The Resurrected Man (42 page)

“A flashback,” he said, his voice sounding weak. “I didn't think it would be like this. I thought the memories would just filter back in, that blocked pathways would reopen and suddenly the information would be there when I looked again. I didn't expect it to come in a rush, completely out of control.”

“Maybe both will happen,” the AI suggested. “Perhaps you should try to remember something specific—a date or person—and see what emerges.”

“Perhaps.” Jonah hesitated, even though he knew QUALIA was right. The experience had been so powerful that he hesitated to encourage another one just yet.

And besides, what would he look for? There was no point looking for Lindsay, who had died before the week of his memory-loss. Any images of his father Jonah might recall would almost certainly be—

Click

—broadcast by his overseer on a virtual screen covering almost sixty percent of his primary visual field. He was sitting on the lounge of the unit in
Faux
Sydney, the data-card lifted from SciCon pressed firmly against his palm. The images flickered on the virtual screen, silent, flat and colourless as a result of heavy compression, and limited to the view obtained by the minuscule security camera. But the image was clear enough. He could see the interior of SCAR in adequate detail.

The view was focussed on one corner of the lab from a point on the ceiling in the opposite corner. To the left was a hefty SHE processor, its maintenance lid ajar. To the right was the airlock leading to the observation bay. The exterior door was open.

As he watched, someone walked across the image to fiddle with the case of the SHE processor. The person's face was obscured by the angle, but he knew who it was.

Someone else stepped half into view, pacing and gesticulating down one side of the lab. Lindsay paused with his hand inside the case of the processor, turned to look over his shoulder at his son, shifted position slightly, then—

Click

—he had stopped the recording at that point. He remembered it now. He hadn't needed—or wanted—to watch any more. And indeed the flashback ended there, too, as though the memory and the recording both shied away from the explosion that had shattered the lab in the next frame, lifting Lindsay off the ground and hurtling him to the far wall with enough force to make him ricochet two metres.
Jonah himself disappeared from view, blown back by the shockwave but not killed by it due to the muffling effect of his father's body. The rest of the recording had consisted of his futile attempts to deal with the situation, and he'd had no desire to revisit that.

He had learned nothing new from the memory, but it remained in his head after the initial flashback, allowing him to examine it in more detail. At first, little extra came. He had felt sad, watching the playback three years in the past, and angry, but his present self couldn't explain the latter emotion. He couldn't recall where the data had come from, although he imagined it wouldn't have been hard to obtain with his contacts then. He didn't know why he had been watching it, either, except to torture himself with feelings of guilt and inadequacy. And he didn't know
when
the original experience had taken place—on which day between April 11 and 19, 2066.

He had learned very little from the two flashbacks so far—but it was undeniably progress.

“How much output is there from the dying brain?” he asked QUALIA. “Can we squeeze it all into an hour?”

“I am fast-tracking the input, Jonah. That may be why memories are emerging spontaneously rather than—”

Click

“—hiding out here and waiting for it to come. Don't you see? Your isolation makes you ineffective, and your insulation makes you vulnerable. If he wants to find you, he will, just like I did. It wasn't hard.”

“But you had access to Lindsay's data,” said Karoly Mancheff. “That made it easier.”

“Only marginally.” Jonah's voice was raised and strained. “The point is, it can be done. Maybe later than sooner, but done all the same. And when the time comes, you'll—”

Click

“—respond, please. Jonah—”

“I'm here. Just.”

“I said, if you try verbalising the details you wish to recall, that may encourage event-specific recall instead of—”

“I heard you the first time. You're distracting me.”

The conversation he had just remembered came from the 17th—he knew that much. Stress had coloured the memory like viewing it through a filter. He still didn't know who or what he was talking about, but he could recall now from where he had obtained the location of the WHOLE head office. The information had been stored on Lindsay's work-station—which meant that the work-station itself must have been working at that point. The core programming must have been erased at a later date.

By whom?

Verbalising the question produced no response. Either the memory was missing, or he had never known the answer to the question, or the technique itself was invalid.

What about Marylin?

The response was almost instantaneous.

Click

A hand-stitched rosette caught his eye as he stood by the tapestry that hid the interior of the yist chapel from view. He focussed on it to the exclusion of everything around him. But the muffled voice droned on—“Science teaches us that there are no such things as souls”—quoting from that damned book Lindsay and his mates in WHOLE had loved so much. He couldn't ignore it. For a supposedly secular funeral, there was an awful lot of mysticism flying about.

He really should have turned up on time, he chided himself. And now that he was late, he really should go in anyway. But he couldn't. It felt wrong. It was Lindsay's lie, not his. People would find out soon enough, and when they did, they would understand. Or not. He didn't care much either way.

He was honest enough to admit that the real reason he wasn't there was because Marylin might be.

Click

He blinked. So, the technique worked, and it was much smoother than relying on chance. But it hadn't told him much in this case. He wasn't really surprised. Marylin had walked out on him before the 11th, so it was unlikely that any of the partitioned memories would contain—

Click

“—any mention of me or my presence here. By the time you're found, InSight will have made sure of that. And if, by some incredible fluke, you
do
remember something, who would take the word of a v-med junkie? Much less risky than assassination or blackmail, no?”

“Mary—” he gasped, his face forced down into the pillow as the muzzle of a gas delivery device jammed into his neck.

“Ah, yes. Your partner. I wouldn't worry about her. She won't find you until I'm good and ready.”

The sharp sting of the gas-gun made him jump. “No!”

“Yes, Jonah. Goodbye for now.”

The pressure holding him down eased as his muscles relaxed. Whatever drug he had been given, his overseer couldn't fight it. But he remained conscious, horribly so, as the gas-gun came up and fired again, this time delivering a stream of nanoware into his bloodstream. He could neither move nor make a sound.

All he could—

Click

—feel was a terrible combination of relief and dismay.
He had been given InSight deliberately to suppress his memories.
Now he knew he had not been suicidal. But who had given it to him? He couldn't tell from that memory.

Who
?

“Jonah, I am becoming concerned about your mental well-being.”

“Be quiet! Leave me alone!”

“I am genuinely sorry to disturb you, but—”

Click

“—I am aware that you have been less than honest in your dealings with us, especially with respect to certain data obtained without formal permission. We don't mind that you have it, of course, but we would rather you went through the normal channels.”

Jonah stared at the man standing in the unit's living room. Two weeks ago the face had been that of a stranger; now he knew it well. It belonged to Herold Verstegen.

“Why the hell are you here?”

“There's no need to be so suspicious, Jonah.” Verstegen took several slow steps across the room, touching objects as he went: the back of a chair, a plant, a sculpture. His eyes never left Jonah for long. “I came because I am concerned for you. We all are. Your father's death has come as a great shock to no one more so than you, and on top of the recent dissolution of your investigative partnership—”

“That's none of your business.”

“On the contrary, Jonah: it
is
my business. I am a human being who cannot pass by when a close relative of a former colleague is in need. You must be under an awful amount of strain.”

“That still doesn't explain why you're here.”

“Can I put it any more bluntly?” Verstegen bent down and picked something off the coffee table. At first Jonah couldn't tell what it was. “I'm worried about you killing yourself, of course.”

“What makes you think that?”

“Why, this.”

As Verstegen's hand came up and out, Jonah realised that he was holding a pistol.
Jonah's
pistol. He had left it lying in full view.

“Very careless, Jonah. Can you blame me for being concerned?”

The eye of the barrel pointed directly at him just for a second, underscoring with menace any genuine sincerity Verstegen's words might have held, before Jonah reached out and took the weapon from him.

“Fuck you, Verstegen.”

“You have been stealing from us, Jonah,” he said. “Perhaps, in future, we can cooperate. I'm sure that will make our conversations—”

Click

“—less stressful.”

Jonah blinked.

The globe was gone. In its place was a simulation of a candle. The flickering of its narrow flame had caught his attention.

“QUALIA! What do you think you're doing?”

“Your prevocal outputs are becoming increasingly erratic. I am attempting to alter the procedure in order to make the assimilation of memory less stressful. Please tell me if anything I do—”
Click
“—makes a difference.”

Click

His head was under water—

Click

“Wait—”

Click

—and the pain was in his chest, but the—

Click

“—QUALIA, stop! Whatever you're—”

Click

—real hurt was in his head, where he could feel his thoughts—

Click

“—doing, you're making it—”

Click

—slowly and inevitably fading to—

Click

“—worse!”

Click

Click

Click

—black.

Click

Everything was calm. He was wrapped in darkness, in silence, in peace. He thought nothing, experienced nothing,
was
nothing. Time passed, but he did not mark its passing. Time passed, but he didn't care. And as time continued to pass, he learned to forget. That, after all, was the point.

Click

He burst out of the void and into a sensory explosion.

“
QUALIA!
”

“Be calm, Jonah! I am here!”

“Where's
here
?” The candle was a pillar of fire an impossible distance away. “What the hell did you do to me? How long was I gone?”

“I intended no harm, Jonah. I swear. Your brain—”

“
How long
?”

“Twenty-four minutes and forty-eight seconds.”

“Jesus christ—”

“The loss of time is irrelevant. The inputs continued unchecked. Listen to me, Jonah. The interruption was only to your centres of consciousness, and may have worked in your favour. You have been spared the trauma of recall driven by subconscious urges or spurious connections. Can you tell me what happened?”

“I was back under InSight,” he said. “I was asleep. No—I was dead. I was nothing. I was—”

Click

“—beginning to think that
you
had killed Lindsay.”

“Me?” Herold Verstegen laughed in his face. “Next you'll be telling me I was—”

Click

“—I was—” He shook his head to clear the fragment of memory. “I'm confused.”

“The dormant portions of your own brain were activated by the stimulus. For a short period of time, the InSight agents still present in
your tissue were also active. You fell into the hibernation state your cortex has been conditioned to adopt by years of repeated entrainment.”

“So I really
was
back there?”

“In a physiological sense, yes.”

“Who's to say it won't happen again?”

“It won't. I will avoid, in future, the combination of inputs that encouraged the state. In attempting to regulate the recollections, I in fact made things worse.”

“But it's all right now?”

“In a manner of speaking, yes.”

“In
what
manner of speaking.”

“We have only five minutes left before I must end the simulation.”

“So? How much more do we need to do? Once you've finished inputting the memories, it doesn't matter whether I access them here or in the real world. Are we nearly there?”

“The superimposition is complete. This, combined with your reversion to hibernation, alerted me to the difficulty we are now experiencing. It was my intention to return you to the Resurrection suite immediately—in case the simulation itself was contributing to your condition, not just my interference. Returning you then would also have saved processing time otherwise wasted maintaining the simulation.”

“But obviously that didn't happen,” he said, trying to guess ahead.

“No. Normal Resurrection procedures have been interrupted. We are unable to synthesise your physical body. Something—or someone—is preventing us from bringing you back.”

“You mean I'm trapped here?”