Frankenstein

principle.
    Unfailing cooperation with others of the Community was an important principle, too, as was keeping their existence secret from ordinary men and women.
    There were other important principles, as well, but none was more important than any other. When no hierarchy of values existed, making decisions became easy. Confronted with any problem, snared in any difficult situation, Erskine Potter—like any member of the Community—just did the most efficient thing, took the most direct action, and was confident that what he had done was
right
.
    The only morality was efficiency. The only immorality was inefficiency.
    Testing his self-control, risking anger, Mayor Potter opened the refrigerator. What a mess.
    Jars of olives and pickles stood on the same door shelf as a squeeze-bottle of chocolate syrup. Capers, mustard, ketchup, and salsa—which logically should have been with the olives and pickles—rested instead on a shelf with a pressurized can of whipped cream and a jar of maraschino cherries, which obviously belonged with the chocolate syrup. The items on the primary shelves were stored in an unspeakably disordered fashion.
    Appalled, Potter hissed between clenched teeth. Although displeased, even indignant, he would not allow himself to be angry.
    Determined to proceed briskly with the task at hand, he closed the refrigerator door.
    Faint footsteps crossed the room above. Potter heard someone descending the front stairs.
    Beyond the kitchen, the hallway brightened. A cut-crystal fixture on the ceiling cast geometric patterns of light across the walls and floor, as if reality were fracturing.
    Erskine Potter did not flee. He did not hide. He remained by the refrigerator, waiting.
    A silhouette appeared in the doorway. In the kitchen, from the overhead fluorescents, cool light suddenly fell through the air.
    Wearing pajamas and slippers, evidently seeking a late-night snack, the
current
mayor of Rainbow Falls, Montana, entered the kitchen. Five feet ten, a hundred eighty pounds, fifty-two years old, with brown hair and a sweet round face, the son of Loretta and Gavin Potter, his name was Erskine.
    The current Mayor Potter halted in stunned disbelief when he saw his duplicate.
    The future Mayor Potter said, “Erskine. My dear brother, I’ve been searching for you half my life.”
    This was a lie. Loretta and Gavin Potter weren’t the intruder’s parents. He had no mother or father. He had never been born. Instead, he was grown to maturity in mere months, programmed, and extruded.
    He pretended to be the current Mayor Potter’s twin only because the claim would confuse and briefly disarm his prey.
    As he talked, he moved, opening his arms as if to embrace his long-lost sibling. He gripped the mayor, drove a knee viciously into his crotch, and pinned him in a corner beside the double ovens with the incorrect clocks.
    From under his jacket, he withdrew a pistol-like device. He pressed the muzzle to the mayor’s left temple and pulled the trigger.
    Instead of a bullet, the gun fired a needle that pierced the skull and penetrated the brain to a precise depth.
    Instantly, the mayor stopped convulsing around his crushed testicles, stopped gasping for breath. His eyes were as wide as the eyes of a child struck by wonder.
    Because the needle chemically cauterized the tissue that it pierced, the victim did not bleed.
    Like a nail, the needle had a head. It was not flat but rounded, resembling the head of a decorative upholstery tack.
    The round form looked like a silvery beetle clinging to the mayor’s temple. The needle was a probe, and the head contained an abundance of electronics, intricate nanocircuitry.
    The intruder led the docile mayor to the kitchen table, pulled out a chair, and said, “Sit.”
    When the mayor settled in the chair, hands palms-up in his lap, the intruder went to the back door and opened it.
    The woman and the girl entered from the porch. Nancy Potter was forty-four, attractive, with shaggy blond hair. The daughter, Ariel, was fourteen. In fact, they were replicants of the real Nancy and Ariel: grown, programmed, and extruded nine days previously.
    Nancy quietly closed the back door. Ariel swept the kitchen with her gaze, then stared at the ceiling. Nancy focused on the ceiling, too, and then she and Ariel exchanged a glance.
    As the replicant of Erskine Potter watched, the woman and the girl proceeded quietly out of the kitchen, into the hallway, toward the front stairs. He liked the