The Process Server

  Chapter Five

  Children adapt to social connection and disconnection based on what they're taught – if their egos are gratified by validation or reward for taking a selfish approach, they'll continue to do it until it becomes normal, and empathically disconnect from community. – from the Handbook of Joshua, Chapter 4, Verse 3.

  We were already into low-atmosphere when the com signal on the Esmeralda lit up like a neon clip joint on Kel.

  I hit the linkup button. “Yeah?”

  “Process Server Smith? My name is Dawson Granger, personal secretary to Robert Cardale.”

  There weren’t many names that could send a shiver of anxiety up my weary spine, but Robert Cardale was at the head of the list. The oldest living human, Cardale ruled over humanity’s arguably largest Mega Corp, The Cardale Group.

  Founded 18 generations earlier by his direct line of ancestors, it had started as a government consulting firm, but its expertise and ability to attract top former political and military figures had long ago led to a grand corporate outreach. Now, it was the biggest military provider, supplier and trainer in Sol System, as well as its biggest supplier of pure infrastructure. If you used a land-based vehicle anywhere between G’Farg Station and Earth, Robert Cardale’s firm laid the cement.

  Cardale’s company eventually dwarfed all competition – except, perhaps, Hui-Matsumori – by the time it funded the development of the cellular anti-necrosis agent still in wide use more than a century later.

  Legend had it that Cardale – known as the Millennium Man to many, due to his publicly stated goal of living to 1,000 years – had tried the earliest successful version of the drug on himself. He was officially listed as 298 years old, although he insisted the record was incorrect and that he is 301, a cause of much public debate a year earlier between Cardale Group and VirtuTech.

  Of course, it had come at a cost. The anti-necrosis agents were still in their infancy, and even his extended cells began to rapidly disintegrate after age 235.

  Consequently, he’d used nano-grafting, the process of inserting nanites in the body to rebuild limbs and organs as they withered and died with artificial equivalents.

  His arms, legs, neck, back muscles, ears and a portion of his skull had already been replaced. Skin polymer technology was still also in its infancy, and so the end result look artificial, like rubber draped over a machine.

  In the end, even in his heavily doctored propaganda holos, Cardale came off as more machine now than man, an android posing as a human.

  Like I said, creepy as hell.

  Granger wanted to know when we would be available to meet with his boss. Jayde shot me a nervous look. Very few people – nobody I knew, anyway – had ever talked to Cardale in person.

  What the hell had we stumbled into?

  Experience told me getting off on the right foot was always a high-percentage play. “We can meet with him at his convenience, Mr. Granger,” I said. “Just give us the time and place.”

  Granger beamed a smile on the com link. Functionaries always liked it when you made their daily grind a little easier. “Well that is excellent news, Process Server Smith. I thank you. Would tomorrow at 8 a.m. OE GMT be suitable at Mr. Cardale’s NTC retreat?”

  Not really. Even in space, where it didn’t matter so much, I never got up that early. But you just didn’t say no to Robert Cardale.

  After Granger had logged off, Jayde punched me in the shoulder.

  I rubbed it. “Ow! What the fuck?”

  “That’s what I should be saying. What have you gotten me involved in, Bob? This was supposed to be a straightforward job, finding the Archivist. Now he’s dead and Robert Cardale wants to talk to us. Robert. Freaking. Cardale. This is not a good thing, Bob.”

  I threw up my hands “Yeah, gotcha. I know. Geez, gimme a break will ya? I don’t know how the hell this all got so upside down.”

  It was true. Things had seemed a lot simpler a day earlier. Now we were looking for something valuable as hell that was worth killing a lot of people over, but we didn’t know what. The biggest religious kook in the system was paying the freight, and the most powerful man in the galaxy was keeping tabs on us.

  Jayde had seen Cardale once before.

  “He won’t remember me, I’m sure, but he did a walkthrough at the NTC plant when we were being ... “disassembled.”

  She didn’t talk much about the Big Six Corps’ attempts to figure out her lack of cellular decay, except to say they were horrible.

  “He didn’t talk to us, just asked the workers touring him around, like we were exhibits in a salesroom of some kind.”

  It wouldn’t have surprised me. RDHs were only one rank above Smiths on the social ladder, after all.

  “Maybe Cardale was trying to figure out a way to get his creepy ol’ brain into your seemingly ageless body.”

  I said it with mock dread, but she shot back a cold look. “Don’t even suggest it.”