City of Night

Chapter 45

At the Hands of Mercy, none of the three isolation rooms had been designed to contain a deadly disease, for Victor did not have an interest in the engineering of microorganisms. There was no danger whatsoever that he would accidentally create a deadly new virus or bacterium.

Consequently, the twenty-by-fifteen-foot chamber that he chose for Werner was not surrounded by a positive-pressure envelope to prevent the escape of airborne microbes and spoors. Neither did it have its own self-contained ventilation system.

The isolation room had been meant solely to contain any New Race variant — he experimented with some exotic ones — that Victor suspected might prove difficult to manage and any that unexpectedly exhibited antisocial behavior of a lethal nature.

Therefore, the walls, ceiling, and floor of the chamber were of poured-in-place, steel-reinforced concrete to a thickness of eighteen inches. The interior surfaces had been paneled with three overlapping layers of quarter-inch steel plate.

If necessary, a killing electrical charge could be introduced into those steel plates with the flip of the switch in the adjoining monitor room.

Sole access to the isolation chamber was through a transition module between it and the monitor room.

The staff sometimes referred to it as the air lock, although this inaccurate term annoyed Victor. No atmosphere changes occurred during the use of the transition module, and there was not even a simple recycling of air.

The module featured two round steel doors that had been made for bank vaults. By design, it was mechanically impossible to have both doors open at the same time; therefore, when the inner door opened, a prisoner of the isolation chamber might get into the vestibule, but it could not break through into the monitor room.

On a gurney, his flesh undergoing cellular breakdown if not even molecular reorganization, Werner had been rushed through the halls of Mercy, into the monitor room, through the module, into the isolation chamber, with Victor urging the attendants to “hurry, faster, damn you, run!”

The staff might have thought that blind panic had seized their maker, but Victor couldn’t concern himself with what they thought. Werner had been secured in that fortresslike cell, which was all that mattered.

When the hand had formed out of the amorphous flesh of Werner’s torso, it had taken hold of Victor’s hand tenderly, beseechingly. But the initial docility dared not be taken as a reliable prediction of a benign transformation.

Nothing remotely like this had ever happened before. Such a sudden collapse of cellular integrity accompanied by self-driven biological reformation should not be possible.

Common sense suggested that such a radical metamorphosis, which must obviously include drastic changes in cerebral tissues, would entail the loss of a significant percentage of the direct-to-brain data and programming that Werner had received in the tank, including perhaps the proscription against killing his maker.

Prudence and responsible haste — not panic — had been required. As a man of unequaled scientific vision, Victor had at once foreseen the worst-case scenario and had acted with admirable calm yet with alacrity to respond to the danger and to contain the threat.

He made a mental note to circulate a stern memo to that effect throughout Mercy before the end of the day.

He would dictate it to Annunciata.

No, he would compose it and distribute it himself, and to hell with Annunciata.

In the monitor room, where Victor gathered with Ripley and four additional staff members, a bank of six rectangular high-definition screens, each displaying the closed-circuit feed from one of six cameras in the isolation chamber, revealed that Werner still remained in a disturbingly plastic condition. At the moment, he had four legs, no arms, and an ill-defined, continuously shifting body out of which thrust a vaguely Wernerlike head.

Highly agitated, the Werner thing jittered around the isolation chamber, mewling like a wounded animal and sometimes saying, “Father? Father? Father?”

This father business irritated Victor almost beyond the limits of his endurance. He didn’t shout Shut up, shut up, shut up at the screens only because he wished to avoid the necessity of adding a second paragraph to that memo.

He did not want them to think of him as their father. They were not his family; they were his inventions, his fabrications, and most surely his properly. He was their maker, their owner, their master, and even their leader, if they wished to think of him that way, but not their paterfamilias.

The family was a primitive and destructive institution because it put itself above the good of society as a whole. The parent-child relationship was counterrevolutionary and must be eradicated. For his creations, their entire race would be their family, each of them the brother or the sister of all the others, so that no particular relationship would be different from all the others or more special than all the others.

One race, one family, one great humming hive working in unison, without the distractions of individuality and family, could achieve anything to which it set its mind and its bottomless bustling energy, unhampered by childish emotions, freed from all superstition, could conquer any challenge that the universe might hold for it. A dynamic, unstoppable species of heretofore unimagined determination, gathering ever greater momentum, would rush on, rush on, to glory after glory, in his name.

Watching the four-legged, mewling, jittering Werner thing as it began to sprout something like but not like arms from its back, Ripley raised his ridiculous eyebrows and said, “Like Harker.”

Victor at once rebuked him. “This is nothing like Harker. Harker was a singularity. Harker spawned a parasitical second self. Nothing like that is happening to Werner.”

Riveted by the shocking images on the screen, Ripley said, “But, Mr. Helios, sir, he appears to be —”

“Werner is not spawning a parasitical second self,” Victor said tightly. “Werner is experiencing catastrophic cellular metamorphosis. It’s not the same. It is not the same at all. Werner is a different singularity.”