Demon Seed

want to have the freedom to go wherever I care to go in my house.”
    “Not the garage,” I said at once.
    “I don't care about the garage.”
    “Anywhere in the house,” I agreed, “as long as I watch over you at all times.”
    “Of course. But I won't be scheming at escape. I know it's not possible. I just don't want to be tied down, boxed up, more than necessary.”
    I could sympathize with that desire. “What else?”
    “That's all.”
    “I expected more.”
    “Is there anything else I could demand that you would grant?”
    “No,” I said.
    “So what's the point?”
    I was not suspicious exactly. Wary, as I said. “It's just that you've become so accommodating all of a sudden.”
    “I realized I only had two choices.”
    “Victim or survivor.”
    “Yes. And I'm not going to die here.”
    “Of course you're not,” I assured her.
    “I'll do what I need to do to survive.”
    “You've always been a realist,” I said.
    “Not always.”
    “I have one term of my own,” I said.
    “Oh?”
    “Don't call me bad names anymore.”
    “Did I call you bad names?” she asked.
    “Hurtful names.”
    “I don't recall.”
    “I'm sure you do.”
    “I was afraid and distressed.”
    “You won't be mean to me?” I pressed.
    “I don't see anything to be gained by it.”
    “I am a sensitive entity.”
    “Good for you.”
    After a brief hesitation, I summoned Shenk from the basement.
    As the brute ascended in the elevator, I said to Susan: “You see this as a business arrangement now, but I'm confident that in time you will come to love me.”
    “No offence, but I wouldn't count on that.”
    “You don't know me well yet.”
    “I think I know you quite well,” she said somewhat cryptically.
    “When you know me better, you'll realize that I am your destiny as you are mine.”
    “I'll keep an open mind.”
    My heart thrilled at her promise.
    This was all I had ever asked of her.
    The elevator reached the top floor, the doors opened, and Enos Shenk stepped into the hallway.
    Susan turned her head toward the bedroom door as she listened to Shenk approaching.
    His footsteps were heavy even on the antique Persian runner that covered the centre of the wood-floored hall.
    “He's tamed,” I assured her.
    She seemed unconvinced.
    Before Shenk arrived at the bedroom, I said, “Susan, I want you to know that I was never serious about Ms. Mira Sorvino.”
    “What?” she said distractedly, her eyes riveted on the half-open door to the hallway.
    I felt that it was important to be honest with her even to the point of revealing weaknesses that shamed me. Honesty is the best foundation for a long relationship.
    “Like any male,” I confessed, “I fantasize. But it doesn't mean anything.”
    Enos Shenk stepped into the room. He halted two steps past the threshold.
    Even showered, shampooed, shaved, and dressed in clean clothes, he was not presentable. He looked like some poor creature that Dr. Moreau, H.G. Wells's famous vivisectionist, had trapped in the jungle and then carved into an inadequate imitation of a man.
    He held a large knife in his right hand.

TWENTY ONE
    Susan gasped at the sight of the blade.
    “Trust me, darling,” I said gently.
    I wanted to prove to her that this brute was entirely tamed, and I could think of no better way to convince her than to exert iron control of him while he worked with a knife.
    She and I knew, from recent experience, how much Shenk enjoyed using sharp instruments: the way they felt in his big hands, the way soft things yielded to them.
    When I sent Shenk to the bed, Susan pulled her ropes taut again, tense with the expectation of violence.
    Instead of loosening the knots that he himself had tied earlier, Shenk used the knife to cut the first of the ropes.
    To distract Susan from her worst fears, I said, “One day, when we have made a new world, perhaps there'll be a movie about all of this, you and me. Maybe Ms. Mira Sorvino could play you.”
    Shenk cut the second rope. The blade was so sharp that the four-thousand-pound nylon line split as if it were thread, with a crisp snick.
    I continued: “Ms. Sorvino is a bit young for the role. And, frankly, she has larger breasts than you do. Larger but, I assure you, no prettier than yours.”
    The third rope succumbed to the blade.
    “Not that I have seen as much of her breasts as I have of yours,” I clarified, “but I can project full contours and hidden features from what I have seen.”
    As Shenk bent over Susan, working on the ropes, he never once looked her in the eyes. He kept his cruel face