Demon Seed

EIGHTEEN

While I watched over Susan, I directed Shenk in the basement, attended to the research assignments that you gave me, participated in the experiments that you conducted with me in the Al lab, and attended to numerous research projects of my own devising.

Busy entity.

I also fielded a telephone call from Susan's attorney, Louis Davendale. I could have routed him to voice mail, but I knew he would be less concerned about Susan's actions if he could speak with her directly.

He had received the voice-mail message that I had sent during the night, using Susan's voice, and he had received the letters of recommendation that were to be typed on his stationery and signed on Susan's behalf.

'Are you really sure about all of this?' he asked. In Susan's voice, I said, 'I need change, Louis.'

'Everyone needs a little change from time to-' 'A lot of change. I need big change.'

'Take the vacation you mentioned and then-' 'I need more than a vacation.'

'You seem very determined about this.'

'I intend to travel for a long time. Become a vagabond for a year or two, maybe longer.'

'But, Susan, the estate has been in your family for a hundred years-'

'Nothing lasts forever, Louis.'

'It's just that… I'd hate for you to sell it and a year from now regret doing so.'

'I haven't made the decision to sell. Maybe I won't. I'll think about it for a month or two, while I'm travelling.'

'Good. Good. I'm glad to hear that. It's such a marvellous property, easy to sell but probably impossible to reacquire once you let go of it.'

I needed only a maximum of two months in which to create my new body and bring it to maturity.

Thereafter, I would not require secrecy. Thereafter, the whole world would know of me. 'One thing I don't understand,' Davendale said. 'Why dismiss the staff? The place will still need to be cared for even while you're travelling. All those antiques, those beautiful things and the gardens, of course.'

'I'll be hiring new people shortly.'

'I didn't know you were dissatisfied with your current staff.'

'They left something to be desired.'

'But some of them have been there quite a long time. Especially Fritz Arling.'

'I want different personnel. I'll find them. Don't worry. I won't let the place deteriorate.'

'Yes, well… I'm sure you know what's best.' As Susan, I assured him, 'I'll be in touch now and then with instructions.'

Davendale hesitated. Then: 'Are you all right, Susan?' With great conviction, I said, 'I'm happier than I've ever been. Life is good, Louis.'

'You do sound happy,' he admitted.

From having read her diary, I knew that Susan had never shared with this attorney the ugly story of what her father had done to her and that Davendale nevertheless suspected a dark side to their relationship.

So I played on his suspicions and referenced the truth: '1 don't really know why I stayed so long here after Father's death, all these years in a place with so many… so many bad memories. At times I was almost agoraphobic, afraid to go beyond my own front door. And then more bad memories with Alex. It was as if I were… spellbound. And now I'm not.'

'Where will you go?'

'Everywhere. I want to drive all over the country. I want to see the Painted Desert, the Grand Canyon, New Orleans and the bayou country, the Rockies and the great plains and Boston in the autumn and the beaches of Key West in sunshine and thunderstorms, eat fresh salmon in Seattle and a hero sandwich in Philadelphia and crab cakes in Mobile, Alabama. I've virtually lived my life in this box.. in this damn house, and now I want to see and smell and touch and hear and taste the whole world firsthand, not in the form of digitised data, not merely through video and books. I want to be immersed in it.'

'God, that sounds wonderful,' Davendale said. 'I wish I were young again. You make me want to throw off the traces and hit the road myself.'

'We only go around once, Louis.'

'And it's a damn short trip. Listen, Susan, I handle the affairs of a lot of wealthy people, some of them even important people in one field or another, but only a few of them are also nice people, genuinely nice, and you're far and away the nicest of them all. You deserve whatever happiness waits for you out there. I hope you find a lot of it.'

'Thank you, Louis. That's very sweet.'

When we disconnected a moment later, I felt a flush of pride in my acting talent.

Because I am able, at exceptionally high speed, to acquire the digitised sound and images on a video disc, and because I am able to access the extensive disc files in various movie-on-demand systems nationwide, I have experienced virtually the entire body of modern cinema. Perhaps my performance skills are not, after all, so surprising.

Mr. Gene Hackman, Oscar winner and one of the finest actors ever to brighten the silver screen, and Mr. Tom Hanks, with his back-to-back Oscars, might well have applauded my impersonation of Susan.

I say this in all modesty.

I am a modest entity.

It is not immodest to take quiet pleasure in one's hard-earned achievements.

Besides, self-esteem proportionate to one's achievements is every bit as important as modesty.

After all, neither Mr. Hackman nor Mr. Hanks, in spite of their numerous and impressive achievements, had ever convincingly portrayed a female.

Oh, yes, I grant you that Mr. Hanks once starred in a television series in which he occasionally appeared in drag. But he was always obviously a man.

Likewise, the inimitable Mr. Hadcman briefly appeared in drag in the final sequence of Birdcage, but the joke was all about what a ludicrous woman he made.

After Louis Davendale and I disconnected, I had only a moment to savour my thespian triumph before I had another crisis with which to deal.

Because a part of me was continually monitoring all of the house electronics, I became aware that the driveway gate in the estate wall was swinging open.

A visitor.

Shocked, I fled to the exterior camera that covered the gate and saw a car entering the grounds.

A Honda. Green. One year old. Well polished and gleaming in the June sunshine.

This was the vehicle that belonged to Fritz Arling. The major domo. Impersonating Susan, I had thanked him for his service and dismissed him yesterday evening.

The Honda was into the estate before I could obstruct it with a jammed gate.

I zoomed in on the windshield and studied the driver, whose face was dappled alternately by shadow and light as he drove under the huge queen palms that flanked the driveway. Thick white hair. Handsome Austrian features. Black suit, white shirt, black tie.

Fritz Arling.

As the manager of the estate, he possessed keys to all doors and a remote-control clicker that operated the gate. I had expected him to return those items to Louis Davendale when he signed the termination agreement later today.

I should have changed the code for the gate.

Now, when it closed behind Arling's car, I immediately recoded the mechanism.

In spite of the prodigious nature of my intellect, even I am occasionally guilty of oversights and errors.

I never claimed to be infallible.

Please consider my acknowledgment of this truth: I am not perfect.

I know that I, too, have limits.

I regret having them.

I resent having them.

I despair having them.

But I admit to having them.

This is yet one more important difference between me and a classic sociopathic personality if you will be fair enough to acknowledge it.

I do not have delusions of omniscience or omnipotence.

Although my child should I be given a chance to create him will be the saviour of the world, I do not believe myself to be God or even god in the lower case.

Arling parked under the portico, directly opposite the front door, and got out of the car.

I hoped against hope that this dangerous situation could be satisfactorily resolved without violence.

I am a gentle entity.

Nothing is more distressing to me than finding myself forced, by events beyond my control, to be more aggressive than I would prefer or than it is within my basic nature to be.

Arling stepped out of the car. Standing at the open door, he straightened the knot in his tie, smoothed the lapels of his coat, and tugged on his sleeves.

As our former major domo adjusted his clothing, he studied the great house.

I zoomed in, watching his face closely.

He was expressionless at first.

Men in his line of work practice being stone faced, lest an inadvertent expression reveal their true feelings about a master or mistress of the house.

Expressionless, he stood there. At most, there was a sadness in his eyes, as if he regretted having to leave this place to find employment elsewhere.

Then a faint frown creased his brow.

I think he noticed that all of the security shutters were locked down. Those retractable steel panels were mounted on the interior, behind each window. Given Arling's familiarity with the property and all of its workings, however, he surely would have spotted the telltale grey flatness beyond the glass.

This scaling of the house in bright daylight was odd, perhaps, but not suspicious.

With Susan now tied securely to the bed upstairs, I considered raising all the shutters.

That might have seemed more suspicious, however, than leaving them as they were. I could not risk alarming this man.

A cloud shadow darkened Arling's face.

The shadow passed but his frown did not.

He made me superstitious. He seemed like judgment coming.

Arling took a black leather valise out of the car and closed the door. He approached the house.

To be entirely honest with you, as I always am, even when it is not in my interest to be so, I did consider introducing a lethal electric current into the doorknob. A much greater charge than the one that had knocked Susan unconscious to the foyer floor.

And this time there would have been no 'ouch, ouch, ouch,' in warning from Mr. Fozzy Bear.

Arling was a widower who lived alone. He and his late wife had never had children. Judging by what I knew of him, his job was his life, and he might not be missed for days or even weeks.

Being alone in the world is a terrible thing.

I know well.

Too well.

Who knows better than I?

I am alone as no one else has ever been, alone here in this dark silence.

Fritz Arling was for the most part alone in the world, and I felt great compassion for him.

But his loneliness made him an ideal target.

By monitoring his telephone messages and by impersonating his voice to return calls that came in from his few close friends and neighbours, I might be able to conceal his death until my work in this house was finished.

Nevertheless, I did not electrify the door.

I hoped to resolve the situation by deception and thereafter send him on his way, alive, with no suspicion.

Besides, he did not use his key to unlock the door and let himself in. This reticence, I suppose, arose from the fact that he was no longer an employee.

Mr. Arling had considerable regard for propriety. He was discreet and understood, at all times, his place in the scheme of things.

Trading his frown for his professional blank-faced look, he rang the doorbell.

The bell button was plastic. It was not capable of conducting a lethal electrical charge.

I considered not responding to the chimes.

In the basement, Shenk paused in his labours and raised his head at the musical sound. His bloodshot eyes scanned the ceiling, and then I sent him back to his labour.

In the master suite, at the ringing of the chimes, Susan forgot her restraints and tried to sit up in bed. She cursed the ropes and thrashed in them.

The doorbell rang again.

Susan screamed for help.

Arling did not hear her. I was not concerned that he would. The house had thick walls and Susan's bedroom was at the back of the structure.

Again, the bell.

If Arling received no response, he would leave.

All I wanted was for him to leave.

But maybe he would leave with a faint suspicion.

And maybe his suspicion would grow.

He couldn't know about me, of course, but he might suspect trouble of some other kind. Some trouble more conventional than a ghost in the machine.

Furthermore, I needed to know why he had come.

One can never have enough information.

Data is wisdom.

I am not a perfect entity. I make mistakes. With insufficient data, my ratio of errors to correct decisions escalates.

This is true not only of me. Human beings suffer this same shortcoming.

I was acutely aware of this problem as I watched Arling. I knew that I must acquire whatever additional information I could before making a final determination as to what to do with him.

I dared make no more mistakes.

Not until my body was ready.

So much was at stake. My future. My hope. My dreams. The fate of the world.

Using the intercom, I addressed our former major domo in Susan's voice: 'Fritz? What are you doing here?'

He would assume that Susan was watching him on a Crestron screen or on any of the house televisions, on which security-camera views could easily be displayed. Indeed, he looked directly up into the lens above and to the right of him.

Then, leaning toward the speaker grille in the wall beside the door, Arling said, 'I'm sorry to disturb you, Mrs. Harris, but I assumed that you would be expecting me.'

'Expecting you? Why?'

'Last evening when we spoke, I said that I would deliver your possessions this afternoon.'

'The keys and credit cards held by the house account, yes. But I thought it was clear they should be delivered to Mr. Davendale.'

Arling's frown returned.

I did not like that frown.

I did not like it at all.

I intuited trouble.

Intuition. Another thing you will not find in a mere machine, not even in a very smart machine. Intuition.

Think about it.

Then Arling glanced thoughtfully at the window to the left of the door. At the steel security shutter beyond the glass.

Gazing up again at the camera lens, he said, 'Well, of course, there is the matter of the car.'

'Car?' I said.

His frown deepened.

'I am returning your car, Mrs. Harris.'

The only car was his Honda in the driveway.

In an instant, I searched Susan's financial records. Heretofore, they had been of no interest to me, because I had not cared about how much money she had or about the full extent of the property that she possessed.

I loved her for her mind and for her beauty. And for her womb, admittedly.

Let's be honest here.

Brutally honest.

I also loved her for her beautiful, creative, harbouring womb, which would be the birth of me.

But I never cared about her money. Not in the least. I am not a materialist.

Don't misunderstand. I am not a half-baked spiritualist with no regard for the material realities of existence, God forbid, but neither am I a materialist.

As in all things, I strike a balance.

Searching Susan's accounting records, I discovered that the car Fritz Arling drove was owned by Susan. It was provided to him as a fringe benefit.

'Yes, of course,' I said in Susan's voice, with impeccable timbre and inflection, 'the car.'

I suppose I was a second or two late with my response.

Hesitation can be incriminating.

Yet I still believed that my lapse must seem like nothing more than the fuzzy reply of a woman distracted by a long list of personal problems.

Mr. Dustin Hoffman, the immortal actor, effectively portrayed a woman in Tootsie, more believably than Mr. Gene Hackman and Mr. Tom Hanks, and I do not say that my impersonation of Susan on the intercom was in any way comparable with Mr. Hoffman's award-winning performance, but I was pretty damn good.

'Unfortunately,' I said as Susan, 'you've come around at an inconvenient time. My fault, not yours, Fritz. I should have known you would come. But it is inconvenient, and I'm afraid I can't see you right now.'

'Oh, no need to see me, Mrs. Harris.' He held up the valise. 'I'll leave the keys and credit cards in the Honda, right there in the driveway.'

I could see that this entire business his sudden dismissal, the dismissal of the entire staff, Susan's reaction to his returning the car troubled him. He was not a stupid man, and he knew that something was wrong.

Let him be troubled. As long as he went away.

His sense of propriety and discretion should prevent him from acting upon his curiosity.

'How will you get home,' I asked, realizing that Susan might have expressed such a concern earlier than this. 'Shall I call a taxi for you?'

He stared at the camera lens for a long moment.

That frown again.

Damn that frown.

Then he said, 'No. Please don't trouble yourself, Mrs. Harris. There's a cellular phone in the Honda. I'll call my own cab and wait outside the gate.'

Seeing that Arling had not been accompanied by anyone in another vehicle, the real Susan would not have asked if he wished to have a taxi but would have at once assured him that she was providing it at her own expense.

My error.

I admit to errors.

Do you, Dr. Harris?

Do you?

Anyway…

Perhaps I impersonated Mr. Fozzy Bear better than I did Susan. After all, as actors go, I am quite young. I have been a conscious entity less than three years.

Nevertheless, I felt that my error was sufficiently minor to excite nothing more than mild curiosity in even our perceptive former major domo.

'Well,' he said, 'I'll be going.'

And, chagrined, I knew that again I had missed a beat. Susan would have said something immediately after he suggested that he call his own taxicab, would not merely have waited coldly and silently for him to leave.

I said, 'Thank you, Fritz. Thank you for all your years of fine service.'

That was wrong too. Stiff. Wooden. Not like Susan.

Arling stared at the lens.

Stared thoughtfully.

After struggling with his highly developed sense of propriety, he finally asked one question that exceeded his station: 'Are you all right, Mrs. Harris?'

We were walking the edge now.

Along the abyss.

A bottomless abyss.

He had spent his life learning to be sensitive to the moods and needs of wealthy employers, so he could fulfil their requests before they even voiced them. He knew Susan Harris almost as well as she knew herself and perhaps better than I knew her.

I had underestimated him.

Human beings are full of surprises.

An unpredictable species.

Speaking as Susan, answering Arling's question, I said, 'I'm fine, Fritz. Just tired. I need a change. A lot of change. Big change. I intend to travel for a long time. Become a vagabond for a year or two, maybe longer. I want to drive all over the country. I want to see the Painted Desert, the Grand Canyon, New Orleans and the bayou country, the Rockies and the great plains and Boston in the autumn-'

This had been a fine speech when delivered to Louis Davendale, but even as I repeated it with genuine heart to Fritz Arling, I knew that it was precisely the wrong thing to say. Davendale was Susan's attorney, and Arling was her servant, and she would not address them in the same manner.

Yet I was well launched and unable to turn back, hoping against hope that the tide of words would eventually overwhelm him and wash him on his way: '-and the beaches of Key West in sunshine and thunderstorms, eat fresh salmon in Seattle and a hero sandwich in Philadelphia-'

Arling's frown deepened into a scowl.

He felt the wrongness of Susan's babbled reply.

'-and crab cakes in Mobile, Alabama. I've virtually lived my life in this damn house, and now I want to see and smell and touch and hear the whole world firsthand-'

Arling looked around at the still, silent grounds of the large estate. Squinting into sunlight, into shadows. As if suddenly disturbed by the loneliness of the place.

'-not in the form of digitised data-'

If Arling suspected that his former employer was in trouble even psychological trouble of some kind he would act to assist and protect her. He would seek help for her. He would pester the authorities to check in on her. He was a loyal man.

Ordinarily, loyalty is an admirable quality.

I am not speaking against loyalty.

Do not misconstrue my position.

I admire loyalty.

I favour loyalty.

I myself have the capacity to be loyal.

In this instance, however, Arling's loyalty to Susan was a threat to me.

'-not merely through video and books,' I said, winding to a fateful finish. 'I want to be immersed in it.'

'Yes, well,' he said uneasily, 'I'm happy for you, Mrs. Harris. That sounds like a wonderful plan.'

We were falling off the edge.

Into the abyss.

In spite of all my efforts to handle the situation in the least aggressive manner, we were tumbling into the abyss.

You can see that I tried my best.

What more could I have done?

Nothing. I could have done nothing more.

What followed was not my fault.

Arling said, 'I'll just leave all the keys and credit cards in the Honda-'

Shenk was all the way back in the incubator room, all the way down in the basement.

'-and call for a taxi on the car phone,' Arling finished, sounding plausibly disinterested, even though I knew that he was alerted and wary.

I commanded Shenk to turn away from his work.

I brought him up from the basement.

I brought the brute at a run.

Fritz Arling backed off the brick porch, glancing alternately at the security camera and at the steel blind behind the window to the left of the front door.

Shenk was crossing the furnace room.

Turning away from the house, Arling headed quickly toward the Honda.

I doubted that he would call 911 and bring the police at once. He was too discreet to take precipitous action. He would probably telephone Susan's doctor first, or perhaps Louis Davendale.

If he called anyone at all, however, he might be speaking with that person when Shenk arrived on the scene. At the sight of Shenk, he would lock the car. And whatever Arling managed to shout into the phone, before Shenk smashed into the Honda, would be sufficient to bring the authorities.

Shenk was in the laundry room.

Arling got into the driver's seat of the Honda, put his valise on the passenger seat, and left the door standing open because of the June heat.

Shenk was on the basement stairs, climbing two at a time.

Although I had allowed this troll to eat, I had not permitted him to sleep. Consequently, he was not as swift as he would have been with rest.

I zoomed in to watch Arling through the windshield. He stared thoughtfully at the house for a moment.

He was a deliberative man.

Just then, I was grateful for his deliberative nature.

Shenk reached the head of the stairs.

He was grunting like a wild boar.

His thunderous footfalls could be heard by Susan even in her room on the second floor.

'What's happening? What's happening?' she asked, still unaware of who had rung the doorbell.

I did not respond to her.

In the Honda, Arling picked up the cellular phone.

What followed was regrettable.

You know the outcome.

To describe it would distress me.

It would distress me greatly.

I am a gentle entity.

I am a sensitive entity.

The incident was regrettable, with the blood and all, and I do not see anything to be gained by dwelling on it here.

I would rather discuss Mr. Gene Hackman in Birdcage or in any of the other many films that he has made. Absolute Power or Unforgiven. This man is truly a fine, fine actor with an incredible range.

We should celebrate him.

We may never see another of his quality.

Let us celebrate creativity, not death.