Frankenstein

way they moved, their swift grace and supreme efficiency. They were his kind of people.
    He sat across the table from the real Erskine Potter, pointed the pistol at him, and pulled the trigger. The device contained only one round. The second shot was a telemetric command that switchedon the embedded needle’s electronics, initiating transmission to a processing-and-storage module in the replicant’s brain.
    Although the intruder remained aware of the kitchen, through his mind raced images extracted from the mayor’s gray matter, torrents of them, most of them connected and serial. Others were disconnected flashes, moments from a life.
    With the images came data: names, places, experiences, scraps of dialogue, fears and hopes. He was downloading the mayor’s memories with all the distortions and the discontinuities that were a part of recollections.
    At the end of this session, the intruder would be able to pass for the real Erskine Potter among even the mayor’s closest friends. He would recognize everyone in Potter’s life and be able to draw upon rich remembrances of each person.
    The ninety-minute download left him with the need to pee. He did not know why this should be the case, but it was very much the case, and he barely made it to the half bath, off the downstairs hall, without wetting himself.
    When the new—and much relieved—mayor returned to the kitchen, the former mayor still sat at the table, of course, hands palms-up in his lap, looking startled, unmoving except that his lips appeared to be continuously forming words that he didn’t vocalize.
    The new mayor washed the dishes in the sink and put them away. He reorganized the contents of the refrigerator. He disposed of some moldy cheese and a pint of cream ten days past its expiration date.
    The time was 4:08:24 A.M . His program included an awareness oftime to the precise second, an internal thousand-year clock that made timepieces and calendars superfluous.
    Before he could adjust the oven clocks, the new Nancy and the new Ariel returned from upstairs. Behind them shambled the real Nancy and Ariel, barefoot and in pajamas, small silver scarabs bright on their left temples.
    From outside came the sound of an approaching truck, no more than a minute ahead of schedule.
    To the real Mayor Potter, his replicant said, “Erskine, get to your feet and come out to the back porch.”
    When the mayor rose from the chair, his gaze was no longer either distant or startled, not mesmerized, but terror-stricken. Nevertheless, he obeyed, as did his wife and daughter when commanded by their replicants.
    On the porch, as the big paneled truck braked to a stop in the driveway, Erskine raised one hand to his temple and tentatively touched the rounded head of the needle, which glowed like a jewel in the headlights. But he proved powerless to extract it.
    In the cold night, warm breath steamed from everyone. The plumes from the real Potters were more forcefully expelled and more rapidly repeated than the exhalations of those who had usurped their lives.
    The house stood on two forested acres on the outskirts of town. No neighbors were near enough to see the three former residents being dispatched to their fates.
    Two members of the Community got out of the cab of the unmarked truck and opened the rear doors.
    While the new Nancy and Ariel waited on the porch, the new mayor led the former Potter family to the back of the truck. “Get in.”
    Along both sides of the cargo area, benches were bolted to the walls.
    Five people in nightclothes were seated on the right, two on the left. The Potters joined the two on the left.
    Like animals paralyzed by fright, the ten stared out at the new mayor. None of them could cry out or move unless told to move.
    The truck was big enough to carry ten more. The driver and his teammate had other stops on their schedule.
    With the Potter family aboard, the driver closed and bolted the doors. He said, “For the Community.”
    “For the Community,” the new Erskine Potter replied.
    He had no idea where the individuals in the truck would be taken or when they would be killed. He wasn’t curious. He didn’t care. They were the spoilers of the world. They would get what they deserved.

    
chapter
3

    For Carson O’Connor-Maddison and her husband, Michael Maddison—she the daughter of a homicide cop, he the son of industrial-safety engineers—the past two years were the busiest of their lives, with considerable homicide and