Midnight by Dean R. Koontz

“There’re several,” Harry said.

“—then I could slip out in the rain, try their house, see if anyone’s home. At this hour they’ll probably be at work. If no one’s there, maybe I can get a call out on their phone.”

“Wait, wait,” Tessa said. “What’s all this about phones? The phones don’t work.”

Sam shook his head. “All we know is that the public phones are out of service, as is Harry’s. But remember New Wave controls the telephone-company computer, so they can probably be selective about what lines they shut down. I’ll bet they haven’t cut off the service of those who’ve already undergone this … conversion. They wouldn’t deny themselves communication. Especially not now, in a crisis, and with this scheme of theirs nearly accomplished. There’s a better than fifty-percent chance that the only lines they’ve shut down are the ones they figure we might get to—pay phones, phones in public places—like the motel—and the phones in the homes of people who haven’t yet been converted.”

16

Fear permeated Loman Watkins, saturated him so completely that if it had possessed substance, it could have been wrung from his flesh in quantities to rival the rivers currently pouring forth from the storm-racked sky outside. He was afraid for himself, for what he might yet become. He was afraid for his son, too, who sat at the computer in an utterly alien guise. And he was also afraid of his son, no use denying that, scared half to death of him and unable to touch him.

A flood of data coruscated across the screen in blurred green waves. Denny’s glistening, liquid, silvery eyes—like puddles of mercury in his sockets—reflected the luminescent tides of letters, numbers, graphs, and charts. Unblinkingly.

Loman remembered what Shaddack had said at Peyser’s house when he had seen that the man had regressed to a lupine form that could not have been a part of human genetic history. Regression was not merely—or even primarily—a physical process.

It was an example of mind over matter, of consciousness dictating form. Because they could no longer be ordinary people, and because they simply could not tolerate life as emotionless New people, they were seeking altered states in which existence was more endurable. And the boy had sought this state, had willed himself to become this grotesque thing.

“Denny?”

No response.

The boy had fallen entirely silent. Not even electronic noises issued from him any longer.

The metallic cords, in which the boy’s fingers ended, vibrated continuously and sometimes throbbed as if irregular pulses of thick, inhuman blood were passing through them, cycling between organic and inorganic portions of the mechanism.

Loman’s heart was pounding as fast as his running footsteps would have been if he could have fled. But he was held there by the weight of his fear. He had broken out in a sweat. He struggled to keep from throwing up the enormous meal he had just eaten.

Desperately he considered what he must do, and the first thing that occurred to him was to call Shaddack and seek his help. Surely Shaddack would understand what was happening and would know how to reverse this hideous metamorphosis and restore Denny to human form.

But that was wishful thinking. The Moonhawk project was now out of control, following dark routes down into midnight horrors that Tom Shaddack had never foreseen and could not avert.

Besides, Shaddack would not be frightened by what was happening to Denny. He would be delighted, exuberant. Shaddack would view the boy’s transformation as an elevated altered state, as much to be desired as the degeneration of the regressives was to be avoided and scorned. Here was what Shaddack truly sought, the forced evolution of man into machine.

In memory even now, Loman could hear Shaddack talking agitatedly in Peyser’s blood-spattered bedroom: “… what I don’t understand is why the regressives have all chosen a subhuman condition. Surely you have the power within you to undergo evolution rather than devolution, to lift yourself up from mere humanity to something higher, cleaner, purer …”

Loman was certain that Denny’s drooling, silver-eyed incarnation was not a higher form than ordinary human existence, neither cleaner nor purer. In its way it was as much a degeneration as Mike Peyser’s regression to a lupine shape or Coombs’s descent into apelike primitiveness. Like Peyser, Denny had surrendered intellectual individuality to escape awareness of the emotionless life of a New Person; instead of becoming just one of a pack of subhuman beasts, he had become one of many dataprocessing units in a complex supercomputer network. He had relinquished the last of what was human in him—his mind—and had become something simpler than a gloriously complex human being.