Kevin Anderson - Resurrection, Inc.

The technician worked alone, in silence, and when he finally eased the tiny battery pellet into the synHeart’s chamber and made ready to close the chest wound, he mused to himself, amazed at how easy it had been for him. His spine ached, and his fingers felt stiff, but he felt proud at proving his skill again. Let Supervisor try to deny that he was one of the best damned technicians in all of Resurrection, Inc!

Though both of Rodney’s parents had been blue-collars, he himself had fought above all that. It could be done, if you had the ambition and the drive. He had spent his teenage years in terror, knowing that he was doomed to follow in his parents’ footsteps of manual labor, tedious blue-collar work that required no brains, no skill at all. Then even that bleak future had been stolen from him by the Servant revolution.

But Rodney had had enough years ahead of him to plan a little, to realize how he must adapt to survive in a rapidly changing new world. He had pored over the resources of The Net, isolating himself, focusing his teenage world on the bright pixels. He expended all his effort to climb a few rungs higher on the ladder of success, finally reaching a position where he could feel important—Main Technician on Lower Level Six of Resurrection, Inc.

But now, with Servants rapidly replacing many blue-collar jobs, all the lower rungs in the ladder of success were also disappearing—and Rodney Quick found himself back near the bottom again through no fault of his own.

Rodney’s father, who had worked in a factory that manufactured shampoo and soap products, was killed in one of the early anti-Servant riots, receiving the full force of an Enforcer’s scatter-stun. Rodney’s mother, tossed out of her job as a dishwasher at the Sunshine cafeteria, now lived off the blue allotment, a special fund garnered from a tariff on the purchase price of Servants. His mother now wandered the streets with the other aimless and apathetic blues who had no training and no hope for any other type of employment. Competition was vicious for the remaining jobs, and Rodney’s mother didn’t have the stamina or the enthusiasm to fight for something she had always thought would be hers by default. Nor would she have anything more to do with her son, claiming that the stink of Resurrection clung to him and that it reminded her of her husband’s blood.

Rodney finished the synHeart operation on the pre-Servant and sealed the dead man’s chest, taking care to make certain the skin seams matched. He then rigged up a slow-pump that began the long and delicate process of refilling the blood vessels with synBlood.

Rodney clasped his hands behind his back in a Napoleonic pose and walked away from the pre-Servant on the table, leaving the pumps to do their work. He inspected the entire resurrection room like a commander surveying his troops. Occasionally he had other human sub-technicians to assist him in some of the inspections and operations, but most of the time Rodney remained the only human on the floor, with only a few other Servants to handle the uninteresting tasks.

Seventy different vats rose from floor to ceiling, dispersed in perfect geometrical order around the room. Some of the vats were for the initial bath of scrubber bacteria; others were for the solution of genetically volatile bacteria to perform the finishing touches before reanimation. Intermediate holding chambers of mud-thick silvery paste were sunk into the floor between some of the vats. At any one time Rodney could prepare over a hundred different Servants for resurrection.

While grooming himself for a position at Resurrection, Inc., Rodney had reached out through The Net, uncovering the scattered history of Servants and the corporation. After many abortive attempts to build a serviceable, human-looking android, researchers had given up in despair at the incredible task of manufacturing something as sophisticated as the human body. Even the few almost-successful android attempts would have been prohibitively expensive to mass-produce—and if android labor was going to cost more than even Union workers, why bother at all?

But fifteen years before, Francois Nathans had realized that a nearly inexhaustible supply of almost-androids lay waiting to be used: the perfect machine of the human body, discarded at death but often still completely serviceable with only a few minor repairs. Rather than trying to recreate out of inanimate materials, and then mass-produce, the delicate interconnecting mechanisms of neurons and muscles and bones and tendons and sensory organs, Nathans argued that it made more sense to find a new “engine” to put into these already built—but no longer functional—machines, instead of doing everything from scratch.

The sophisticated microprocessor embedded in a Servant’s head linked into the existing contours of the brain, simulating life. Attached to the proper ganglia, the microprocessor acted as a controlling motor, a new engine for the discarded machine. A special “Command” phrase bound all Servants and made them obey, humans, locking their reflexes and forcing them to follow instructions.

As far as Rodney was concerned, Servants weren’t real people; the tech couldn’t possibly think of them as such. Sure, the bodies moved, and Servants could respond when you talked to them, but no real person lived inside. Servants retained their language skills, and some basic knowledge—pretty much anything that happened to be residing on the surface of the temporal lobe when they died. Servants varied—some were like blundering zombies who needed explicit instructions for almost everything, but others held a residue of intelligence and could actually respond almost conversationally.

But no Servant had a memory of its past life—all of that had been erased either in death or in the resurrection process… or maybe the microprocessor just couldn’t reach deep enough to catch hold of those memories. It didn’t matter—despite the artistry Rodney Quick put into the creation of his Servants, they were all just pieces of equipment, machinery, appliances.

Certainly not people.

Rodney stopped and gawked at the body of a well-proportioned young female floating in one of the final baths, weighted down by heavy spheres tied to her waist, wrists, and legs. The front panel of the vat was transparent, and she hung suspended in the thick golden-colored solution, but Rodney could imagine all her details to perfection. She had already been shaved and trimmed, but Rodney still remembered when she had come in, dead from self-inflicted poison. She’d had thick red hair, beautiful, almost the color of blood. Rodney kept records of all such details.

It seemed that every time he tried to start a relationship with a woman, an honest-to-goodness human being, she always broke it off. Handlers of the dead had been despised and shunned throughout history, though in modern times men had claimed to be enlightened about such things. Undertakers and morticians, sextons during the Black Death, gravediggers, the eta in Japan, “resurrectionists” in the nineteenth century illicitly providing dead bodies for medical research…. How the hell was he supposed to fight against leftover cultural sentiments?

Rodney sometimes wondered if spending his teenage years sweating over a Net terminal, trying to escape from the other jobless blues and into a real job, might have left him socially inept… not quite able to relate to others in a meaningful way. He dressed stylishly, according to illustrations in all the Net periodicals. He tried to be funny, compassionate, interesting—yet women seemed so volatile, so unpredictable, with so much capacity for hurting in them.

On the other hand, Servant females never said a harsh word. Rodney placed his fingertips against the warm glass of the finishing vat, staring at the naked body of the once redheaded female, watching as she moved slowly in the gradual convection currents of the amniotic fluid. His own breath began to condense fog on the side of the glass.