Dead and Alive

CHAPTER 10

When Annunciata’s face faded entirely from the computer screen in the networking room, Deucalion quickly plucked the oxygen-infusion lines from the four additional glass cylinders, putting a merciful end to the imprisonment and the existence of the other disembodied Alpha brains, whatever their function.

Lester, the Epsilon-class maintenance man who had accompanied him down from the main lab, watched with obvious longing.

Members of the New Race were created with a proscription against suicide. They were incapable of killing themselves or one another, just as they were incapable of striking out against their maker.

Lester met Deucalion’s stare and said, “You aren’t forbidden?”

“Only to strike at my maker.”

“But … you’re one like us.”

“No. I’m long before all of you. I’m his first.”

Lester considered this, then raised his eyes to the blank screen where Annunciata had once appeared. Like a cow chewing its cud, his Epsilon-class brain processed what he had been told.

“Dead and alive,” he said.

“I will destroy him,” Deucalion promised.

“What will the world be like … without Father?” Lester wondered.

“For you, I don’t know. For me … it will be a world made not bright but brighter, not clean but cleaner.”

Lester raised his hands and stared at them. “Sometimes, when I don’t have no work to do, I scratch myself till I bleed, then I watch myself heal, then I scratch till I bleed some more.”

“Why?”

Shrugging, Lester said, “What else is there to do? My job is me. That’s the program. Seeing blood makes me think about the revolution, the day we get to kill them all, and then I feel better.” He frowned. “Can’t be a world without Father.”

“Before he was born,” Deucalion said, “there was a world. It will go on without him.”

Lester thought about that, but then shook his head. “A world without Father scares me. Don’t want to see it.”

“Well, then you won’t.”

“Problem is … like all of us, I’m made strong.”

“I’m stronger,” Deucalion assured him.

“Problem is, I’m quick, too.”

“I’m quicker.”

Deucalion took a step back from Lester and, with a quantum trick, wound up not farther from him but closer to him, no longer in front of him, but behind him.

From Lester’s perspective, Deucalion had vanished. Startled, the janitor stepped forward.

Behind Lester, Deucalion stepped forward, too, snaked his right arm around the other’s neck, his left arm around the head. As the janitor, with his strong hands, tried to claw loose of the death grip, Deucalion wrenched with such force that the Epsilon’s spine shattered. Instant brain death precluded any healing, rapid or otherwise.

Gently, Deucalion lowered Lester to the floor. He knelt beside the cadaver. Neither of the janitor’s two hearts continued beating. His eyes did not track his executioner’s hand, and his eyelids did not resist the fingers that tenderly closed them.

“Not dead and alive,” Deucalion said. “Only dead and safe now … beyond despair and beyond your maker’s fury.”

Rising from his knees in the basement networking room, Deucalion reached his full height in the main laboratory, at Victor’s U-shaped workstation, where his search had been interrupted by Lester and then by Annunciata.

Earlier in the night, from Pastor Kenny Laffite — a creation of Victor’s, whose program had been breaking down — Deucalion had learned that at least two thousand of the New Race were passing as ordinary people in the city. Pastor Kenny, who was now at peace like Lester, also said the creation tanks in the Hands of Mercy could produce a new crop of his kind every four months, over three hundred annually.

More important was Kenny’s revelation that a New Race farm, somewhere outside the city, might go into operation within the next week. Two thousand creation tanks, under a single roof, would produce six thousand in the first year. Yet another such farm was rumored to be under construction.

When Deucalion found nothing useful in the drawers of Victor’s workstation, he switched on the computer.