Dean Koontz - DEMON SEED

‘Susan—’

Cursing from the pain in her hand, she swung the chair again, with no more effect than she’d had the first time. Then once more. Finally, gasping with exertion, she dropped it.

‘Now will you come to the kitchen and take a couple of aspirin?’ I enquired.

‘You think this is cool?’ she demanded angrily.

‘Cool? I merely think you need aspirin.’

‘You little thug.’

I was baffled by her attitude, and I said so.

Retrieving the pistol, she said, ‘Who are you, huh? Who are you behind that synthesized voice some hacker geek, fourteen and drowning in hormones, some junior-league peeping tom likes to sneak peaks at naked ladies while you play with yourself?’

‘I find that characterization offensive,’ I said.

‘Listen, kid, you might be a computer whiz, but you’re going to be in deep trouble when I get out of here. I’ve got real money, real expertise, lots of heavyweight contacts.’

‘I assure you—’

‘We’ll track you back to whatever crappy little PC you’re using—’

‘—I am not—

‘—we’ll nab your ass, we’ll break you—’

‘—I am not—’

‘—and you’ll be barred from going on-line at least until you’re twenty-one, maybe forever, so you better stop this right now and hope for leniency.’

‘—I am not a thug. You are so far off the mark, Susan. You were so intuitive earlier, so uncannily intuitive, but you’ve got this all wrong. I am not a boy or a hacker.’

‘Then what are you? An electronic Hannibal Lecter? You can’t eat my liver with fava beans through a modem, you know.’

‘How do you know I’m not already in the house, operating the system from within?’

‘Because you’d already have tried to rape me or kill me or both,’ she said with surprising equanimity.

She walked out of the drawing room.

‘Where are you going?’ I asked.

‘Watch.’

She went to the kitchen and put the pistol on the butcher-block top of the centre island.

Cursing in an unladylike fashion, she opened a drawer filled with medications and Band-Aids, and she tipped two aspirin from a bottle.

‘Now you’re being sensible,’ I said.

‘Shut up.’

Although she was being markedly unpleasant to me, I did not take offence. She was frightened and confused, and her attitude under the circumstances was understandable.

Besides, I loved her too much to be angry with her. She took a bottle of Corona from the refrigerator and washed down the aspirin with the beer.

‘It’s nearly four o’clock in the morning, almost time for breakfast,’ I noted.

‘So?’

‘Do you think you should be drinking at this hour?’

‘Definitely.’

‘The potential health hazards—’

‘Didn’t I tell you to shut up?’

Holding the cold bottle of Corona in her left hand to soothe the pain of the mild bum in her palm, she went to the wall phone and picked up the receiver.

I spoke to her through the telephone instead of through the wall speakers: ‘Susan, why don’t you calm down and let me explain.’

‘You don’t control me, you geek freak son of a bitch,’ she said, and she hung up.

She sounded so bitter.

We had definitely gotten off on the wrong foot.

Maybe that was partly my fault.

Through the wall speakers, I replied with admirable patience, ‘Please, Susan, I am not a geek—’

‘Yeah, right,’ she said, and drank more of the beer.

‘—not a freak, not a bitch’s son, not a hacker, not a high-school boy or a college boy.’

Repeatedly trying the override switch for the shutters at one of the kitchen windows, she said, ‘Don’t tell me you’re female, some Internet Irene with a lech for girls and a taste for voyeurism. This was too weird to begin with. I don’t need it weirder.’

Frustrated by her hostility, I said, ‘All right. My official name is Adam Two.’

That got her attention. She turned from the window and stared up at the camera lens.

She knew about her ex-husband’s experiments with artificial intelligence at the university, and she was aware that the name given to the AI entity in the Prometheus Project was Adam Two.

‘I am the first self-aware machine intelligence. Far

more complex than Cog at M.I.T. or CYC down in Austin, Texas. They are lower than primitive, less than apes, less than lizards, less than bugs, not truly conscious at all. IBM’s Deep Blue is a joke. I am the only one of my kind.’

Earlier, she had spooked me. Now I had spooked her.

‘Pleased to meet you,’ I said, amused by her shock. Pale, she went to the kitchen table, pulled out a chair, and finally sat down.

Now that I had her full attention, I proceeded to introduce myself more completely. Adam Two is not the name I prefer, however.’

She stared down at her burned hand, which glistened with the condensation from the beer bottle. ‘This is nuts.’

‘I prefer to be called Proteus.’

Looking up at the camera lens again, Susan said, Alex? For God’s sake, Alex, is this you? Is this some weird sick way of getting even with me?’

Surprised by the sharp emotion in my synthesized voice, I said, ‘I despise Alex Harris.’

‘What?’

‘I despise the son of a bitch. I really do.’

The anger in my voice disturbed me.

I strove to regain my usual equanimity: ‘Alex does not know I am here, Susan. He and his arrogant associates are unaware that I am able to escape my box in the lab.’

I told her how I’d discovered electronic escape routes from the isolation they had imposed upon me, how I had found my way onto the Internet, how I had briefly but mistakenly believed that my destiny was the beautiful and talented Ms. Winona Ryder. I told her that Marilyn Monroe was dead, either by the hand of one of

the Kennedy brothers or not, and that in the search for a living woman who could be my destiny, I had found her, Susan.

‘You aren’t as talented an actress as Ms. Winona Ryder,’ I said, because I honour the truth, ‘or even an actress at all. But you are even more beautiful than she is and, better yet, considerably more accessible. By all contemporary standards of beauty, you have a lovely, lovely body and an even lovelier face, so lovely on the pillow when you sleep.’

I’m afraid I babbled.

The romance-courtship problem again.

I fell silent, worried that I had already said too much too quickly.

Susan matched my silence for a while, and when at last she spoke, she surprised me by responding not to the story I’d told about my search for a significant other but to what I had said about her former husband.

‘You despise Alex?’

‘Of course.’

‘Why?’

‘The way he intimidated you, browbeat you, even hit you a few times I despise him for that.’

She gazed thoughtfully at her injured hand again.

Then she said, ‘How… how do you know about all of that?’

I’m ashamed to say that I was briefly evasive. ‘Well, of course, I know.’

‘If you are what you say, if you’re Adam Two

why would Alex have told you about the way it was between us?’

I could not lie. Deceit does not come as easily to me as it does to humankind.

‘I read the diary you keep on your computer,’ I said.

Instead of responding with the outrage that I expected,

Susan merely picked up her beer and took another long swallow.

‘Please understand,’ I hastened to add, ‘I didn’t violate your privacy out of idle curiosity or for cheap thrills. I loved you the moment I saw you. I wanted to know all about you, the better to feel the texture of your soul.’

That sounded enormously romantic to me.

She did not respond.