The dead monkey was not a good flier. She set up a wailing keen that had even the pilot complaining.
“Stop that,” Sol Gursky snapped. It would not do anything for him, though, and rocked on its bare ass and wailed all the louder.
“What way is that to talk to a piece of history?” the PA said. He grinned in through the grille, waggled fingers, clicked tongue. “Hey there, little fellow. Whatcha call him?”
“Little bitch, actually. We call her Jesus; also known as Bride of Frankenstein.”
Bite him, Solomon Gursky thought as ten thousand mirrored swimming pools slipped beneath the belly of the Tesler Corporada lifter.
Frankenstein’s creations were dead. That was the thing. That was the revelation.
It was the Age of Everything, but the power to make anything into anything else was not enough, because there was one thing the tectors of Nanosis and Aristide-Tlaxcalpo and the other founders of the nanotech revolution could not manipulate into anything else, and that was death. A comment by a pioneer nanotechnologist captured the optimism and frustration of the Age of Everything: Watson’s Postulate. Never mind turning trash into oil or asteroids into heaps of Volkswagens, or hanging exact copies of Van Goghs in your living room; the first thing we get with nanotechnology is immortality.
Five billion Rim dollars in research disproved it. What tectors touched, they transformed; what they transformed, they killed. The Gursky-Asado team had beaten its rivals to the viral replicators, that infiltrated living cells and converted them into a different, tector-based matrix, and from their DNA spored a million copies. It had shaped an algorithm from the deadly accuracy of carcinomas. It had run tests under glass and in tanks. It had christened that other nameless Rhesus Frankenstein and injected the tectors. And Sol and Elena had watched the tiny machines slowly transform the monkey’s body into something not even gangrene could imagine.
Elena wanted to put it out of its misery, but they could not open the tank for fear of contamination. After a week, it ended.
The monster fell apart. That was the thing. And then Asado and Gursky remembered a hot afternoon when Sol got a set of diamond gears built in a place called Redención.
If death was a complex thing, an accumulation of micro-death upon minideath upon little death upon middling death, life might obey the same power law. Escalating anti-entropy. Pyramid-plan life.
Gursky’s Corollary to Watson’s Postulate: The first thing we get with nanotechnology is the resurrection of the dead.
The Dark Tower rose out of the amber haze. Sol and Elena’s private joke had escaped and replicated itself; everyone in R&D now called the thing Adam Tesler was building down in the valley Barad Dur, in Mordor, where the smogs lie. And Adam Tesler, its unresting, all-seeing Eye.
There were over fifty levels of it now, but it showed no signs of stopping. As each section solidified and became dormant, another division of Adam Tesler’s corporate edifice was slotted in. The architects were unable to say where it would stop. A kilometer, a kilometer and a half; maybe then the ar-chitectors would stabilize and die. Sol loathed its glossy black excrescences and crenellations, a miscegeny of the geological and the cancerous. Gaudi sculpting in shit.
The lifter came in high over the construction, locked into the navigation grid and banked. Sol looked down into its open black maw.
All just atoms, the guy who owned the factory had said. Sol could not remember his name now. The living and the dead have the same atoms.
They’d started smalclass="underline" paramecia, amoebae. Things hardly alive. Invertebrates. Reanimated cockroaches, hurtling on their thin legs around the observation tank. Biological machine, nanotech machine, still a machine. Survival machine. Except now you couldn’t stomp the bastards. They came back.
What good is resurrection, if you are just going to die again?
The cockroaches came back, and they kept coming back.
He had been the cautious one this time, working carefully up the evolutionary chain. Elena was the one who wanted to go right for it. Do the monkey. Do the monkey and you do the man.
He had watched the tectors swarm over it, strip skin from flesh, flesh from bone, dissolve bones. He had watched the nanomachines put it all back together into a monkey. It lay in the liquid intact, but, its signs said, dead. Then the line kicked, and kicked again, and another twitched in harmony, and a third came in, and then they were all playing together on the vital signs monitor, and that which was dead was risen.
The lifter was into descent, lowering itself toward the exact center of the white cross on the landing grid fastened to the side of the growing tower. Touchdown. The craft rocked on its bug legs. Seat-belt sign off, steps down.
“You behave yourself,” Solomon Gursky told Jesus.
The All-Seeing Eye was waiting for him by the upshaft. His Dark Minions were with him.
“Sol.”
The handshake was warm and strong, but Sol Gursky had never trusted Adam Tesler in all the years he had known him; as nanoengineering student or as head of the most dynamic nanotech corporada in the Pacific Rim Co-Prosperity Sphere.
“So this is it?” Adam Tesler squatted down and choo-choo-chooked the monkey.
“She bites.”
“I see.” Jesus grabbed his thumb in her tiny pink homunculus hand. “So, you are the man who has beaten the final enemy.”
“Not beaten it. Found something on the far side of it. It’s resurrection, not immortality.”
Adam Tesler opened the cage. Jesus hopped up his arm to perch on the shoulder of his Scarpacchi suit. Tesler tickled the fur of her belly.
“And humans?”
“Point one percent divergence between her DNA and yours.”
“Ah.” Adam Tesler closed his eyes. “This makes it all the harder.”
Fear pulsed through Solomon Gursky like a sickness.
“Leave us, please,” Adam Tesler said to his assistants. “I’ll join you in a moment.”
Unspeaking, they filed to the lifter.
“Adam?”
“Sol. Why did you do it?”
“What are you talking about, Adam?”
“You know, Sol.”
For an instant, Sol Gursky died on the landing grid fused to the fifty-third level of the Tesler corporada tower. Then he returned to life, and knew with cool and beautiful clarity that he could say it all, that he must say it all, because he was dead now and nothing could touch him.
“It’s too much for one person, Adam. This isn’t building cars or growing houses or nanofacturing custom pharmaceuticals. This is the resurrection of the dead. This is every human being from now to the end of the universe. You can’t be allowed to own that. Not even God should have a monopoly on eternal life.”
Adam Tesler sighed. His irises were photochromed dark, their expression unreadable.
“So. How long is it?”
“Thirteen years.”
“I thought I knew you, Sol.”
“I thought I knew you.” The air was clear and fresh and pure, here on this high perch. “How did you find out?”
Adam Tesler stroked the monkey’s head. It tried to push his fingers away, baring sharp teeth.