Dead and Alive

this empire might not be the end of the threat to civilization that it posed.
    To ensure eternal power over his creations, Victor designed the New Race to be infertile. He created females with vaginas but without wombs. When they were the sole version of humanity on Earth, the world would be perpetually without children. Never again would society be organized around the family and its traditions, an Old Race institution that Victor abhorred.
    But when their biological structure collapsed, when they remade themselves into something like the aggregate beast or like the pale dwarfish thing that had come out of Detective Harker, perhaps they would rediscover the structures of fertility and efficient methods of reproduction.
    Who was to say that this new thing on Earth, this Werner-driven thing, might not at some point reproduce by fission, split into two functioning organisms, as parameciums did?
    It might even split into a male and a female. Thereafter, the two might cease to reproduce by fission and resume breeding through some kind of sexual intercourse.
    After all, in an infinite universe, anything that could be imagined might somewhere exist.
    The fate of the Old Race would be bleak if Victorsucceeded in producing an army to undertake a methodical genocide. But that horror might pale by comparison to a future in which humankind was harried and hunted by a multiple-species hybrid able to gain control of its currently chaotic physiology. Such an adversary would be nearly indestructible by virtue of its amorphous nature, full-bore insane by any standard yet intelligent, with an enthusiasm for violence un-equaled by any species of natural origin, with a distilled hatred for its prey that would be satanic in its bitterness, intensity, and eternal endurance.
    At Victor’s workstation, Deucalion settled onto the chair and switched on the computer once more.
    Among the many discoveries that he had made earlier, he found that even prideful Victor, whose well of hubris would never run dry, provided for the possibility that something would go so wrong in the Hands of Mercy that the old hospital would have to be reduced to molten slag. An option existed to destroy all evidence of the work done there and to prevent the escape of a rogue organism.
    Within the walls on each floor of the building were numerous bricklike packages of a highly incendiary material, developed by a foreign despot with a thing for fire and an affection for Victor. The doomsday countdown could be activated through a program that was on the computer menu under the name DRESDEN .
    The program allowed for a countdown as short as ten minutes, as long as four hours, or of any duration in between. Deucalion expected a call momentarilyfrom Michael, revealing a new location for their rendezvous. The Werner thing wouldn’t finish acquiring all the staff of Mercy for at least another hour; and even thereafter, the anarchic nature of the beast would ensure that it didn’t manage to break out of the hospital on a timely basis. Just in case Deucalion needed to return to Mercy because of something that came up during the meeting with Michael and Carson, he set the countdown clock at one hour.
    On the screen appeared the numbers 60:00, and at once they changed to 59:59 as the end of Mercy drew closer second by second.

CHAPTER 34
    CHRISTINE, HEAD HOUSEKEEPER at the Helios mansion, was afflicted by a most peculiar condition. For six days, she had been confused about her identity.
    Much of the time, she knew perfectly well who and what she was: Christine, a Beta, one of the New Race. She managed the house staff with efficiency, and was number two in authority, after the butler.
    But there were moments when she believed she was someone else entirely, when she did not even remember that she was Christine or that she had been manufactured at the Hands of Mercy.
    And, as a third condition, there were times when she remembered that she had been living here as Christine, a Beta, housekeeper to Mr. Helios, but
also
remembered the other and more exciting identity into which she now and then entirely submerged.
    Being one or the other, she could cope. But whenaware of both existences, she became confused and anxious. As she was now.
    Only a short while ago, she had been in the staff dormitory, at the back of the property, where she belonged at this hour.
    But a few minutes ago, she found herself here in the library, not attending to any chore that was her responsibility, but