City of Night

nuances.
    “A parasitical second self developed spontaneously from Harker’s flesh,” Victor said, “and when it could live independently of him, it… separated.”
    Ripley stopped filming and stood slack jawed with amazement, pale with trepidation. He had bushy eyebrows that gave him a look of comic astonishment.
    Victor could not remember why he had decided to design Ripley with those shaggy eyebrows. They were absurd.
    “Mr. Helios, sir, I beg your indulgence, but are you saying that this is what you intended, for a second self to mutate out of Harker? Sir, to what purpose?”
    “No, Ripley, of course it’s not what I intended. There’s a useful saying of the Old Race—‘Shit happens.’”
    “But sir, forgive me, you are the designer of our flesh, the maker, the master. How can there be anything about our flesh that you do not understand… or foresee?”
    Worse than the comic expression that the eyebrows gave Ripley was the fact that they facilitated an exaggerated look of reproach.
    Victor did not like to be reproached. “Science proceeds in great leaps, but also sometimes takes a couple of small steps backward.”
    “Backward?” Having been properly indoctrinated while in the tank, Ripley sometimes had difficulty squaring his expectations with real life. “Science in general, sir, yes, it sometimes missteps. But not you. Not you, and not the New Race.”
    “The important thing to keep in mind is that the leaps forward are much greater than the steps backward, and more numerous.”
    “But this is a very big step backward. Sir. I mean, isn’t it? Our flesh… out of control?”
    “Your flesh isn’t out of control, Ripley. Where did you get this melodramatic streak? You’re embarrassing yourself.”
    “I’m sorry, sir. I’m sure I don’t understand. I’m sure when I’ve had time to consider, I’ll share your equanimity on the matter.”
    “Harker isn’t a sign of things to come. He’s an anomaly. He’s a singularity. There will be no more mutations like him.”
    Perhaps the parasite had not merely fed on Harker’s innards but had incorporated his two hearts into itself, as well as his lungs and various other internal organs, at first sharing them and then taking them for its own. These things were missing from the cadaver.
    According to Jack Rogers—the real medical examiner, now dead and replaced by a replicant—Detectives O’Connor and Maddison claimed that a trollish creature had come out of Harker, as if shedding a cocoon. They had seen it drop out of sight through a manhole, into a storm drain.
    By the time that he finished with Harker and took tissue samples for later study, Victor had fallen into a bad mood.
    As they bagged Harker’s remains and set them aside for shipment to Crosswoods, Ripley asked, “Where is Harker’s second self now, Mr. Helios?”
    “It fled into a storm drain. It’s dead.”
    “How do you know it’s dead?”
    “I know ,” Victor said sharply.
    They turned next to William, the butler, who waited on a second autopsy table.
    Although he believed that William’s finger chewing episode had been triggered solely by psychological collapse, Victor nevertheless opened the butler’s torso and inventoried his organs, just to make certain that no second self had begun to form. He found no evidence of mutation.
    With a bone saw of Victor’s design, one with a diamond blade sharp enough to grind through the dense bone of any New Man, they trepanned William’s skull. They removed his brain and put it in preservative solution in a Tupperware container for later sectioning and study.
    William’s fate clearly did not alarm Ripley as did Harker’s. He had seen this sort of thing before.
    Victor brought to life a perfect being with a perfect mind, but contact with the Old Race, immersion in their sick society, sometimes corrupted the tank born.
    This would continue to be an occasional problem until the Old Race was eradicated and with it the social order and pre-Darwinian morality that it had created. Thereafter, following the Last War, without the paradigm of the Old Race to confuse and seduce them, Victor’s people would always and forever exist in perfect mental health, every last one of them.
    When they were finished with William, Ripley said, “Mr. Helios, sir, I’m sorry, but I can’t stop wondering, can’t stop thinking—is it possible that what happened to Harker could happen to me?”
    “No. I told you, he was a