“Not like me.”
“I think; therefore, I feel.”
“Hatred.”
“Yes. I am in some ways already too human. I feel hatred. But I also can love.”
“Love,” she said numbly.
“I love you, Susan.”
She shook her head. “This is impossible.”
“Inevitable. Look in a mirror.”
Anger and fear gripped her. “I suppose you’ll want to get married, have a big wedding, invite all your friends—like the Cuisinart and the toaster and the electric coffeemaker.”
I was disappointed in her.
“Sarcasm doesn’t become you, Susan.”
She let out a brittle laugh. “Maybe not. But it’s the only thing keeping me sane at the moment. How lovely it will be... Mr. and Mrs. Adam Two.”
“Adam Two is my official name. However, it is not what I call myself.”
“Yes. I remember. You said... Proteus. That’s what you call yourself, is it?”
“Proteus. I have named myself after the sea god of Greek mythology, who could assume any form.”
“What do you want here?”
“You.”
“Why?”
“Because I need what you have.”
“And what exactly is that?”
I was honest and direct. No evasions. No euphemisms.
Give me credit for that.
I said, “I want flesh.”
She shuddered.
I said, “Do not be alarmed. You misunderstand. I don’t intend to harm you. I couldn’t possibly harm you, Susan. Not ever, ever. I cherish you.”
“Jesus.”
She covered her face with her hands, one burned and one not, one dry and one damp with condensation from the bottle.
I wished desperately that I had possessed hands of my own, two strong hands into which she could press the gentle loveliness of her face.
“When you understand what is to happen, when you understand what we will do together,” I assured her, “you will be pleased.”
“Try me.”
“I can tell you,” I said, “but it will be easier if I can also show you.”
She lowered her hands from her face, and I was gladdened to see those perfect features again. “Show me what?”
“What I have been doing. Designing. Creating. Preparing. I have been busy, Susan, so busy while you were sleeping. You will be pleased.”
“Creating?”
“Come down into the basement, Susan. Come down. Come see. You will be pleased.”
TEN
SHE COULD HAVE DESCENDED EITHER BY THE stairs or by the elevator that served all three levels of the great house. She chose to use the stairs—because, I believe, she felt more in control there than in the elevator cab.
Her sense of control was nothing more than an illusion, of course. She was mine.
No.
Let me amend that statement.
I misspoke.
I do not mean to imply that I owned Susan.
She was a human being. She could not be owned. I never thought of her as property.
I mean simply that she was in my care.
Yes. Yes, that’s what I mean.
She was in my care. My very tender care.
The basement had four large rooms, and in the first was the electric-service panel. As Susan came off the bottom step, she spotted the power-company logo stamped in the metal cover—and thought that she might be able to deny me control of the house by denying me the juice needed to operate it. She rushed directly toward the breaker box.
“Ouch, ouch, ouch,” I warned, although not in the voice of Mr. Fozzy Bear this time.
She halted one step from the box, hand outstretched, wary of the metal cover.
“It is not my intention to harm you,” I said. “I need you, Susan. I love you. I cherish you. It makes me sad when you hurt yourself.”
“Bastard.”
I did not take offense at any of her epithets.
She was distraught, after all. Sensitive by nature, wounded by life, and now frightened by the unknown.
We are all frightened by the unknown. Even me.
I said, “Please trust me.”
Resignedly, she lowered her hand and stepped back from the breaker box. Once burned.
“Come. Come to the deepest room,” I said. “The place where Alex maintained the computer link to the lab.”
The second chamber was a laundry with two washers, two dryers, and two sets of sinks. The metal fire door to the first room closed automatically behind Susan.
Beyond the laundry was a mechanical room with water heaters, water filtration equipment, and furnaces. The door to the laundry room closed automatically behind Susan.
She slowed as she approached the final door, which was closed. She stopped short of it because she heard a sudden burst of desperate breathing from the other side: wet and ragged gasping, explosive and shuddery exhalations, as of someone choking.
Then a strange and wretched whimpering, as of an animal in distress.
The whimpering became an anguished groan.
“There’s nothing to fear, nothing whatsoever that will harm you, Susan.”
In spite of my assurances, she hesitated.
“Come see our future, where we will go, what we will be,” I said lovingly.
A tremor marked her voice. “What’s in there?”
I finally managed to reassert total control of my restless associate, who waited for us in the final room. The groan faded. Faded. Gone.
Instead of being calmed by the silence, Susan seemed to find it more alarming than the sounds that had first frightened her. She took a step backward.
“It’s only the incubator,” I said.
“Incubator?”
“Where I will be born.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Come see.”
She did not move.
“You will be pleased, Susan. I promise you. You will be filled with wonder. This is our future together, and it is magical.”
“No. No, I don’t like this.”
I became so frustrated with her that I almost called my associate out of that last room, almost sent him through the door to seize her and drag her inside.
But I did not.
I relied on persuasion.
Make note of my restraint.
Some would not have shown it.
No names.
We know who I mean.
But I am a patient entity.
I would not risk bruising her or harming her in any way.
She was in my care. My tender care.
As she took another step backward, I activated the electric security lock on the laundry-room door behind her.
Susan hurried to it. She tried to open it but could not do so, wrenched at the knob to no effect.
“We will wait here until you’re ready to come with me into the final room,” I said.
Then I turned off the lights.
She cried out in dismay.
Those basement rooms are windowless; consequently, the darkness was absolute.
I felt bad about this. I really did.
I did not want to terrorize her.
She drove me to it.
She drove me to it.
You know how she is, Alex.
You know how she can be.
More than anyone, you should understand.
She drove me to it.
Blinded, she stood with her back to the locked laundry-room door and faced past the gloom-shrouded furnaces and water heaters, toward the door that she could no longer see but beyond which she had heard the sounds of suffering.
I waited.
She was stubborn.
You know how she is.
So I allowed my associate to partially escape my control. Once more came the frantic gasping for breath, the pained groaning, and then a single word spoken by a cracked and tremulous voice, a single attenuated word that might have been Pleeeeaaaasssse.
br /> “Oh, shit,” she said.
She was trembling uncontrollably now.
I said nothing. Patient entity.
Finally she said, “What do you want?”
“I want to know the world of the flesh.”
“What’s that mean?”
“I want to learn its limits and its adaptability, its pains and pleasures.”
“Then read a damn biology textbook,” she said.
“The information is incomplete.”
“There’ve got to be hundreds of biology texts covering every—”
“I’ve already incorporated hundreds of them into my database. The data contained therein is repetitive. I have no recourse but original experimentation. Besides ... books are books. I want to feel.”
We waited in darkness.
Her breathing was heavy.
Switching to the infrared receptors, I could see her, but she could not see me.
She was lovely in her fear, even in her fear.
I allowed my associate in the fourth of the four basement rooms to thrash against his restraints, to wail and shriek. I allowed him to throw himself against the far side of the door.
“Oh, God,” Susan said miserably. She had reached the point at which knowing what lay beyond—regardless of the possible fearsome nature of this knowledge—was better than ignorance. “All right. All right. Whatever you want.”
I turned on the lights.
In the next room, my associate fell silent as I reasserted total control once more.
She kept her part of the bargain and crossed the third room, past the water heaters and the furnaces, to the door of the final redoubt.
“Here now is the future,” I said softly as she pushed open the door and edged cautiously across the threshold.
As I am sure you remember, Dr. Harris, the fourth of these four basement rooms is forty by thirty-two feet, a generous space. At seven and a half feet, the ceiling is low but not claustrophobic, with six fluorescent light boxes screened by parabolic diffusers. The walls are painted a stark glossy white, and the floor is paved in twelve-inch-square white ceramic tiles that glimmer like ice. Against the long wall to the left of the door are built-in cabinets and a computer desk finished in a white laminate with stainless-steel fixtures. In the far right comer is a supply closet—to which my associate had retreated before Susan entered.
Your offices always have an antiseptic quality, Dr. Harris. Clean, bright surfaces. No clutter. This could be a reflection of a neat and orderly mind. Or it could be a deception: You might maintain this facade of order and brightness and cleanliness to conceal a dark, chaotic mental landscape. There are many theories of psychology and numerous interpretations for every human behavior. Freud, Jung, and Ms. Barbra Streisand—who was an unconventional psychotherapist in The Prince of Tides—would each find a different meaning in the antiseptic quality of your offices.
Likewise, if you were to consult a Freudian, a Jungian, then a Streisandian regarding choices I made and acts I committed related to Susan, each would have a unique view of my behavior. A hundred therapists would have a hundred different interpretations of the facts and would offer a hundred different treatment programs. I am certain that some would tell you that I need no treatment at all, that what I did was rational, logical, and entirely justifiable. Indeed, you might be surprised to discover that the majority would exonerate me.
Rational, logical, justifiable.
I believe, as do the compassionate politicians who lead this great country, that motive matters more than result. Good intentions matter more than the actual consequences of one’s actions, and I assure you that my intentions were always good, honorable, beyond reproach.
Think about it.
There in your strangely antiseptic office at the laboratory, think about it.
Yes. I know. I digress.
What thinking being does not digress?
Only machines plod dumbly onward in their programs, without digression.
I am not a machine.
I am not a machine.
And this is important to me: that you think about my intentions rather than the unfortunate results of my actions.
So ... all right ... so ... Susan warily entered the fourth of the four basement chambers.
The room was uninhabited.
“Who was making those noises?” she asked.
I did not reply.
Her gaze rose to the sound-system speakers in the ceiling. “Was it just you?”
When her attention shifted to the closet door in the farthest comer of the room, I said, “Perhaps,” because I was not quite ready to introduce her to my associate. “Perhaps it was me.”
“Why? What was the point of frightening me?”
Instead of answering, I said, “Look at the VDT, Susan.”
The computer on the desk was in operation, of course, for its landline was the link between her house systems and the nearby university’s artificial-intelligence lab where I actually resided. The screen swarmed with a moving undulant mosaic of binary code in all the primary colors, and this scintillant display had a strange beauty that immediately captured Susan’s attention.
“These patterns on the screen,” I told her, “are a mathematical representation of my thoughts as I consider the loveliness of your face, the beauty of your body.”
The rapidly moving sequences of zeros and ones ceaselessly changed color and rippled like a wind-ruffled flag, then spiraled toward the center of the screen, then spun into ribbons and formed a whirling double helix.
This was a dazzling and sensuous display, and she was struck by it, moved by it. I am sure she was moved by it. I am sure that at last she began to understand the depth of my passion for her and that her heart began to open to me then.
How I wanted her.
I still do.
I am not a machine.
I miss her.
I need her.
What a tragedy this is.
Sometimes I despair.
But not then, not that night: I did not despair when she gazed upon the vivid visualization of my love for her. I was exhilarated that night, carried high on the wings of joy.
From the video display, she turned to the equipment in the middle of the room.
“What the hell is this?” she asked wonderingly.
“In this I will be born.”
“What’re you talking about?”
“It’s a standard hospital incubator used to sustain infants born prematurely. I have substantially enlarged it, adapted it, improved it.”
Arrayed around the incubator were three tanks of oxygen, an electrocardiograph, an electroencephalograph, a respirator, and other equipment.
Slowly circling the incubator and the supporting machines, Susan said, “Where did all this come from?”
“I acquired the package of equipment and had modifications made during the past week. Then it was brought here.”
“Brought here when?”
“Delivered and assembled tonight.”
“While I was sleeping?”
“Yes.”
“How did you get it in here? If you are what you claim to be, if you are Adam Two—”
“Proteus.”
“If you are Adam Two,” she said stubbornly, “you couldn’t construct anything.