Free The Sons of Heaven by Kage Baker

ginger ale. “We call it the Silence. Have you asked the Company about it, straight out?”
    “I’ve made certain inquiries,” said Hearst. “I have yet to receive a plain answer from anyone.”
    “No surprise there. The official answer is that 2355 is when Dr. Zeus finallygoes public, when immortals will finally be able to live openly.” Joseph swirled ice in his glass and looked sidelong at Hearst. “They say they don’t give us any movies or whatever from after that time because we’ll be able to discover them for ourselves. I don’t think anybody has ever believed that.”
    “So you’re saying that you don’t know, either.” Hearst looked down at his little dog. Joseph shook his head.
    “There’re theories. Global cataclysm in that year, for example. Or that there’s an intracorporate war, and the winners maintain transmission silence after 2355 so nobody in the past knows who wins or how. You want to know what I think?”
    “Yes, I do.”
    “I think that’s the year when the Company doublecrosses its immortals. We’ve worked for them from the beginning of time—immortals like me, anyway; you’re a special case—with the promise that one day we’d finally get to the wonderful Future and share the great stuff we’ve spent all our lives obtaining for Dr. Zeus. I think it’s a crock. I think they’ll come up with some way to finally kill us, or disable us, and cancel out their debt. You want to know why I think that, Mr. Hearst?”
    “Please tell me,” said Hearst.
    Joseph stood up and looked Hearst in the eye. “Because they’re doing it already. That’s why I’m on the run, pal, that’s why you got that request to let the Company know immediately if you ever saw me again. You want to know the truth about the Bureau of Punitive Medicine? The Company ran it themselves! Marco was just the guy they had standing guard there. It was a research facility they had, to find a way to reverse the immortality process.”
    Hearst nodded. “I was afraid it was something like that.”
    “And it was just the tip of the iceberg,” Joseph said, beginning to pace. “The Bureau was only one of the places the Company locks away operatives it doesn’t want anymore. There are at least seven others, not as bad as the Bureau but holding more people. I’ve seen ‘em, Mr. Hearst. And there’s worse.
    “You remember Lewis? The guy who worked with me in 1933?”
    “The fellow Garbo was so taken with, yes.” Hearst smiled at the memory, but Joseph’s eyes were like flint.
    “You should have seen what the Company did to
him,”
he said. “They handed him over to—to an outside agency, let’s say. So he could be experimented on, like a lab rat. Nice, huh? I know, because I was there. I nearly got caught, too. If you followed their orders right now and called the Company, they’d do something worse to me.”
    “I’m not given orders,” said Hearst, with a momentary flash of human emotion in his eyes.
    “You don’t think so?” said Joseph. “You’ve done everything the Company wanted you to do for them. They’ve given you stuff in return—hell, they made you immortal, you own Company stock—but you aren’t calling the shots, friend.”
    Hearst sat silent a moment. At last he reached down and snapped his fingers for Helen. She came at once. He stroked her, scratched between her ears. “I assume,” he said, “that you’re not taking this lying down? You immortals, I mean.” He smiled for a second.
“We
immortals.”
    “You got it,” Joseph said. “We’re immortal, we’re indestructible, and we can outthink them. The only advantage they’ve got is, they know everything that’s going to happen up to 2355 and we don’t. Kind of levels the playing field, huh? But it also gives us hope, Mr. Hearst. See—what if
we’re
what happens after 2355?”
    “A war in Heaven?” said Hearst. “The Titans rising in rebellion against Zeus? It seems a chancy business, don’t you think?”
    Joseph