Lost Souls

chapter 64

This facility is so immense that if you were more comfortable living with illusions than with truth, you could believe that it went on forever, corridor into corridor through uncountable intersections, chamber after chamber above chamber under chamber within chamber, like a concrete-and-steel expression of an equation by Einstein defining the indefinable.

Victor Immaculate lives with no illusions. Nothing is infinite or eternal, neither the world nor the people of the world, neither the universe nor time.

From the chamber with chair and futon, he walks two corridors, descends in an elevator, walks another corridor, and passes through two rooms into a third, where a straight-backed chair faces a blank wall.

During this journey, he sees no one. No voices are heard, no footsteps other than his own, no doors closing in the distance, no sounds but those he makes.

Two hundred twenty-two individuals work here, live here, but Victor sees his key personnel only when necessary. The many others, he never sees. The facility’s core computer keeps track of Victor’s position at all times. It also tracks the position of every member of the staff, each of whom it alerts by direct-to-brain messaging when Victor approaches them, enabling them to fade away and avoid seeing-or being seen by-the master of this maze.

All but a minute fraction of face-to-face encounters are a waste of time. They distract the mind and foster inefficiency.

Initially, Victor worked here with scores of the best scientists of this or any age. They are all dead.

Now the Community staffs this facility. They call it the Hive, a term that is not intended to have a negative connotation. They all admire the organization, industry, and efficiency of bees.

In the room with the single straight-backed chair, Victor sits.

Beside the chair is a small table. On the table is a cold bottle of water. Beside the bottle is a small white dish. In the dish lies a pale-blue capsule. He opens the bottle, slips the capsule into his mouth, drinks.

Now he waits for the blank wall, which is a plasma screen, to fill with images from the roadhouse.

While he waits, he thinks.

He is always thinking. His mind is ever occupied-it abounds, it teems-with ideas, theories, extrapolations. The continuous nature of his thought is less remarkable than the profundity and fertility of it. The world has never previously known a mind of such high caliber-nor will it ever again.

One of his finest ideas is the entity he calls a Builder. He has heretofore seen them in action only in a laboratory setting, and he looks forward to observing them in the field for the first time, as they kill and process the people in the roadhouse.

The original Victor, being a man too much of the flesh and a prisoner of his human heritage, had thought too much in archetypes and clichés. He wanted to build a new race of exceptionally strong and virtually indestructible men, populate the world with immortals, make himself their living god, and thereby become the god of gods.

Victor Immaculate is the strict materialist that the original Victor could only dream of being.

He has no desire to create a race of immortal supermen. Members of the Community are immune to infections and diseases, but that is simply a consequence of their biology, of their unique flesh, not a design goal that he has set for himself. And although their wounds heal rapidly, they are just slightly harder to kill than is a human being.

To be as a god, one must concede the validity of the concept of God, and Victor Immaculate, unlike the original Victor, makes no such concession. He wishes to create nothing that endures. He desires only to be the transitional manager between the world as it is now and the world as it will be without a single thinking creature in it. He creates to destroy. His vision is a world without vision, without ideals, without purpose.

To Victor Immaculate, this question is not worth asking: If a tree falls in the woods when no one is present to hear it, does it make a sound?

To Victor Immaculate, the better question is this: If humanity no longer exists on Earth to see, hear, smell, taste, and touch the abundance of Nature, does Earth itself continue to exist in its absence? His answer is no. The mind perceives matter and invests it with meaning. Without the mind to observe it, matter has no meaning; what cannot be perceived by any of the five senses-does not exist.

He has created two related but different species to assist him in the deconstruction of the world. The Communitarians are replicants of real people, but they are not clones because their biology is not that of human beings. They pass for humans and are the fifth column that facilitates the Builders.

The Builders are in fact destroyers, their name ironic. They are both biological and mechanical. They can pass for human beings as well as can the Communitarians, but each Builder is a community unto itself, a collection of billions of nanoanimals-microbe-size creatures programmed like machines, each to perform its specialized tasks-that together can assume the appearance of a man or woman, but can also deliquesce and operate as a swarm of individuals. Each nanoanimal is intelligent in the most basic sense, with a small amount of memory-but their shared intelligence and memory equals that of a human being. Each nanoanimal can learn from experience and share its learning with the billions of others comprising a Builder.

Each nanoanimal can reproduce itself asexually. It needs only suitable building materials. Everything it needs can be found in a human body.

The Builders do not build Communitarians, who are created in the Hive. They build only other Builders from the human flesh and bones on which they feed. Living and dead people are of equal value as the fuel and material for their construction work.

The original Victor’s plan for the repopulation of the world was flawed. It depended on vast factories for the production of the New Race, what he called tank farms. Tens of millions of the New Race would have been needed to war successfully with humankind. The scale of the enterprise ensured its discovery and destruction by the Old Race that it was intended to replace.

Victor Immaculate needs to create only a few Communitarians to support each Builder. The Builders, not the Communitarians, are the true army, the shock troops. They can feed on and dispose of the bodies of the real people the Communitarians replace, but each Builder also can kill and consume additional hundreds of people per day. And because each Builder can self-reproduce, Victor Immaculate does not need tank farms. He has decentralized the creation process, and as a consequence, because the Builders multiply rapidly, he projects the death of the last human being in fourteen months.

A propagated Builder emerges from its cocoon in no less than twelve hours and no more than thirty-six.

Mind spinning as always, Victor Immaculate takes another drink of the bottled water.

The huge plasma screen brightens. The replicant of Reverend Kelsey Fortis has placed video cameras at four places in the main room of the roadhouse. The family social has not yet become the family slaughter.