Accidental Creatures

She didn’t think so. Martin’s shy, gentle nature was not a ruse, her instincts insisted. Maybe Graham had something to do with this. Whoever had shot this young man had done it without pulling back the shower curtain to see who was in there. They probably thought they were shooting Martin, a reasonable assumption, it was his bathroom, after all. Suddenly she remembered the security report in her morning messages. Ray Wockner had been shot by an unidentified intruder during a crash analysis session late last night. Maybe Graham wasn’t involved after all, maybe it was some nut with a gun ru

Or maybe that was what Graham wanted her to think. Besides there was nothing random about this. Whoever had done this had purposely gained entrance to Hector’s apartment, either through the door or the open ventilation duct. A

She left Hector’s apartment and got into an elevator, pushing the button for the security level. The elevator started down smoothly, but just past the twelfth floor it came to an abrupt halt. She was just about to press the emergency button when the lights went out.

oOo

Nathan Graham smiled with satisfaction leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. He was tired, but it had been a good night’s work. Martin was dead, and the man who shot him had by now been chopped, strained and filtered by the GeneSys building’s ventilation system. Life was good. He took a deep breath, wondering if there were any microscopic Be

Dread blossomed in Graham’s belly like a fetid, night-blooming flower. He could hear the gabbling voices coming from other multi-processors down the hall, and somewhere, far away, a scream that did not come from the network.

He didn’t know how he knew it, it seemed to come on him with the voices, which he covered his ears try to keep from hearing. He knew the way an ant knows that its queen has been killed. He knew by the tenor of the human screams now floating up around him from the depths of the building. But most of all he knew because he knew that voice, that first voice they’d all heard over their multi-processors. It was the voice of the one he’d served all these years, the voice of the company GeneSys. oOo

Chango ducked to the side and ran around a vent fan. Be

She perched on the top rung, wedging herself between the ladder and the roof of GeneSys, and watched as Be

oOo

GeneSys laughed and swiped at Helix, a stinging palm of stock quotes that nearly sent her spi

Nathan Graham ran down flight after flight of maintenance stairways. The elevators were not working, all the lights were out, as he passed the floors he heard varying kinds of noises, people calling out, some laughing, some screaming, once a great crashing noise and the sound of something dragging across the floor.

When he got to the bottom of the staircase he found that the door to level B was locked. He ran up to level A but that one was locked too. He had to climb five more flights until he found an unlocked door. This let him out onto the second floor gallery. Here the sconces in the walls cast flickering shadows over the nightmare landscape of GeneSys’ dreaming.

On the floor below, people were ru

He did not want to go down there, though there might be access to the security levels from there. It seemed to him a liquid pit of madness, the wellspring of the nightmare. To go down there was to be subsumed, so he edged closer to the pillar, and looking up, found that he could read the inscription inlaid on the archway which soared above the lobby and its mania. “To wake the soul by tender strokes of art, to raise the genius and to mend the heart.”

He stood spellbound, his eyes riveted on those words — words of reason. The words of a world where something could be accomplished, where all was not beyond control. And then the crushing realization hit him and drove him to his knees. Those words and the reality they expressed were already beyond him, soaring ever farther out of reach, and he, he was already left behind, in the pit. He reached his hands up towards them, felt that he could just brush their burning golden surface as they slipped away. He pulled his fingers back as if burned, touched them to his lips and screamed, his voice calling the nightmare up around him, the living walls, the breathing air, and his mother’s voice, “Everything is an animal. It can’t be controlled.”

oOo

Be