Working Stiff

“Are you asking if I’m like you? Revived?”

“Revived,” she echoed, testing it out. It sounded innocent, like she’d just had a long rest. “Yes. Are you revived?”

“No. I’ve never died.”

“Him?” She glanced at Joe Fideli.

“No. The drug’s still highly classified, and highly experimental, not to mention expensive. Finding a way to keep you stable and on the drug constitutes extraordinary measures.” His dark eyes locked on hers, demanding a straight answer. “If I give you a gun, are you going to hurt yourself? Or others?”

She imagined doing it. First holding the gun to her own head … but if what they were saying was true, it’d just be painfully inconvenient. And temporary. And messy.

So could she shoot Joe Fideli? He’d brought her back to this. He probably deserved it. Or McCallister. Shoot him right in the heart, if he even had one, which she doubted. She could imagine it, but it didn’t hold any emotional warmth for her.

She’d just be spreading around misery.

“No,” she said, and for the first time, her voice sounded like her own. “No, I wouldn’t do that. I just want to be able to protect myself. It’d make me feel … safer.”

“Gee, thanks,” Fideli said drily. “I’m all flattered and shit.”

“Joe,” McCallister said. Just that, and Fideli went back to being a statue. “All right, you get a gun. And you get paid, Bryn. You run Fairview, and you spread the word that you’re continuing all of your uncle’s business ventures, including the one running out of the basement. I’ll supply you with a stock of Returné, both for yourself and for whatever unfortunates still need the shots, but you have to find his supplier quickly. I can’t guarantee an unlimited supply.”

“I’ll need more,” Bryn said.

“More. More what?”

“Money. If I’m taking over Fairview, I need clothes. Better shoes. A real operational budget.”

“You’ve got it. We’ll be depositing money in an account in your name. Joe will bring you the details. It’ll come through a network of shell companies, out of an annuity. You were left the money from your great-aunt Tabitha.”

“Tabitha? Seriously?”

“Tabitha Quick. She was a real person in Fairview’s family tree, just like you.” McCallister stood up, looked at her for a moment, then went to the door. It buzzed open for him, and he was outside for only a few seconds before coming back and shutting it again.

He had a small pneumatic injection gun in his hand, loaded with a clear vial of … something. “Your arm, please,” he said. When she angled her shoulder toward him, he cleared his throat. “Doesn’t work through cloth.”

Oh. In retrospect, dressing might not have been the best choice, because now it meant she had to slip off the button-up shirt; the sleeves were tight, and wouldn’t roll up that far. She unbuttoned it down the front and said, “I guess you’ve both already seen it anyway.”

Fideli promptly looked down at his feet. McCallister kept his gaze carefully on her face as she pulled the blouse aside and bared the flesh of her upper arm.

“What we saw was a body. It wasn’t you. You, of all people, should understand the difference,” McCallister said, very quietly, as he put the pneumatic gun to her arm. He pulled the trigger, and there was a star-sharp pain in her skin, then a heavy kind of warmth. “Done.”

She pulled her blouse back together, holding it in place until he’d turned away, then did up the buttons with fast, shaking fingers. “How many others have you done this to?” she asked. “Like that man in the video?”

“He was number four in the trials.”

“So four.”

“No,” McCallister said. “He was the first to make it. There have been six since then. Not including you, and whoever Fairview brought back. I told you, it’s top-secret and highly experimental.”

She met his eyes and said flatly, “Why me, then? Why did you bother?”

McCallister exchanged a look with Fideli, who shrugged guiltily. “I thought there was an outside chance —”

“You knew I didn’t know anything. You knew I’d just started.”

This was evidently news to McCallister, who straightened his already straight posture to give Fideli a long, measuring look. Fideli shrugged again. “No excuse, sir. She was a good kid, and I thought there was an outside chance she could be useful. My fault she ended up dead in the first place. I should have gotten there quicker.”

“We’re not in the business of cleaning up your conscience,” McCallister said, and then shook his head. “Done is done, but we’re having a conversation later.”

“Well, that’ll be fun.”

While he was distracted, Bryn slipped in the question she really wanted to ask. “So you wouldn’t have brought me back if I hadn’t been of some potential use to you? Even though you got me killed?”

For the first time, she got an unguarded reaction from Patrick McCallister. It was written all over his face, just for a second, and then the corporate drone was back, smooth and seamless. “Of course we would have tried,” he said.

Liar. But what was interesting to Bryn was that what she’d seen flash over his face hadn’t been the logical match to the lie—not impatience, or disgust, or superiority. What she’d seen had been pure, weary guilt.

Patrick McCallister, she thought, didn’t really like his job very much. Well, how many corporate drones actually did? Brilliant deduction, Bryn, she told herself. You could get federal funding for a research project on that.

Still, it made him just a touch more human to her.

“When can I get out of here?” she asked. She rubbed her arm where he’d given her the shot; it felt warm now, and a little tender.

“Soon,” he told her. He went back to the door and opened it again; this time he was gone longer, and Bryn took a deep, convulsive breath of fresh air that drifted in. Well, not fresh, but new. She felt stifled in here. What she could see of the hallway outside looked like more of the same, though—white tile, clean-room sterility. She couldn’t see any natural daylight, just fluorescents. It felt like they were underground, but they might just as easily have been fifty stories in the air, sealed off from the outside.

McCallister came back with something that looked like a tablet PC, something he made a few taps on and then handed to Joe Fideli, who examined it and nodded.

“What is that?” Bryn asked.

“A lot of things, including an audio/video recorder, infrared detector, secured Internet connection, and tracking device.”

“And it’s got blackjack on it,” Fideli said, straight-faced. He tapped the screen, then turned it around to show her a map, with a blinking light superimposed on it. “That’s you. I can track you anywhere with this. There’s an app for everything, apparently.”

“Is that supposed to make me feel better?”

“The nanites in your bloodstream represent a significant financial investment,” McCallister said. “We’d prefer it if we knew where you were at all times. And, obviously, we need to be able to find you to get you the shot.”

She hated the first part of that, but the second wasn’t unreasonable. “Where’s the tracking device?”

“Inside you,” Fideli said. “It’s a smart device; it went in with the nanites and is attaching to your bone right now. Won’t come off easily. Long battery life, too.”

“It’s not something we would use on a living person,” McCallister said. “The battery sheds toxins, and can lead to metabolic bone problems, but the nanites can easily deal with it.”

“You people are crazy!”

“We’re not you people,” McCallister said, and handed her a clipboard full of paperwork. “You’re one of us now. Officially.”

She looked at what he’d handed her. Employment forms, including—of all the crazy things—a full application and 1–9 form. He shrugged.