Waking The Zed

Disclaimer

Waking the Zed
is obviously a work of fiction. The characters, places, companies, and institutions only exist in the author’s imagination. There is no intended resemblance to any people, places, or things that exist in our universe. Any resemblance to actual people, places, or institutions is purely coincidental.

Copyright

Waking the Zed
belongs to ML Katz. You do not have the right to reproduce this story in any form without express permission of the author.

You may use a short snippet or blurb if you are mentioning this story in a review or article, but you must attribute it back to the original source. I would appreciate you letting me know if you do that.

You can find me here -
http://mlkatz.blogspot.com/
– That site is also the best place to find news and updates.

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Also By ML Katz

The Twice Dead
– This book includes the novella – Waking the Zed – plus The Twice Dead.

Will showing up for her summer internship at Future Faith Cryonics be a mistake that graduate pathology student Pam Stone won’t even live to regret? Dr. Klein wants to revive her frozen clients, but Pam thinks the once respected scientist has turned into a charlatan.

Can expert driver Corporal Gordon, combat veteran Captain Crawford, and a chubby deli owner and part time witch – Hercules Onassis – help Pam find answers to the zombie plague before
it goes too far to stop? Take a ride through an urban zombie apocalypse to find out.

Raft People
– How do ordinary people survive the Big Flood? This is a family friendly apocalyptic adventure tale for young adults and adults.

Closely aligned with the "post-apocalyptic" genre of fiction, "Raft People" uses a premise that is more believable than most and the author tells the story with a voice of realism that will capture your attention almost from the first paragraph
.-
Gather.com

The Information Thieves
– A high tech, family friendly adventure in post-flood Dallas.

ML Katz strikes back! Come journey to a future Dallas (not so far in the future) where the eyesore tent cities can't be pushed back, even by giant multi-national companies that are more powerful than the government.
  -
Goodreads.com

Waking the ZED

Future Faith Cryonics, Incorporated

Romancing the Dead

Waking the Dead

The Hospital of the Damned

The Lonesome Road

Morning at the Mediterranean

Zed
Dawn

Last Words

"I am alone and miserable; man will not associate with me; but one as deformed and horrible as myself would not deny herself to me. My companion must be of the same species and have the same defects.

This being you must create."

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

Dr. Ada Klein’s mood almost appeared rapturous as she made a circuit of Preservation Room 17. Her rubber soled shoes glided soundlessly across the gleaming tiles. Her expertly outlined and tinted lips curved upward in an unusually placid smile. A streak of grey accented her dark and carefully coifed hair. The colorful scarf, draped artfully over her narrow shoulders, fluttered about as she walked. As the slim middle aged woman moved from one gleaming man-sized capsule to another, she bent over the transparent face plate of each tube, considered it, smiled, and then moved on.

Pam Stone, the graduate
student intern, stood stoically as her boss made a circuit of the room. For a moment she thought that her boss’s movements reminded her of a dancer making a grand sweep of a ballroom while curtsying to an array of suitors. Of course, the grey streak in the doctor’s dark hair, her cold manner, and her current occupation also reminded Pam of an old black and white horror movie she had seen at a teenage sleepover. Considering that the gleaming steel and glass cylinders each contained the preserved body of one of Dr. Klein’s
clients
, Pam thought, not for the first time, that her middle aged mentor’s actions and mannerisms were really quite creepy. An involuntary chill ran up Pam’s spine.

Pam cleared her throat, reluctant to disturb her boss’s reveries for a variety of reasons.
When the older woman glanced over at her, Pam asked, “Dr. Klein, do you want me to run the usual diagnostics this morning?”

In contrast to Dr. Klein’s slim and elegant
figure and carefully coifed hair, Pam appeared sturdy and natural looking. Her unremarkable straight hair fell past her shoulders. She had tied it back in a loose and simple pony tail for work. Some Native American ancestors had bequeathed Pam high cheekbones and a long straight nose. English ancestors had contributed her pale eyes. But otherwise Pam Stone’s pleasant face appeared rather strong but unremarkable. Though trim, her corn-fed upbringing on an Iowa farm showed in her muscular legs, strong hands, and fairly broad shoulders.

W
hen Pamela stood next to Dr. Klein she often felt like a thick, ungainly, and untutored hayseed. Few people actually ever considered Pam Stone, a pathology doctoral candidate with her own research and publishing credentials, any of these things.
She just has that affect o people
. Pam frowned crookedly.

Dr. Klein looked up slowly, as if Pam had just pulled her out of a private fantasy.
Though Pam had arrived, on time, at her assigned duty station, she felt like an unwelcome intruder. The older woman considered the request and seemed to study her intern for a moment. Then she shook her head and said, “No, I have something very different planned for this morning. Hopefully, you can handle a change to your normal and expected routine.”

The doctor did not elaborate immediately, so Pam just continued to stand there uncomfortably, trying not to shift from one foot to the other.
Truth be told, the more that Pamela learned about Future Faith Cryonics, the more she thought the whole operation was a giant scam that existed to suck generous annuity payments from each paying client.

Pam knew that t
his collection of industry giants and political leaders could have well afforded the price tag of the required annuity fund that had to be established to pay for their care. Their heirs would be unlikely to skip a five star restaurant meal, utility bill, or even a luxury trip to St Bart’s because of the added expense. But Pam also knew that many live people subsisted on less money than Future Faith Cryonics required for the care of the dead. She certainly thought that the money could be put to better use funding care for the living. The whole concept just jarred with her normally practical way of viewing the world.

There
, Pam had thought it, and she knew she believed it.
No matter what Future Faith Cryonics called those poor people, they were surely dead and quite likely to stay that way.
No matter how much Dr. Klein insisted that Future Faith preserved the cream of society until they could be safely revived, Pamela believed that her boss either must be lying or deluded.

Dr. Klein
paused and gazed at her young assistant. She kept her placid smile frozen in place, enjoying the younger woman’s discomfort. She imagined how Pamela would look, frozen in one of the gleaming capsules. If Pam Stone could have shared that image she surely would have listened to her instincts and bolted for the door.

“Ms. Stone
thinks she keeps her face impassive, but I know what she’s thinking,” the doctor speculated silently. “Well, she doesn’t have to believe in me. She only has to do her job for a little while longer. After that she can return to school or her parent’s farm for all I care. People like her should be usefully employed teaching middle school science classes. People like me change the world through the advancement of human knowledge.”

Dr. Ada Klein had
surely always believed in herself. Even if her parents had not always lavished praise on their perfect little girl, which they certainly did, she would had been aware of her gifts since before the very first day she had entered kindergarten class. She had certainly never had any issues with her school work, except for being bored by the chore of copying simple words or coloring in boxes to work out basic math problems. Sometimes she had only felt challenged by minimizing her gifts so she would not draw the ire of her more modestly talented classmates.

As a very young child, Ada had learned that she could not be the first one w
ith the right answer every time. Now as an accomplished scientist, she learned that restriction no longer applied.

Once the final results of her work became public kno
wledge she imagined that many of her past acquaintances, including old schoolmates, would be beating on her door for help rather than mocking or shunning her.
Everybody will be eager to tell all their friends that they knew me.
This simple and cynical young woman she employed as a favor to the university, for example, would be clamoring for full time work instead of regarding her duties as some sort of highly paid nonsense. Then Dr. Klein could decide if she would get more pleasure from terminating the young woman’s employment or keeping her around to torment a bit longer.

In the meantime,
Dr. Klein certainly never minded the fact that she spent most of her time working with the uncomplaining corpses in the gleaming laboratory, away from the chatter of animate people. Her
client’s
passive faces, viewed through the transparent face plates, seemed calm and restful. She imagined they almost looked hopeful. Her clients certainly would not speak up to censure her when her experiments finally legitimized a lifetime of work. She imagined them rising from their preservations chambers full of praise and gratitude. They would have Dr. Ada Klein to thank because she was their savior.

Technically
, at least in the opinion of Future Faith Cryonics, Incorporated, the hard frozen bodies, resting in their separate capsules around her were not corpses at all. They were her very wealthy clients who had chosen cybernetic freezing, right at the moment of death instead of a burial. She would have harvested them sooner, before a doctor called the time of death, but the laws forbade it. Dr. Klein considered these laws quite silly and old-fashioned, but she had to abide by them to stay in business.

In the case of the silent and still residents of the frosty capsules, the line between life and death blurred. But in life, they
believed they could be preserved at the moment before a doctor would call their time of death. And then they believed in the promise of resurrection when science had advanced sufficiently to revive and cure them. They had believed that Future Faith Cryonics, Incorporated was the best company to insure their destiny.