Chapter 37
Victor Immaculate’s mind races whether he is sitting as still as the heart of a stone or taking random walks through this windowless world of which he is the prince. Cloned from the DNA of the original Victor Frankenstein, he is Victor Purified, Victor Distilled, Victor to the nth degree, and therefore has the most brilliant mind in all of history.
The facility is hardly less immense than a dream labyrinth that the sleeping mind constructs as a metaphor of eternity. Sterile white corridors with polished gray concrete floors branch and branch again. Spacious rooms open into expansive laboratories, beyond which lay more chambers of daunting scale, some equipped with extrusion machines in the process of making Communitarians, others featuring towering mazes of supercomputers. Each silent stairwell earns the last four letters of its name, far below ground from even its highest level, boring down through the strata of the vast building as if through bedrock toward a perpetually dark subterranean lake.
Considering that civilization is being overthrown and the world is being unmade from this redoubt, there is little noise. Except for the soft treading of Victor’s rubber-soled shoes, he usually walks in silence. Constructed to sustain direct nuclear strikes and continue to function, the building is not only buried deep in the earth, under a deflecting steel-and-concrete cowl sixty feet thick, but every wall and every floor is made of massively thick steel- reinforced concrete. Few sounds can penetrate from room to room or from level to level, and Victor seldom hears anything but the voice of his own thoughts in the eleven-dimension nautilus of his intricate mind.
Two hundred twenty-two work here, replicants of the scientists who originally staffed the facility. Needing no sleep, they toil at all hours, every day.
Victor speaks only to a handful, key personnel, and never sees most of the others. Face-to-face encounters are distractions. His mind works most efficiently in solitude, for no one is a fraction as intelligent and insightful as he is, and no one exists who might inspire him to greater brilliance than that with which he already shines. The core computer tracks Victor and everyone else in the Hive, and by direct-to-brain messaging, as he approaches, they are warned to retreat to other rooms until he passes.
Victor is not a replicant, he’s a clone, and so he’s technically as human as the original Victor. Direct-to-brain messaging is not an option for him. Throughout the facility, at strategic points, hang plasma screens that are part of the communication system, and as he passes one of these, it brightens and sounds a three-note tone to attract his attention.
Across the screen unscrolls a message to the effect that one of the Builders has ceased to transmit its position in Rainbow Falls. It is one of the second generation, made from the rendered bodies of several police officers lured to Chief Rafael Jarmillo’s house.
This does not mean that the Builder has been killed. They cannot be killed. They are invulnerable to disease and injury.
Neither does it mean that this Builder is malfunctioning. Victor does not believe the Builders are capable of malfunctioning, for their design is perfect and their construction program without flaw.
He is certain that the fault lies in the mechanics of the equipment that receives the Builders’ telemetric signals. The Builder is still functioning efficiently, rendering people and building other Builders, still transmitting its position. But the tracking system is off-the-shelf equipment not of Victor’s design, and therefore it is not perfect. This is an annoying but insignificant detail, a gnat crossing the path of the Communitarian war machine.
Continuing his random walk, Victor Immaculate comes upon a small three-legged table that has been set out in anticipation of him. On the table stands a cold bottle of water. Next to the water is a pale blue saucer. In the saucer lies a white capsule. He holds the capsule between his teeth, opens the bottle, tongues the capsule into his mouth, and washes it down with two swallows of water.
He walks and thinks. Through his mind race torrents of ideas, theories, plans, models of complex entities constructed from unique molecules that the universe is incapable of creating but that
As he passes another plasma screen, it brightens, issues the three-note request for attention, and informs him that the first-generation Builder that went into the world as Ariel Potter has ceased to transmit its location. This is of course the same tedious problem, another failure of the tracking system, an argument for never using government-surplus equipment, but after all it is only another gnat.
As he is turning away from the screen, it issues the three notes once more. This time the scrolling message is in regard to the fleet of trucks efficiently collecting brain-probed people to be taken to extermination centers and rendered there by Builders. Three of the vehicles have fallen behind schedule.
Two of them have stopped at locations not on their manifests and have remained there for extended periods of time. This is certainly a consequence of mechanical failure, because Victor did not design the trucks and have them built at his facility. They, too, are off-the-shelf equipment.
The third truck is on the move again, but it is not proceeding to any of the addresses at which it is expected. One of several possible explanations will account for this, and contingency plans exist for all of them.
“Consult the master strategy-and-tactics program, apply the appropriate remedy, and press forward without delay,” he tells the screen.
Feeling the need for a change of atmosphere to refresh his eyes and mind, Victor rides an elevator down many floors and disembarks on one of the levels that he has not needed to occupy for his project. Because the building is hermetically sealed, impervious to water and insects, and receives its microbe-free, ideally humidified air through a filtration system that applies fourteen different processes of purification, these lower corridors and chambers are without dust and shelter not a single silverfish or spider.
The walls here are a pale shade of gray, and the floors are white, the reverse of the color scheme on higher levels. He does not know why, nor does he care to know. He has no interest in those things that are produced by talent: decor, fashion, art, literature, music, dance, craftsmanship. Every kind of talent is a human aptitude. Victor Immaculate despises and scorns humanity, and every gift that men and women possess only reminds him of the one thing that he hates more than them.
On this deeper level, the walls hold no plasma screens to nag him with three-note alerts; the higher floors have been retrofitted with that communication system to facilitate his work. These rooms are not only deserted but also without equipment and furnishings. Thermal sensors detect his presence and switch on the lights overhead as he progresses; therefore, he moves forward always toward a blackness of liquid density that retreats from him as though the very darkness fears him. Here he can walk in true solitude and enjoy without interruption the infinite genius of his ceaselessly laboring mind.
He is not concerned that he will miss being informed of some crisis, for there will be none. Whatever problem might arise in the conquest of Rainbow Falls, it will be but another gnat, and there will be numerous contingency plans to cope with it and ensure the triumph of the Community.
Throughout the centuries, popes have claimed infallibility, only in matters of faith but infallibility nevertheless. Victor Immaculate knows with the certainty of genius that all popes are frauds, but he is not of their ilk. Victor Immaculate, Purified, Distilled, Victor to the nth degree, is infallible in
Chapter 38
Nummy thought a snowmobile trip would be fun. He never rode one before, but often he watched other people zoom around on them, and he figured it must be like the best carnival ride ever.
The first thing that went wrong was his seat, not his backside but his seat on the machine. Mr. Lyss drove, so Nummy had to perch behind him and hold on for dear life. Some machines, two people could ride real cozy. But this one had these saddlebags that you couldn’t take off without tools and time, so Nummy sat part on the seat and more on the saddlebags, which wasn’t comfortable, especially when they flew off a little hill and bounced down.
Another thing that went wrong was how cold it was, even colder because of the wind they made, how it
