could come, evoking mysteries from The Net itself. He stared at it, nearly hypnotized.

Danal reached forward, almost touched the keyboard, drew back, stopped, thought for a brief moment, realized how ridiculous he was being, then reached forward again. He touched his fingers to the panel, and hit the Return key. Real, mechanical keys moved up and down as he touched his fingers to them, making knife-switch contacts. The screen came alive, responding:

“WELCOME TO THE BAY AREA METROPLEX NETWORK.

“USERNAME:”

Danal sat in the chair next to the terminal, resting his elbows on his knees, then typed some letters. With few other names in his nearly vacant memory, the Servant tapped out “VINCENT VAN RYMAN.” The Net returned and prompted him for his access code. Danal felt dizzy for an instant, and hammered a complex, seemingly random pattern of thirteen characters.

The green pixels on the screen vanished briefly, and Danal channeled his thoughts through his own microprocessor, scaling his time sense up to the same speed as The Net itself. For almost a year, it seemed, random pixels ignited and flashed on the screen before the characters returned.

“WELCOME TO THE NETWORK, VINCENT VAN RYMAN. HOW MAY WE HELP YOU TODAY?

“?”

Danal suddenly realized what he had done, that he had somehow keyed in Van Ryman’s supposedly unbreakable personal Net password, a tenth-level access code. He stared down at the tips of his fingers in awe.

Danal logged off immediately and took two steps away from the terminal as if it would bite him, attack him, swallow him up. He turned and hurried back to his room, leaving all the lights on.

Rodney didn’t like the faces all around him on the streets. He was supposed to feel safer among numbers, but some how the people made him even more uneasy as he darted through the crowd—bumping elbows, almost tripping himself—to the meeting place.

The air, the surroundings felt extremely oppressive around all the uncaring pedestrians. He sensed too many things here, too many chances for a mass-trans vehicle to suddenly come careening at him, too many chances for Supervisor to cause a power surge and make a Net booth explode as he passed it, or send an underground repair rat running amok to burst the seams of a power conduit just as Rodney Quick walked above.

Supervisor would take special care to leave Rodney’s body intact—so he could return as a Servant.

He hadn’t made his bargain with the Cremators yet.

But would Supervisor kill him here? Out in the streets? Or would she do it where she could watch in person?

Supervisor had not shown up at Resurrection, Inc. all day, and her unexplained absence seemed more sinister than her presence. What was she doing?

This morning his coffee from the vending panel on Lower Level Six had tasted odd, so odd that he quickly discarded it after touching no more than a drop on the tip of his tongue. And in his own shower Rodney had been suddenly blasted by a scalding spray, with all the cold water mysteriously gone—and nothing wrong with the controls. What if… ? He hurried along.

At the Cremators’ specified meeting place, he paced nervously around the base of an auto-statue of some long-forgotten military hero. The auto-statue shifted its position several times a day to reenact different grandiose poses. Looking incongruously colorful, carefully trimmed geraniums rose around the feet of the great general like the gloriously spilled blood of many enemies.

Rodney chewed his lip and tapped his two silicon fingernails on the rim of the statue. He didn’t have the slightest idea who the Cremators were or how to recognize them. He didn’t know what to do. Two Enforcers stood nearby, motionless. They seemed to be looking at him.

He glanced at the chronometer on his wrist, saw that he had arrived two minutes early. No one else seemed distinct from the rest of the crowd, no one else seemed to be waiting for anyone.

Claiming he had an appointment with a dentist, Rodney had left Resurrection, Inc. for a few hours. Suddenly fearing that Supervisor might check, he made a last minute appointment with a real, but inexpensive, dentist, an appointment he had no intention of keeping. But then as time slowly dragged by, closer and closer to 11:33 A.M., he began to fear that Supervisor might check further, to see if he had actually shown up for his appointment. Just before departing, Rodney sent electronic mail to the dentist’s appointment address, telling him he would be a little late…. Rodney hoped he could afford to pay for both the Cremators and the dentist.

Suddenly Rodney realized that a short, thin woman had come up to him on one side, and before he could turn, a man approached on the other side. The tech almost jumped, flinching and ready to run, but the strange man spoke to him in a calm and soothing voice.

“We’re glad you could get here, Mr. Quick. We are the representatives you wanted to meet.”