Dead and Alive

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.

CHAPTER 7
    IN THE MONITORING HUB that served the containment chambers, Ripley studied the control console. He pressed a button to activate the camera in the transition module between the hub and Isolation Room Number Two.
    The real-time video feed on one of the six screens changed, revealing the thing that had been Werner. The so-called singularity crouched between the massive steel vault hatches, facing the outer barrier, like a trap-door spider waiting for unsuspecting prey to cross the concealed entrance to its lair.
    As if the creature knew that the camera had been activated, it turned to gaze up at the lens. The grossly distorted face was part human, even recognizably that of Mercy’s security chief, though the double-wide mouth and the insectile mandibles, ceaselessly working, were not what the Beekeeper had intended whenhe made Werner. Its right eye still looked like one of Werner’s, but its luminous-green left eye had an elliptical pupil, like the eye of a panther.
    The desktop computer screen, thus far dark, now brightened, and Annunciata appeared. “I have become aware that Werner, that Werner, that Werner is trapped in Isolation Room Number Two.” She closed her eyes. “All right. It is done.”
    Within the stainless-steel vault door, servomotors hummed. The bolt-retracting gears clicked, clicked, clicked.
    In the transition module, the Werner thing looked away from the overhead camera, toward the exit.
    Aghast, Ripley said, “Annunciata, what’re you doing? Don’t open the transition module.”
    On the computer screen, Annunciata’s lips parted, but she didn’t speak. Her eyes remained closed.
    The servomotors continued to hum and gears clicked. With a soft sucking sound, twenty-four massive lock bolts began to withdraw from the architrave around the vault door.
    “Don’t open the transition module,” Ripley repeated.
    Annunciata’s face faded from the computer screen.
    Ripley scanned the control console. The touch switch for the outer door of the module glowed yellow, which meant the barrier was slowly opening.
    He pressed the switch to reverse the process. The indicator light should have turned blue, which would have signified that the retracting bolts had changed direction, but it remained yellow.
    The microphone in the transition module picked up an eager, keening sound from the Werner thing.
    The range of emotions accessible to the New Race was limited. The Beekeeper revealed to each forming person in every creation tank that love, affection, humility, shame, and other of the supposedly nobler feelings were instead only different expressions of the same sentimentalism, arising from thousands of years of a wrongheaded belief in a god who did not exist. They were feelings that encouraged weakness, that led to energy wasted on hope, that distracted the mind from the focus required to remake the world. Tremendous things were achieved not by hope but by the application of the will, by action, by the unrelenting and ruthless use
of power
.
    Ripley anxiously pressed the door switch again, but it remained yellow, and still the gears clicked and the steel bolts retracted.
    “Annunciata?” he called. “Annunciata?”
    The only emotions that mattered, said the Beekeeper, were those that clearly contributed to survival and to the fulfillment of his