“Interesting,” commented Ainsley. The fear in his face had been replaced by contemplation. The darkened room seemed to lighten ever so slightly.
“Why?”
“Killing for pleasure, my boy, is not something well documented in the animal kingdom — and certainly not in the world of the machine. We have come to our first anomaly in the equation.”
“Meaning?…”
“Meaning a rule the makers of this Omicron legion had to write themselves to accomplish their task. It wasn’t enough to refine and expand the skills of their subjects. To achieve total success, the subjects had to be conditioned to enjoy killing. Don’t you see?”
“See what?”
“The deaths of all those Tupi Indians that brought your friend to the Amazon. The Omicron subjects stalked their prey not just to practice their skills, but also to provide positive reenforcement. A reward, if you will.”
“I’ve known plenty of individuals who enjoy killing, Professor, thrive on it even — and there was no biochemical engineering behind it.”
Reston Ainsley shrugged. “Perhaps not. Then again, if my theories are correct, it was their brain chemistry that was behind it. Granted, there was no engineering involved, but that doesn’t mean there couldn’t be.”
“No,” Blaine argued, glancing briefly at the cold black finish of Obie Seven, “there’s got to be more, something beyond enjoyment.”
“I believe you might be quite right, my boy. The conditioning chambers on the fourth sublevel bothered me. I can account for virtually everything else, but not this.”
“Brainwashing,” Blaine proposed.
“More like mind-conditioning. Different terms, same effect. And in this case, the results are what matter. What if killing was made an addiction for this legion? What if they actually needed to kill to survive? Think of drug addicts. They may love their chosen poison, but their addiction is more a question of hating the consequences of being without it.” Ainsley raised his plastic-and-rubber model of the brain to catch the light. “So now we have our two dozen subjects, carefully selected for already possessing an overriding capacity for violence, whose brains have been fine-tuned, so to speak, and skills refined to a great extent.”
“Two dozen.”
“Only for a time. To truly create a perfect legion of killers, an element of uncertainty would have to be factored in. The twenty-four subjects would know only twelve were to be chosen, thus only twelve could survive.”
“You’re saying the dozen that came up short were executed?”
“I’m saying that one dozen were killed by the surviving dozen. The Amazon Basin was not chosen at random. The final field tests might have involved matched competition in the jungle. The twelve survivors became the legion.”
“Except you’re forgetting about that extra cubicle Johnny and I found at the end of the hall. What lived in there, Professor? Why was it kept separate from the rest?”
Reston Ainsley had no answer.
Part Three
The Legion
Chapter 17
The woman had died much too quickly. She gave up her life to him as easily as passing a quarter to a beggar, and he had packed it away in his pocket with a painful awareness of how little it weighed.
He sat on the edge of the bed, feeling that he owned the darkness. He liked the night, for it made him feel more superior than the day. When it was light he could be seen as well as see. But his eyes could pierce the darkness while his prey had no hope of seeing him. Since leaving Home Base, he had done most of his sleeping in the day.
Of course, he did not sleep much. Sleep meant hours lost to inactivity, and this he did not tolerate very well. Sleep also meant dreams, and these he hated most of all — because they were the one thing he could not control. From the first time he had ventured into the woods and killed the three Indians that night, his dreams had been twisted and difficult to comprehend. He wanted to comprehend; he had to. Control was something he relied on. He had learned anyone, anything, could be controlled. There were always ways.
The name they had given him at Home Base was Abraham. The others had been named after the twelve disciples of Christ. Of course, they were different from him.
He was alone.
Abraham could not have explained why he was different from the others. He could say only that he was better. He had seldom worked with them, and, even more seldom, interacted. Interaction was kept to a minimum, in any case, since it could actually prove counterproductive. Only alone can a man confront that part of himself that must be bettered and better it.
And Abraham was better.
He still had memories of the person he had been before coming to Home Base, but they mostly came only in his dreams. This was another reason to loathe the sleep that brought them. Thoughts themselves made for comparisons, and comparisons made him uneasy. He recalled the time he’d been part of a secret military action against a drug lord in Thailand. A shrapnel blast had torn up his face. Plastic surgeons had had plenty of sewing to do, and, for days after the bandages came off, Abraham had refused to look in the mirror. He was afraid of not recognizing the person he saw.
And now that person was gone. Today he was, simply, what he could do. A man must be defined in terms of his capabilities. More than anything else, it seemed, Home Base had changed his methods of looking at others. They had not had time to prepare him and the twelve disciples for life outside the jungle and it showed. Much of what had impressed him previously, impressed him no more. Money was nothing besides something to help make preparations for what he must do. People lived behind facades that must be meaningless even to themselves. Weakness, everywhere weakness. Could it be this was the same world he had left all those months ago?
How many months?
Abraham tried to pin the answer down, then gave up when it didn’t seem to matter. The hotel’s flickering neon light penetrated the torn slivers of the window curtain. It made the blood on the woman’s naked corpse look shiny. Abraham put his hand in the blood that had pooled on the sheet beneath her. He brought the hand to his nose, expecting it to smell of more than salty copper. Its scent was everywhere, but the scent was meaningless and insignificant.
Insignificant, and yet this was the scent of life itself, freed of its paltriness only in death. How ironic. So much Abraham saw now that had been denied him before Home Base. Once, long ago, in the memories forced upon him by his dreams, he had seen pleasure in life. Now there could be pleasure only in death. Vast pleasure beyond anything he thought possible. He wanted the pleasure as much as he needed it.
Abraham had hoped the woman would last longer. He had found her down on the crowded street. She had arranged for the room while he had hovered out of the desk clerk’s line of vision. If the man ever noticed him, Abraham would simply kill him. He might choose to kill him anyway.
He wiped his fingers on the soiled sheet. The woman continued to regard him with bulging glazed eyes. When Abraham had killed for the first time he thought that the death stare looked strangely familiar, but he couldn’t place it until he looked in the mirror. His own steel-blue eyes held the same emptiness, the same dark vacuum. He wondered what it felt like to be dead, then realized he knew already.
When you were dead, you couldn’t be hurt. The fears and pains of life were at last vanquished. Abraham had no fear. Abraham couldn’t be hurt.