Two enormous gray eyes shone out of the brilliant blackness of its face and raked across the two men looking down. Silas could almost feel the weight of the alien gaze. The lower jaw was enormously wide and jutting, built for power. A grossly bossed cranial vault spread wide over the pulled-out face, capped by two soft semicircular flaps of ear cartilage.
It opened its mouth, mewling the same strange cry that Silas had heard the night before. Even the inside of its mouth was midnight black.
“This is beyond …” Baskov began.
“Yes, that’s a perfect way to describe it.”
Baskov began to reach a gloved hand toward the newborn but then apparently thought better of it. “This is beyond the reach of what I thought we were able to do,” he finished.
“It is. We cannot do this,” Silas said.
The two men locked eyes.
“How?” Baskov asked.
“You’re asking the wrong guy, remember? I’m the builder, not the designer.”
“Does it seem to be put together well? Are those legs supposed to look like that?”
“Well, everything is symmetrical on the exterior, so that’s a good sign. But you haven’t seen the really interesting thing yet.” Silas leaned through the bars and grabbed the newborn under the upper arms. It struggled, but he was able to flip it over onto its stomach.
“What are those?” Baskov whispered.
“We’re not totally sure, but the X-ray data indicate they’re probably immature wing structures of some sort.”
“Wings? Are you telling me this thing has wings?”
Silas shrugged his answer.
“They’re not functional, are they?”
“I don’t see how they could be. Flight is probably the single most difficult form of locomotion from a design standpoint, and this thing certainly doesn’t look like it was built along avian lines. The bones are huge, strong.”
“But why even try? There isn’t really room to fly in the arena.” Baskov bent closer. “And those big ears are a liability. The eyes, too.”
“Now you understand my frustration with your chosen designer. We need to talk to him.”
Baskov’s expression faded from wonder to irritation. “Chandler isn’t as easy to reach as he used to be.”
“Where is he?”
“Where isn’t the problem. He just isn’t easy to reach anymore.”
AFTER WALKING Baskov back to the lobby, Silas returned to the nursery and sent Keith home for the night. He stood alone at the side of the crib, silently watching the baby breathe. It was a baby. Big as a newborn calf but just as underdeveloped and fragile as any human newborn. He extended a hand through the bars and stroked the infant’s back. It lay on its tummy, legs drawn up, bottom stuck in the air.
It’s beautiful.
But then, almost all life is beautiful at this stage. Pure innocence combined with complete selfishness. Its only function was to take from those around it so that it could live and grow, while remaining completely unaware of the effort involved in meeting its needs.
Silas closed his eyes and breathed in the smell of the creature. He felt himself relax a little. His sister hinted once that she thought he’d become a geneticist to create something that was a part of him. She was wrong. That was why people have children.
He wanted to create something better than himself. Better than any man could be. Something a little closer to perfect. But he had always failed. His creations were monsters compared to this. They were just animal Frankensteins that acted out impulses society wouldn’t allow men to indulge in.
But he’d come close once. Teddy. Ursus theodorus had been loving, gentle, and even intelligent, after a fashion. That last quality had cost the first prototype its life. It had been too intelligent. Some people got nervous. The board of directors had had its say, and late one evening, he’d been forced to place the little creature on a table and inject it with enough animal tranquilizer to stop its breathing. He’d stood back with ice in his gut while his creation died.
The next series of Teddys were dumber and better suited the board, but it wasn’t the same for Silas. He’d lost his stomach for pet manufacture. When the position at the Olympic Commission became available, he’d jumped at it. If he was going to watch his successes die, he would know to expect it from the outset. No more surprises.
But this was a surprise.
But not my surprise. Not my baby this time.
Chandler was deranged. There was no doubting that. And this was his creation. Silas fought back a surge of begrudging admiration for the man. In all Silas’s years as a geneticist, he’d never even come close to developing a creature like the one that lay before him now.
He shoved the feelings to the side, letting the anger take its place. Chandler knew nothing about genetics. He knew nothing about life. All he knew was computers. And his computer had been the true creator, after all.
This perfect little life form that lay snoring on the other side of the bars had been created by an organized composite of wires, chips, and screens. Somehow, all this beauty, all this perfection, had come from a machine.
CHAPTER TWO
Evan Chandler leaned his significant mass against the wall near the window, picking sores into his face with absentminded fingers. The fluorescent lights hummed softly in the background, providing a subtle soundtrack to the visions in his head. His eyes focused inward on some distant dimly lit horizon. For Evan, that horizon had been growing ever darker over the last several months.
A sudden clap of thunder brought his consciousness swimming to the surface like some strange, stunted leviathan. With an expression approaching surprise, he looked out into the desolation of the early evening. Rain dribbled its way down the glass. God, he hated storms.
He shifted off the wall and trudged over to his desk, where he eased his weight onto a loudly wailing swivel chair. His desk was a sprawling mountain range of papers, folders, and empty foam food containers. He considered the room before him. Stacks of computer digilogs stood at ease like drowsy sentinels against one wall. Several dead brown plants drooped from their pots in various stages of decomposition. He cast his muddied hazel eyes around the chaos, looking for his laptop amid the clutter. Eventually, he gave up. It would be easier to get another than to sift through the various geological layers of refuse he had accumulated.
He knew there was something he was supposed to do today, someone he was supposed to see, but he couldn’t quite remember. Looking around the room, he experienced a painful moment of lucidity, saw vividly where he was going, what he was slipping into. It scared him, but the feeling faded. It always did.
A knock on the door startled him, and his fat rolls shimmied as he jerked his chin up from his chest. He’d faded out again. Lost time. Outside the window he saw the storm had passed. Good. “What do you want?” he called.
A young woman opened the door and leaned her head through. He recognized her face, though he couldn’t quite place her name. Sarah, or Susan, or something like that. Was it his secretary? Did he even have a secretary anymore? He couldn’t remember.