Kevin Anderson - Resurrection, Inc.

But the black dizziness swam in front of his eyes, like shark fins cutting the water of his consciousness. His synHeart labored, ready to burn out, his blood vessels running dry. Danal couldn’t worry about the future if he didn’t survive the present.

“Vincent Van Ryman. My Master is Vincent Van Ryman,” he said weakly. He stated his ID number a few digits at a time until the nurse/tech had all the information. Danal’s joints began to go haywire. For some reason his knees wobbled in and out, and he slumped against the countertop. He was oddly reminded of the moment of his rebirth, as he had emerged dripping from the vat and unable to control his own reflexes, and Rodney Quick standing there taunting him.

But Rodney Quick is dead. I killed him.

An accident.

Danal became partially aware again as the nurse/tech bellowed for one of the human orderlies. He felt a man’s ungentle grip on his waist and his uninjured arm. Their words drifted around his ears, and he was only vaguely able to comprehend them.

“Help me get him to one of the sterile rooms. Then go to the trauma chamber and find some of the extra bottles of synBlood.” (Nurse/tech.)

“Can’t he go to a repair center or something? I thought we didn’t fix Servants here.” (Orderly.)

“Consider it good practice, then.” (Nurse/tech: with cold sarcasm.)

But when Danal tried to move his legs, tried to help carry his own weight, the blackness in the air reached out to swallow him up. He reeled, and lost control of the door in his mind.

Unchecked, all the dead memories swooped after him as he fled undefended down into unconsciousness….

“I’d like to start a religion. That’s where the money is,” Francois Nathans had said.

It was just the start of a conversation, an exchange of ideas. But it altered the lives of Vincent Van Ryman, his father Stromgaard Van Ryman, and Nathans himself.

Young Vincent was eighteen years old at the time. He went to answer the door signal, but he knew it was Nathans even before he opened the door. Outside, the muscular and ever-watchful Servant bodyguards kept their strategic positions around the Van Ryman mansion. The bodyguards would have excluded most people—except Nathans.

With the growing blue-collar opposition to Servants and Resurrection, Inc., several terrorist attacks had been directed at the mansion itself. Perhaps the single private dwelling stated too blatantly how much wealth and success Stromgaard Van Ryman had achieved by putting blues out of work. Nathans, on the other hand, kept several dwellings, none of them elaborate and all of them very secret.

Vincent’s mother had been killed five years before, assassinated while she walked with her son on the streets. She’d fallen next to him, still trying to walk but with a half dozen projectile holes in her body. The thirteen-year-old boy realized how lucky he was to survive, and wondered if he’d be a target as well. He experienced anger and shock, but it was hard to feel deep sorrow for her. His mother had always treated Vincent as a burden, much as Stromgaard now did.

Vincent let Francois Nathans into the well-lit front hallway of the mansion, smiling as the tall man clapped him on the shoulder. “Hello, Vincent.”

Though it was dusk, they had several hours yet before Nathans would worry about the Enforcers’ curfew. Silhouetted in the dampening stillness of sunset, the Servant bodyguards stood motionless and threatening around the house.

Nathans had chosen to wear a silvery hairpiece this time; the older man wore silvery hairpieces only when he had something important on his mind.

“Where’s your father?” Nathans asked him, as if he didn’t know.

“In the study, playing Net games.” Vincent tried to keep his unconscious sneer in check. He hated how Stromgaard wasted his time, and wasted the capabilities of The Net, by using the entertainment directories and nothing else.

Vincent had watched his father slowly drift deeper into the background of running Resurrection, Inc. As the work grew more complex, it required a special kind of mind to manage it all, more than just a competent resource organizer (which, Vincent believed, was all his father could really be).

Nathans had shouldered more of the burden. While Stromgaard sulked and grumbled to himself about how Nathans was taking over what was rightfully his, the elder Van Ryman basically ignored his son.

Vincent had grown used to it over the years and trained himself to find his own means of entertainment. He had grown quite proficient in searching the databases and in doing programming. He became more and more impressed with The Net itself, finding little he could not do once he set his mind to it. He created several false identities on the electronic-mail network—not a difficult task, since some members of special-interest groups operated under pseudonyms, keeping their private lives anonymous. Vincent then carried on five different fictitious lives, all of which allowed him to look at society from different angles.

Nathans shrugged off his jacket and threw it over one arm as he strode down the hall to Stromgaard’s study. In the background, Vincent could hear some of the electronic sound effects as Stromgaard played his idiotic games. He heard a rapid succession of bleeps , then a whoosh , and then a quiet curse from his father.

Nathans waited outside the study door with a half smile on his face. He flashed Vincent a conspiratorial grimace, then entered the room.

Stromgaard did not condescend to acknowledge the other man’s presence. The elder Van Ryman always seemed to be searching for a way to annoy Nathans, but Nathans blithely ignored it, which perturbed Stromgaard even more. Sometimes his father’s childish attitude embarrassed even Vincent.

Vincent made ready to go back upstairs, where he spent most of his time. He never took part in their discussions, but this time Vincent paused on a whim and moved closer to the study as he heard Nathans’s opening gambit.

“I’d like to start a religion. That’s where the money is.”

Stromgaard greeted the proposal with silence, but Vincent could sense that Nathans had captured his father’s attention. The elder Van Ryman waited for him to continue.

“As the saying goes, the first priest was the first charlatan who met the first fool. We could cash in on that.”

“Why?” Stromgaard asked. “You don’t have enough money? You don’t have enough to do lording over Resurrection, Inc. all by yourself?”

Nathans smiled, sidestepping the implied accusation. “It’s not actually the money, Stromgaard. I was thinking more along the lines of something for you to do. You’re… phasing out of your duties at the corporation. You obviously need something else to occupy your time.” He pointed to the Net screen on which Stromgaard’s game score still flashed. “Annihilating alien invaders? You’re more talented than that.”

“I’m not interested in religion,” the elder Van Ryman said. “And I’m not feeling much like a messiah lately.”

“No,” Nathans countered, pacing the room, thinking out loud. “Messiahs are… boring. They’ve been done so many times, you know. I had something more in mind like… well, something new.”

Stromgaard let out an incredulous laugh. “Something new? In a religion? Have fun trying to come up with an idea.”

Nathans sat down in the overstuffed chair and poured himself a glass of the Glenlivet Stromgaard always drank. Vincent occasionally sipped a small snifter of the scotch himself, mainly when trying to be part of someone else’s conversation, but he personally disliked its pungent taste and the way it lingered for hours in the back of his mouth.

“Well,” Nathans continued, “that’s what I was hoping to discuss with you tonight. A brainstorming session, like the ones we used to have when you weren’t moping around all the time.”