Dead and Alive

CHAPTER 24

Sitting in the spa, his champagne mood tainted with the vinegar of his wife’s unthinkable rebellion, Victor should already have hung up on Erika Five as she pretended to be Erika Four. He didn’t know why he continued to listen to this tripe, but he was rapt.

“Here at the dump,” she said, “in a heap of garbage, I found a disposable cell phone that has some unused minutes on it. Eighteen, in fact. Those of the Old Race are so wasteful, throwing away what has value. I, too, still had value, I believe.”

Every Erika was created with precisely the same voice, just as they looked alike in every luscious detail.

“My lovely Victor, my dearest sociopath, I can prove to you that I am who I claim to be. Your current punching bag doesn’t know how you murdered me, does she?”

He realized he was clenching the telephone so tightly that his hand ached.

“But, sweetheart, of course she doesn’t know. Because if you wish to murder her in the same fashion, you want it to be a surprise to her, as it was to me.”

No one in decades had spoken to him so contemptuously, and never had one whom he created addressed him with such disrespect.

Furious, he declared, “Only people can be murdered. You’re not a person, you’re property, a thing I owned. I didn’t murder you, I disposed of you, disposed of a worn-out, useless thing.”

He had lost control. He needed to restrain himself. His reply had seemed to suggest he accepted her ridiculous assertion that she was Erika Four.

She said, “All of the New Race are designed to be extremely difficult to kill. None can be strangled easily, if at all. None except your Erikas. Unlike the others, we wives have tender throats, fragile windpipes, carotid arteries that can be compressed to stop the blood from flowing to our brains.”

The water in the spa seemed to be less hot than it had been a minute ago.

“We were in the library, where you had beaten me. You instructed me to sit in a straightbacked chair. I could only obey. You took off your silk necktie and strangled me. And not quickly. You made an ordeal of it for me.”

He said, “Erika Four earned what she received. And now so have you.”

“In extreme situations,” she continued, “you are able to kill any of your creations by speaking a few words, a secret phrase, which triggers in our programs a shutdown of the autonomic nervous system. The heart ceases to beat. Lungs at once stop expanding, contracting. But you didn’t deal with me as mercifully as that.”

“Now I shall.” He spoke the phrase that would shut her down.

“Dear one, my precious Victor, it will no longer work. I was for a while dead enough that your control program dropped out of me. Not so dead, however, that I couldn’t be resurrected.”

“Nonsense,” he said, but his voice had no conviction.

“Oh, darling, how I yearn to be with you again. And I will be. This is not good-bye, only au revoir.” She hung up.

If she had been Erika Five, she would have dropped dead when he used the termination phrase.

Erika Four was alive again. For the first time ever, Victor seemed to have a marital problem with which he could not easily cope.