Margaret Carlson felt her knees weaken, and she sank down into one of the chairs that flanked the desk. “Why?” she breathed. “What …?” But once more she couldn’t complete her question, as her mind reeled.
“She’s not dead, Mrs. Carlson,” Josh told her, his voice trembling. “She’s just asleep or something. Adam did something to her, and she went to sleep!”
Margaret stared numbly at Gordon Billings. “Is that true?”
Billings shrugged uneasily. “She’s in some kind of deep coma, yes. But it seems to be far beyond sleep. It looks to me as though her brain must be dying, although the instruments monitoring it indicate that it’s physically healthy.”
“Healthy?” Frank Carlson echoed. His eyes fixed on the tank, and he felt a terrible welling of anger coming from deep within him. “That’s not my daughter,” he declared, his voice strangling on his own words. “That’s not Amy!” His voice began to rise. “Don’t tell me that’s Amy! Do you understand? I will not accept that that — that thing — is any part of my little girl! No!” He was sobbing now, his rage suddenly dissolving into grief as the truth of what had happened to his daughter sank into him. “No,” he wailed again. “Not Amy! Not my little Amy!”
As his anguish filled the room, the lines on the monitor displaying Amy Carlson’s brain waves suddenly changed.
A blip appeared in the gentle wave pattern, a blip that lingered on the screen, slowly moving toward the left as the instruments gathered new data and displayed it on the monitor.
“She heard you,” Josh breathed, staring at the display. “Amy heard you!”
Out of the quiet and darkness into which Amy had retreated, a voice rang out, speaking her name, then died away almost as quickly as it had come. Amy’s first instinct was to cringe away from the stimulus, to retreat further into the shell she had built around her mind.
And yet the voice she’d heard was familiar.
Not Adam.
Not Dr. Engersol, either.
But familiar, nonetheless.
Terrified, she gathered her shell more tightly around her, willing herself not to respond to the stimulus, not to allow herself to be baited into whatever trap Adam had set for her this time. Memories of the demons still haunted her, and the fear that enveloped her was a palpable thing.
And yet a tiny tendril of her mind responded to that voice. Almost unconsciously, she opened a crack in that psychic shell. Reaching out with her mind, she took a tentative exploratory step into the world beyond the confines of her own brain.
She sensed instantly that something had changed.
The cacophony of stimuli that had assaulted her earlier was gone. She hesitated, certain that at any moment Adam would sense that she had opened herself again and let down her defenses, however slightly, and attack.
The attack didn’t ome.
She opened the crack in her shell wider and began to let her mind emerge once again. Still, she remained cautious, creeping forth into the computer’s circuitry, searching for the weapons she was certain were trained on her.
Slowly, almost imperceptibly, she began to sense that Adam was gone. She could no longer feel his presence, nor detect the stimuli emanating from his brain.
Was he hiding? Had he, too, closed himself down, waiting for her to drop her defenses entirely so that he could spring forth out of the black nothingness of the circuitry?
She reached further, exploring the world within the microchips and the data that were stored there.
Nowhere was there any trace of Adam.
There were voices coming through the microphone, though. A babble of voices that were being instantly digitalized and transmitted to her brain, tumbling over one another so that none of them was distinct.
She emerged completely from her shell, searching through the computer for some clue as to what had happened, some explanation for Adam’s disappearance. For she had already discovered that the support system for his tank was no longer functioning, nor could she find, anywhere, any trace of activity coming from his mind.
Ranging through the computer, she discovered the archive files, closely compressed, that the powerful Croyden had been steadily generating through every phase of the experiments that had been conducted in the laboratory. Reviewing them in an instant, she watched everything that had transpired in the lab while she had pulled herself down into the deep, black well she had imagined. It was as if she was experiencing a dream, the action as clear as if she’d been watching it herself, but being absorbed into her mind within the space of a split second.
From the still-running cameras suspended from the ceiling, she could see her parents in the laboratory now.
And Josh was there.
Other people, people she didn’t recognize at all.
Did they know what had happened in the laboratory? Or why it had happened?
Her mind fully functional once more, she began to work furiously, for suddenly she knew how it had to end — and what she must do to prepare for that ending.
“What is it?” Margaret Carlson whispered, her eyes riveted on the monitor displaying the activity within Amy’s brain.
Gordon Billings stared at the same monitor. What he saw was impossible. And yet there it was. The alpha patterns, the beta patterns, all of it familiar. And there was no arguing with what it told him. “She’s waking up,” he said quietly. “She’s coming into consciousness.”
“Consciousness?” Frank Carlson repeated. “That’s not possible! That’s not Amy in that tank! It’s not a human being at all! It’s nothing more than a mass of tissue! For God’s sake, someone turn that damned machine off and let it die!”
His words echoed in the room. For a moment no one said anything at all. Then, just as Gordon Billings was about to speak, a voice came from the speaker in the ceiling.
“Not yet, Daddy,” Amy said. “I’m not ready yet.”
Frank Carlson froze, and Margaret, at the sound of her daughter’s voice, instinctively glanced around the room as if half expecting to see her daughter hidden somewhere there.
“Amy?” Josh breathed. “Are you okay? What happened?”
The adults in the room stared at the boy, who seemed to accept that what they were hearing was actually Amy Carlson’s voice, impossible though it patently was. But before any of them could react, Amy herself spoke once more.
“Adam tried to hurt me,” she said. “He tried to make me go crazy, and I had to hide from him.”
Josh frowned, trying to fathom what she could be talking about. Hide where? How? “But what happened?” he asked again. “They’re dead, Amy. Jeff and Adam, and Dr. Engersol. And Hildie, too. They’re all dead.”
Amy was silent for a moment. When she spoke again, her voice was trembling. “Adam killed them, Josh. He took over everything, even the elevator. I never meant for Hildie to die, but he took over and killed her. He killed them all.” Even as she spoke, Amy’s mind continued to work, manipulating data within the massive storage banks of the Croyden, sending and receiving stimuli with far more speed than even the Croyden itself could generate.
“You’re going to see me in a second, Mama,” she said softly. “I’ll be on the monitor above my tank. All you have to do is look up. And I can see you, too. I get images from the camera, and they come into my mind as clearly as if I still had eyes. I’m not dead, Mama. I’m just — different, I guess.”
Her mind half refusing to believe what she was hearing, Margaret Carlson, along with everyone else in the room, looked up at the monitor above the tank in which Amy’s brain was imprisoned.
Slowly, the image developed, built by the Croyden from the instructions generated within Amy’s own mind. It was an instantly recognizable portrait of a freckle-faced, red-haired girl, her face framed by a mass of red curls. And yet, it wasn’t quite Amy. Something about her had changed.