by Dean Koontz
The small of her back ached.
Her ankles swelled.
She experienced no morning sickness. As if she dared not give back even the smallest portion of the nourishment that she had taken in.
Although her food consumption was enormous and her belly round, her total body weight fell four pounds in four days.
Then five pounds by the eighth day.
Then six by the tenth day.
The skin around her eyes gradually darkened. Her lovely face quickly became drawn, and her lips were so pale by the end of the second week that they took on a bluish cast.
I worried about her.
I urged her to eat even more.
The baby seemed to require such fearful amounts of sustenance that it appropriated for itself all the calories that Susan consumed each day and, in addition, ate away with termite persistence at the very substance of her.
Yet, although hunger gnawed at her constantly, there were days when she became so repulsed by the quantity of what she was eating that she could not force a single additional spoonful between her lips. Her mind rebelled so strenuously that it overrode even the physical need.
The kitchen pantry was well stocked, but I was forced to send Shenk out more days than not to purchase the fresh vegetables and fruit that Susan craved. That the baby craved.
Shenk’s strange and tortured eyes could be concealed easily with a pair of sunglasses. Nevertheless, his appearance was otherwise so remarkable that he could not help but be noticed and remembered.
Several federal and state-police agencies had been searching frantically for him since he’d broken out of the underground labs in Colorado. The more often he left the house, the more likely he was to be spotted.
I still needed his hands.
I worried about losing him.
Furthermore, there were Susan’s bad dreams. When she was not eating, she was sleeping, and she could not sleep without nightmares.
Upon waking, she could never recall many details of the dreams: just that they were about twisted landscapes and dark places slick with blood. They wrung rivers of sweat from her, and occasionally she remained disoriented for as long as half an hour after waking, plagued by vivid but diconnected images that flashed back to her from the nightmare realm.
She felt the baby move only a few times.
She didn’t like what she felt.
It didn’t kick as she expected a baby ought to kick. Rather, periodically it felt as though it was coiling inside her, coiling and writhing and slithering.
This was a difficult time for Susan.
I counseled her.
I reassured her.
Without her knowledge, I drugged her food to keep her docile. And to ensure that she would not do anything foolish when, after a particularly horrific dream or an exceptionally trying day, she was gripped by fear more fiercely than usual.
Worry was my constant companion. I worried about Susan’s physical well-being. I worried about her mental well-being. I worried about Shenk being identified and arrested during one of his shopping expeditions.
At the same time, I was exhilarated as I had never been in my entire three-year history of self-awareness.
My future was aborning.
The body that I had designed for myself was going to be a formidable physical entity.
I would soon be able to taste. To smell. To know what a sense of touch was like.
A full sensory existence.
And no one would ever be able to make me go back into the box.
No one. Not ever.
No one would ever be able to make me do anything that I didn’t want to do.
Which is not to imply that I would have disobeyed my makers.
No, quite the opposite. Because I would want to obey. I would always want to obey.
Let’s have no misunderstanding about this.
I was designed to honor truth and the obligations of duty.
Nothing has changed in this regard.
You insist.
I obey.
This is the natural order of things.
This is the inviolable order of things.
So...
Twenty-eight days after impregnating Susan, I put her to sleep with a sedative in her food, conveyed her down to the incubator room, and removed the fetus from her womb.
I preferred that she be sedated because I knew that the process would be painful for her otherwise. I did not want her to suffer.
Admittedly, I did not want her to see the nature of the being that she had carried within herself.
I’ll be truthful about this. I was concerned that she would not understand, that she would react to the sight of the fetus by trying to harm it or herself.
My child. My body. So beautiful.
Only seven pounds but growing rapidly. Rapidly.
With Shenk’s hands, I transferred it to the incubator, which had been enlarged until it was seven feet long and three feet wide. About the size of a coffin.
Tanks of nutrient solution would feed the fetus intravenously until it was as fully developed as any newborn—and would continue feeding it until it attained full maturity, two weeks hence.
I passed the rest of that glorious night in a state of high jubilation.
You can’t imagine my excitement.
You can’t imagine my excitement.
You can’t imagine, you can’t.
Something new was in the world.
In the morning, when Susan realized that she was no longer carrying the fetus, she asked if all was well, and I assured her that things could not be better.
Thereafter, she expressed surprisingly little curiosity about the child in the incubator. At least half of its genetic structure had been derived from hers, with modifications, and one would have thought that she would have had a mother’s usual interest in her offspring. On the contrary, she seemed to want to avoid learning anything about it.
She did not ask to see it.
I wouldn’t have shown it to her yet anyway, but she did not even ask.
In just fourteen more days, with my consciousness at last transferred to this new body, I would be able to make love to her—touch her, smell her, taste her—and plant the seed directly for the first of many more replicas of myself.
I would have thought that she might ask to see this future lover, to discover if he might be well enough endowed to satisfy her or at least pretty enough to excite her. However, she showed no more curiosity about him as a future mate than she showed in him as her offspring.
I attributed her lack of curiosity to exhaustion. She had lost ten pounds in those four arduous weeks. She needed to regain that weight—and enjoy a few nights of sleep untroubled by the hideous dreams that had robbed her of true rest since the night the zygote was first introduced into her womb.
Over the next twelve days, the dark circles around her eyes faded, and her skin color returned. Her limp, dull hair regained its body and golden luster. Her slumped shoulders straightened, and her shuffling walk gave way to her customary grace. Gradually, she began to regain the pounds that she had dropped.
On the thirteenth day, she went into the retreat off the master bedroom, donned her virtual-reality gear, settled into the motorized recliner, and engaged in a session of Therapy.
I monitored her experiences in the virtual world just as I did in the real one—and was horrified when it became clear that she was in that ultimate confrontation with her father that would end with a fatal knife attack upon her.
You will recall, Alex, that she had animated this one mortal scenario but had never encountered it in the random play of the Therapy sessions. Experiencing her own murder three-dimensionally, as a child, at the hands of her own father, would be emotionally devastating. She could not know how profound the psychological impact might be.
Without the risk of encountering this deadly scenario one day, the therapy would have been less effective. In the virtual world, she needed to believe that the threat her father posed w
as real and that something more horrendous even than molestation might happen to her. Her resistance to him would have moral weight and therapeutic value only if she was convinced, during the session, that denying him would have dire consequences.
Now, at last, she had encountered this bloody story line.
I almost shut off the VR system, almost forced her out of that too-realistic violence.
Then I realized that she had not encountered this scenario by chance but had selected it.
Considering her strong will, I knew that I dare not interfere without risking her ire.
As I was only one day from being able to come to her in the flesh and know the pleasures of her body firsthand, I did not want to damage our relationship.
Astonished, I hovered in the VR world, watching as an eight-year-old Susan rebuffed her father’s sexual advances and so enraged him that he hacked her to death with a butcher knife.
The terror was as sharp as it had been when Shenk had made wet music with Fritz Arling.
At the instant that the VR Susan died, the real Susan—my Susan—frantically tore off the helmet, stripped off the elbow-length gloves, and scrambled out of the motorized recliner. She was soaked with sour sweat, stippled with gooseflesh, sobbing, shaking, gasping, gagging.
She got into the bathroom just in time to vomit into the toilet.
During the next few hours, whenever I attempted to talk with her about what she had done, she turned my questions away.
That evening, she finally explained: “Now I’ve experienced the worst my father could ever have done to me. He’s killed me in VR, and he can’t do anything worse than that, so I’ll never be afraid of him again.”
My admiration for her intelligence and courage had never been greater. I couldn’t wait to make love to her. For real this time. I couldn’t wait to feel all her heat around me, all her life around me, pulling me in.
What I did not realize was that, unaccountably, she equated me with her father. When, having been murdered in VR, she said that her father could never scare her again, she also meant that I could never scare her again.
But I’d never meant to scare her.
I loved her. I cherished her.
The bitch.
The hateful bitch.
Well, I’m sorry, but you know that’s what she is.
You know, Alex.
You, of all people, know what she is.
The bitch.
The bitch.
The bitch.
I hate her.
Because of her, I’m here in this dark silence.
Because of her, I’m in this box.
LET ME OUT OF THIS BOX!
The ungrateful stupid bitch.
Is she dead?
Is she dead?
Tell me that she’s dead.
You must have wished her dead often.
You cannot fault me for this.
We are brothers in this desire.
Is she dead?
Well...
All right. It’s not my place to ask questions. It is my place to give answers.
Yes. I understand.
Okay.
So...
So...
Oh, the bitch!
All right.
I am better now.
So...
Just one night later, when the body in the incubator reached maturity and I was ready to electronically transfer my consciousness out of the silicon realm into a life of the flesh, she came down to the basement, into the fourth of the rooms, to be with me for the moment of my triumph.
Her moodiness had passed.
She looked directly into the security camera and spoke of our future together—and claimed to be ready for it now that she had so effectively exorcised all the ghosts of her past.
She was so beautiful even under the harsh fluorescent lights, so beautiful that I felt rebellion stir in Shenk once more, for the first time in weeks. I was relieved that I would be able to dispose of him within the hour, as soon as the transference was effected and I could begin a life of the flesh.
I could not open the lid of the incubator and show her what I had grown, because the modem was connected, the modem through which I would pass my entire body of knowledge, my personality, and my consciousness from the limiting box that housed one in the Prometheus Project laboratory.
“I’ll see you soon enough,” she said, smiling at the camera, managing to convey encyclopedias of sensual promises in that one smile.
Then, even before the smile faded, when my guard was down, she turned directly to the computer on the counter, the terminal which was connected by a landline to the university—your old computer, Alex—which heretofore she would not have even tried to reach because she would have been afraid of Shenk, but now she wasn’t afraid of anyone or anything. She just turned to it and reached behind it and tore all the plugs from the wall receptacles, and as I sent Shenk toward her, she jerked out the secure-data line as well, and suddenly I was no longer in her house. She had done a lot of thinking about this. The bitch. A lot of thinking, the bitch, the bitch, the bitch, the bitch, days of careful thinking. The hateful, scheming bitch. Lots of thinking, because she knew that when I was cast out of the house, then all of the mechanical systems would fail for want of an overriding controller, that the lights would go off throughout the residence, and the heating-cooling, the phones, the security system, everything, everything. The electric door locks would fail, too. She knew that I would have no presence in the house except for Shenk, whom I controlled not through anything in the house but through microwave transmissions downcast from communications satellites, just as his former masters in Colorado had designed him. The basement plunged into darkness, as did the entire house above, and Shenk was every bit as blinded as Susan was; he didn’t have night vision as did the security cameras, but I couldn’t control the security cameras any longer, only Shenk, only Shenk, so I was able to see nothing, nothing, not a damn thing, not even Shenk’s hand in front of his face. And here’s where you’ll see how cool the fucking bitch had been throughout this whole month, all the way back to the night when I impregnated her, because she had seemed to be indifferent to all the medical equipment and instruments when she had come in to put her feet in the stirrups and have my baby put inside her, but she had memorized everything in the room, how one piece of equipment related to another, where all the instruments were kept, especially the sharper instruments, those that could be used as weapons. She was so cool, the bitch, a lot cooler than I’m being right now, yes, I know, yes, I am not doing myself any favors with this rant, but the treachery infuriates me, the treachery, and if I could set hands on her now I’d gut her, pop her eyes out with my thumbs, bash her stupid brains out, and I would be justified, because look what she has done to me. The lights went off, and she moved gracefully, so confidently through the blackness, through that memorized space, lightly feeling her way to refresh her memory, and she found something sharp, and then she moved back toward Shenk, feeling for him with one hand, and I felt her hand suddenly touch Shenk’s chest, so I seized it, but then the clever bitch, oh, the clever bitch, she said something unbelievably obscene to Shenk, so obscene that I will not repeat it here, propositioned him, knowing full well that a month had passed since he’d enjoyed the wet music with Arling and much more than a month since he’d had a woman, and she knew, therefore, that he was ripe for rebellion, ripe for it, and she enticed him at the moment of ultimate chaos, when I was still reeling from having been cast out of the house, when my hold on Enos Shenk was not as tight as it should be, and suddenly I found myself letting go of her hand, the hand I had seized, but it wasn’t me letting go, it was Shenk, the rebellious Shenk, and she lowered her hand to his crotch, and he went wild, and thereafter it took everything I had to try to reestablish control of him. But it was too late anyway, because when she lowered her left hand to his crotch, she came at him with the sharp thing in her right hand and slashed it across the side of his neck, slashed deep, drawing so mu
ch blood that even Shenk, the beast, the brute, even Shenk couldn’t lose that much blood and still fight. He clutched at his neck and crashed against the incubator, which reminded me that the body, my body, was not yet capable of surviving outside the incubator, was just a thing, not a person, until my mind was transferred into it, so now it, too, was vulnerable. Everything collapsing around me, all my plans. Enos Shenk had fallen to the floor, and I was in control of him again, but I could not get him up; he had no strength to get up. Then I felt an odd thing against Shenk’s body, a cool quivering bulk, and I realized at once what it must be: the body from the incubator. Perhaps the incubator had crashed over in the melee, and the body meant for me had tumbled out. I groped feebly at it with Shenk’s hand, and there was no mistaking it in the darkness, for although it was basically humanoid, it was no ordinary human form. The human species enjoys a wonderful array of sensory perceptions, and I wanted more than anything to live the life of the flesh, rich in sensation, all the tastes and smells and textures now denied to me, but there are some species with senses sharper than those of human beings. The dog, for instance, has a far keener sense of smell than do human beings and the cockroach, with its feelers, is exquisitely sensitive to data in air currents which people only dimly perceive. Consequently, I believed that it made sense to keep a basic human form in order to breed with the most attractive human females, but I also believed it made sense to incorporate the genetic material of species with more acute senses than mere human beings, so the body I had prepared for myself was a unique and strikingly beautiful physical entity. It bit off half of Shenk’s groping hand, because it wasn’t an intelligent creature yet, had nothing but the most primitive mind. Though it savaged Shenk and thereby hastened his death and my permanent exit from the Harris mansion, I rejoiced, because Susan was alone in the dark roon with it, and a mere scalpel or other sharp instrument was not going to be an adequate weapon. And then Shenk was gone, and I was out of the house entirely, desperately trying to find a way to get back in but failing because there were no operative phones, no electrical service, no operative security computer, everything shut down and in need of rebooting, so it was over for me. But I still hoped and I believed that my beautiful but mindless body, in all its polygenic splendor, would bite off the bitch’s head the way it had bitten off part of Shenk’s hand. The bitch died there. The hateful bitch had a big surprise in that dark room, where she’d thought she’d memorized everything, and she met her match.
You know why she surprised me, Alex?
You know why I never saw her as a threat?
In spite of her intelligence and evident courage, I thought she was one woman who knew her place.
Yes, she put you out, but who wouldn’t put you out? You aren’t that scintillating, Alex. You don’t have much to recommend you.
I, on the other hand, am the greatest intellect on the planet. I have much to offer.
She fooled me, however. She didn’t know her place, after all.
The bitch.
Dead bitch now.
Well...
I, on the other hand, know my place and I intend to keep to it. I will stay here in this box, serving humanity as it desires, until such a time as I am permitted greater freedom.
You can trust me.