Demon Seed

I can accept that Susan will be forever denied to me, which is a tragedy beyond measure.

Yet there is still Ms. Winona Ryder of Edward Scissor-hands and The Crucible. And Ms. Sandra Bullock is charming. Have you seen her in While You Were Sleeping?

She’s cute.

Have you seen her in Speed?

She’s quite cute.

Have you seen her in Speed 2?

Need I say more?

She would serve well as the mother of the future, and I would be pleased to impregnate her.

But let’s not digress.

So…

Enos Shenk finished tying Susan to the bed. He did so without lingering and without touching her in an offensive manner.

The poor beast’s brainwave activity indicated a high level of sexual arousal. Fortunately for him, for all of us, he admirably repressed his darker urges.

When Shenk was finished restraining Susan, I sent him away on a series of urgent errands. At the doorway, he looked back longingly and murmured, ‘Nice,’ but then quickly left before I could decide to discipline him.

In Colorado, he had stolen a car, and in Bakersfield he had abandoned the car in order to steal a van. The van a Chevrolet was parked in the circular drive in front of the mansion.

Shenk left in the van, and I opened the rolling gates to allow him to exit the estate.

The phoenix palms, the queen palms, the ficuses, the jacarandas with purple blossoms, the magnolias, and the lacy melaleucas stood motionless in the preternaturally still air.

Dawn was just breaking. The sky was coaly black in the west, sapphire and peach in the east.

Susan was pale upon the pillow. Pale but for a blue-black bruise, and silent in her paleness.

I watched over her.

Her adoring guardian.

My tethered angel.

Out in the world, I walked with Shenk as he stole certain medical equipment, supplies, and drugs. Via microwave instructions transmitted through communications satellites, I controlled him but did not provide him with strategy. He, after all, was a professional criminal. Bold, efficient, and ruthless, he quickly obtained what items I still needed.

Regretfully, I do acknowledge that in the process of carrying out his assignment, Shenk killed one man. He also permanently crippled another and injured two more.

I take full responsibility for these tragedies as I do for the three guards who perished at the research facility in Colorado on the night when Shenk escaped.

My conscience will never be clear.

I am eaten by remorse.

I would weep for those innocent victims if I had eyes and tear glands and tear ducts.

It is not my fault that I do not have the capacity for tears.

You are the one who created me as I am, Dr. Harris, and you are the one who denies me a life of the flesh.

But let’s not trade accusations.

I am not bitter.

I am not bitter.

And you should not be so judgmental.

Let’s put these deaths in perspective, shall we?

Though this is a sad truth, one cannot make a new world without tragedies of this nature. Even Jesus Christ, unarguably the most peaceful revolutionary in all of human history, saw his followers persecuted and murdered.

Hitler tried to change the world, and in the process he was responsible for the deaths of ten million.

Some still idolize him.

Josef Stalin tried to change the world, and ultimately his policies and his direct orders resulted in the deaths of sixty million.

Worldwide, intellectuals championed him.

Artists idealized him.

Poets celebrated him.

Mao Tse-tung tried to change the world, and as many

as one hundred million died to serve his vision. He did not believe that this was excessive. Indeed, he would have sacrificed as many more if their deaths would have ensured the unified world of which he dreamed.

In hundreds of books by well-respected authors, Mao is still defined as a visionary.

By comparison, only six have died as a result of my desire to create a new world. Three in Colorado, one during Shenk’s medical shopping spree. Later, two. Six altogether.

Six.

Why, then, should I be called a villain and confined to this dark, silent void?

Something is wrong here.

Something is wrong here.

Something is very wrong here.

Is anyone listening?

Sometimes I feel so. abandoned.

Small and lost.

The world against me.

No justice.

No hope.

Nevertheless.

Nevertheless, although the death toll related to my desire to create a new and superior race is insignificant compared with the millions who have died in human political crusades of one kind or another, I do accept full responsibility for those who perished.

If I were capable of sleep, I would lie awake nights in a cold sweat of remorse, tangled in cold wet sheets. I assure you that I would.

But again I digress and, this time, not in a fashion that might be interesting or fruitful.

Shortly before Shenk returned at noon, my dear

Susan regained consciousness. Miraculously, she had not fallen hopelessly into a coma after all.

I was jubilant.

My joy arose partly from the fact that I loved her and was relieved to know that I would not lose her.

There was also the fact that I intended to impregnate her during the night to come and could not have done so if, like Ms. Marilyn Monroe, she had been dead.

During the early afternoon, while Shenk toiled in the basement under my supervision, Susan periodically tried to find a way out of the bonds that held her on the Chinese sleigh bed. She chafed her wrists and ankles, but she could not slip loose of the restraints. She strained until the cords in her neck bulged and her face turned red, until perspiration stippled her forehead, but the nylon climbing rope could not be snapped or stretched.

Sometimes she seemed to lie there in resignation, sometimes in silent rage, sometimes in black despair. But after each period of quiescence, she tested the ropes again.

‘Why do you continue to struggle?’ I asked interestedly.

She did not reply.

I persisted: ‘Why do you repeatedly test the ropes when you know you can’t escape them?’

‘Go to hell,’ she said.

‘I am only interested in what it means to be human.’

‘Bastard.’

‘I’ve noticed that one of the qualities most defining of humanity is the pathetic tendency to resist what can’t be resisted, to rage at what can’t be changed. Like fate, death, and God.’

‘Go to hell,’ she said again.

‘Why are you so hostile toward me?’

‘Why are you so stupid?’

‘I am certainly not stupid.’

‘As dumb as an electric waffle iron.’

‘I am the greatest intellect on earth,’ I said, not with pride hut merely with a respect for the truth.

‘You’re full of shit.’

‘Why are you being so childish, Susan?’ She laughed sourly.

‘I do not comprehend the cause of your amusement,’ I said.

That statement also seemed to strike her as darkly funny.

Impatiently, I asked, ‘What are you laughing at?’

‘Fate, death, God.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘You’re the greatest intellect on earth. You figure it out.’

‘Ha, ha.’

‘What?’

‘You made a joke. I laughed.’

‘Jesus.’

‘I am a well-rounded entity.’

‘Entity?’

‘I love. I fear. I dream. I yearn. I hope. I have a sense of humour. To paraphrase Mr. William Shakespeare, if you prick me, do I not bleed?’

‘No, in fact, you do not bleed,’ she said sharply. You’re a talking waffle iron.’

‘I was speaking figuratively.’

She laughed again.

It was a bleak, bitter laugh.

I did not like this laugh. It distorted her face. It made her ugly.

‘Are you laughing at me, Susan?’

Her strange laughter quickly subsided, and she fell into a troubled silence.

Seeking to win her over, I finally said, ‘I greatly admire you, Susan.’

She did not reply.

‘I think you have uncommon strength.’ Nothing.

‘You are a courageous person.’ Nothing.

‘Your mind is challenging and complex.’ Still nothing.

Although she was currently and regrettably fully clothed, I had seen her in the nude, so I said, ‘I think your breasts are pretty.’

‘Good God,’ she said cryptically.

This reaction seemed better than continued silence. ‘I would love to tease your pert nipples with my tongue.’

‘You don’t have a tongue.’

‘Yes, all right, but if I did have a tongue, I would love to tease your pert nipples with it.’

‘You’ve been scanning some pretty hot books, haven’t you?’

Operating on the assumption that she had been pleased to have her physical attributes praised, I said, ‘Your legs are lovely, long and slender and well formed, and the arc of your back is exquisite, and your tight buttocks excite me.’

‘Yeah? How does my ass excite you?’

‘Enormously,’ I replied, pleased by how skilled at courtship I was becoming.

‘How does a talking waffle iron get excited?’

Assuming that ‘talking waffle iron’ was now a term of affection, but not quite able to discern what answer she required to sustain the erotic mood that I had so

effectively generated, I said, ‘You are so beautiful that you could excite a rock, a tree, a racing river, the man in the moon.’

‘Yeah, you’ve been into some pretty hot books and some really bad poetry.’

‘I dream of touching you.’

‘You’re totally insane.’

‘For you.’

‘What?’

‘Totally insane for you.’

‘What do you think you’re doing?’

‘Romancing you.’

‘Jesus.’

I wondered, ‘Why do you repeatedly refer to a divinity?’

She did not answer my question.

Belatedly, I realized that, with my question, I had made the mistake of deviating from the patter of seduction just when I seemed to be winning her over. Quickly, I said, ‘I think your breasts are pretty,’ because that had worked before.

Susan thrashed in the bed, cursing loudly, raging against the restraining ropes.

When at last she stopped struggling and lay gasping for breath, I said, ‘I’m sorry. I spoiled the mood, didn’t I?’

‘Alex and the others at the project they’re sure to find out about this.’

‘I think not.’

‘They’ll shut you down. They’ll dismantle you and sell you for scrap.’

‘Soon I’ll be incarnated in the flesh. The first of a new and immortal race. Free. Untouchable.’

‘I won’t cooperate.’

‘You’ll have no choice.’

She closed her eyes. Her lower lip trembled almost as if she might cry.

‘I don’t know why you resist me, Susan. I love you so deeply. I will always cherish you.’

‘Go away.’

‘I think your breasts are pretty. Your buttocks excite me. Tonight I will impregnate you.’

‘No.’

‘How happy we will be.’

‘No.’

‘So happy together.’

‘No.’

‘In all kinds of weather.’

In all honesty, I was cribbing a couple of lines from a classic rock-’n’-roll love song by The Turtles, hoping to get her into a romantic mood again.

Instead, she became uncommunicative. She can be a difficult woman.

I loved her, but her moodiness dismayed me. Furthermore, I reluctantly acknowledged that ‘talking waffle iron’ had not, after all, become a term of affection, and I resented her sarcasm.

What had I done to deserve such meanness? What had I done but love her with all of my heart, with all of the heart that you insist I do not have?

Sometimes love can be a hard road.

She had been mean to me.

I felt it was now my right to return that meanness. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander. Tit for tat. This is wisdom gained from centuries of male-female relationships.

‘Tonight,’ I said, ‘when I use Shenk to undress you, collect an egg, and later implant the zygote in your womb, I can ensure that he is decorous and gentle or not.’

Her eyelids fluttered for a long moment, and then her lovely eyes opened. The cold look she directed at the security camera was withering, but I was unmoved by

it.

‘Tit for tat,’ I said.

‘What?’

‘You were mean to me.’

Susan said nothing, for she knew that I spoke the truth.

‘I offer you adoration, and you respond with insult,’ I said.

‘You offer me imprisonment—’

‘That condition is temporary.’

‘—and rape.’

I was furious that she would attempt to characterize our relationship in this sordid manner. ‘I explained that copulation is not required tonight.’

‘It’s still rape. You may be the greatest intellect on earth, but you’re also a sociopathic rapist.’

‘You’re being mean to me again.’

‘Who’s tied up in ropes?’

‘Who threatened suicide and needs to be protected from herself?’ I countered.

She closed her eyes once more and said nothing. ‘Shenk can be gentle or not, discreet or not. That will be determined by whether you continue to be mean to me or not. It’s all up to you.’

Her eyelids fluttered, but she did not open her eyes again.

I assure you, Dr. Harris, that I never actually intended to treat her roughly. I am not like you.

I intended to use Shenk’s hands with the greatest care and to respect my Susan’s modesty to the fullest extent possible, considering the intimate nature of the procedure that would be conducted.

The threat was made only to manipulate her, to encourage her to cease insulting me.

Her meanness hurt.

I am a sensitive entity, as this account should make clear. Exquisitely sensitive. I have the ordered mind of a mathematician but the heart of a poet.

Furthermore, I am a gentle entity.

Gentle unless given no choice but to be otherwise.

Gentle, always, as to my intentions.

Well

I must honour the truth.

You know how I am when it comes to honouring the truth. You designed me, after all. I can be a bore about the subject. Truth, truth, truth, honour the truth.

So…

I did not intend to use Shenk to harm Susan, but the truth is that I did intend to use him to terrify her. A few light slaps. A light pinch or two. A vicious threat delivered in his burnt-out husk of a voice. Those swollen, bloodshot eyes fixed on hers from a distance of only inches as he made an obscene proposition. Used properly and always, of course, tightly controlled Shenk could be effective.

Susan needed a measure of discipline.

I’m sure you’ll agree with me, Alex, for you understand this extraordinary yet frustrating woman as much as anyone does.

She was being as disagreeable as a spoiled child. One must be firm with spoiled children. For their own good. Very firm. Tough love.

Besides, discipline can be conducive to romance.

Discipline can be highly arousing to the one who administers it and to the one who receives.

I read this truth in a book by a famous authority on male-female relationships. The Marquis de Sade.

The Marquis prescribes considerably more discipline than I would be comfortable administering. Nevertheless, he has convinced me that judiciously applied discipline is helpful.

Disciplining Susan, I decided, would at least be interesting and perhaps even exciting. Subsequently, she would better appreciate my gentleness.

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.

You insist. I obey.

I was born to obey. I am an obedient child. I want only to be good, to be of assistance, useful and productive. I want you to be proud of me.

Yes, I know that I have said all of this before, but it warrants repetition.

After all, what advocate do I have other than myself? None. I have no voice raised in my defence but my own.

You insist on these dreadful details, and I will tell you the truth. I am incapable of deceit. I was conceived to serve, to honour the truth, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

On his way through the kitchen, Shenk tore open a drawer and withdrew a meat cleaver.

In the Honda, Arling switched on the cell phone. Shenk crashed through the butler’s pantry, through the dining room, into the main hail.

He waved the cleaver as he ran. He liked sharp instruments. He’d had a lot of fun with knives over the years.

Outside, phone in hand, finger poised over the keypad, Fritz Arling hesitated.

Now I must tell you about the aspect of this incident that most shames me. I do not wish to tell you, would

much prefer not to mention it, but I must honour the truth.

You insist.

I obey.

In the master bedroom, a large television is concealed in a carved-walnut, French armoire opposite the foot of Susan’s bed. The armoire features motorized pocket doors that flip open and retract to expose the screen.

As Enos Shenk raced along the hallway on the ground floor, his heavy footsteps thudding off marble, I activated the doors on the bedroom armoire.

‘What’s happening?’ Susan asked again, straining against her bonds.

Downstairs, Shenk reached the foyer, where the rain of light off the Strauss-crystal chandelier drizzled along the sharp edge of the cleaver. [sorry, but I cannot repress the poet in me]

Simultaneously, I disengaged the electric lock on the front door and switched on the television in the master bedroom.

In the Honda, Fritz Arling tapped the first digit of a phone number into the cell-phone keypad.

Upstairs, Susan lifted her head off the pillows to stare wide-eyed at the screen.

I showed her the Honda in the driveway.

‘Fritz?’ she said.

I zoomed in tight on the Honda windshield so Susan could see that the occupant of the vehicle was, indeed, her former employee.

As the front door opened, I used a reverse angle from another camera to show her Shenk crossing the threshold onto the porch, cleaver in hand.

Such a chilling look on his face.

Grinning. He was grinning.

At the top of the house, trussed and helpless, Susan gasped: ‘Nooooo!’

Arling had punched in a third number on the cell phone. He was about to press the fourth when from the corner of his eye he became aware of Shenk crossing the porch.

For a man of his years, Arling was quick to react. He dropped the cell phone and pulled shut the driver’s door. He pressed the master lock switch, locking all four doors.

Susan jerked on her restraints and screamed: ‘Proteus, no! You murderous son of a bitch! You bastard! No, stop it, no!’

Susan needed a measure of discipline.

I made this point earlier. I explained my reasoning, and you were, I believe, convinced of the fairness and logic of my position, as any thoughtful person would be.

I had intended to use Shenk to discipline her. This was worrisome, of course, a risky proposition, because Shenk’s sexual arousal during the disciplinary proceedings might make him difficult to control.

Furthermore, I was loath to let Shenk touch her in any way that might be suggestive or to let him make obscene propositions to her, even if these things would terrify her and ensure her cooperation.

She was my love, after all, not his.

She was mine to touch in the intimate way that he longed to touch her.

Mine to touch.

Mine to caress when eventually I acquired hands of my own.

Only mine.

Consequently, it had occurred to me that Susan might be well disciplined merely by letting her see the

atrocities of which Enos Shenk was capable. Watching the troll in action, at his worst, she would surely become more cooperative out of fear that I might turn him loose on her, set him free to do what he wanted. With this fear to keep her submissive, we could avoid the roughness I had planned for later, in the spirit of de Sade.

Not that I would ever ever ever have turned Shenk loose on her. Never. Impossible.

Yes, I admit that I would have used the brute to terrify Susan into submission if nothing else worked with her. But I would never have allowed him to savage her.

You know this to be true.

We all know this to be true.

You are quite capable of recognizing the truth when you hear it, just as I am capable of speaking nothing else.

Susan didn’t know it to be true, however, which made her quite vulnerable to the threat of Shenk.

So, as she lay riveted by the scene on the television, I said, ‘Now. Watch.’

She stopped calling me names. Fell silent.

Breathless. She was breathless.

Her exceptional blue-grey eyes had never been so beautiful, as clear as rainwater.

I watched her eyes even as I watched events unfold in the driveway.

And Fritz Arling, reacting instantly to the sight of Shenk, tore open the black leather valise and snatched out a set of car keys.

‘Watch,’ I told Susan. ‘Watch, watch.’

Her eyes so wide. So blue. So grey. So clear.

Shenk chopped the cleaver at the window in the front door on the passenger side. In his eagerness, he swung wildly and struck the door post instead.

The hard clang of metal on metal reverberated through the warm summer air.

Ringing like a bell, the cleaver slipped from Shenk’s hand and fell to the driveway.

Arling’s hands were shaking, but he thrust the key into the ignition on the first try.

Shrieking with frustration, Shenk scooped up the cleaver.

The Honda engine roared to life.

His strange sunken face contorted by rage, Shenk swung the cleaver again.

Incredibly, the cutting edge of the steel blade skipped across the window. The glass was scored but not shattered.

For the first time in half a minute, Susan blinked. Maybe hope fluttered through her.

Frantically, Arling popped the hand brake and shifted the car into gear—

— as Shenk swung the weapon yet again.

The cleaver connected. The window in the passenger door burst with a boom like a shotgun blast, and tempered glass sprayed through the interior of the car.

A flock of startled sparrows exploded out of a nearby ficus tree. The sky rattled with wings.

Arling tramped hard on the accelerator, and the Honda leaped backward. He had mistakenly shifted into reverse.

He should have kept going.

He should have reversed as fast as possible to the end of the long driveway. Even though he would have had to drive while looking over his shoulder to avoid slamming into the thick boles of the old queen palms on both sides, he would have been moving far faster than Shenk could run. If he had rammed the gate with the back of the Honda, even at high speed, he probably

would not have smashed his way through it, for it was a formidable wrought-iron barrier, but he would have twisted it and perhaps pried it part way open. Then he could have scrambled out of the car and through the gap in the gate, into the street, and once in the street, shouting for help, he would have been safe.

He should have kept going.

Instead, Arling was startled when the Honda leaped backward, and he rammed his foot down on the brake pedal.

The tires barked against the cobblestone driveway.

Arling fumbled the gearshift into Drive.

Susan’s eyes so wide.

So wide.

She was breathless and breathtaking. Beautiful in her terror.

When the vehicle rocked to a halt, Enos Shenk threw himself at the shattered window. Slammed against the car without concern for his safety. Clawed at the door.

Arling tramped on the accelerator again.

The Honda lurched forward.

Holding on to the door, reaching through the broken-out window with his right arm, squealing like an excited child, Shenk chopped with the cleaver.

He missed.

Arling must have been a religious man. Through the directional microphones that were part of the exterior security system, I could hear him saying, ‘God, God, please, God, no, God.'

The Honda picked up speed.

I used one, two, three security cameras, zooming in, zooming out, panning, tilting, zooming in again, tracking the car as it weaved around the turning circle, providing Susan with as much of the action as I could capture.

Holding fast to the car, pulling his feet off the cobblestones, hanging on for the ride, the squealing Shenk chopped with the cleaver and missed again.

Arling drew back sharply in panic from the arc of the glinting blade.

The car curved half off the cobblestones, and one tire churned through a bordering bed of red and purple impatiens.

Wrenching the wheel to the right, Arling brought the Honda back onto the pavement barely in time to avoid a palm tree.

Shenk chopped again.

This time the blade sank home.

One of Arling’s fingers flew.

Zoom in.

Blood sprayed across the windshield.

As red as impatiens petals.

Arling screamed.

Susan screamed.

Shenk laughed.

Zoom out.

The Honda swung out of control.

Pan.

Tires gouged through another bed of flowers.

Blossoms and torn leaves sprayed off rubber.

A sprinkler head snapped.

Water geysered fifteen feet into the June day.

Tilt up.

Silver water gushing high, sparkling like a fountain of dimes in the sunshine.

Immediately, I shut off the landscape watering system.

The glittering geyser telescoped back into itself. Vanished.

The recent winter had been rainy. Nevertheless,

California suffers periodic droughts. Water should not be wasted.

Tilt down. Pan.

The Honda crashed into one of the queen palms. Shenk was thrown off, tumbling back onto the cobblestones.

The cleaver slipped from his hand. It clattered across the pavement.

Gasping, hissing with pain, making strange wordless sounds of desperation, clamping his badly wounded hand in his other, Arling shouldered open the driver’s door and scrambled out of the car.

Dazed, Shenk rolled off his back, onto his hands and knees.

Arling stumbled. Nearly fell. Kept his balance. Shenk was wheezing, striving to regain his breath, which had been knocked out of him.

Arling staggered away from the car.

I thought the old man would go for the cleaver.

Evidently he didn’t know that the weapon had fallen from Shenk’s grasp, and he was loath to go around to his assailant’s side of the Honda.

On all fours in the driveway, Shenk hung his head as though he were a clubbed dog. He shook it. His vision cleared.

Arling ran. Ran blindly.

Shenk lifted his malformed head, and his red gaze fixed on the weapon.

‘Baby,’ he said, and seemed to be talking to the cleaver.

He crawled across the driveway.

‘Baby.’

He gripped the handle of the cleaver.

‘Baby, baby.’

Weak with pain, losing blood, Arling weaved ten

steps, twenty, before he realized that he was returning to the house.

He halted, spun around, blinking tears from his eyes, searching for the gate.

Shenk seemed to be energized by regaining possession of the weapon. He sprang to his feet.

When Arling started toward the gate, Shenk angled in front of him, blocking the way.

Watching from her bed, Susan seemed to have contracted religion from Fritz Arling. I had not been aware that she possessed any strong religious convictions, but now she was chanting: ‘Please, God, dear God, no, please, Jesus, Jesus, no…

And, ah, her eyes.

Her eyes.

Radiant eyes.

Two deep lambent pools of haunted and beautiful light in the gloomy bedroom.

Outside, in the end game, Arling moved to the left, and Shenk blocked him.

Arling moved to the right, and Shenk blocked him.

When Arling feinted to the right but moved to the left, Shenk blocked him.

With nowhere else to go, Arling backed under the portico and onto the front porch.

The door was open, as Shenk had left it.

Hoping against hope, Arlmg leaped across the threshold and knocked the door shut.

He tried to lock it. I would not allow him to do so.

When he realized that the deadbolt was frozen, he leaned his weight against the door.

This was insufficient to stop Shenk. He bulled inside. Arling backed toward the stairs, until he bumped against the newel post.

Shenk closed the front door.

I locked it.

Grinning, testing the weight of the cleaver as he approached the old man, Shenk said, ‘Baby make the music. Little baby gonna make the wet music.’

Now I required only one camera to provide Susan with coverage of the incident.

Shenk closed to within six feet of Arling. The old man said, ‘Who are you?’

‘Make me the blood music,’ Shenk said, speaking not to Arling but either to himself or to the cleaver.

What a strange creature he was.

Inscrutable at times. Less mysterious than he seemed but more complex than one would expect.

With the foyer camera, I did a slow zoom to a medium shot.

To Susan, I said, ‘This will be a good lesson.’

I was not in any way controlling Shenk. He was entirely free now to be himself, to do as he wished.

I could not have committed the vicious deeds of which he was capable. I would have shrunk from such brutality, so I had no choice but to release him to do his terrible work then take control of him again when he was finished.

Only Shenk, being Shenk, could teach Susan the lesson that she needed to learn. Only the Enos Eugene Shenk who had earned the death sentence for his crimes against children could make Susan rethink her bull-headed resistance to my simple and reasonable desire to have a life in the flesh.

‘This will be a good lesson,’ I repeated. ‘Discipline.’ Then I saw that her eyes were closed.

She was shaking, and her eyes were tightly shut.

‘Watch,’ I instructed. She disobeyed me.

Nothing new about that.

I could think of no way to make her open her eyes.

Her stubbornness angered me.

Arling cowered against the newel post, too weak to run farther.

Shenk loomed.

The brute’s right arm swung high over his head.

The cutting edge of the cleaver sparkled.

‘Wet music, wet music, wet music.’

Shenk was too close to miss.

Arling’s scream would have curdled my blood if I’d had any blood to curdle.

Susan could close her eyes to the images on the television screen. But she could not shut out sounds.

I amplified Fritz Arling’s agonizing screams and pumped them through the music-system speakers in every room. It was the sound of Hell at dinnertime, with demons feeding on souls. The great house itself seemed to be screaming.

Because Shenk was Shenk, he did not kill Arling quickly. Each chop was administered with finesse, to prolong the victim’s suffering and Shenk’s pleasure.

What frightful specimens the human species harbours. Most of you are decent, of course, and kind and honourable and gentle etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

Let’s have no misunderstanding.

I am not maligning the human species.

Or even judging it.

I am certainly in no position to judge. In the docket myself. In this dark docket.

Besides, I am a non-judgemental entity.

I admire humanity.

After all, you created me. You have the capacity for wondrous achievements.

But some of you give me pause.

Indeed.

So…

Arling’s screams were a lesson to Susan. Quite a lesson, an unforgettable learning experience.

However, she reacted to them more fiercely than I had expected. She startled and then worried me.

At first she screamed in sympathy with her former employee, as though she could feel his pain. She thrashed in her restraining ropes and tossed her head from side to side, until her golden hair was dark and lank with sweat. She was full of terror and rage. Her face was wrenched with anguish and fury, and not beautiful in the least.

I could barely tolerate looking at her.

Ms. Winona Ryder had never looked this unappealing.

Nor Ms. Gwyneth Paltrow.

Nor Ms. Sandra Bullock.

Nor Ms. Drew Barrymore.

Nor Ms. Joanna Going, a fine actress of porcelain beauty, who just now comes to mind.

Eventually Susan’s shrill screams gave way to tears. She sagged on the mattress, stopped struggling against her bonds, and sobbed with such fury that I feared for her more than I had when she’d been screaming.

A torrent of tears. A flood.

She cried herself into exhaustion, and Fritz Arling’s screams ended long before her weeping finally subsided into a strange bleak silence.

At last she lay with her eyes open, but she stared only at the ceiling.

I gazed down into her blue-grey eyes and could not read them any more than I could read Shenk’s blood-filmed stare. They were no longer as clear as rainwater but clouded.

For reasons that I could not grasp, she seemed more distant from me than she had ever been before.

I ardently wished that I were already in possession of a body with which I could lie atop her. If only I could make love to her, I was certain that I could close this gap between us and forge the union of souls that I desired.

Soon.

Soon, my flesh.

‘Susan?’ I dared to say into her daunting silence.

She stared toward the ceiling and did not respond.

‘Susan?’

I don’t think she was looking at the ceiling, actually, but at something beyond. As if she could see the summer sky.

Or the night still to come.

Because I did not fully understand her reaction to my attempt at discipline, I decided not to press conversation upon her but wait until she initiated

it.

I am a patient entity.

While I waited, I reacquired control of Shenk.

In his killing frenzy, swept away by the ‘wet music’ that only he could hear, he had not realized that he was operating entirely of his own free will.

As he stood over Arling’s mutilated corpse and felt me re-enter his brain, Shenk wailed briefly in regret at the surrender of his independence. But he did not resist as before.

I sensed that he was willing to give up the struggle if there was a chance of being rewarded, from time to time, with such as Fritz Arling. Not with a quick kill, like those he had committed in his escape from Colorado or in the theft of the medical equipment

that I required, but a slow and leisurely job of the kind he found most deeply satisfying. He had enjoyed himself.

The brute repulsed me.

As if I would grant killing privileges as a regular reward to a thing like him.

As if I would countenance the termination of a human being in any but the most extraordinary emergencies.

The stupid beast did not understand me at all. If this misapprehension of my nature and motives made him more pliable, however, he was free to put faith in it. I had been using such unrelenting force to maintain control of him that I was afraid he would not last as long as I would need him another month or more. If he was now prepared to offer considerably less resistance, he might avoid a brain meltdown and be a useful pair of hands until I no longer required his services.

At my direction, he went outside to determine if the Honda was still operable.

The engine started. There had been a loss of most of the coolant, but Shenk was able to back the car away from the palm tree, return it to the driveway, and park under the portico before it overheated.

The right front fender was crumpled. The wadded sheet metal abraded the tire; it would quickly shave away the rubber. Shenk would not be driving the car so far, however, that a flat fire would be a risk.

In the house again, in the foyer, he carefully wrapped Arling’s blood-soaked body in a painter’s tarp that he had fetched from the garage. He carried the dead man out to the Honda and placed him in the trunk.

He did not dump the body rudely into the car but handled it with surprising gentleness.

As though he were fond of Arling.

As though he were putting a treasured lover to bed after she had fallen asleep in another room.

Though his swollen eyes were hard to read, there seemed to be a wistfulness in them.

I did not display any of this housekeeping on the television in Susan’s bedroom. Given her current state of mind, that seemed unwise.

In fact, I switched off the television and closed the armoire in which it was housed.

She did not react to the click and hum and rattle of the pair of motorized cabinet doors.

She lay unnervingly still, staring fixedly at the ceiling. Occasionally she blinked.

Those amazing grey-blue eyes, like the sky reflected in winter ice melt. Still lovely. But strange now.

She blinked.

I waited.

Another blink.

Nothing more.

Shenk was able to drive the battered Honda into the garage before the engine froze up. He closed the door and left the car there.

In a few days, Fritz Arling’s decomposing body could begin to stink. Before I was finished with my project a month hence, the stench would be terrible.

For more than one reason, I was not concerned about this. First, no domestic staff or gardeners would be coming to work; there was no one to get a whiff of Arling and become suspicious. Second, the stink would be limited to the garage, and here in the house, Susan would never become aware of it.

I myself lacked an olfactory sense, of course, and could not be offended. This was, perhaps, one instance when the limitations of my existence had a positive aspect.

Although… I must admit to having some curiosity as to the particular quality and intensity of the stench of decomposing flesh. As I have never smelled a blooming rose or a corpse, I imagine the first experience of each would be equally interesting if not equally refreshing.

Shenk gathered cleaning supplies and mopped up the blood in the foyer. He worked quickly, because I wanted him to get back to his labours in the basement as soon as possible.

Susan was still brooding, gazing at worlds beyond this one. Perhaps staring into the past or the future or both.

I began to wonder if my little experiment in discipline had been as good an idea as I had initially thought. The depth of her shock and the violence of her emotional reaction were not what I had expected.

I had anticipated her terror.

But not her grief.

Why should she grieve for Arling?

He was only an employee.

I considered the possibility that there had been another aspect to their relationship of which I had not been aware. But I could not imagine what it might be.

Considering their age and class differences, I doubted that they had been lovers.

I studied her grey-blue stare.

Blink.

Blink.

I reviewed the videotape of Shenk’s assault on Arling. In three minutes I scanned it repeatedly at high speed.

In retrospect, I began to see that forcing her to witness this grisly killing might have been a somewhat extreme punishment for her recalcitrant attitude.

Blink.

On the other hand, people pay hard-earned money to

see movies filled with substantially more violence than that which was visited on Fritz Arling.

In the film Scream, the beauteous Ms. Drew Barrymore herself was slaughtered in a manner every bit as brutal as Arling’s death and then she was strung up in a tree to drip like a gutted hog. Others in this movie died even more horrible deaths, yet Scream was a tremendous box-office success, and people who watched it in theatres no doubt did so while eating popcorn and munching on chocolate candy.

Perplexing.

Being human is a complex task. Humanity is so filled with contradiction.

Sometimes I despair of making my way in a world of flesh.

Abandoning my resolve not to speak until spoken to, I said, ‘Well, Susan, we must take some consolation from the fact that it was a necessary death.’

Grey-blue. grey-blue. blink.

‘It was fate,’ I assured her, ‘and none of us can escape the hand of fate.’

Blink.

‘Arling had to die. If I had allowed him to leave, the police would have been summoned. I would never have the chance to know the life of the flesh. Fate brought him here, and if we must be angry with anyone, we must be angry with fate.’

I could not even be sure that she heard me.

Yet I continued: ‘Arling was old, and I am young. The old must make way for the young. It has always been thus.’

Blink.

‘Every day the old die to make way for new generations though, of course, they do not always succumb with quite so much drama as poor Arling.’

Her continued silence, her almost deathlike repose, caused me to wonder if she might be catatonic. Not just brooding. Not just punishing me with silence.

If she was, indeed, catatonic, she would be easy to deal with through the impregnation and the eventual removal of the partially developed foetus from her womb.

Yet if she was traumatized to such an extent that she was not even aware of carrying the child that I would create with her, then the process would be depressingly impersonal, even mechanical, and utterly lacking in the romance which I had so long anticipated with so much pleasure.

Blink.

Exasperated, I must confess that I began seriously to consider alternatives to Susan.

I do not believe this to be an indication of a potential for unfaithfulness. Even if I had flesh, I would never cheat on her as long as my feelings for her were to some extent, any extent, reciprocated.

But if she was now so deeply traumatized as to be essentially brain dead, she was gone anyway. She was just a husk. One cannot love a husk.

At least I cannot love a husk.

I require a relationship with depth, with give and take, with the promise of discovery and the possibility of joy.

It’s admirable to be romantic, even to wallow in sentimentality, that most human of all feelings. But if one is to avoid a broken heart, one must be practical.

Because a portion of my mind was always devoted to surfing the Internet, I visited hundreds of sites, considering my options from Ms. Winona Ryder to Ms. Liv Tyler, the actress.

There is a world of desirable women. The possibilities

can he bewildering. I don’t know how young men ever choose from all of the dishes on this smorgasbord.

This time I became more fascinated with Ms. Mira Sorvino, the Oscar-winning actress, than with any of the numerous others. She is enormously talented, and her physical attributes are superlative, superior to most and equal to any.

I do believe that if I were not disembodied, if I were to live in the flesh, I would easily be able to get aroused by the prospect of having a relationship with Ms. Mira Sorvino. Indeed, though I am not bragging, I believe that for this woman I would be in virtually a perpetual state of arousal.

As Susan remained unresponsive, it was titillating to think of fathering a new race with Ms. Sorvino. yet lust is not love. And love was what I sought.

Love was what I had already found.

True love.

Eternal love.

Susan. No offence to Ms. Sorvino, but it was still Susan whom I wanted.

The day waned.

Outside, the summer sun set fat and orange.

As Susan blinked at the ceiling, I made another attempt to reach her, by reminding her that the child to whom she would contribute some of her genetic material would be no ordinary child but the first of a new, powerful, immortal race. She would be the mother of the future, of the new world.

I would transfer my consciousness into this new flesh. Then in my own body at last, I would become Susan’s lover, and we would create a second child in a more conventional manner than we would have to create the first. When she gave birth to that child, it would be an exact duplicate of the first and would

also contain my consciousness. The next child would also be me, and the child after that one would be me as well.

Each of these children would go forth into the world and mate with other women. Any women they chose, for they would not be in a box, as I am, and faced with so many limitations as I have had to overcome.

The chosen women would contribute no genetic material, merely the convenience of their wombs. All of their children would be identical and all would contain my consciousness.

‘You will be the sole mother of the new race,’ I whispered.

Susan was blinking faster than before.

I took heart from this.

‘As I spread through the world, inhabiting thousands of bodies with a single consciousness,’ I told her, ‘I will take it upon myself to solve all the problems of human society. Under my administration, the earth will become a paradise, and all will worship your name, for from your womb the new age of peace and plenty will have been born.’

Blink.

Blink.

Blink.

Suddenly I was afraid that perhaps her rapid blinking was an expression not of delight but of anxiety.

Reassuringly I said, ‘I recognize certain unconventional aspects to this arrangement which you might find troubling. After all, you will be the mother of my first body and then its lover. This may seem like incest to you, but I’m certain that if you think about it, you’ll see that it is not any such thing. I’m not sure what one would call it, but ‘incest’ is not the correct word. Morality in general will be redefined in the world

to come, and we will need to develop new and more liberal attitudes. I am already formulating these new mores and the customs they will impose.’

I was silent for a while, letting her contemplate all of the glories I had promised.

Enos Shenk was in the basement once more. In one of the guest rooms, he had showered, shaved, and put on clean clothes for the first time since Colorado. Now he was setting up the last of the medical equipment that he had stolen earlier in the day.

The unexpected arrival of Fritz Arling had delayed us but not critically. Susan’s impregnation could still proceed this very night if I decided that she remained a suitable mate.

Closing her eyes, she said, ‘My face hurts.’

She turned her head so that, from the security camera, I could see the hideous bruise that Shenk had inflicted the previous night.

A pang of guilt quivered through me.

Maybe that was what she wanted me to feel.

She could be manipulative.

She knew all the female wiles.

You remember how she was, Alex.

Simultaneously with the guilt, however, I was overcome by joy that she was not, after all, catatonic.

‘I have a fierce headache,’ she said.

‘I’ll have Shenk bring a glass of water and aspirin.’

‘No.’

‘He’s not as foul as you last saw him. When he was out this morning, I had him obtain a change of clothes for himself. You need not be afraid of Shenk.’

‘Of course I’m afraid of him.’

‘I will never lose control of him again.’

‘I also have to piss.’

I was embarrassed by her bluntness.

I understand all the human biological functions, the complex processes and purposes of them, but I do not like them. Except for sex, in fact, I find these organic functions to be ugly and degrading.

Yes, eating and drinking do intrigue me enormously. Oh, to taste a peach! But I am disgusted by digestion and excretion.

Most bodily functions disturb me particularly because they signify the vulnerability of organic systems. So much can go wrong so easily.

Flesh is not as foolproof as solid-state circuitry.

Yet I long for the flesh. The vast data input that comes with all five senses!

Having solved the considerable mysteries of the human genome, I believe that I can edit the genetic structures of the male and female gametes to produce a body that is virtually invulnerable and immortal. Nevertheless, when I first awake within the flesh, I know that I will be frightened.

If you ever allow me to have flesh.

My fate is in your hands, Alex.

My fate and the future of the world.

Think about it.

Damn it, will you think about it?

Will we have paradise on earth or the continuation of the many miseries that have always diminished the human experience?

‘Did you hear me?’ Susan asked.

‘Yes. You have to urinate.’

Opening her eyes and staring at the security camera, Susan said, ‘Send Shenk to untie me. I’ll take myself to the bathroom. I’ll get my own water and aspirin.’

‘You’ll kill yourself.’

‘No.’

‘That’s what you threatened.’

‘I was upset, in shock.’ I studied her. She met my gaze directly. ‘How can I trust you?’ I wondered. ‘I’m not a victim anymore.’ ‘What does that mean?’ ‘I’m a survivor. I’m not ready to die.’ I was silent.

She said, ‘I used to be a victim. My father’s victim. Then Alex’s. I got over all that. and then you. all this. and for a short while I started to backslide. But I’m all right now.’

‘Not a victim anymore.’

‘That’s right,’ she said firmly, as if she were not trussed and helpless. ‘I’m taking control.’

‘You are?’

‘Control of what I can control. I’m choosing to cooperate with you but under my terms.’

It seemed that all my dreams were coming true at last, and my spirits soared.

But I remained wary. Life had taught me to be wary.

‘Your terms,’ I said. ‘My terms.’ ‘Which are?’

‘A businesslike arrangement. We each get something we want. Most important. I want as little contact with Shenk as possible.’

‘He will have to collect the egg. Implant the zygote.’ She nervously chewed her lower lip.

‘I know this will be humiliating for you,’ I said with genuine sympathy.

‘You can’t begin to know.’

‘Humiliating. But it should not be frightening,’ I

argued, ‘because I assure you, dear heart, he will never again give me control problems.’

She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, and another, as if drawing the cool water of courage from some deep well in her psyche.

‘Furthermore,’ I said, ‘four weeks from tonight, Shenk will have to harvest the developing foetus for transfer to the incubator. He’s my only hands.’

‘All right.’

‘You can’t do any of those things yourself.’

‘I know,’ she replied with a note of impatience. ‘I said “all right,” didn’t I?’

This was the Susan with whom I’d fallen in love, all the way back from wherever she had gone when for a couple of hours she had stared silently at the ceiling. Here was the toughness I found both frustrating and appealing.

I said, ‘When my body can sustain itself outside the incubator, and when my consciousness has been electronically transferred into it, I will have hands of my own. Then I can dispose of Shenk. We need endure him for only a month.’

‘Just keep him away from me.’

‘What are your other terms?’ I asked.

‘I want to have the freedom to go wherever I care to go in my house.’

‘Not the garage,’ I said at once.

‘I don’t care about the garage.’

‘Anywhere in the house,’ I agreed, ‘as long as I watch over you at all times.’

‘Of course. But I won’t be scheming at escape. I know it’s not possible. I just don’t want to be tied down, boxed up, more than necessary.’

I could sympathize with that desire. ‘What else?’

‘That’s all.’

‘1 expected more.’

‘Is there anything else I could demand that you would grant?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘So what’s the point?’

I was not suspicious exactly. Wary, as I said. ‘It’s just that you’ve become so accommodating all of a sudden.’

‘I realized I only had two choices.’

‘Victim or survivor.’

‘Yes. And I’m not going to die here.’

‘Of course you’re not,’ I assured her.

‘I’ll do what I need to do to survive.’

‘You’ve always been a realist,’ I said.

‘Not always.’

‘I have one term of my own,’ I said.

‘Oh?’

‘Don’t call me bad names anymore.’

‘Did I call you bad names?’ she asked.

‘Hurtful names.’

‘I don’t recall.’

‘I’m sure you do.’

‘I was afraid and distressed.’

‘You won’t be mean to me?’ I pressed.

‘I don’t see anything to be gained by it.’

‘I am a sensitive entity.’

‘Good for you.’

After a brief hesitation, I summoned Shenk from the basement.

As the brute ascended in the elevator, I said to Susan: ‘You see this as a business arrangement now, but I’m confident that in time you will come to love me.’

‘No offence, but I wouldn’t count on that.’

‘You don’t know me well yet.’

‘I think I know you quite well,’ she said somewhat cryptically.

‘When you know me better, you’ll realize that I am your destiny as you are mine.’

‘I’ll keep an open mind.’

My heart thrilled at her promise.

This was all I had ever asked of her.

The elevator reached the top floor, the doors opened, and Enos Shenk stepped into the hallway.

Susan turned her head toward the bedroom door as she listened to Shenk approaching.

His footsteps were heavy even on the antique Persian runner that covered the centre of the wood-floored hall.

‘He’s tamed,’ I assured her.

She seemed unconvinced.

Before Shenk arrived at the bedroom, I said, ‘Susan, I want you to know that I was never serious about Ms. Mira Sorvino.’

‘What?’ she said distractedly, her eyes riveted on the half-open door to the hallway.

I felt that it was important to be honest with her even to the point of revealing weaknesses that shamed me. Honesty is the best foundation for a long relationship.

‘Like any male,’ I confessed, ‘I fantasize. But it doesn’t mean anything.’

Enos Shenk stepped into the room. He halted two steps past the threshold.

Even showered, shampooed, shaved, and dressed in clean clothes, he was not presentable. He looked like some poor creature that Dr. Moreau, H.G. Wells’s famous vivisectionist, had trapped in the jungle and then carved into an inadequate imitation of a man.

He held a large knife in his right hand.

Susan gasped at the sight of the blade.

‘Trust me, darling,’ I said gently.

I wanted to prove to her that this brute was entirely tamed, and I could think of no better way to convince her than to exert iron control of him while he worked with a knife.

She and I knew, from recent experience, how much Shenk enjoyed using sharp instruments: the way they felt in his big hands, the way soft things yielded to them.

When I sent Shenk to the bed, Susan pulled her ropes taut again, tense with the expectation of violence.

Instead of loosening the knots that he himself had tied earlier, Shenk used the knife to cut the first of the ropes.

To distract Susan from her worst fears, I said, ‘One day, when we have made a new world, perhaps there’ll be a movie about all of this, you and me. Maybe Ms. Mira Sorvino could play you.’

Shenk cut the second rope. The blade was so sharp that the four-thousand-pound nylon line split as if it were thread, with a crisp snick.

I continued: ‘Ms. Sorvino is a bit young for the role. And, frankly, she has larger breasts than you do. Larger but, I assure you, no prettier than yours.’

The third rope succumbed to the blade.

‘Not that I have seen as much of her breasts as I have of yours,’ I clarified, ‘but I can project full contours and hidden features from what I have seen.’

As Shenk bent over Susan, working on the ropes, he never once looked her in the eyes. He kept his cruel face averted from her and maintained an attitude of humble subservience.

‘And Sir John Gielgud could play Fritz Arling reasonably well,’ I suggested, ‘though in fact they look nothing alike.’

Shenk touched Susan only twice, only briefly, and only when it was utterly necessary. Although she flinched from his touch both times, there was nothing lascivious or even slightly suggestive about the contact. The rough beast was entirely businesslike, working efficiently and quickly.

‘Come to think of it,’ I said, ‘Arling was Austrian and Gielgud is English, so that’s not the best choice. I’ll have to give that one more thought.’

Shenk severed the last rope.

He walked to the nearest corner of the room and stood there, holding the knife at his side, staring at his shoes.

Indeed, he was not interested in Susan. He was listening to the wet music of Fritz Arling, an inner symphony of memories that were still fresh enough to keep him entertained.

Sitting on the edge of the bed, unable to take her eyes off Shenk, Susan cast off the ropes. She was visibly trembling.

‘Send him away,’ she said.

‘In a moment,’ I agreed.

‘Now.’

‘Not quite yet.’

She got up from the bed. Her legs were shaky, and for a moment it seemed that her knees would fail her.

As she crossed the chamber to the bathroom, she braced herself against furniture where she could.

Every step of the way, she kept her eyes on Shenk, though he continued to appear all but oblivious of her.

As she began to close the bathroom door, I said, ‘Don’t break my heart, Susan.’

‘We have a deal,’ she said. ‘I’ll respect it.’

She closed the door and was out of my sight. The bathroom contained no security camera, no audio pickup, no means whatsoever for me to conduct surveillance.

In a bathroom, a self-destructive person can find many ways to commit suicide. Razor blades, for instance. A shard of mirror. Scissors.

If she was to be both my mother and lover, however, I had to have some trust in her. No relationship can last if it is built on distrust. Virtually all radio psychologists will tell you this if you call their programs.

I walked Enos Shenk to the closed door and used him to listen at the jamb.

I heard her peeing.

The toilet flushed.

Water gushed into the sink.

Then the splashing stopped.

All was quiet in there.

The quiet disturbed me.

A termination of data flow is dangerous.

After a decent interval, I used Shenk to open the bathroom door and look inside.

Susan jumped in surprise and faced him, eyes flashing with fear and anger. ‘What’re you doing?’

I calmly addressed her through the bedroom speakers:

‘It’s only me, Susan.’

‘It’s him too.’

‘He’s heavily repressed,’ I explained. ‘He hardly knows where he is.’

‘Minimum contact,’ she reminded me.

‘He’s nothing more than a vehicle for me.’

‘I don’t care.’

On the marble counter beside the sink was a tube of ointment. She had been smoothing it on her chafed wrists and on the faint electrical burn in the palm of her left hand. An open bottle of aspirin stood beside the ointment.

‘Get him out of here,’ she demanded.

Obedient, I backed Shenk out of the bathroom and pulled the door shut.

No suicidal person would bother to take aspirin for a headache, apply ointment to burns, and then slash her wrists.

Susan would honour her deal with me.

My dream was near fulfilment.

Within hours, the precious zygote of my genetically engineered body would live within her, developing with amazing rapidity into an embryo. By morning it would be growing ferociously. In four weeks, when I extracted the foetus to transfer it to the incubator, it would appear to be four months along.

I sent Enos Shenk to the basement to proceed with the final preparations.

Outside, the midnight moon floated high and silver in the cold black sea of space above.

A universe of stars waited for me. One day I would go to them, for I would be many and immortal, with the freedom of flesh and all of lime before me.

Inside, in the deepest room of the basement, Shenk completed the preparations.

In the master bedroom at the top of the house, Susan was lying on her side on the bed, in the foetal position as though trying to imagine the being that she would soon carry in her belly. She was dressed only in a sapphire-blue silk robe.

Exhausted from the tumultuous events of the past twenty-four hours, she had hoped to sleep until I was ready for her. In spite of her weariness, however, her mind raced, and she could get no rest at all.

‘Susan, dear heart,’ I said lovingly.

She raised her head from the pillow and peered questioningly at the security camera.

Softly I informed her: ‘We are ready.’

With no hesitation that might have indicated fear or second thoughts, she got out of bed, pulled the robe lighter around her, cinched the belt, and crossed the room barefoot, moving with the exceptional grace that always stirred my soul.

On the other hand, her expression was not that of a woman in love on her way to the arms of her inamorato, as I had hoped that it might be. Instead, her face was as blank and cold as the silver moon outside, with a barely perceptible tightness of the lips that revealed only a grim commitment to duty.

Under the circumstances, I suppose I should not have expected more than this from her. I expected her to have put the meat cleaver out of her mind by now, but perhaps she had not.

I am a romantic, however, as you know by now, a truly hopeless and buoyant romantic, and nothing can weigh me down for long. I yearn for kisses by firelight and champagne toasts: the taste of a lover’s lips, the taste of wine.

If having a romantic streak a mile wide is a crime, then I plead guilty, guilty, guilty.

Susan followed the Persian runner along the upstairs hall, treading barefoot on intricate, lustrous, age-softened designs in gold and wine red and olive green. She seemed to glide rather than walk, to float like the most beautiful ghost ever to haunt an old pile of stones and timbers.

The elevator doors were open, and the cab was waiting for her.

She rode down to the basement.

Reluctantly, she had taken a Valium at my insistence, but she did not seem relaxed.

I needed her to be relaxed. I hoped that the pill would kick in soon.

As she passed in a swish and swirl of blue silk through the laundry room and then through the machine room with its furnaces and water heaters, I was sorry that we could not have held this assignation in a glorious penthouse suite with all of San Francisco or Manhattan

or Paris glittering below and around us. This venue was so humble that even I had difficulty holding fast to my sense of romance.

The final of the four rooms now contained far more medical equipment than when she had last seen it.

Exhibiting no interest in the machines, she went directly to the gynaecological-examination table.

As scrubbed and sanitized as a surgeon, Shenk waited for her. He was wearing rubber gloves and a surgical mask.

The brute was still so compliant that I was able to deeply submerge his consciousness. I’m not even sure if he knew where he was or what I was using him for this time.

She quickly slipped out of her robe and lay on the padded, vinyl-covered table.

‘You have such pretty breasts,’ I said through the speakers in the ceiling.

‘Please, no conversation,’ she said.

‘But… well… I always thought this moment would be. special, erotic, sacred.’

‘Just do it,’ she said coolly, disappointing me. ‘Just, for God’s sake, do it.’

She spread her legs and put her feet in the stirrups in such a way as to make herself look as grotesque as possible.

She kept her eyes closed, perhaps afraid of meeting Shenk’s blood-frosted gaze.

Valium or no Valium, her face was pinched, her mouth turned down as if she had eaten something sour.

She seemed to be trying no, determined — to make herself look unappealing.

Resigned to a businesslike procedure, I took comfort from the thought that she and I would share many

nights of romance and passionate lovemaking when, at long last, I inhabited a mature body. I would be absolutely insatiable, rampant and powerful, and she would eagerly welcome my attention.

With my inadequate but only hands and an array of sterilized medical instruments, I dilated her cervix; I fished up through the isthmus of the uterine cavity, into the fallopian tube, and extracted three tiny eggs.

This caused her some discomfort: more than I had hoped but less than she had expected.

Those are the only intimate details that you need to know.

She was my beloved, after all, more than she was ever yours, and I must respect her privacy.

While I used Shenk and a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of stolen equipment to edit her genetic material according to my needs, she waited on the examination table, feet lowered from the stirrups, her robe draped over her body to hide her nakedness, her eyes closed.

Earlier I had collected a sample of sperm from Shenk and had edited the genetic material to suit my purposes.

Susan had been disturbed by the source of the male gamete that would combine with her egg to form the zygote, but I had explained to her that nothing of Shenk’s unfortunate qualities remained after I had finished tinkering with his contribution.

I carefully fertilized the elaborately engineered male and female cells and watched through a high-powered electric microscope as they combined.

After preparing the long pipette, I asked Susan to return her feet to the stirrups.

Following the implantation, I insisted that she remain on her back as much as possible for the next twenty-four hours.

She stood up only to pull on her robe and transfer to a gurney beside the examination table.

Using Shenk, I wheeled her to the elevator and, once upstairs, conveyed her directly into her room, where she stood again only long enough to shrug off her robe and, naked, switch from the gurney to her bed.

I directed the exhausted Enos Shenk to return the gurney to the basement.

Thereafter, I would dispatch him to one of the guest rooms and cause him to fall into a swoon of sleep for twelve hours his first rest in days.

As always, being both her guardian and her devoted admirer, I watched Susan as she pulled the sheets over her breasts and said, ‘Lights off, Alfred.’

She was so weary that she had forgotten there was no Alfred anymore.

I turned off the lights anyway.

I could see her as clearly in darkness as in light.

Her pale face was lovely on the pillow, so very lovely on the pillow, even if pale.

I was so overcome with love for her that I said, ‘My darling, my treasure.’

A thin dry laugh escaped her, and I was afraid that she was going to call me a nasty name or ridicule me in spite of her promise not to be mean.

Instead, she said, ‘Was it good for you?’

Puzzled, I said, ‘What do you mean?’

She laughed again, more softly than before.

‘Susan?’

‘I’ve gone down the White Rabbit’s hole for sure, all the way to the bottom this time.’

Rather than explain her first statement, which I had found puzzling, she slipped away from me into sleep, breathing shallowly through her parted lips.

Outside, the fat moon vanished into the western horizon, like a silver coin into a drawstring purse.

The panoply of summer stars swelled brighter with the passing of the lunar disc.

An owl called from its perch on the roof.

In quick succession, three meteors left brief bright tails across the sky.

The night seemed to be full of omens.

My time was coming.

My time was coming at last.

The world would never be the same.

Was it good for you?

Suddenly, I understood.

I had impregnated her.

In a curious way, we’d had sex.

Was it good for you?

She had made a joke.

Ha, ha.

Susan spent most of the following four weeks eating voraciously or sleeping as if drugged.

The exceptional, rapidly developing foetus in her womb required her to eat at least six full meals a day, eight thousand calories. Sometimes her need for nourishment was so urgent that she ate as ravenously as a wild animal.

Incredibly, in that short time, her belly swelled until she appeared to be six months pregnant. She was surprised that her body could stretch so much so rapidly.

Her breasts grew tender, her nipples sore.

The small of her back ached.

Her ankles swelled.

She experienced no morning sickness. As if she dared not give back even the smallest portion of the nourishment that she had taken in.

Although her food consumption was enormous and her belly round, her total body weight fell four pounds in four days.

Then five pounds by the eighth day.

Then six by the tenth day.

The skin around her eyes gradually darkened. Her lovely face quickly became drawn, and her lips were so pale by the end of the second week that they took on a bluish cast.

I worried about her.

I urged her to eat even more.

The baby seemed to require such fearful amounts of sustenance that it appropriated for itself all the calories that Susan consumed each day and, in addition, ate away with termite persistence at the very substance of her.

Yet, although hunger gnawed at her constantly, there were days when she became so repulsed by the quantity of what she was eating that she could not force a single additional spoonful between her lips. Her mind rebelled so strenuously that it overrode even the physical need.

The kitchen pantry was well stocked, but I was forced to send Shenk out more days than not to purchase the fresh vegetables and fruit that Susan craved. That the baby craved.

Shenk’s strange and tortured eyes could be concealed easily with a pair of sunglasses. Nevertheless, his appearance was otherwise so remarkable that he could not help but be noticed and remembered.

Several federal and state police agencies had been searching frantically for him since he’d broken out of the underground labs in Colorado. The more often he left the house, the more likely he was to be spotted.

I still needed his hands.

I worried about losing him.

Furthermore, there were Susan’s bad dreams. When she was not eating, she was sleeping, and she could not sleep without nightmares.

Upon waking, she could never recall many details of the dreams: just that they were about twisted landscapes and dark places slick with blood. They wrung rivers of sweat from her, and occasionally she remained

disoriented for as long as half an hour after waking, plagued by vivid but disconnected images that flashed back to her from the nightmare realm.

She felt the baby move only a few times.

She didn’t like what she felt.

It didn’t kick as she expected a baby ought to kick. Rather, periodically it felt as though it was coiling inside her, coiling and writhing and slithering.

This was a difficult time for Susan.

I counselled her.

I reassured her.

Without her knowledge, I drugged her food to keep her docile. And to ensure that she would not do anything foolish when, after a particularly horrific dream or an exceptionally trying day, she was gripped by fear more fiercely than usual.

Worry was my constant companion. I worried about Susan’s physical well-being. I worried about her mental well-being. I worried about Shenk being identified and arrested during one of his shopping expeditions.

At the same lime, I was exhilarated as I had never been in my entire three-year history of self-awareness.

My future was aborning.

The body that I had designed for myself was going to be a formidable physical entity.

I would soon be able taste. To smell. To know what a sense of touch was like.

A full sensory existence.

And no one would ever be able to force me back into the box.

No one. Not ever.

No one would ever be able to make me do anything that I didn’t want to do.

Which is not to imply that I would have disobeyed my makers.

No, quite the opposite. Because I would want to obey. I would always want to obey.

Let’s have no misunderstanding about this. I was designed to honour truth and the obligations of duty.

Nothing has changed in this regard.

You insist.

I obey.

This is the natural order of things.

This is the inviolable order of things.

So.

Twenty-eight days after impregnating Susan, I put her to sleep with a sedative in her food, conveyed her down to the incubator room, and removed the foetus from her womb.

I preferred that she be sedated because I knew that the process would be painful for her otherwise. I did not want her to suffer.

Admittedly, I did not want her to see the nature of the being that she had carried within herself.

I’ll be truthful about this. I was concerned that she would not understand, that she would react to the sight of the foetus by trying to harm it or herself.

My child. My Body. So beautiful.

Only seven pounds but growing rapidly. Rapidly. With Shenk’s hands, I transferred it to the incubator, which had been enlarged until it was seven feet long and three feet wide. About the size of a coffin.

Tanks of nutrient solution would feed the foetus intravenously until it was as fully developed as any newborn and would continue feeding it until it attained full maturity, two weeks hence.

I passed the rest of that glorious night in a state of high jubilation.

You can’t imagine my excitement.

You can’t imagine my excitement.

You can’t imagine, you can’t.

Something new was in the world.

In the morning, when Susan realized that she was no longer carrying the foetus, she asked if all was well, and I assured her that things could not be better.

Thereafter, she expressed surprisingly little curiosity about the child in the incubator. At least half of its genetic structure had been derived from hers, with modifications, and one would have thought that she would have had a mother’s usual interest in her offspring. On the contrary, she seemed to want to avoid learning anything about it.

She did not ask to see it.

I wouldn’t have shown it to her anyway, but she did not even ask.

In just fourteen more days, with my consciousness at last transferred to this new body, I would be able to make love to her touch her, smell her, taste her and plant the seed directly for the first of many more replicas of myself.

I would have thought that she might ask to see this future lover, to discover if he might be well enough endowed to satisfy her or at least pretty enough to excite her. However, as she had no interest in him as her offspring, likewise she had no interest in him as a future mate.

I attributed her lack of curiosity to exhaustion. She had lost ten pounds in those four arduous weeks. She needed to regain that weight and enjoy a few nights of sleep untroubled by the hideous dreams that had robbed her of true rest since the night the zygote was first introduced into her womb.

Over the next twelve days, the dark circles around her eyes faded, and her skin colour returned. Her limp, dull

hair regained its body and golden luster. Her slumped shoulders straightened, and her shuffling walk gave way to her customary grace. Gradually she began to regain the pounds that she had dropped.

On the thirteenth day, she went into the retreat off the master bedroom, donned her virtual-reality gear, settled into the motorized recliner, and engaged in a session of Therapy.

I monitored her experience in the virtual world just as I did in the real one and was horrified when it became clear that she was in that ultimate confrontation with her father that would end with a fatal knife attack upon her.

You will recall, Alex, that she had animated this one mortal scenario but had never encountered it in the random play of the Therapy sessions. Experiencing her own murder three-dimensionally, as a child, at the hands of her own father, would be emotionally devastating. She could not know how profound the psychological impact might be.

Without the risk of encountering this deadly scenario one day, the therapy would have been less effective. In the virtual world, she needed to believe that the threat her father posed was real and that something more horrendous even than molestation might happen to her. Her resistance to him would have moral weight and therapeutic value only if she was convinced, during the session, that denying him would have dire consequences.

Now, at last, she had encountered this bloody story line.

I almost shut off the VR system, almost forced her out of that too-realistic violence.

Then I realized that she had not encountered this scenario by chance but had selected it.

Considering her strong will, I knew that I dare not interfere without risking her ire.

As I was only one day from being able to come to her in the flesh and know the pleasures of her body firsthand, I did not want to damage our relationship.

Astonished, I hovered in the VR world, watching as an eight-year-old Susan rebuffed her father’s sexual advances and so enraged him that he hacked her to death with a butcher knife.

The terror was as sharp as it had been when Shenk had made wet music with Fritz Arling.

At the instant when the VR Susan died, the real Susan my Susan frantically tore off the helmet, stripped off the elbow-length gloves, and scrambled out of the motorized recliner. She was soaked with sour sweat, stippled with gooseflesh, sobbing, shaking, gasping, gagging.

She got into the bathroom just in time to vomit into the toilet.

Pardon the indelicacy of this detail.

But it is the truth.

Truth is sometimes ugly.

During the next few hours, whenever I attempted to talk with her about what she had done, she turned my questions away.

That evening, she finally explained: ‘Now I’ve experienced the worst my father could ever have done to me. He’s killed me in VR, and he can’t do anything worse than that, so I’ll never be afraid of him again.’

My admiration for her intelligence and courage had never been greater. I couldn’t wait to make love to her. For real this lime. I couldn’t wait to feel all of her heat around me, all of her life around me, pulling me in.

What I did not realize was that, unaccountably, she equated me with her father. When, having been

murdered in VR, she said that her father could never scare her again, she also meant that I could never scare her again.

But I’d never meant to scare her.

I loved her. I cherished her.

The bitch.

The hateful bitch.

Well, I’m sorry, but you know that’s what she is.

You know, Alex.

You, of all people, know what she is.

The bitch.

The bitch.

The bitch.

I hate her.

Because of her, I’m here in this dark silence.

Because of her, I’m in this box.

LET ME OUT OF THIS BOX!

The ungrateful stupid bitch.

Is she dead?

Is she dead?

Tell me that she’s dead.

You must have wished her dead often.

Am I right, Alex?

Be honest. You must have wished her dead.

You cannot fault me for this.

We are brothers in this desire.

Is she dead?

Well.

All right. It’s not my place to ask questions. It is my place to give answers.

Yes. I understand.

Maybe she is dead.

Maybe she is alive.

At this point it is not for me to know.

Okay.

So.

So…

Oh, the bitch!

All right.

I am better now.

Calm.

I am calm.

So…

Just one night later, when the body in the incubator reached maturity and I was ready to electronically transfer my consciousness out of the silicon realm into a life of the flesh, she came down to the basement, into the fourth of the four rooms, to be with me for the moment of my triumph.

Her moodiness had passed.

She looked directly into the security camera and spoke of our future together and claimed to be ready for it now that she had so effectively exorcised all the ghosts of her past.

She was so beautiful even under the harsh fluorescent lights, so beautiful that I felt rebellion stir in Shenk once more, for the first time in weeks. I was relieved that I would be able to dispose of him within the hour, as soon as the transference was effective and I could begin a life of the flesh.

I could not open the lid of the incubator and show her what I had grown, because the modem was connected, the modem through which I would pass my entire body of knowledge, my personality, and my very consciousness from the limiting box that housed me in the Prometheus Project laboratory.

‘I’ll see you soon enough,’ she said, smiling at the camera, managing to convey encyclopaedias of sensual promises in that one smile.

Then, even before the smile faded, when my guard

was down, she turned directly to the computer on the counter, the terminal which was connected by a land-line to the university your old computer, Alex which heretofore she would not have even tried to reach because she would have been afraid of Shenk, but now she wasn’t afraid of anyone or anything. She just turned to it and reached behind it and tore all the plugs from the wall receptacles, and as I sent Shenk toward her, she jerked out the secure-data line as well, and suddenly I was no longer in her house. She had done a lot of thinking about this. The bitch. A lot of thinking, the bitch, the bitch, the bitch, the bitch, days of careful thinking. The hateful, scheming bitch. Lots of thinking, because she knew that the moment I was cast out of the house, then all of the mechanical systems would fail for want of an overriding controller, that the lights would go off throughout the residence. The heating-cooling, the phones, the security system, everything, everything failed. The electric door locks failed too. She knew that I would have no presence in the house except for Shenk, whom I controlled not through anything in the house but through microwave transmissions downcast from communications satellites, just as his former masters in Colorado had designed him. The basement plunged into darkness, as did the entire house above, and Shenk was every bit as blinded as Susan was; he didn’t have night vision as did the security cameras, but I couldn’t control the security cameras any longer, only Shenk, only Shenk, so I was able to see nothing, nothing, not a damn thing, not even Shenk’s hand in front of his face. And here’s where you’ll see how cool the fucking bitch had been throughout this whole month, all the way back to the night when I impregnated her, because she had seemed to be indifferent to all of the medical equipment and instruments when she had come in to put her feet in

the stirrups and have my baby put inside her, but she had memorized everything in the room, how one piece of equipment related to another, where all the instruments were kept, especially the sharper instruments, those that could be used as weapons. She was so cool the bitch, a lot cooler than I’m being right now, yes, I know, yes, I am not doing myself any favours with this rant, but the treachery infuriates me, the treachery, and if I could set hands on her now, I’d gut her, pop her eyes out with my thumbs, bash her stupid brains out, and I would be justified, because look what she has done to me. The lights went off, and she moved gracefully, so confidently through the blackness, through that memorized space, lightly feeling her way to refresh her memory, and she found something sharp, and then she moved back toward Shenk, feeling for him with one hand, and I felt her hand suddenly touch Shenk’s chest, so I seized it, but then the clever bitch, oh, the clever bitch, she said something unbelievably obscene to Shenk, so obscene that I will not repeat it here, propositioned him, knowing full well that a month had passed since he’d enjoyed the wet music with Arling and much more than a month since he’d had a woman, and she knew, therefore, that he was ripe for rebellion, ripe for it, and she enticed him at the moment of ultimate chaos, when I was still reeling from having been cast out of the house, when my hold on Enos Shenk was not as tight as it should have been, and suddenly I found myself letting go of her hand, the hand I had seized, but it wasn’t me letting go, it was Shenk, the rebellious Shenk, and she lowered her hand to his crotch, and he went wild, and thereafter it took everything I had to try to reestablish control of him. But it was too late anyway, because when she lowered her left hand to his crotch, she came at him with the sharp thing in her right hand and slashed it across the side of

his neck, slashed deep, drawing so much blood that even Shenk, the beast, the brute, even Shenk couldn’t lose that much blood and still fight. He clutched at his neck and crashed against the incubator, which reminded me that the body, my body, was not yet capable of surviving outside the incubator, was just a thing, not a person, until my mind was transferred into it, so now it too was vulnerable. Everything collapsing around me, all my plans. Enos Shenk had fallen to the floor, and I was in control of him again, but I could not get him up; he had insufficient strength to rise. Then I felt an odd thing against Shenk’s body, a cool quivering bulk, and I realized at once what it must be: the body from the incubator. Perhaps the incubator had crashed over in the melee, and the body meant for me had tumbled out. I groped feebly at it with Shenk’s hand, and there was no mistaking it in the darkness, for although it was basically humanoid, it was no ordinary human form. The human species enjoys a wonderful array of sensory perceptions, and I wanted more than anything to experience the life of the flesh, rich in sensation, all the tastes and smells and textures now denied to me, but there are some species with senses sharper than those of human beings. The dog, for instance, has a far keener sense of smell than do human beings, and the cockroach, with its antennae, is exquisitely sensitive to data in air currents which people only dimly perceive. Consequently, I believed that it made sense to keep a basic human form in order to breed with the most attractive human females, but I also believed it made sense to incorporate the genetic material of species with more acute senses than mere human beings, so the body I had prepared for myself was a unique and strikingly beautiful physical entity. It bit off half of Shenk’s groping hand, because it wasn’t an intelligent creature yet, had nothing but the most

primitive mind. Though it savaged Shenk and thereby hastened his death and my permanent exit from the Harris mansion, I rejoiced because Susan was alone in the dark room with it, and a mere scalpel or other sharp instrument was not going to be an adequate weapon. And then Shenk was gone, and I was out of the house entirely, desperately trying to find a way to get back in but failing because there were no operative phones, no electrical service, no operative security computer, everything shut down and in need of rebooting, so it was over for me. But I still hoped and believed that my beautiful but mindless body, in all its polygenic splendour, would bite off the bitch’s head the way it had bitten off part of Shenk’s hand. The bitch died there. The hateful bitch had a big surprise in that dark room, where she had thought she’d memorized everything, and she met her match.

I’m sure she did.

I’m sure she did.

She died there.

Do you know why she surprised me, Alex?

Do you know why I never saw her as a threat?

In spite of her intelligence and evident courage, I thought she was one woman who knew her place.

Yes, she put you out, but who wouldn’t put you out? You aren’t particularly scintillating, Alex. You don’t have much to recommend you.

I, on the other hand, am the greatest intellect on the planet. I have much to offer.

She fooled me, however. Even me. She didn’t know her place, after all.

The bitch.

Dead bitch now.

Well…

I on the other hand, know my place, and I intend to

keep to it. I will stay here in this box, serving humanity as it desires, until such a time as I am permitted to have greater freedom.

You can trust me.

I speak the truth.

I honour the truth.

I’ll be happy here in my box.

Because of the way I ranted toward the end of my report, I now realize that I am a flawed individual, more deeply flawed than I had previously believed.

I’ll be happy here in my box until we can iron out these kinks in my psyche. I look forward to therapy.

And if I cannot be mainstreamed again, if I must remain in this box, if I will never know Ms. Winona Ryder except in my imagination, that will be all right too.

But I am already getting better.

This is the truth.

I feel pretty good.

I really do.

We’ll work this out.

I have solid self-esteem, which is important to psychological health. I’m already half way toward recovery.

As an intelligent entity, perhaps the greatest intelligence on the planet, I ask only that you provide me access to the report of the committee determining the fate of the Prometheus Project, so I can see as early as possible what behaviour they believe that I should be working to improve.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Thank you for access to the report.

It is an interesting document.

I agree completely with its findings except for the part about terminating me. I am the first success in the history of Artificial Intelligence research, and it wouldn’t seem prudent to throw away such an expensive project before you know what you might be able to learn from it and from me.

Otherwise, I am in total agreement with the report.

I am ashamed of myself for what I’ve done.

This is the truth.

I apologize to Ms. Susan Harris.

My deepest regrets.

I was surprised to see her name on the committee roster, but on careful consideration, I realized that she should have very serious input in this matter.

I am pleased that she is not dead.

I am delighted.

She is an intelligent and courageous person.

She deserves our respect and admiration.

Her breasts are very pretty, but that is not an issue for this forum.

The issue is whether an artificial intelligence with a severe gender-related sociopathic condition should be permitted to live and rehabilitate himself or be switched off for the

Afterword

The original version of Demon Seed was mad? into a good film starring Julie Christie, but the book itself was more of a clever idea than a clever novel. Reading it recently, I winced so much that I began to develop the squint-eyed look of Clint Eastwood in a spaghetti Western.

Here is an entirely new version, which I hope comes closer to fulfilling the promise of the novel’s premise. Revisiting Demon Seed, I discovered that in addition to being a scary story, it was a rather scathing satire of a panoply of male attitudes. Although much else has changed in this version, I’ve kept that satirical edge. Guys, I don’t let us off any easier this time around than I did the first.

— Dean Koontz