DEMON SEED - Dean Koontz

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