The Unincorporated Man (4 page)

“You can’t be serious,” cried Neela. “There’s no way this is legal.”

“Actually,” he continued, “the law states that we can charge whatever we wish. He was found in
our
territory, under
our
jurisdiction, brought to
our
hospital, and is under
our
care. Now a party of standing, a relative or spouse, could contest this in court and, I’ll even give it to you, could probably win. However, that doesn’t appear to be the case. But I’m nothing if not thorough.” He spoke up loudly so all in the bay could hear. “Anybody here a party of standing, a relative or spouse? Speak up… anyone?”

Silence.

“Hmm,” he said. “How unfortunate. The gentleman in question seems to be an orphan. When we revive him he’ll be free to contest the price… in, say, four or five years.”

“You mean when you’ve already got a firm grasp on his shares,” said Mosh.

“Why, Director, you are speaking prematurely. He’s not even incorporated yet. We’ll need to set up a legal guardianship and assign stock options, as well as investigate the legal ramifications. It would do this man an injustice to bring him into this world without making sure everything was in order.”

“Mosh can pay,” blurted Neela.

Before Mosh could respond, Hektor laughed out loud. “Yes, I suppose he could. Now that is
very
generous of you, spending your boss’s money like that, but I think he’ll be more than happy to explain to you why
that’s not going to happen
.” He then looked over at the director.

“Mosh?” pleaded Neela.

Mosh raised his hand to silence her. “We’ve taken up enough of Mr. Sambianco’s time.” Then, looking over at Hektor, “I trust, sir, that you will not hold my employee’s enthusiasm against her.” It was delivered more as a warning than a request.

“On the contrary, Director. I’m greatly impressed by her zeal.” Hektor considered for a moment, and brightened. “In fact,” he said, inputting some new commands in his DijAssist, “I just placed a purchase order for another thousand shares of her personal stock.”

“You really are a bastard,” Neela said, before turning on her heel and storming out of the bay.

Hektor and Mosh were now alone.

“Look,” Hektor said, “I know you were once a pretty powerful member of GCI, and you came to this nice little hospital of your own volition. But you were clearly outmatched today. I hope it will not be necessary to embarrass you like this in the future.”

“Not if I can help it, Mr. Sambianco.”

Mosh smiled thinly and walked away without saying another word.

Neela was anxiously pacing outside the transport bay entrance when Mosh emerged.

“Sorry about that,” she said.

Mosh put his hand on her shoulder and smiled.

“Don’t worry about it.”

They walked down a long hallway toward the cafeteria.

“No, it really was wrong of me to offer
your
money,” Neela continued, narrowly avoiding a group of internists on their rounds. Then, as an aside, “Like you’d even have that kind of money lying around anyways.”

“Actually, Neela,” he said, stopping to thumbprint-approve some forms handed to him by a nurse, “I do.” He continued walking—minus his rebellious subordinate. After a few paces he turned to Neela, standing in consternation. “You coming, or what?” he asked.

He waited for her at the entrance to the cafeteria. They headed together to his reserved table. “You’re telling me,” she asked, “you have ten million credits?”

“Considerably more, actually.” She knew he wasn’t bragging; it wasn’t in his nature.

“Then why didn’t you just pay him?” she asked. “Why did you let me go out on a limb for ten thousand when you had millions, no, I’m sorry, tens of millions in the bank?”

“Neela,” he answered, reaching across the table to take her hands into his. “I’m truly sorry, but I had to let you, well… be you. Besides, I never would have been able to pay, and neither would you.”

“Care to explain that one?”

Mosh smiled. “Of course,” he said, releasing her hands from his grasp and leaning back into his chair. “Neela, you’re an excellent revivalist. With experience, you may be one of the best. Hektor’s not the only one buying your stock.”

“Really?” she asked in disbelief.

“Ten thousand shares, to be exact, but only in options. You have a temper that may get the better of you. As I was saying, you really are quite talented. But you don’t have a corporate bone in your body. As much as this may surprise you, I never went to the transport bay with any hope of helping that man.”

“Why would you leave him like that?”

“I wouldn’t. But Neela, it’s not up to me. It never was. Nor is it up to you. Even if I’d been suicidal enough to want to pay, I wouldn’t have been allowed to.”

“How could they stop you from paying with your own money?”

Mosh sighed. “Neela, I can think of three ways off the top of my head, conflict of interest being right at the top. But they don’t need to stop payment—just delay it. A court order from a friendly judge would be more than enough to delay the revive for days, if not weeks.”

“So we revive him in a couple of weeks instead of hours. Better than five years, no?”

“Neela, GCI wants him. In a couple of weeks he could be lost in a warehouse with a foreman all set up to take the blame for misplacing him. Or worse, someone could decide that he’s too much of an inconvenience, and the corpsicle disappears for another hundred years.”

“That doesn’t happen!”

“Not often, but yes, it does. Why do you think I got out? The price was too high for the power I was capable of wielding.” Neela looked at her boss with a mixture of respect and worry.

“But…”

“No buts, Neela. Suppose that we
had
managed to succeed. And I was willing to expend the bulk of my fortune using the connections built up over a lifetime to protect and revive this man against the most powerful corporation in human history—against, I might add, a corporation that wants this man for numerous compelling reasons, and would be willing and economically justified to go to incredible lengths to insure their investment in him. Now, my dear girl, what do you think GCI would do to anyone standing in their way?”

“Oh please, Mosh, you don’t really mean to say that they’d…”

“Neela, don’t be dramatic,” he continued. “But they would make our lives miserable, if only as a warning to others. How would you like to spend the next hundred years performing emergency suspensions on the frozen moons of Jupiter?”

“But what could they do to you?” Neela asked. “You’re rich and have already made majority. You’re untouchable, aren’t you?”

Mosh looked at her, his sad smile the precursor to an answer she suspected but had never really wanted to hear.

“Neela,” he said, “most people assume that when you get majority all your worries go away—in most cases that’s correct. As long as you don’t try to off yourself you can pretty much do what you want with your life. But let’s assume that GCI decides to make an example of me. I might start getting audited medically on a monthly or even weekly basis. There may be court challenges as to my fitness to maintain control of my own portfolio.”

“On what basis?”

“Well, the willingness to spend ten million credits on someone I have never met may be justification for trial alone.”

Neela sighed. “That wouldn’t stand, Mosh.”

“Neela, it doesn’t have to stand. But it would be expensive and time consuming. Or they could just have people sue me, not for money but for stock. I would just need to lose three or four cases, and there goes my majority.”

“Damsah’s ghost,” whispered Neela.

“You’re beginning to understand.”

Mosh took her hand and leaned closer. “Neela, sometimes there are things in life worth sacrificing everything for. For every individual it’s something different. I’m not sure what I would risk everything for. But even if it were Tim Damsah himself in there I doubt I’d do it. And I’m positive I won’t for a three-hundred-year-old frozen body of someone I have never met and probably never heard of.”

Neela sat for a moment while she absorbed all that Mosh had told her.

“OK, Mosh,” she asked, “why did we go through all of that if you realized it wasn’t going to get us anywhere?”

“Why,” he smiled, “to cover our collective asses, of course… and you can say ‘thank you.’ ”

“OK, now you’ve lost me.”

Mosh took out his DijAssist and pushed a button. He showed her the screen. The entire encounter in the bay had been vidacorded for posterity.

“But why?” she asked.

“Insurance, my dear.” Mosh leaned forward and lowered his voice, indicating that she come closer. “When our poor bastard finally does wake up and finds his valuable shares already owned by GCI, what do you think he’s gonna do first? Say ‘thanks for screwing me’? Not bloody likely. He’s going to go to court and try and win back as much of himself as he can. And who, my dear, do you think’s going to get nailed against the wall in all his legitimate fury?”

“Hektor and his cohorts. Who else?” she answered.

“
We else,
Neela. Think about it. He goes after GCI, and he’ll be tied up in court for years. He goes after us, and we’ll be forced to settle a lot sooner than that. But let’s just take your scenario. Let’s suppose he hires a bad litigator and is stupid enough to go after GCI. Who do you think they’ll make the scapegoat for his righteous indignation?”

And there it was. Neela realized she’d been played. That the entire confrontation with Hektor was the first move in a high-stakes game of corporate survival.

“You could have told me, Mosh. I would have been a good girl, you know.”

“Which,” Mosh intoned, “is exactly why I didn’t. There’s not a poly-psyche in the world that will ever question your sincerity on this vidacord. As far as the world, and more importantly, the courts, will see, we did our absolute utmost to ‘free’ our little frozen friend from the clutches of ‘corporate’ greed.”

Neela sat back. “I’ll be damned.”

_______

Mosh was just getting ready to leave his office. He looked around and was satisfied with how the day had turned out. His encounter with Hektor had provided some excitement, reminded him of why he got out of the upper echelons in the first place, and reaffirmed that he could still handle the sharks if need be. Not bad for a day’s work. He backed up all the relevant data into his secure file and separated it from the main computer storage. Switching his phone to emergency calls only by shaking his left hand in the air, he left his small but functional office.

Just outside the door he was ambushed by his secretary.

“I’m sorry to bring this up, but they wanted me to make sure you read it,” she said. She stood directly in his path, arms folded—devilish smirk on her face.

“Which ‘they,’ Eleanor?” he asked, resigned.

“The accounting department
they,
O great and powerful director, sir,” she answered.

“Oh that,” he laughed. “I saw it and ignored it, as any sane man would do with yet another memo from Accounting. It can wait until tomorrow. Coming?” he asked, motioning toward the door.

“In a minute.” She stepped toward him and put her arms around his neck, then gently nuzzled his ear. Speaking softly she cooed, “It seemed pretty urgent, and I did promise them you would look into it before you left today.”

“I never should have married you,” Mosh said with a smile, knowing he’d lost this battle. He turned around and headed back into his office. Without even sitting down he hovered over the holodisplay and called up the memo that had assumed the extraordinary power to influence his marital bliss in an amazingly short amount of time.

He read the first line.

Interesting
. He reached for his chair, and without taking his eyes off the display, pulled it beneath him and sat down.

He spent the next fifteen minutes calling up and sending out data. When he’d confirmed the essentials of the memo and all it entailed, he leaned back into his chair and allowed himself a brief respite. He had a funny feeling it was going to be his last for some time.

He called out to his wife through the still open doorway. “Honey, I don’t think I’ll be able to make dinner after all. And get me Dr. Wang.”

Hektor was busy indulging his one true vice. The smell of an incredibly rare and expensive cigar was filling the small, impersonal office he’d been using for the day he was at the Boulder facility. The thought that the cigar smoke would linger and annoy the prissy, health-conscious bureaucrats filled him with joy. After all, the prejudice against smoking had no basis in modern health care, and yet this petty meme was still making its presence felt centuries after the need for it had disappeared. But this was a time to celebrate, and if the celebration bothered the hospital staff, so be it.

He’d just finished talking with the deputy director in charge of Special Operations, DepDir for short, and had given his report. The DepDir was very pleased and told Hektor that the board would be informed of his outstanding work. He’d even hinted that The Chairman himself had taken an interest in the project. This meant that there was a chance, small but there nonetheless, that The Chairman would hear Hektor’s name. Something he could only have hoped for in the course of ten more years of steady progress. If that didn’t call for an expensive cigar, then nothing in his immediate future would. And he wasn’t about to wait for the more traditional reason to light one up.
Hell, you can always have kids,
he thought.

Hektor’s thumb started to vibrate.

“What is it?” he asked, still smiling, cigar dangling from the corner of his mouth. His iris scan let him know that it was his intern. Good self-starter. Efficient problem solver.

“Uh, sir, we have a problem.”

“Handle it, Raga.”

“I tried, sir, but the shippers aren’t willing to move the package without your assurance.”

“What are you talking about, Rag? This is a company service, and they’re company employees. Come to think of it, they’re even getting bonuses.” He paused for a moment. “Or at least they were.”