Dead and Alive

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.

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