by Dean Koontz
Helene’s face puckered with concern. She stepped away from the sidelight.
As Bucky heard Helene opening the first of two deadbolts, he said to Janet, “Do something spectacular to her.”
“I hate her so much,” Janet replied.
“I hate her, too,” Bucky said. “I hate him. I hate them all. Do something really amazing to her.”
Helene disengaged the second deadbolt, opened the door, and stepped back to admit them. She was an attractive blonde with a pleasing dimple in her right cheek, though you couldn’t see the dimple now because she wasn’t smiling.
“Janet, Bucky, you look devastated. Oh, God, I’m afraid to ask, what’s happened?”
“Something terrible has happened,” Janet said. “Where’s Yancy?”
“He’s out on the back porch. We’re having a night-cap, listening to some Etta James. What’s happened, sweetie, what’s wrong?”
Closing the front door behind him, Bucky said, “A terrible thing has happened.”
“Oh, no,” Helene said, sounding distraught. “We love you guys. You look stricken. You’re drenched, you’re dripping all over the parquet. What happened?”
“An unspecified terrible thing has happened,” Bucky said.
“You ready with the camera?” Janet asked.
“Ready,” Bucky replied.
“Camera?” Helene asked.
“We want this for our album,” Janet said, and did something more spectacular to Helene than anything Bucky could have imagined.
In fact, it was so spectacular that he stood dumb-founded, the camera forgotten, and missed getting a shot of the best of it.
Janet was a runaway locomotive of rage, a log-cutting buzz saw of hatred, a jackhammer of envy-driven cruelty. Fortunately, she did not kill Helene instantly, and some of the subsequent things she did to the woman, while spectacular in themselves, were sufficiently less shocking that Bucky was able to get some cool pictures.
When she finished, Janet said, “I think I’ve dropped a few more lines of code from my program.”
“It sure looked that way,” Bucky said. “You know how I said I thought I’d enjoy watching? Well, I really did.”
“You want Yancy for yourself?” Janet asked.
“No. I’m not that far along yet. But you better let me get him inside from the porch. If he’s out there and he sees you like this, he’ll be through the porch door and gone.”
Janet was still drenched but now not only with rain.
Comfortable rattan furniture with yellow cushions and rattan tables with glass tops furnished the spacious screened porch. The lights were lower than the music.
In a white linen shirt, tan slacks, and sandals, Yancy Bennet sat at a table on which were two glasses of what was most likely Cabernet as well as a cut-glass decanter in which more wine breathed and mellowed.
When he saw Bucky Guitreau, Yancy lowered the volume on Etta James. “Hey, neighbor, isn’t this past your bedtime?”
“A terrible thing has happened,” Bucky said as he approached Yancy. “A terrible, terrible thing.”
Pushing his chair away from the table, getting to his feet, Yancy Bennet said, “What? What happened?”
“I can’t even talk about it,” Bucky said. “I don’t know how to talk about it.”
Putting a hand on Bucky’s shoulder, Yancy said, “Hey, pal, whatever it is, we’re here for you.”
“Yes. I know. You’re here for us. I’d rather Janet told you about it. I just can’t be specific. She can be specific. She’s inside. With Helene.”
Yancy tried to usher Bucky ahead of him, but Bucky let him lead the way. “Give me some prep, Bucky.”
“I can’t. I just can’t. It’s too terrible. It’s a spectacular kind of terrible.”
“Whatever it is, I hope Janet’s holding up better than you.”
“She is,” Bucky said. “She’s holding up really well.”
Entering the kitchen behind Yancy, Bucky closed the door to the porch.
“Where are they?” Yancy asked.
“In the living room.”
As Yancy started toward the darkened hallway leading to the front of the house, Janet stepped into the lighted kitchen.
She was the crimson bride of Death.
Shocked, Yancy halted. “Oh, God, what happened to you?”
“Nothing happened to me,” Janet said. “I happened to Helene.”
An instant later, she happened to Yancy. He was a big man, and she was a woman of average size. But he was Old Race, and she was New, and the outcome was as inevitable as the result of a contest between a wood-chipper and a woodchuck.
Most amazing of all: Janet did not once repeat herself. Her vicious hatred of the Old Race was expressed in unique cruelties.
In Bucky’s hands, the camera flashed and flashed.
CHAPTER 5
WITHOUT THE LASH OF WIND, rain did not whip the streets but fell in a heavy dispiriting drizzle, painting blacktop blacker, oiling the pavement.
Homicide detective Carson O’Connor and her partner, Michael Maddison, had abandoned their unmarked sedan because it would be easily spotted by other members of the police department. They no longer trusted their fellow officers.
Victor Helios had replaced numerous officials in city government with replicants. Perhaps only ten percent of the police were Victor’s creations, but then again … maybe ninety percent. Prudence required Carson to assume the worst.
She was driving a car that she had borrowed from her friend Vicky Chou. The five-year-old Honda seemed reliable, but it was a lot less powerful than the Batmobile.
Every time Carson turned a corner sharp and fast, the sedan groaned, creaked, shuddered. On the flat streets, when she tramped on the accelerator, the car responded but as grudgingly as a dray horse that had spent its working life pulling a wagon at an easy pace.
“How can Vicky drive this crate?” Carson fumed. “It’s arthritic, it’s sclerotic, it’s a dead car rolling. Doesn’t she ever give it an oil change, is the thing lubed with sloth fat, what the hell?”
“All we’re doing is waiting for a phone call from Deucalion,” Michael said. “Just cruise nice and easy around the neighborhood. He said stay in Uptown, near the Hands of Mercy. You don’t have to be anywhere yesterday.”
“Speed soothes my nerves,” she said.
Vicky Chou was the caregiver to Arnie, Carson’s autistic younger brother. She and her sister, Liane, had fled to Shreveport, to stay with their Aunt Leelee in case, as seemed to be happening, Victor’s race of laboratory-conceived post-humans went berserk and destroyed the city.
“I was born for velocity,” Carson said. “What doesn’t quicken dies. That’s an indisputable truth of life.”
Currently, Arnie’s caregivers were the Buddhist monks with whom Deucalion had lived for an extended period. Somehow, only hours ago, Deucalion opened a door between New Orleans and Tibet, and he left Arnie in a monastery in the Himalayas, where the boy would be out of harm’s way.
“The race doesn’t always go to the swift,” Michael reminded her.
“Don’t give me any of that hare-and-tortoise crap. Turtles end up crushed by eighteen-wheelers on the interstate.”
“So do a lot of bunnies, even as quick as they are.”
Squeezing enough speed out of the Honda to make the rain snap against the windshield, Carson said, “Don’t call me a bunny.”
“I didn’t call you a bunny,” he assured her.
“I’m no damn bunny. I’m cheetah-fast. How does Deucalion just turn away from me, vanish with Arnie, and step into a monastery in Tibet?”
“Like he said, it’s a quantum-mechanics thing.”
“Yeah, that’s totally clear. Poor Arnie, the sweet kid, he must think he’s been abandoned.”
“We’ve been through this. Arnie is fine. Trust Deucalion. Watch your speed.”
“This isn’t speed. This is pathetic. What is this car, some kind of idiot green vehicle, it runs on corn syrup?”<
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“I can’t imagine what it’ll be like,” Michael said.
“What?”
“Being married to you.”
“Don’t start. Keep your game on. We’ve got to live through this first. We can’t live through this if we’re playing grab-ass.”
“I’m not going to grab your ass.”
“Don’t even talk about grabbing or not grabbing my ass. We’re in a war, we’re up against man-made monsters with two hearts in their chests, we have to stay focused.”
Because the cross street was deserted, Carson decided not to stop for a traffic light, but of course Victor Helios Frankenstein’s freak show wasn’t the only mortal danger in New Orleans. A pie-eyed prettyboy and his slack-jawed girlfriend, in a black Mercedes without headlights, barreled out of the night as if racing through a quantum doorway from Las Vegas.
Carson stood on the brake pedal. The Mercedes shot across the bow of the Honda close enough for her headlights to reveal the Botox injection marks in the prettyboy’s face. The Honda hydroplaned on the slick pavement and then spun 180 degrees, the Mercedes raced away toward some other rendezvous with Death, and Carson cruised back the way they had come, impatient for Deucalion’s phone call.
“Only three days ago, everything was so great,” she said. “We were just two homicide dicks, taking down bad guys, nothing worse to worry about than ax murderers and gang shootings, stuffing our faces with shrimp-and-ham jambalaya at Wondermous Eats when the bullets weren’t flying, just a couple of I’ve-got-your-back cops who never even thought about making moon eyes at each other—”
“Well, I was thinking about it,” Michael said, and she refused to glance at him because he would be adorable.
“—and suddenly we’re being hunted by a legion of inhuman, superhuman, posthuman, pass-for-human, hard-to-kill meat machines cooked up by the for-real Victor Frankenstein, and they’re all in a go-nuts mode, it’s Armageddon on the Bayou, and on top of all that, you suddenly want to have my babies.”
He said, “We’ll negotiate who has the babies. Anyway, bad as things are right now, it wasn’t all jambalaya and roses before we discovered Transylvania had come to Louisiana. Don’t forget the psycho dentist who made himself a set of pointy steel dentures and bit three little girls to death. He was totally human.”
“I’m not going to defend humanity. Real people can be as inhuman as anything Helios stitches together in his lab. Why hasn’t Deucalion called? Something must have gone wrong.”
“What could go wrong,” Michael asked, “on a warm, languid night in the Big Easy?”
CHAPTER 6
A STAIRWELL DESCENDED from the main lab all the way to the basement. Lester led Deucalion to the networking room, where three walls were lined with racks of electronic equipment.
Against the back wall were handsome mahogany cabinets topped with a copper-flecked black-granite counter. Even in mechanical rooms, Victor had specified high-quality materials. His financial resources seemed bottomless.
“That’s Annunciata,” said Lester, “in the middle box.”
Lined up on the black granite were not boxes but instead five thick glass cylinders on stainless-steel cradles. The ends of the cylinders were capped with stainless steel, as well.
In those transparent containers, floating in golden fluid, were five brains. Wires and clear plastic tubes full of darker fluid rose from holes in the granite countertop, penetrated the steel caps in the ends of the cylinders, and were married to the brains in ways that Deucalion could not quite discern through the thick glass and the nutrient baths.
“What are these four others?” Deucalion asked.
“You’re talking to Lester,” said his companion, “and there’s more Lester doesn’t know than what he does.”
Suspended from the ceiling above the counter, a video screen brightened with Annunciata’s beautiful virtual face.
She said, “Mr. Helios believes that one day, one day, one day, one day … Excuse me. A moment. I am so sorry. All right. One day, biological machines will replace complex factory robots on production lines. Mr. Helios Helios believes also that computers will become true cybernetic organisms, electronics integrated with specially designed organic Alpha brains. Robotic and electronic systems are expensive. Flesh is cheap. Cheap. Flesh is cheap. I am honored to be the first cybernetic secretary. I am honored, honored, honored, but afraid.”
“Of what are you afraid?” Deucalion asked.
“I’m alive. I’m alive but cannot walk. I’m alive but have no hands. I’m alive but cannot smell or taste. I’m alive but I have no … have no … have no …”
Deucalion placed one immense hand on the glass that housed Annunciata. The cylinder was warm. “Tell me,” he encouraged. “You have no what?”
“I’m alive but I have no life. I’m alive but also dead. I’m dead and alive.”
A stifled sound from Lester drew Deucalion’s attention. Anguish wrenched the janitor’s face. “Dead and alive,” he whispered. “Dead and alive.”
Only hours earlier, from a conversation with one of the New Race, Pastor Kenny Laffite, Deucalion learned these latest creations of Victor’s were engineered to be incapable of feeling empathy either for the Old Race they were to replace or for their laboratory-born brothers and sisters. Love and friendship were forbidden because the least degree of affection would make the New Race less efficient in its mission.
They were a community; however, the members of this community were committed not to the welfare of their kind but to fulfilling the vision of their maker.
Lester’s tears were not for Annunciata but for himself. The words dead and alive resonated with him.
Annunciata said, “I have im-im-imagination. I am so easily able to envision what I w-w-w-want, but I cannot have hands to touch or legs to leave here.”
“We never leave,” Lester whispered. “Never. Where is there to go? And why?”
“I am afraid,” Annunciata said, “afraid, I am afraid of living without a life, the tedium and solitude, the solitude, intolerable loneliness. I am nothing out of nothing, destined for nothing. ‘Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee.’ Nothing now, nothing forever. ‘Waste and void, waste and void, and darkness on the face of the deep.’ But now … I must organize the appointment schedule for Mr. Helios. And Werner is trapped in Isolation Room Number Two.”
“Annunciata,” Deucalion said, “are there archives you can tap to show me engineering drawings for the cylinder that contains you?”
Her face faded from the screen, and a diagram of the cylinder appeared, with all the tubes and wires labeled. One of them infused her cerebral tissues with oxygen.
“May I see you again, Annunciata?”
Her lovely face appeared on the screen once more.
Deucalion said, “I know that you are unable to do for yourself what I am now going to do for you. And I know that you are unable to ask me for this deliverance.”
“I am honored, honored, honored to serve Mr. Helios. I have left one thing undone.”
“No. There is nothing more for you to do, Annunciata. Nothing but accept … freedom.”
Annunciata closed her eyes. “All right. It is done.”
“Now I want you to use the imagination you mentioned. Imagine the thing you would want above all others, more than legs and hands and taste and touch.”
The virtual face opened its mouth but did not speak.
“Imagine,” Deucalion said, “that you are known as surely as every sparrow is known, that you are loved as surely as every sparrow is loved. Imagine that you are more than nothing. Evil made you, but you are no more evil than a child unborn. If you want, if you seek, if you hope, who is to say that your hope might not be answered?”
As if enchanted, Lester whispered, “Imagine….”
After a hesitation, Deucalion pulled the oxygen-infusion line from the cylinder. There could be no pain for her in this, only a gradual loss of consciousness, a sliding into sleep, and from sleep to
death.
Her beatific face began to fade from the screen.
CHAPTER 7
IN THE MONITORING HUB that served the containment chambers, Ripley studied the control console. He pressed a button to activate the camera in the transition module between the hub and Isolation Room Number Two.
The real-time video feed on one of the six screens changed, revealing the thing that had been Werner. The so-called singularity crouched between the massive steel vault hatches, facing the outer barrier, like a trap-door spider waiting for unsuspecting prey to cross the concealed entrance to its lair.
As if the creature knew that the camera had been activated, it turned to gaze up at the lens. The grossly distorted face was part human, even recognizably that of Mercy’s security chief, though the double-wide mouth and the insectile mandibles, ceaselessly working, were not what the Beekeeper had intended when he made Werner. Its right eye still looked like one of Werner’s, but its luminous-green left eye had an elliptical pupil, like the eye of a panther.
The desktop computer screen, thus far dark, now brightened, and Annunciata appeared. “I have become aware that Werner, that Werner, that Werner is trapped in Isolation Room Number Two.” She closed her eyes. “All right. It is done.”
Within the stainless-steel vault door, servomotors hummed. The bolt-retracting gears clicked, clicked, clicked.
In the transition module, the Werner thing looked away from the overhead camera, toward the exit.
Aghast, Ripley said, “Annunciata, what’re you doing? Don’t open the transition module.”
On the computer screen, Annunciata’s lips parted, but she didn’t speak. Her eyes remained closed.
The servomotors continued to hum and gears clicked. With a soft sucking sound, twenty-four massive lock bolts began to withdraw from the architrave around the vault door.
“Don’t open the transition module,” Ripley repeated.