A Darkness in My Soul

sense of power over the artificial wombs was much like the sense of power which the young guard at the Tombs had experienced in his fantasies about slaughtering his parents in their bed. Like him, I was rising up against the most fundamental loyalty of my life, against the salty seed and the warm womb which had engendered me (albeit, with the aid of some eighty technicians and physicians and computer programmers). But I thrust that notion down and got on with the job at hand.
        I raised my figurative ax over my mother's symbolic head and savored the destruction I was about to wreak…
        Did Jesus think of striking Mary down? Hardly. But I had given up that vision of God. I was another sort altogether.
        I split open the surfaces of the walls and peeled back the plastic and the plaster, revealed the snaking conduits and the tangled ganglion of wires. I grasped these nerves gleefully and tore them free of the womb structures, sent the complex mechanisms into shuddering, heavy spasms of mechanical terror and confusion, into wrenching machine agony that drew smoke rather than blood or tears.
        Moving swiftly, almost maniacally, I wrenched the programming keyboards loose of their connections and smashed them repeatedly into the floor.
        The wombs were no longer connected to a brain to tell them what to do with themselves.
        Smoke rose from the blocks of data-processing equipment, and tapes whined senselessly through the memory banks, seeking answers that could not be found.
        There was but one answer, and that answer was God, and that God was me…
        I shattered the glass outer walls of all the wombs, The floor was littered with fragments of sharp, bright, and bloodless flesh.
        I broke inward, reached the heart of each warm, dark chamber, and shredded the slowly forming germ cells, squashed them.
        I destroyed the wombs from inside, working back toward the shattered outer walls until there was nothing left but powder and fumes.
        It must have looked singularly strange in that place: invisible hands making havoc in the center of that technological wonder; explosions without origin; plastic dribbling down and lying in cooling puddles on the floor; smoke rising everywhere… It must have looked as if Nature had risen up in fury to dispose of such a blasphemous and pretentious project as this last folly of man's.
        In essence, that was exactly what had happened.
        Mother was dead.
        And she was disfigured.
        I had never had a father.
        I left that place of smoldering memories, of twisted plastic and running wires, jellied tubes and transistors, returned to the hospital room where my body sat in the same chair where I had left it. Morsfagen and the others remained in a state of suspended animation, offering no resistance.
        In a few moments, I had made all the necessary decisions; I knew what had to be done next. I had decided everything with the speed and the thoroughness of a super-computer, my thought processes racing faster and faster as the godly power within me became further integrated with my own mind. And I knew there were no flaws in my plans.
        A god is not plagued with doubt.
        I divorced my mind from my body again, and sought out of the AC complex, across vast stretches of land toward the minds of other men, where I would begin to build the new world. I found the members of the junta, one by one, and altered their minds. I rooted deeply, found their personality problems and removed them. I gave them the best psychotherapy man had ever imagined, and left them without a desire to rule.
        Then; in each man's mind, I planted the desire for a return to elective government, and left them as their own counter-revolutionaries.
        Next, I began a methodical search of the corners of the world; I radiated a growing, toughening web of power that sought out the minds of every leader in every nation, down through the lowest bureaucratic posts. I cleared those minds of power-hunger, of sexual frustration turned into violence. I healed them like a prophet with the power of god in his hands, and I left them better men.
        Not satisfied yet, I struck downward and located - all the men with the potential of leadership, even though they were not yet in positions to guide the destinies of their fellow citizens. I cleaned house in every psyche, helped all of them to learn to cope with