Dean Koontz: Anti-Man

They were horrified by the possible applications of such a talent. Try as they might, however, they could not convey their horror to Him. He had been given a mind freer than any mind in history. Where a man rarely uses a third of his brain, He used nearly a hundred percent of His. Completely unshackled as He was, He held true to what He had deduced as the highest values of existence. One of these was to prolong human life as long as possible, as healthfully as possible. Since He refused to let men die when He could delve into them and correct or heal them with His magic fingers, let the strange time-reversal touch draw together their deteriorating flesh, He was a menace to World Authority. Since He could get into parts of the liver or kidneys where no mortal surgeon could ever reach, delve into the alveoli of the lungs and scrape out the cancer cell-by-goddamned-cell, He could not be allowed to exist. We had given Him a conscience, and He had given Himself new systems that enabled Him to reshape His hands. We had given Him a complex human-type brain that was almost totally operative, and He had begun to surpass Man in a speeded evolution consciously wrought. Given all that we knew about Him, all we had built into Him, we should have expected something like this. But we had not. And now the panic began.

It was decided by the project directors, who sit behind large desks with nothing to do but decide things they know absolutely nothing about, to junk the project and disassemble-disassemble: that's just the word the idiots used! — the first android, partly because of His ability to increase Man's lifespan (after scientists had been working frantically to hold it down to eighty-five, after World Authority Secret Police had liquidated countless researchers who were trying to lick the immortality secret on the sly in private laboratories), and mostly because it was frightening for the military to face a superhuman who could evolve Himself, who could adapt His body, given sufficient time, to the optimum efficiency. They saw Him as a potential threat, not as a tool by which men could learn and grow. They didn't even want to know how He was able to restructure Himself. They just wanted to "disassemble" as completely and swiftly as possible, striking all knowledge of the project from the records.

That same night, I kidnapped Him.

Don't ask my why. If we had to explain ourselves, life would be one constant flow of words, and still the angels would shake their heads in dissatisfaction. I guess it had to do with seeing Him revive men I had left for dead. That shakes a physician, believe me. I just could not allow those marvelous hands or the mind that made them to be broken down into pseudo-flesh components, smashed and burned in modern witchcraft. It was as if Picasso had been standing by when the drunken SS troops destroyed priceless paintings on Paris museum walls with the points of their bayonets. What was there to do but act?

I went to the lab that night, woke Him, told Him the situation, and left with Him. I had the keys to the lab, keys to His quarters, and the guards thought nothing of my coming and going. They thought nothing of me taking Him with me, for they had never seen Him, had no way of knowing He was more than just another doctor or technician. The laboratory remained peaceful. Until the next morning.

That had been a week ago. We had been running ever since.

Fast.

Now, in the bathroom of the world-circling commercial rocket miles above the western edge of the old United States, He removed His shirt and stood before me, a magnificent specimen, all muscle and no fat He had developed a new tissue-building process, He told me, by which all food material not used for energy was converted into a new sort of muscle fiber which dissolved as easily as fat when needed to produce energy, though the body — did not have to suffer the burden of useless tissue when it was not needed. The wound on His right shoulder was an inch or so deep and three to four inches long. It had stopped bleeding, though no scab or clotting seemed to have formed. I guess He stopped the blood, though I don't know exactly how.

"It'll need stitches," I said, spreading the sides of it and surveying the torn flesh. It wasn't pretty at all, and it had a faintly bluish tinge that I could not identify except as a bruise, which it was not. "I can do a rough stitching with what I have in my bag, but — "

"No," He said. "I'm completing new systems."

"So?"

"I'll be able to speed heal myself in another half hour."

"You serious?" Sometimes I am exceedingly dense.

"That's why I said you did not have to bother."

I swallowed, let the wound go. The flesh snapped back into place as if it were made of rubber. "I see."

He put His arm on my shoulder, and we had quite suddenly exchanged roles so that He was the father image, I the son. Again I wondered how the terror of the interns had come to this low point. There was paternal concern in His stabbing blue eyes, a faint, anxious smile playing about His thin, red lips. "I still need you, Jacob. I'll always need someone to talk to, someone who understands me. You're such a part of me now that our relationship can never cease to be a vibrant one."

"Well," I said, avoiding His eyes, "let's get back to the debarking hold. It'll soon be time to make our drop, and we don't want to miss that."

We left the bathroom and walked the length of the main passenger compartment where two hundred travelers read magazines or sipped one of their three allotted drinks, or puffed their allotted joint of pot, or even napped. Oh, yes, or watched Mason Chambers on their individual Comscreens; The famous muck-raker leaned toward his audience, his thin cap of gray-black hair threatening to part and bare his carefully concealed baldness, and said: "Just who does Secretary Libermann think we are — cretins? We cannot be convinced that the World Authority Police cannot capture the android and the infamous Dr. Kennelmen. With all of the facilities available to the police, such a thing isn't feasible. No, dear viewers, it is something else — something more sinister. Conjecture this, if you will: The World Authority has discovered something about the android that makes it the most important find of the century, something so valuable that no price can be placed on it. Something the Council would like to keep to itself and its own, to the privileged of this world. By staging this false escape, proclaiming the android dangerous and killing it on sight, they will impress on the public the fact that the research on androids has been abandoned. They will be free to continue it secretly to reap the benefits themselves!" He smiled triumphantly and looked at his notes. He was tough on everyone, even the sacrosanct Council. There would be a lot of lights burning in the Capitol tonight as the best minds in the government tried to find some way to silence Mason Chambers. Too bad the old boy was on the wrong track. He was right about the marvelous discovery, the value of the century, but that was as far as he carried it correctly.

The length of our walk down the main compartment, I waited tensely for someone to leap and shout, "That's them!" But no one did. We stepped through the open hatch into the debarking chamber and breathed a little easier. The officer on duty was a slim, dark-haired man in his early thirties. He had a long nose, separating slow, heavy-lidded eyes that gave him a slightly saurian and very stupid look. He sat reading a low-quality papsheet and puffing on a cigarette, letting the smoke leak out of a tiny hole at the edge of his mouth. It was almost impossible that he could be ignorant of our presence, but he studied the sheet intensely and pretended we were not there. At last, I said, "We'll be disembarking at Cantwell, Alaska."

He looked up reluctantly and folded the papsheet. "That's a helluva place." He shivered and grimaced. "Had a duty station with the airline there for two months once. Cold. Snow. Wind like you wouldn't believe. Threatened to quit, so they transferred me."

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