Prodigal Son

not fundamentally about beauty. It was at root about power and the establishment of a New Truth.
        Consequently, the young men he summoned might be considered extraordinary in appearance only because, considering what they were inside, they looked so common. Their names were Jones and Picou.
        He told them about Bobby Allwine in a drawer at the morgue. "His body must disappear tonight. And all confirming evidence-tissue samples, photographs, video."
        "The autopsy report, tape recordings?" asked Jones.
        "If they're easily found," Victor said. "But by themselves, they confirm nothing."
        Picou said, "What about the medical examiner, anyone who might have been there when the body was opened?"
        "For now, let them live," Victor said. "Without the body or any evidence, all they'll have is a wild story that'll make them sound like drunks or druggies."
        Although they were intellectually capable of greater work than this garbage detail, neither Jones nor Picou complained or found their assignments demeaning. Their patient obedience was the essence of the New Race.
        In the revolutionary civilization that Victor was making, as in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, everyone in the social order would have a rank. And all would be content, without envy.
        Huxley ordered his world with Alphas at the top, the ruling elite, followed by Betas and Gammas. Brute laborers were designated Epsilons, born to their positions in a designed society.
        To Huxley, this vision had been a dystopia. Victor saw it more clearly: Utopia.
        He'd once met Huxley at a cocktail party. He considered the man to be an officious little prig who worried ridiculously about science becoming a juggernaut and more dogmatic than any religion could hope to be, crushing everything human from humanity. Victor found him to be rich in book knowledge, light on experience, and boring.
        Nevertheless, Huxley's nightmare vision served well as Victor's ideal. He would make the Alpha class almost equal to himself, so they would be challenging company and capable of carrying out his plans for the day after humanity had been liquidated, when the Earth would serve as a platform for great accomplishments by a race of posthumans who would work together as industriously as a hive.
        Now these two Epsilons, Oliver Jones and Byron Picou, set out like two good worker bees, eager to fulfill the roles for which they had been designed and built. They would steal Allwine's remains and dispose of them in a landfill that operated in higher ground outside the city.
        The landfill was owned by Victor through another shell company, and it employed only members of the New Race. He regularly required a secure disposal site to bury forever those interesting but failed experiments that must never be discovered by ordinary humans.
        Under those mountains of garbage lay a city of the dead. If ever they fossilized and were excavated by paleontologists a million years hence, what mysteries they would present, what nightmares they would inspire.
        Although problems existed with the comparatively small hive -as yet only two thousand of the New Race-that he had established here in New Orleans, they would be solved. Week by week he made advances in his science and increased the number in his implacable army. He would soon begin to mass produce the tanks, creating his people not in a laboratory but by the many thousands in much larger facilities that might accurately be called farms.
        The work was endless but rewarding. The Earth had not been made in a day, but he had the necessary patience to remake it.
        Now he was thirsty. From a lab refrigerator, he got a Pepsi. A little plate of chocolate chip cookies was in the fridge. He adored chocolate chip cookies. He took two.

CHAPTER 34
        
        SOMEONE HAD PUT a police seal on Bobby Allwine's apartment door. Carson broke it.
        This was a minor infraction, considering that the place was not actually a crime scene. Besides, she was, after all, a cop.
        Then she used a Lockaid lock-release gun, sold only to police agencies, to spring the deadbolt. She eased the thin pick of the gun into the keyway, under the pin tumblers, and pulled the trigger. She pulled it four times before lodging all the pins at the shear line.
        The Lockaid gun was more problematic than breaking the seal. The department owned