Dean Koontz - Anti-Man

"You're fantastic," I told him.

"Never. Just thorough. Now, can I drop you someplace in my copter?"

"At the Cul-de-sac. Grid 40I. You know it?"

"Best French restaurant in town," he said. "Of course, I know it. We lawyers are not necessarily slobs."

At the Cul-de-sac, the maitred' gave me a corner table in a dark section of the main room and left me to the top-heavy, young blonde waitress who gave me a menu, requested my wine order, asked if I wanted a drink of any sort, and went away to get my Whiskey Sour while I perused the menu. All in all, it was a delightful meal, and I managed not to think about anything but the taste of the food-and whether or not the young blonde's blouse-bulging attributes were real or silicone-induced. I had no compunction against marrying a girl with chemically-created allurements, so long as they were indistinguishable from the real thing. As far as I could tell, these were. I played a game with myself, trying to decide whether or not I should ask her to marry me. I listed what I could see of her faults and her virtues. In the end, I decided to come back in a day or two and look the merchandise over again.

Outside, in the corridor, I boarded a pedwalk, one of the faster ones, and rode it a block and a half to a Bubble Drop station. There, I got off, moved through the turnstile, and onto the drop platform. The destination keyboard slid quickly down in front of me. I keyed my address in less than five seconds, then walked forward and sat down in the hard plastic seat that had slid in front of me. Attached to the bottom of the seat were the compressed air cylinders. A moment later, the chair moved into the tunnel, through the bubbling foyer where it moved over a discharge vent that blew the plastic around me in a teardrop. The plastic hardened instantly, and I shot forward into the sucking wind of the tunnel, pulled by the constant currents kept in operation there and also propelled by my own cylinders. At the hundreds of crossroads where tube slashed through tube, I sped by Bubbles going opposite ways, sped across the intersections inches ahead of them, saw others zip behind me, missing me by millimeters. The computer routed perfectly, but it was still a bit difficult to sit and watch the journey in a Bubble Drop tubeway.

So I thought. I had been trying not to think, but there was no way to deny what was going through my mind. I had spent hours on the concept in the prison, and I had still reached no conclusions. The android was God. He had said so. But why would He choose to come to Earth in such a laborious manner? And what was He planning to do here? Was this the Second Coming? Or wasn't He the Christian God? Was He the Buddhist version? The Jewish? The Hindu? Or, and this seemed most likely, was He not like any version of God that Man subscribed to?

I knew the last must be correct. We had never understood the nature of God. Our religions, all our religions, with all their extensive theories, doctrines and dogmas, all of them were totally wrong. But I am one who does not believe in criticizing something until you can replace it with something better. And I could not formulate any theories on the nature of this God of ours. His nature was a mystery beyond my immediate comprehension.

I worried about what was going to happen to the world when He began to bring His changes. Was the fabric of our reality going to change so drastically that many of us would not learn to fit into it? No, He had said we would be changed intellectually, our minds opened to full awareness. What a world of geniuses would be like was a toss-up question. In theory, it sounded quite lovely. In practice, it might be intolerable. A society of cold, thinking machines was not what I considered Utopia.

Before I knew it, I was shunted out of the main tubeways and into an exit tunnel. The Bubble swept through the exit foyer, crossing a suction vent where the molecules of the Bubble were instantly broken down, and the powdery residue slid down through the grating to be reconstructed into another Bubble, and another after that, and so on, for as long as the Bubble Drop system was operational. The chair stopped on a ramp; I stood, and walked off into the corridor.

I caught an elevator up, rose 104 floors to my level and debarked. In this apartment level, there were no pedways, for this was a relatively exclusive area. I walked along the thick carpeting to the door to my apartment, placed my thumb on the identification lock, and waited for the computer in the Yale system to decide I was one of those authorized to enter. A moment later, the door began to slide back. As I stepped through, two bullets smashed in the frame of the door and showered me with chips of wood. I fell, rolled inside, and made a vocal order to close the door.

It slid shut just as the killer on the other side slammed into it. I got shakily to my feet, trying to figure out what I should do. I was almost in a state of shock, for the killer I had seen when I rolled into the apartment was a dead ringer for the android in His humanoid form

I went to the nearest easy chair and collapsed in it. My mind was in a state of pandemonium, trying to rationalize what I had seen. It did not help any when the recurring word Frankenstein whispered across the front of my brain like a cold, dry wind. At first, I tried to tell myself that it was just chance resemblance — that a thief had come up to this floor, had waited for someone to come so that he might rob them. But why would a thief bother coming up this far? It would be just that much more difficult to get out, for he would have to use the elevator to go down enough levels to reach a Bubble Drop station. The elevator could be stopped as soon as I turned in the alarm, and there was an alarm call-box not ten feet away. And if he had planned on robbing me, why shoot to kill? Why not just take the money and run? No, I was only deluding myself. There was nothing so simple as chance resemblance here. That man in the corridor had been one of His android selves, and it had been trying to kill me.

Now, why? Why?

The only reason I could find was that, perhaps, He thought I would tell the WA people where He was, that He had not been killed after all. But that was senseless. Surely, He would know that I would keep faith, would not turn Him in. Even if I had wanted to, surely the time to have done it would have been while I was in jail and without much hope. I could have done it then to make my sentence easier. But to kill me now was pointless.

Besides, He was God. And God did not kill without some sort of divine reason. Wasn't that right? Or was it? I reminded myself that He was not the sort of God we had envisioned. He differed physically. Why not mentally? Why not a God who is sadistic? And maybe He had been lying to me. Who said that God did not lie? But what in the hell was He trying to do? Why kill me? What possible purpose could be served? I was right back where I started, nothing solved, but a great deal of apprehension spread on where there had not been any before.

Then I heard the noise. I had thought that He had gone away when the door closed Him out. Now I could hear Him forcing His weight against the heavy panel in an effort to either snap the lock or throw the door off its sliding track.

I stood up, suddenly frantic.

The door squeaked. I looked for a weapon. The door rattled as the bottom coasters slipped out of their grooves.

There was no weapon.

The door lifted, started bending inward. The wheels on the upper track snapped, popped, and scraped out of their track. The door swung inward.

I ran for the bedroom, slid that portal shut behind me, and thumbed the lock on it. A slug snapped into the door, came through, leaving a hole as big as a quarter near the top, and cracking the plastic of the portal, until it looked like a spider web. That would go down in a second. One solid push, and the pieces would fall inward, and He would be on top of me.