Company

Dr. Zeus Incorporated has solved two problems its shareholders long thought insoluble: time travel, and death. The first only runs backward, and history stubbornly refuses to be rewritten. So the Company works the margins instead — reaching into the past to recruit doomed children, remaking them as immortal cyborgs, and setting them to labor down the long corridor of the centuries. They rescue the library of Alexandria a scroll at a time, bank extinct species and lost paintings, and salvage anything a future auction house might pay for. Then they wait out the slow years until the twenty-fourth century arrives to collect. Immortality, it turns out, is mostly a very long temp job with excellent benefits and no exit interview. The account runs to eight core novels, opening with In the Garden of Iden and closing with The Sons of Heaven, and it belongs almost entirely to one hand — Kage Baker, whose sister Kathleen Bartholomew carried the ledger forward after her death. The spine follows Mendoza, a botanist salvaged from the Inquisition, and Joseph, the smiling Facilitator who recruits her. Around it orbit story collections, a Martian venture (The Empress of Mars), and the gaslit escapades of Nell Gwynne's Gentlemen's Speculative Society. What gives it teeth is the Silence: no operative has ever sent word back from beyond July 2355, and the immortals, who cannot die, have begun to wonder what their employer intends once the future no longer needs them. Baker writes it wry, worldly, and quietly heartbroken — corporate satire threaded with real grief for everything time takes. Begin at the beginning, In the Garden of Iden; publication order is the arc.