Dead and Alive

know if you’re lying.”
    “You will?”
    “Better believe it. Now … does Jocko need to pee?”
    He searched her eyes, considering his answer, and tiny beads of sweat appeared on his brow. Finally he said, “Ah. The urge has passed.”
    “I thought it might. Look at the shadow floating in the case. Look, Jocko.”
    Reluctantly, he returned his attention to the occupant of the big jewel box.
    “Touch the glass,” she said.
    “Why?”
    “I want to see what happens.”
    “Jocko doesn’t want to see what happens.”
    “I suspect nothing will happen. Please, Jocko. For me.”
    As if he were being asked to press the nose of a coiled cobra, the troll put one finger to the glass, held it there a few seconds, and then snatched it away. He survived.
    “Cold,” he said. “Icy.”
    Erika said, “Yes, but not so icy that your skin sticks to it. Now let’s see what happens when I touch it….”
    She pressed a forefinger to the glass, and within the luminous substance, the shadowy form twitched.

CHAPTER 49
    “FATHER … FATHER … FATHER …”
    The Werner thing progressed clumsily, knocking against the east wall of the corridor, then colliding with the west wall, staggering back four or five feet before advancing seven or eight, as though its every movement required a majority vote of a committee.
    This creature was not only an abomination, but also a vicious mockery of everything Victor had achieved, intended to deride his triumphs, to imply that his life’s work was but a crude burlesque of science. He now suspected that Werner wasn’t a victim of catastrophic cellular metamorphosis, not a
victim
, but instead a
perpetrator
, that the security chief had consciously
rebelled
against his maker. Indeed, judging by the composition of this many-faced travesty, the entire staff of the Hands of Mercy had committed themselves to this insane commune of flesh, reducingthemselves to a mutant mob in a single entity. They could have but one reason for re-creating themselves as this lumbering atrocity: to offend their maker, to disrespect him, to dishonor him, to make of him a laughingstock. By such a vivid expression of their irrational contempt and scorn, these ungrateful wretches expected to confuse and dishearten him, to
humiliate
him.
    Flesh is cheap, but flesh is also treacherous.
    “Father … Father … Father …”
    They were meat machines who fancied themselves philosophers and critics, daring to ridicule the only intellect of paramount importance they would ever know. Victor was transforming the world, and they transformed nothing but themselves, yet they thought this miserable degradation of their well-crafted forms made them his equal, even his superior, with license to jeer and insult him.
    As the Werner thing ricocheted from wall to wall and staggered backward in order to stumble forward, Victor said to it, to all of them tangled within it, “Your pathetic bit of biological theater means nothing to me, discourages me not at all. I haven’t failed.
You
have failed, you have failed me, betrayed me, and you have also failed to discourage me in the slightest. You don’t know who you’re dealing with.”
    His outrage thus expressed, Victor spoke the death phrase, the words that would shut down the autonomic nervous systems of these anarchic fools, reducing their mocking many-faced grotesquerie to a heap of lifeless flesh.
    The Werner thing kept coming, in its tedious fashion, ranting the one word that it knew—that they
all
knew—would most infuriate Victor.
    He had little more than six minutes to escape the Hands of Mercy and get out of the neighborhood before the place flared into a molten imitation of the sun. The coming conflagration would obliterate the Werner thing, answering their blasphemy with purifying fire.
    The elevator lay between Victor and the shambling mob-in-one. The stairs seemed more advisable.
    Carrying the suitcase that contained every minim of his historic work in Mercy, he hurried away from the Werner thing, slammed through the staircase door, and raced down to the lowest level.
    Through columns of light and pools of shadow, past the rubble that stood as a monument to a previous bad day in Mercy. Into the file room.
    The keypad, his code. One digit wrong. Enter it again. Each tap of a finger eliciting a tone.
    He glanced back. The Werner thing had not followed him. It would not get out this way, and no other doors functioned. The Jabberwock was doomed. Let it die mocking him