State of Decay (20 page)

“Yes, but you know why I’m here, right?” I asked.

“I understand some of our components were recovered from a foreign combat revivor that had been smuggled into the country.”

“Yes. Mr. MacReady, I’ll be frank. I am only interested in tracking down the people who are bringing the revivors into the country. We don’t believe Heinlein Industries is involved in anything illicit; we just want to know how the parts might have gotten there, to aid us in tracking the traffickers down.”

“I understand,” MacReady said. “We ran the numbers you sent along and were able to trace the components ourselves. The parts were surplus, unclassified and obsolete. They were sold at auction.”

“Along with how much other product?”

“I’ve compiled the complete list and I’ll make sure you leave with it,” MacReady said.

“You understand this was a foreign combat model we pulled them out of?”

“Our current technology is so far advanced beyond those components as to make them irrelevant.”

“I see.”

“It’s very complicated, Agent, and completely legal.”

“I understand. In a nutshell, can you say what the specific components were for?”

“Different things,” he said, “but mainly? Collective command.”

“Which is?”

“Revivors are more sophisticated than they were back when you served, Agent. A collective-command structure allows revivors a common communications connection for sending and receiving information. That may sound like a simple thing, but it’s fairly complicated. Think of it as a version of the Jovanovic-Zaytsev system you use to communicate with your teammates.”

“So it allows revivors to communicate with each other?”

“Not exactly,” he said. “It’s a hub-and-spoke configuration; many to one, not many to many. It allows a single source to command many revivors.”

“And by command, you mean . . . ?”

“Control. Usually they’re given orders, but if the situation requires, the shunts are in place today to override and virtually control them from a remote location.”

“Nice.”

“The revivors also use the system to report back to that common source. Any modern revivor outfitted with one will automatically join a default command chain, if one is available.”

“They can’t talk to each other?”

“They can, just not directly,” he said. He was quiet for a moment, then asked, “Have you recovered any others with the same components?”

“I can’t comment on that.”

“Well, if you have,” he said, “or if you do, or suspect you might, then you would be dealing with someone who wanted to command a unified group.”

“Hypothetically, how many nodes could be commanded in that way?”

“Typically, small groups—say, four to nine—but when commanding many such groups, it can add up. In the future, we hope to have a single command control hundreds of units.”

“Hundreds?”

“The future of revivor technology is today, Agent. The M8 models we’re currently creating far surpass what you would have encountered during your time in the service. Tomorrow will bring even greater advances.”

“Field bring-back?” The ability to raise a revivor on the battlefield, without requiring a trip back to Heinlein’s labs, was something they’d been chasing for years without success. MacReady grinned and gave a shrug.

“Field administration too, perhaps,” he said. “One day, being wired may be as simple as a shot in the arm.”

That took me by surprise, and he seemed to enjoy that.

“You understand what I mean, then,” he said, “when I tell you the components you recovered are no longer relevant.”

“I see.”

MacReady leaned back in his chair and sighed. He still held an easy smile, but his eyes looked grave.

“We are as concerned about this as you are, Agent,” he said. “We want to help in any way we can.”

“I appreciate that,” I told him. “The most useful information for us right now is those auction records you’ve made available. For now, I think that’s all I need.”

“Very good.”

“I did have one last question, though,” I said. “Does the name Zhang mean anything to you?”

“You mean Zhang’s Syndrome?”

I shrugged.

“That,” MacReady said, “is a piece of Heinlein Industries lore, in a manner of speaking. The fathers of the modern revivor were two men named Isaac Ericsson and Olav Sodder, and while neither of them founded Heinlein Industries, they made it what it is today.”

“How so?”

“The two men met during their tour in the service, where they were exposed to some of the earliest revivor technology,” he said. “They were fascinated by it, especially Sodder, who studied the ones that came off the battlefield, looking for weaknesses to exploit, and then ultimately a way to re-create the revivor for our own use. He got pigeonholed as a tech specialist, while Ericsson, by all accounts, was more of a military man. Sodder saw the military benefit of a large, stable revivor force that could do more than blindly jump out of the bushes. When they got out of the service, the two pooled their resources and began development.”

“They formed their own company?”

“Initially,” he said. “In fact, Elise Jovanovic and Michael Zaytsev were part of that original endeavor, but Heinlein snapped the whole entity up very early on and then split it; Jovanovic and Zaytsev, whose names I’m sure you’re at least familiar with, formed the team that perfected your JZ interface, while Sodder and Ericsson developed revivor technology. They all became very rich, and under the umbrella of Heinlein Industries, they were given all the resources they would ever need. Heinlein itself became even more profitable than it already was, and the marriage resulted in our obtaining one of the largest government contracts in history. In return, we provided the United American Coalition with the most powerful military force the world has ever seen.”

“So what is Zhang’s Syndrome?” I coaxed.

“It is the wedge that eventually came between Ericsson and Sodder,” MacReady said. “Basically, it’s a corruption of the memory pathways that occurs sometimes during reanimation, named after where the condition was finally isolated, Ning Zhang. It came up only in the later part of Sodder’s life, because it wasn’t until then that revivors became sophisticated enough to retain a significant part of their memories and cognitive abilities. It didn’t affect memories that formed after reanimation, only preexisting ones.”

“Affected them how?”

“Basically, a small percentage of those who were reanimated would describe a cognitive dissonance,” he said. “Think of it like this: If a quantifiable memory event could be portrayed as an image, the same image would differ between the time of death and reanimation. They would be similar, but not equal.”

“Give me an example.”

“For example, a man comes to a fork in the road and goes right. Years later, upon reanimation, that man’s revivor believes he went left.”

“Maybe he just remembered it wrong.”

“It’s hard to say, but Sodder believed he had empirical evidence that this was not the case—and that was the crux of it. To someone like Ericsson it wasn’t a problem, but to someone like Sodder it was a puzzle he felt compelled to solve. He felt such a discrepancy had to have an explanation.”

“How did that drive a wedge between the two men?”

“Well, since only a small portion of the memories were affected and not all revivors exhibited the anomaly, Ericsson declared it a waste of resources to chase it,” he said. “He was only interested in increasing the field capacity of the revivor itself; past memories were irrelevant to him. Sodder was the opposite; he was obsessed with the problem and with finding what caused it.”

“So it was a professional disagreement, then?”

“It was more than that,” MacReady said. “It came down to their beliefs. Ericsson didn’t just think it was a waste of resources. He didn’t think the memories should be preserved. If he had his way, I think he would have had all former life memory wiped out, but it wasn’t practical. He viewed Sodder’s work as attempting to blur the line between life and reanimation, to make reanimation an extension of life. He was offended by it, I believe. The two distanced themselves from one another.”

“You said, ‘in the last part of Sodder’s life’,” I said. “He’s dead now?”

“Both men are dead now,” he said, “but their legacies still live on, as do the two camps they established, which still lock horns over that same issue, though not so much these days.”

“Why not?”

“Sodder had a protégé named Samuel Fawkes,” he said, “who continued his work trying to pinpoint the cause of Zhang’s Syndrome. Some years ago, he died as well, and since then it’s almost completely lost steam. Samuel’s primary partner in that endeavor was a man named Edward Cross, but honestly, when Samuel died, Edward moved on to other areas.”

“How hard would it be to get what you have on Zhang’s Syndrome to me?”

“Not hard at all. Blocks of the data are still classified, you understand, but I can give you plenty to chew on for now. I’ll assemble them and then forward them to your office.”

“Fair enough.”

“Is there anything else I can help you with?” he asked. “I could arrange a tour of the facilities, if you like.”

“No, thanks,” I said. “I have all the information I need for now.”

“Let me show you out, then.”

I followed him back to the visitors’ lobby, where we shook hands and he gave me his card before disappearing back behind the glass security door. I headed out to the parking garage, toward the car.

Zhang’s Syndrome.
Could that have been what the revivor was referring to?

Slowing down as I approached the car, I noticed something on the windshield. It looked like a business card had been slipped under the driver’s-side windshield wiper.

No one else was around. I couldn’t see any cameras but I was sure they were there, so I palmed the card and got into the car without turning it over. Once I was inside, I held it down out of sight and looked at it. The name and contact information had been scratched out.

Someone must have wanted to leave me a message without showing himself and without leaving any kind of electronic trail. Sometimes the low-tech approach was still the best way to go.

I flipped it over and looked at the back; there was a handwritten note there, printed in black ink.

SAMUELNEVER LEFT

The card wasn’t signed. There was no other information on it.

Someone else knew I was here, then. The reference had to be to the Samuel Fawkes that MacReady had mentioned to me, and that implied that someone else had managed to hear that conversation as well.

With the restrictions put down over VP Industrial, there was no way to check the information. I slipped the card in my pocket and headed back toward the railway.

When I first opened my eyes, I wasn’t sure where I was. I was lying on something soft, but it wasn’t my bed and it wasn’t the couch. Also, I was covered with a thick blanket that wasn’t mine. The lights were out and the room was lit by flickering candlelight.

I took a deep breath and smelled some kind of perfume smell, along with the smell of the bar soap I used. When I reached up to rub my face, it wasn’t greasy, and the blanket was crisp and clean.

Pushing my face into it, I breathed in and it smelled good, but it wasn’t mine. The oversized pink sweatshirt and sweatpants I was wearing weren’t mine either. I heard slippers shuffle across the floor nearby.

“Oh, you’re up,” a woman said, looking down at me. It was Karen, my downstairs neighbor. I was on the floor, lying across sofa cushions that had been arranged there like a bed. I was still in my apartment.

“Your lights are out, so I brought up some candles. I hope you don’t mind,” she said, sitting down next to me. Near my head there was a large ceramic bowl filled with soapy water that had a facecloth draped over the lip. Three or four candles had been arranged around the room.

“What happened?” I asked.

“You flipped,” she said, with a thin smile.

“Oh.”

“You said something terrible happened,” she said. “Then you started going on about dead people, and then needles in your head, and then I kind of lost track. Do you remember any of it?”

“No.”

“It’s just as well.”

My body physically ached as I struggled into a sitting position. My head was throbbing.

“Why did you stay?”

“You needed help, and you helped me. It was the least I could do, right?”

The reality of what I was wearing and the way I smelled finally started sinking in, and immediately I felt myself getting anxious, the blood rushing to my face.

“Did you wash me?”

“I’m a nurse. It’s okay; I do it all the time.”

“You—”

“Look,” she said. “You puked on yourself, and that’s not even all, okay? I put up with a bucket full of abuse—I took it because I knew you weren’t in your right mind, and I’m sorry if you’re embarrassed, but I couldn’t leave you lying in it like that. I just couldn’t.”

I didn’t say anything, partly because I didn’t know what to say and also because my mouth just wouldn’t open. I felt like crying, but I was too exhausted.

“Besides,” she said, leaning closer, “something terrible did happen. There was an explosion, a suicide bombing, just a few blocks away. Over fifty people died and hundreds more got injured.”

“Someone blew himself up?”

“Right in the middle of the restaurant strip at lunch-time.”

I did kind of remember that, once she said it. I saw a bunch of people running, bloody and burned and screaming.

“Bad things are coming,” I said.

“That’s what you said last night.”

There was more—I knew there was more—but I couldn’t remember it.

“There was a panic,” she said. “A riot broke out. Everyone’s freaking out. They’re calling in the National Guard and there’s going to be a curfew until they can get things under control. They say there are even going to be revivors patrolling.”