A STAIRWELL DESCENDED from the main lab all the way to the basement. Lester led Deucalion to the networking room, where three walls were lined with racks of electronic equipment.
Against the back wall were handsome mahogany cabinets topped with a copper-flecked black-granite counter. Even in mechanical rooms, Victor had specified high-quality materials. His financial resources seemed bottomless.
“That’s Annunciata,” said Lester, “in the middle box.”
Lined up on the black granite were not boxes but instead five thick glass cylinders on stainless-steel cradles. The ends of the cylinders were capped with stainless steel, as well.
In those transparent containers, floating in golden fluid, were five brains. Wires and clear plastic tubes full of darker fluid rose from holes in the granite countertop, penetrated the steel caps in the ends of the cylinders, and were married to the brains in ways that Deucalion could not quite discern through the thick glass and the nutrient baths.
“What are these four others?” Deucalion asked.
“You’re talking to Lester,” said his companion, “and there’s more Lester doesn’t know than what he does.”
Suspended from the ceiling above the counter, a video screen brightened with Annunciata’s beautiful virtual face.
She said, “Mr. Helios believes that one day, one day, one day, one day … Excuse me. A moment. I am so sorry. All right. One day, biological machines will replace complex factory robots on production lines. Mr. Helios Helios believes also that computers will become true cybernetic organisms, electronics integrated with specially designed organic Alpha brains. Robotic and electronic systems are expensive. Flesh is cheap. Cheap. Flesh is cheap. I am honored to be the first cybernetic secretary. I am honored, honored, honored, but afraid.”
“Of what are you afraid?” Deucalion asked.
“I’m alive. I’m alive but cannot walk. I’m alive but have no hands. I’m alive but cannot smell or taste. I’m alive but I have no … have no … have no …”
Deucalion placed one immense hand on the glass that housed Annunciata. The cylinder was warm. “Tell me,” he encouraged. “You have no what?”
“I’m alive but I have no life. I’m alive but also dead. I’m dead and alive.”
A stifled sound from Lester drew Deucalion’s attention. Anguish wrenched the janitor’s face. “Dead and alive,” he whispered. “Dead and alive.”
Only hours earlier, from a conversation with one of the New Race, Pastor Kenny Laffite, Deucalion learned these latest creations of Victor’s were engineered to be incapable of feeling empathy either for the Old Race they were to replace or for their laboratory-born brothers and sisters. Love and friendship were forbidden because the least degree of affection would make the New Race less efficient in its mission.
They were a community; however, the members of this community were committed not to the welfare of their kind but to fulfilling the vision of their maker.
Lester’s tears were not for Annunciata but for himself. The words dead and alive resonated with him.
Annunciata said, “I have im-im-imagination. I am so easily able to envision what I w-w-w-want, but I cannot have hands to touch or legs to leave here.”
“We never leave,” Lester whispered. “Never. Where is there to go? And why?”
“I am afraid,” Annunciata said, “afraid, I am afraid of living without a life, the tedium and solitude, the solitude, intolerable loneliness. I am nothing out of nothing, destined for nothing. ‘Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee.’ Nothing now, nothing forever. ‘Waste and void, waste and void, and darkness on the face of the deep.’ But now … I must organize the appointment schedule for Mr. Helios. And Werner is trapped in Isolation Room Number Two.”
“Annunciata,” Deucalion said, “are there archives you can tap to show me engineering drawings for the cylinder that contains you?”
Her face faded from the screen, and a diagram of the cylinder appeared, with all the tubes and wires labeled. One of them infused her cerebral tissues with oxygen.
“May I see you again, Annunciata?”
Her lovely face appeared on the screen once more.
Deucalion said, “I know that you are unable to do for yourself what I am now going to do for you. And I know that you are unable to ask me for this deliverance.”
“I am honored, honored, honored to serve Mr. Helios. I have left one thing undone.”
“No. There is nothing more for you to do, Annunciata. Nothing but accept … freedom.”
Annunciata closed her eyes. “All right. It is done.”
“Now I want you to use the imagination you mentioned. Imagine the thing you would want above all others, more than legs and hands and taste and touch.”
The virtual face opened its mouth but did not speak.
“Imagine,” Deucalion said, “that you are known as surely as every sparrow is known, that you are loved as surely as every sparrow is loved. Imagine that you are more than nothing. Evil made you, but you are no more evil than a child unborn. If you want, if you seek, if you hope, who is to say that your hope might not be answered?”
As if enchanted, Lester whispered, “Imagine….”
After a hesitation, Deucalion pulled the oxygen-infusion line from the cylinder. There could be no pain for her in this, only a gradual loss of consciousness, a sliding into sleep, and from sleep to death.
Her beatific face began to fade from the screen.