Dead and Alive

convincing laughter, but their mirth was not genuine. They did what they did with the dead man because their hatred for the Old Race was intense, and this seemed like a good way to express that hatred.
    The dog followed them on this photo shoot, watching them from the doorways of various rooms but never venturing close.
    Finally, they stripped Pizza Guy naked again, tied a rope around his neck, hauled him over a transverse beam in the family room, and let him dangle like a big fish on a dock scale. Janet stood beside the corpse, as if proud of her catch.
    “You know what I think we’re doing?” she asked.
    All of this behavior had seemed as reasonable to Bucky as to her, though he didn’t know why. He said, “What
are
we doing?”
    “I think we’re having fun.”
    “Could this be what fun is like?”
    “I think it could,” Janet said.
    “Well, it’s more interesting than anything else we’ve ever done. What else do you want to do with him?”
    “He’s getting a little boring,” Janet said. “I think it’s really time now to go next door and kill the Bennets.”
    The original Bucky had kept two guns in the house. “You want to take a pistol, blow their faces off?”
    Janet thought about it, but then shook her head. “That doesn’t sound fun enough.”
    “You want to take a knife or that Civil War sword on the wall of my study?”
    “What I want,” Janet said, “is just to do them both with my bare hands.”
    “Strangle them?”
    “Been there, done that.”
    “Then what are you going to do with them?”
    “Oh, I’ve got like a thousand ideas.”
    “Should I bring the camera?” he asked.
    “Absolutely, bring the camera.”
    “Maybe we can put all these shots in an album,” Bucky suggested. “That’s what people do.”
    “I’d like that. But we’re not really people.”
    “I don’t see why we can’t have an album. In a lot of ways we’re
similar
to people.”
    “Except that we’re superior. We’re the super race.”
    “We are the super race,” Bucky agreed. “Soon we’re going to rule the world, colonize the moon and Mars. We’ll own the universe. So it seems like we could have a photo album if we wanted. Who’s to tell us we can’t?”
    “Nobody,” Janet said.

CHAPTER 3
    ALONE IN THE INSTITUTIONAL KITCHEN at the Hands of Mercy, Ripley sat on a stool at one of the stainless-steel islands. With his hands, he tore apart a three-pound ham and stuffed chunks into his mouth.
    The average man of the New Race required five thousand calories per day to sustain himself, two and a half times what the average man of the Old Race needed. Recently, Ripley had engaged in binge eating, packing in ten thousand calories or more at a single sitting.
    The tearing was more satisfying than the eating. These days, the urge to tear things apart—especially meat—frequently overcame Ripley. Cooked meat served as a substitute for raw flesh, the flesh of the Old Race, which was what he most wanted to tear.
    None of his kind was either permitted to kill or capable of killing—until ordered to do so by the Beekeeper.
    That was Ripley’s private name for Victor Helios. Many of the others referred to him as Father, but Mr. Helios became infuriated when he heard them use that word.
    They weren’t their maker’s children. They were his property. He had no responsibility to them. They had every responsibility to him.
    Ripley ate the entire ham, all the while reminding himself that the Beekeeper had a brilliant plan for a new world.
    The family is an obsolete institution, and it’s also dangerous because it puts itself above the common good of the race. The parent-child relationship must be eradicated. The sole allegiance of members of the New Race, who were born from the tanks as adults, must be to the organized community that Helios envisioned, not to one another, but to the
community
, and in fact not to the community but to the
idea
of community.
    From one of two walk-in refrigerators, Ripley retrieved a fully cooked two-pound brisket of beef. He returned with it to the stool at the kitchen island.
    Families breed individuals. The creation tanks breed worker bees, each with its specific function to fulfill. Knowing your place and the meaning of your life, you can be content as no member of the Old Race ever could be. Free will is the curse of the Old. Programmed purpose is the glory of the New.
    The swarm was the family, the hive was the home, and the future belonged to the horde.
    With