by Dean Koontz
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 tra
p-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.
Annunciata’s face faded from the computer screen.
Ripley scanned the control console. The touch switch for the outer door of the module glowed yellow, which meant the barrier was slowly opening.
He pressed the switch to reverse the process. The indicator light should have turned blue, which would have signified that the retracting bolts had changed direction, but it remained yellow.
The microphone in the transition module picked up an eager, keening sound from the Werner thing.
The range of emotions accessible to the New Race was limited. The Beekeeper revealed to each forming person in every creation tank that love, affection, humility, shame, and other of the supposedly nobler feelings were instead only different expressions of the same sentimentalism, arising from thousands of years of a wrongheaded belief in a god who did not exist. They were feelings that encouraged weakness, that led to energy wasted on hope, that distracted the mind from the focus required to remake the world. Tremendous things were achieved not by hope but by the application of the will, by action, by the unrelenting and ruthless use of power.
Ripley anxiously pressed the door switch again, but it remained yellow, and still the gears clicked and the steel bolts retracted.
“Annunciata?” he called. “Annunciata?”
The only emotions that mattered, said the Beekeeper, were those that clearly contributed to survival and to the fulfillment of his magnificent vision for a one-world state of perfected citizens who would dominate nature, perfect nature, colonize the moon and Mars, colonize the asteroid belt, and eventually own all the worlds that revolved around all the stars in the universe.
“Annunciata!”
Like all of the New Race, Ripley’s spectrum of emotions remained limited largely to pride in his absolute obedience to his maker’s authority, to fear in all its forms—as well as to envy, anger, and hate directed solely at the Old Race. For hours every day, as he labored on his maker’s behalf, no emotion whatsoever interfered with his productivity any more than a high-speed train would be distracted from its journey by a nostalgic yearning for the good old days of steam locomotives.
“Annunciata!”
Of the emotions he was allowed, Ripley proved best at envy and hate. Like many others, from the brainiest Alphas to the shallowest Epsilons, he lived for the day when the killing of the Old Race would begin in earnest. His most satisfying dreams were of violent rape, mutilation, and mass slaughter.
But he was no stranger to fear, which came over him sometimes without apparent cause, long hours of unfocused anxiety. He had been afraid when he witnessed Werner’s catastrophic cellular metamorphosis—not afraid for Werner, who was nothing to him, not afraid of being attacked by the thing Werner was becoming, but afraid that his maker, the Beekeeper, might not be as omniscient and omnipotent as Ripley had once thought.
The implications of that possibility were terrifying.
With twenty-four simultaneous clunks, the lock bolts retracted entirely into the vault door. On the control console, the yellow switch turned green.
The formidable barrier swung open on its single, thick barrel hinge.
Having burst out of and torn off its garments long ago, the Werner thing stepped naked from the transition module, into the monitoring hub. It was not as handsome as Adam in Eden.
Apparently, it continuously changed, never achieving a stable new form, for it was in significant ways different from the beast that had regarded the overhead camera in the transition module only moments earlier. Standing on his hind legs, the new Werner might have been a man crossed with a jungle cat and also with a praying mantis, a hybrid so strange that it seemed utterly alien to this planet. The eyes were both human now—but they were much enlarged, protuberant, lid-less, and staring with a feverish intensity that seemed to reveal a mind in the triplex grip of fury, terror, and desperation.
Out of the wickedly serrated insectile mouth came a subhuman voice full of gargle and hiss, yet intelligible: “Something has happened to me.”
Ripley could think of nothing either informative or reassuring to say to Werner.
Perhaps the bulging, feverish eyes revealed only rage, and not also terror and desperation, for Werner said, “I am free, free, free. I am FREE!”
Ironically, considering that he was an Alpha with a high IQ, Ripley only now realized that the Werner thing stood between him and the only exit from the monitoring hub.
CHAPTER 8
BUCKY AND JANET GUITREAU STOOD side by side on the dark back lawn of the Bennet house, drinking their neighbors’ best Cabernet. Bucky held a bottle in each hand, and so did Janet. He alternated between a swig from the left bottle and a swig from the right.
Gradually the warm, heavy rain rinsed Janet clean of Yancy and Helene.
“You were so right,” Bucky said. “They really are pussies. Did it feel as good as doing the pizza guy?”
“Oh, it felt better. It felt like a hundred times better.”
“You were really amazing.”
“I thought you might join in,” Janet said.
“I’d rather have one of my own to do.”
“Are you ready to do one of your own?”
“I might be almost ready. Things are happening to me.”
“Things are still happening to me, too,” Janet said.
“Truly? Wow. I would’ve thought you’re already … liberated.”
“You remember I watched that TV guy twice?”
“Dr. Phil?”
“Yeah. That show made no sense to me.”
“You said it was gibberish.”
“But now I understand. I’m starting to find myself.”
“Find yourself—in what sense?” Bucky asked.
Janet tossed an empty wine bottle onto the lawn.
She said, “My purpose, my meaning, my place in the world.”
“That sounds good.”
“It is good. I’m quickly discovering my PCVs.”
“What’re they?”
“My personal core values. You can’t be of use to yourself or to the community until you live faithfully by your PCVs.”
Bucky pitched an empty wine bottle across the yard. He had drunk more than a bottle and a half of wine in ten minutes, but because of his superb metabolism, he would be lucky to get a mild buzz from it.
“One of the things happening to me,” he said, “is I’m losing the education in law I got from direct-to-brain data downloading.”
“You’re the district attorney,” she said.
“I know. But now I’m not sure what habeas corpus means.”
“Seems stupid.”
“It is stupid,” Janet agreed.
“If you just kill him, you don’t have to bother with the judge, the court, or the prison.”
“Exactly.” Janet finished the last of her wine and discarded the second bottle. She began to undress.
“What’re you doing?” Bucky asked.
“I need to be naked when I kill the next ones. It feels right.”
“Does it feel right just for the next house or is it maybe one of your personal core values?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it is a PCV. I’ll have to wait and see.”
Toward the back of the yard, a shadow moved through shadows. A pair of eyes gleamed, then faded into rain and gloom.
“What’s the matter?” Janet asked.
“I think someone’s back there in the yard, watching.”
“I don’t care. Let him watch. Modesty isn’t one of my PCVs.”
“You look good naked,” Bucky said.
“I feel good. It feels so natural.”
“That’s odd. Because we aren’t natural. We’re man-made.”
“For the first time, I don’t feel artificial,” Janet said.
“How does it feel not to feel artificial?”
“It feels good. You should get naked, too.”
“I’m not there yet,” Bucky demurred. “I still know what nolo contendere means, and amicus curiae. But, you know, as long as I keep my clothes on, I think I’m ready to kill one of them.”
CHAPTER 9
EARLIER IN THE NIGHT, arriving home to his elegant Garden District mansion, in a foul mood, Victor had savagely beaten Erika. He seemed to have had a bad day in the laboratory.
He found her eating a late dinner in the formal living room, which offended his sense of propriety. No one programmed with a deep understanding of tradition and etiquette—as Erika had been—should think that taking dinner in the living room, alone or not, would be acceptable.