Zombie Apocalypse! Endgame

Book 3: Zombie Apocalypse!

by Stephen Jones

Genres: Horror

Synopsis

Human Reanimation Virus (HRV) has spread around the globe and most of the major cities have fallen or been destroyed. As a new race of intelligent zombies rise to power, the remaining pockets of human resistance make a last, desperate stand in the ruins of a world on the brink of unimaginable change. With the final pieces of the epic puzzle falling into place, a centuries-old Endgame is revealed through a series of interconnected documents ? emails, articles, reports, diaries and eyewitness accounts ? as past and future hang in the balance. In this third and final volume of the original best-selling Zombie Apocalypse! trilogy, Thomas Moreby?s plan for world domination is finally revealed in all its mad glory, as the very fabric of time and space is ripped apart and history itself is about to be changed forever . . . Praise for previous Zombie Apocalypse! novels : There is a sense that events are building to a climax and each episode moves things forward. The Eloquent Page A phenomenal undertaking . . . Zombie Apocalypse! is a great read for any zombie fan. SF Site

Release date: November 20, 2014

Publisher: Robinson

Print pages: 564

Sample

By Ramsey Campbell

Who’s the occultist who shows up most often in the media? I imagine we’d all say Aleister Crowley. Most people who know would point out that Karswell in ‘Casting the Runes’ and Night of the Demon is based on him, and he’s the model for Oscar Clinton in ‘He Cometh and He Passeth By’, not to mention Mocata in The Devil Rides Out and Rowley Thorne, John Thunstone’s adversary in Manly Wellman’s series of tales. He’s even on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (though we’ll come back to that), and looms in Led Zeppelin’s background. Several of Kenneth Anger’s films are based on his magic. He’s the man who gets all the publicity, but he has nothing on Thomas Moreby, whom nearly all of us may never have heard of.

He was a pupil of Nicholas Hawksmoor (although he isn’t mentioned by name in Peter Ackroyd’s novel). He helped build several of Hawksmoor’s final churches and was responsible for a later one, All Hallows in Blackheath. There’s disagreement over whether he picked up his interest in the occult from Hawksmoor or taught it to his master, but it’s clear that they both incorporated magical elements in the churches they constructed. Moreby went on to design country houses, concealing occult secrets in the process. When Sir Francis Dashwood (founder of the Hellfire Club) employed him to redesign Medmenham Abbey, Moreby provided the motto above the front door, ‘Do what thou wilt’ (which Crowley made famous, but he confided to his associates that he had learned much from studying Moreby’s life). It was also Moreby’s idea to extend the caves (renamed the Hellfire Caves) beneath the abbey, where he had located a pre-Christian altar. This rediscovery prompted Dashwood to have Moreby restore the local St. Lawrence Church as an openly pre-Christian edifice. While Dashwood never identified the ancient cult he sought to revive, it was rumoured to be the Well of Seven, an occult society so sinister that he may even have used the Hellfire Club as a device to distract attention from it. Supposedly the famous St. Lawrence church tower – topped with a golden ball that contains six seats “from which all creation may be viewed” – signifies this association, and so do the six bells in the tower. This may explain an obscure pronouncement by John Wilkes, a leading member of the Hellfire Club: “Seven is the number of the resonance; the globe resounds with the sixfold peal of those who mount within” – apparently one of the few recorded examples of what’s called the Wisdom of the Well.

We’ll come back to the Well of Seven. Moreby is said to have lived until 1803, when he was over a hundred years old. He may have been killed in a riot or died in Bedlam. While his occult leanings weren’t known to many in his lifetime, they were rediscovered by various interested parties after his death. The Ghost Club began to investigate his work until one of the founders, E.W. Benson (father of E.F., R.H. and A.C. – a dynasty of supernatural authors – and later to become Archbishop of Canterbury) forbade all research into Moreby’s life and practices. This earned him notoriety among writers – Dickens and Conan Doyle were both members of the Ghost Club – and perhaps that’s one reason why M.R. James based Count Magnus on him.

James appears to have regretted this as well as referring to the Black Pilgrimage, an occult excursion Moreby had made to the accursed city of Chorazin. In May 1904 James wrote to his illustrator James McBryde “On further reflection I do not think I care to see Magnus illustrated at all – that is, the Count himself. I think it best to ensure by this means that even an accidental resemblance to the historical model T–– M–– is avoided. If my publishers were not so insistent on having a book I might well prefer to suppress the tale, for it has been giving me some horrid visions in the night lately.” Less than a month later McBryde died young, from complications after an appendix operation that should have been routine. He left two illustrations for ‘Count Magnus’ uncompleted, but his sister apparently told James that the artist had destroyed a third.



Lovecraft borrowed Moreby too. In January 1927 he wrote to Donald Wandrei “My return to my beloved Providence has inspired me to renewed endeavours. I am at work on a new short story, based in part upon material brought to my attention by my favourite adopted grandson, the ebullient & erudite Belknapius (author Frank Belknap Long. S.J.) In some shadowed bookstore in a New York alley where few human feet have trod, he found a mouldering tome which whispered of one Thomas Moreby, occult architect & seeker of dread secrets which history prefers to veil. It appears that he believed the ‘essential saltes’ of corpses could be used to reconstitute the dead, by some method I am now at pains to imagine. Alas, Belknap lacked the lucre for an immediate purchase, & when he returned some days later, the bookseller denied that the volume had ever been in the shop. From his quick perusal Belknap also brought away an impression that Moreby, already said to be over a century old, might have survived far longer. What a boon his like may be to my tale! Indeed, the tome (the name of which my forgetful grandson sadly cannot bring to mind) apparently suggested that the Shelleys were wont to dally near Moreby’s grave, which exerted a sufficient influence on Mary’s dreams to inspire Frankenstein. Might this obscure scribbler from Providence be similarly possessed to pen a masterwork?”

In fact, Lovecraft based Charles Dexter Ward’s evil ancestor Joseph Curwen on Moreby – at the time he was writing he thought The Case of Charles Dexter Ward would be a short story, much as Stephen King found The Mist outgrowing his original notion of it. Lovecraft also wrote in his Commonplace Book of notes for stories: “Moreby’s resurrection by employment of ‘essential saltes’. Hideous marriage of necromancer & wife he has summoned from grave. Unholy ceremony conducted by corpses. What offspring may this union produce?” This was presumably Lovecraft’s inspiration rather than actual material from the book Frank Belknap Long mentioned to him, and I used it in my early story ‘The Horror from the Bridge’.

The use of “essential saltes” appears to have been Moreby’s contribution to the Well of Seven, whose central aim was physical immortality. Some members of the cult may have been buried in Hob’s Lane in Deptford, an area that subsequently became known for inexplicable disturbances. Nigel Kneale is said to have based Quatermass and the Pit on these rumours, and in his studies of British witchcraft Gerald Gardner identified the horned apparition in the last episode of the television serial with Anarchon, Lord of Fleas, a demon apparently regarded by the Well of Seven as their occult patron. Gardner also claimed that William Blake’s monstrous painting The Ghost of a Flea (based on a vision Blake had during a séance) was both a version of Anarchon and a reference to the fleas the demon brings (fleas Blake described as “inhabited by the souls of such men as were by nature blood thirsty to excess”, but regarded by the cult as somehow conferring immortality). According to Gardner, the cult’s secret sign – four fingers of the left hand fully extended at the same time as three of the right, while both thumbs and the remaining finger are pressed against the palms (not as easy as it sounds: try it yourself) – is concealed in many paintings, including religious images. Sometimes it’s signified by the right hand of one figure and the left hand of its neighbour (in the Bayeux Tapestry, for instance) or by these hands in the two panels of a diptych, even occasionally the outer panels of a trip-tych (see works by Bosch, Rubens, Lippi, Brueghel the Elder and others). Gardner apparently believed some of these images were meant as warning messages to the well-informed viewer, but others may reveal that the painter was involved with the Well of Seven.

An engineer at EMI claims he overheard John Lennon proposing Moreby for inclusion in the collage on the Sgt. Pepper cover. An image of Crowley was used instead, whether since he would be more recognisable by the public or because other members of the band objected (as they did to Lennon’s other unused suggestions, Christ and Hitler) isn’t clear. Or could pressure have been brought to bear by the cult itself? That certainly seems to have been the case with the Val Lewton film The Seventh Victim.

This wasn’t the first film to include references to Moreby and the Well. A 1915 silent serial, The Seven Wizards, apparently began the trend. The film was written by Charles W. Goddard (best known for The Perils of Pauline and The Ghost Breakers) and made by Wharton Incorporated in Ithaca, New York. Like the Whartons’ other overtly occult serial The Mysteries of Myra (1916), which is said to have alluded to the Well under the name of the Black Order, the 1915 serial appears to be completely lost – in fact, some film histories suggest both films were deliberately destroyed. A review of The Seven Wizards in Variety questioned whether resurrection was a subject for entertainment. The reviewer also advised the makers to take more care with their intertitles; in some episodes the leader of the cult is called Moseby, in others Morley. Perhaps this was intended to suggest that neither was the real name.

White Zombie (1932) offers several details to the knowing audience. Murder Legendre (Bela Lugosi) is constantly attended by six zombies – in other words, a band of seven – and the six remove the heroine in her coffin from the vault, again adding up to seven undead. We’re told that voodoo and the revival of the dead were “old when Egypt was young”, and other lines of dialogue suggest that the practices are based on ancient magic. Beaumont, the plantation owner who turns to Legendre for help in winning the heroine, reacts with horror when the zombie master whispers her fate in his ear. Even before the Hays Code came into play, the film mutes Legendre’s original line (obviously based on Moreby’s notion of occult marriage) that the planter would be marrying the dead. The film also stops short of showing the sign of the Seven, instead concealing it within the gesture Legendre makes to control the zombies. However, several shots show Beaumont making it in the midst of his convulsions once Legendre has drugged him. The film’s director Victor Halperin also alluded to the Seven in Supernatural, his 1933 film about the resurrection of a serial killer, and particularly in Revolt of the Zombies (1936). However, he subsequently denied all interest in horror and expressed regret for making these films. It has been suggested that he’d been made to regret referring to the Well.

The most detailed Hollywood treatment of the Seven would have been The Seventh Victim. Val Lewton had already referred obliquely to them in I Walked with a Zombie, where the zombie who guards the path to magic is called Carrefour after Moreby’s zombie servant. Later Bedlam would recall Moreby by having Karloff play Sims, the apothecary general of the asylum where Moreby is rumoured to have been an inmate. Just as Cat People was originally to have been based on Algernon Blackwood’s ‘Ancient Sorceries’, The Seventh Victim would have dealt with a young woman’s search for her sister, who had fallen under the influence of the Well of Seven. The younger sister was to rescue her, only to discover that she is already a zombie, who is recaptured in the final reel by a private eye employed in the search, now himself undead. Very little of this remains in the film that was made, but The Seventh Victim is full of hints of the secret it had to keep.

Mary Gibson still tries to find her elder sister Jacqueline, who has joined a cult. In some prints, particularly of the European release, the stained-glass windows over the stairs at the school Mary attends display the sign of the Seven. The room Jacqueline has rented above an Italian restaurant proves to contain just a chair and above it a noose. The restaurant is called Dante’s, no doubt to remind us of the number of deadly sins and virtues in the poet’s epic, and the room is – yes – number seven. The legend above the entrance to a morgue Mary visits in her search is “He calleth all his children by their name”, a motto Moreby added to Francis Dashwood’s church during the restoration. (While it sounds scriptural, it isn’t to be found in the Bible, and may have a more occult significance.) Irving August, the private eye who helps Mary in her search, is murdered when he enters a locked room at La Sagesse, the cosmetic firm Jacqueline signed over to the cult. The name of the firm clearly refers to the Wisdom of the Well, and the door of the locked room is the seventh one we see at La Sagesse (although the firm may also recall Maison Desti, the cosmetics company owned by Preston Sturges’ mother, who practised magic with Crowley and manufactured the scarf that strangled her friend Isadora Duncan). After the murder Mary flees to the subway but seems to be trapped on the train; she keeps passing 14th Street (twice seven, of course). She consults Louis Judd, Jacqueline’s psychiatrist, who is one of the film’s clearest references to the revival of the dead practised by the Seven; he has already been killed in an earlier Lewton production, Cat People. Later Jacqueline refers to “coming back to life”, a line left over from her undead character in the original draft of the screenplay. The La Sagesse trademark is also the sigil of the cult in the film, a triangle inside a parallelogram – seven points, in other words. Mary finds herself a teaching job and leads a kindergarten class in singing ‘Oranges and Lemons’ – which, in the version printed in Songs Every Child Can Sing Well (1803), names several Moreby churches. As the cultists attempt to persuade Jacqueline to do away with herself for betraying them, one of them plays sevenths on a piano. The assassin who pursues Jacqueline through the streets is played by an actor chosen to resemble the murdered private eye – not quite a resurrection but suggestive of one. In the final scene Jacqueline’s dying neighbour goes out for a night on the town, and we hear the chair fall in Jacqueline’s room, recalling Judd’s enigmatic line in the original screenplay – “No resurrection without sacrifice” – that apparently refers to a tenet of the Wisdom of the Seven.

Two final points about The Seventh Victim – Lewton’s wittiest details. In the film the Seven are replaced by the Palladists, a Satanic cult so genteel that we never see a ritual or even a magical device. This is Lewton’s way of signifying that they’re not just a substitution but an attempt to tone down the reality to placate the actual cult. The Palladists did exist – or rather, they’re a matter of historical record, but in fact they were fabricated in the 1890s by the anticlerical French journalist Léo Taxil as a hoax at the expense of the Catholic church. Lewton presumably hoped some of his audience would recognise that the cult in the film was so thoroughly fictitious that it must disguise something else. Undoubtedly he meant informed viewers to notice the betraying detail in the quotation from John Donne that opens the film (“I run to death, and death meets me as fast, And all my pleasures are like yesterday.”) The quote is accurate, but it comes from Donne’s first holy sonnet. In his subtlest touch Lewton misattributes it on-screen to the seventh sonnet, which contains the formula “Arise, arise from death”.

Since then the cinema appears to have been wary of referring to the Seven – perhaps the pressure exerted on Lewton was enough to deter others, and the film industry may have included members of the cult – although Mike Raven is said to have concealed allusions in his horror films and later in his paintings, which were first exhibited in the crypt of a Hawksmoor church (St. George’s, Bloomsbury). The Seven have kept their secrets well enough that little else is known about them. Their name is supposed to refer to Beersheba, the Biblical name that has been translated as “well of the oath” besides “well of the seven”. Their oath is meant to be the Oath of the Abyss, which Jack Parsons – rocket scientist at Caltech and leading member of Crowley’s occult organisation – took when he made the Black Pilgrimage to Chorazin. A crater on the dark side of the moon is named after him.

So there we have it: a mass of strange glimpses that may fit together in ways we can’t quite see. Perhaps we never will. Since the Seven seem hardly to have been heard of since they leaned on Lewton, they may have faded into history. No harm in keeping our eyes open, though, and I’ll be happy to report sightings in a future issue. It will take more than an obscure occult society to silence Shock Xpress.





[Annotated letter from Olaf Stapledon to H.G. Wells. From the Olaf Stapledon Archives, University of Liverpool Special Collections and Archives]

SIMON'S FIELD,CALDY,WEST KIRBY,WIRRAL,HOYLAKE 1154

13th February 1946

My Dear H.G.,

I was motivated to write to you again, having read (and admired, but not much enjoyed!) your latest.1 Indeed I was moved to look again at a copy I kept of my very first correspondence with you -- perhaps you remember it, a gushing note I sent on publication of my own first romance2 -- about a chap not recording his debt to the air he breathes, and so on and so forth.

You know that I admire you, that you dominate the landscape of my mind, as your Time Traveller's Sphinx dominated the England of the year 802,701 A.D. And yet I do not follow you, H.G., not without question.

And I cannot follow you now, into the vale of gloom which you so eloquently explore in your latest.

Of course I agree with you that it is hard to be optimistic about the state of mankind, given the horrors which we have seen exposed as the Nazi tyranny has unravelled since August last, like a bandage drawn back from a suppurating wound -- and you may recall that with my service as an ambulance driver in the last lot I saw enough of that. The industrialisation of pain, the organisation of death! And all in pursuit of a theory of the perfectibility of blood and race . . .

(Incidentally, and oddly enough, you and I share a grisly connection with the camps of death, though you will not welcome knowing it. On the publication of my Last & First Men in '30 I was contacted by a fellow called Tomas Moerbitz, a German "chemist" as he called himself -- a prominent and wealthy industrialist as it turned out, and later a significant supplier to the Nazi machine -- a ghastly one-eyed fellow judging3 by recent photographs.

(Moerbitz claimed to have sought you out in London after your Time Machine, with suggestions on human evolution and perfectibility in stark disagreement with the content of your novel -- as well as arguments with your portrayal of time travel4 -- and claimed too that as a consequence of that meeting he had been the inspiration for the Moreau of your novel. If so it must have been a memorable but unpleasant encounter for you, H.G., which would rather satisfy the fellow I think. The name's the thing -Moerbitz, Moreau -- a plasticity of names, and "the plasticity of living forms", to quote your own words back at you, was his subject matter, his fascination.

(He also had the gall to praise my own Last & First for showing whole human species created and raised up by the appliance of eugenic science in the deep future. A prophet of the blood and the scalpel, he called me. Described my book as an inspirational vision! Well, in the war, as well as stocking the death camps with poison gas, it seems Moerbitz bloodied his own hands with practical experiments of that sort.

(And now, according to sources I shall not trouble you with naming, he has escaped the justice of the trials by attaching himself to the Peenemunde rocket group who have fled to the bosom of America. Ugh -- enough of him!)

No, H.G., in spite of it all, I cannot agree with you that even the horrors of the recent war presage the end of things -- that as the latest war recedes into the past, "extinction is coming to man". Who can say what our ultimate destiny is? But we shan't be extinguished in the near future at least. We need only watch our own ragged children, happily playing amid the rosebay willow herb that flourishes in the bomb sites of our scarred cities, to be assured of that. I myself am determined to throw my remaining energies into a quest for global peace, and trust that you, my model, my inspiration, will yet find it in your heart to forgive the rest of us for our faults, and rejoin me in hope.

Yours very truly as ever,



 

____________

 

1/ H.G. Wells, Mind at the End of its Tether, Heinemann, 1945

2/ Olaf Stapledon, Last and First Men, Methuen, 1930.

3/ H.G. Wells, The Time Machine, Heinemann, 1895.

4/ H.G. Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau, Heinemann, 1896.

[Extract from: A Biographical Guide to Nazis Who Escaped Justice by Edmund Underhill (Freedom Press, 1978)]

Tomas Moerbitz (d.o.b. unknown) was the principal shareholder in Todt Chemie-AG, a chemical company specialising in the manufacture of industrial gases. Founded in the late 19th century by another Tomas Moerbitz, in 1925 Todt joined with several other German chemical companies to form the conglomerate IG Farben.

At the time the largest chemical company in the world, IG Farben was involved in numerous war crimes in World War II. IG Farben was seized by the allies in 1945, and liquidated in 1952.

Among the surviving successor companies are BASF, Bayer and Hoechst. Todt did not survive, and indeed its contribution to IG Farben is poorly documented. Moerbitz, however, went on to found the U.S. corporation New World Pharmaceuticals Group, it is rumoured with funds smuggled out of IG Farben through Swiss bank accounts during the closing stages of the war. But despite the strenuous efforts of those who objected to the presence of such men as Wernher von Braun and Moerbitz in American public life, this was never proved.



A HARD NEWS EXCLUSIVEby Janet Ramsey,Head of Current Affairs

A DECADE AGO, almost no one had ever heard of New World Pharmaceuticals Group – but today this secretive organisation ranks alongside Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, Roche and GlaxoSmithKline as one of the top five drug research companies in the world.

And if they have their way, within the next few years they will be double the size of all those companies put together – thanks to a mysterious family dynasty which has run the company ever since its modest start-up almost five decades ago.

NWP was originally founded by wealthy German industrialist Tomas Moerbitz, who fled to America after World War II. However, despite being linked by a number of Death Camp survivors to the Holocaust, he is reputed to have escaped the Nuremberg Trials through his wealth and influence. After working on the fledgling U.S. space programme for several years with such fellow émigrés as Wernher von Braun, he went on to create the pharmaceuticals company in an attempt to develop cures for smallpox and typhus.

Since control of the company passed to Moerbitz’s son, T. J., a few years ago, this giant in medical research and development has grown into an $85 billion dollar (in excess of £56 billion) corporation, comfortably topping even Johnson & Johnson, which turns over $60 billion a year.

Last week’s shock announcement that New World Pharmaceuticals Group has toppled American giant Johnson & Johnson from the top of the table was followed by rumours that it is making a hostile take-over bid for Novartis Vaccines and Diagnostics – specifically to get its hands on Novartis’ innovative work using reverse genetics to manufacture vaccines for avian flu.

But in Britain, the Competition Commission – known as the Monopolies and Mergers Commission until last year – is already considering last week’s surprise offer for German company Chemie Grünenthal, the family firm responsible for releasing the deformed babies drug thalidomide into 46 countries and continuing to sell the so-called “wonder drug” for months after Australian doctor William McBride had linked thalidomide to the sudden rash of deaths and hideously deformed births in 1961.

The unspecified but “generous” offer was initially withdrawn when the commission put forward its concerns about NWP linking itself with the company which was responsible for 100,000 miscarriages and thousands of serious deformities to the babies who survived, but the offer was re-presented after a public statement from NWP accused its rivals of trying to derail a deal which would be excellent for employees and shareholders of both companies alike.

Speaking for the NWP board from their offices just outside Baltimore, Mr Bill Pogany said, “Ill-informed scuttlebutt has done untold damage to a well-respected and venerable firm which has contributed greatly to the world of medical research. Chemie Grünenthal has always been known as the home of innovation and excellence, and as such will be a welcome addition to the NWP family.”

And from the UK headquarters Dr M. T. Déesharné said, “Many companies have moments in their history that they would wish never happened, but every company, like every person, is the sum of its experiences, and there is no doubt that Grünenthal’s experiences have resulted in some exciting developments the medical world has been watching with anticipation.

“New World believes that with our backing and funds, the company will be better able to fulfil its potential, which will be of enormous benefit to this country and indeed the world. Our aim has always been to make life better.”

But our source has revealed that NWP has little interest in the painkilling drugs for which Grünenthal is now known; instead, the reclusive businessman who now heads the board is desperate to get his hands on the work of brilliant Nazi chemists Otto Ambros and Heinrich Mückter (see sidebar) – especially their experiments on controlling the deadly disease typhus.

But NWP CEO T. J. Moerbitz has denied there are any sinister reasons for the sudden expansion of the company. Through a press officer he agreed to speak to Hard News from the multi-national company’s British headquarters, a state-of-the-art laboratory believed to be somewhere in the West Country.

“The word will soonknow our name”

In his first public interview for several years, Mr Moerbitz told me, “Our motto – I believe you would call it a ‘Mission Statement’ – is ‘Your World in Our Hands’ and you must believe me when I tell you that is something we take very seriously indeed.

“Today the New World Pharmaceuticals Group comprises a number of researchers and businessmen who have severed our ties with pharmaceutical companies with whom we have enjoyed many years of fruitful relationships to come together to serve the common good.

“Thanks to the work of NWP I can assure you that Britain is now at the forefront of disease research. We have great plans for the future, and when our acquisitions of Grünenthal and Novartis have been satisfactorily concluded, I believe this country will quickly see the benefit. We already have some of the most brilliant men – and women – in the world working within the NWP family, and the whole world will soon come to know our name.”

But not everyone in the New World Pharmaceuticals Group family believes in Mr Moerbitz’s benevolent plan.

One researcher told us, “We have a whole department doing DNA sequencing on old bones and teeth dug from cemeteries and even plague pits, and another studying radical deviations in disease pandemics. It feels like we’re preparing for something major – but anyone who is heard asking the big questions seems to leave the company soon after.

“A mate at Novatis told me NWP is trying to get its hands on the Influenza Genome Sequencing Project, even though it’s a multi-company project – everyone knows how ambitious Mr Moerbitz is. I wouldn’t put it past him.”

But T. J. Moerbitz is an enigma even within his company. One chemist told us, “No one’s ever even seen this Mr Moerbitz – when I worked for my last company our CEO used to walk the floor regularly – I do believe he knew every employee by name, even though we had more than 2,000 people on the books.”

And another source close to the CEO’s office told us, “Here – well, there’s no doubt the labs are the most modern I’ve ever seen, and no expense is spared in R&D – we don’t have any limits on what we can spend on Mr Moerbitz’s pet projects – but no one really knows what they are: everyone knows their own job, and anyone caught discussing anything with a different department immediately gets a final written warning – it’s really scary, sometimes. I feel like I’m constantly being watched.

“And you should see our consent forms! I’ve never seen one like that – once you’ve signed, that’s it: you’re ours for life, no matter what! And even if your body gets reanimated – what’s that about? If people really understood what NWP were going to do with them they’d run a million miles rather than sign.”

Protecting Patents? Or Planning for Disaster?

Mr Moerbitz was quick to deny anything underhand was going on. “Consent forms must look scary to everyone the first time they read one,” he said. “I defy anyone to find anything illegal in what we are doi