Get out, run, run, get out!
Sam resisted the urge to bolt.
He wanted to understand. What was happening? What had, these people become? Why? What did this have to do with the Boogeymen who prowled the night? Evidently through microtechnology Thomas Shaddack had found a way to alter, radically and forever, human biology. That much was clear to Sam, but knowing just that and nothing else was like sensing that something lived within the sea without ever having seen a fish. so much more lay beneath the surface, mysterious.
Get out.
Neither the man before him nor the woman across the room seemed remotely aware of him. Apparently he was in no imminent danger.
Run, said the frightened boy within.
Rivers of data—words, numbers, charts and graphs of myriad types—flowed in a flood-like rampage across the amber screen, while Harley Coltrane stared unwaveringly at that darkly flickering display. He could not have seen it as an ordinary man would have, for he had no eyes. They’d been torn from his sockets and replaced by a cluster of other sensors tiny beads of ruby glass, small knots of wire, waffle-surfaced chips of some ceramic material, all bristling and slightly recessed in the deep black holes in his scull.
Sam was holding the revolver in only one hand now. He kept his finger on the trigger guard rather than on the trigger itself, for he was shaking so badly that he might unintentionally let off a shot.
The man-machine’s chest rose and fell. His mouth hung open, and bitterly foul breath rushed from him in rhythmic waves.
A rapid pulse was visible in his temples and in the gruesomely swollen arteries in his neck. But other pulses throbbed where none should have been in the center of his forehead; along each jawline; at four places in his chest and belly; in his upper arms, where dark ropy vessels had thickened and risen above subcutaneous fat, sheathed now only by his skin. His circulatory system seemed to have been redesigned and augmented to assist new functions that his body was being called upon to perform. Worse Yet, those pulses beat in a strange syncopation, as if at least two hearts pounded within him.
A shriek erupted from the thing’s gaping mouth, and Sam twitched and cried out in surprise. This was akin to the unearthly sounds that he had heard while in the living room, that had drawn him here, but he had thought they’d come from the computer.
Grimacing as the electronic wail spiraled higher and swelled into painful decibels, Sam let his gaze rise from the man-machine’s open mouth to its “eyes.” The sensors still bristled in the sockets. The beads of ruby glass glowed with inner light, and Sam wondered if they registered him on the infrared spectrum or by some other means. Did Coltrane see him at all? Perhaps the man-machine had traded the human world for a different reality, moving from this physical plane to another level, and perhaps Sam was an irrelevancy to him, unnoticed.
The shriek began to fade, then cut off abruptly.
Without realizing what he’d done, Sam had raised his revolver and, from a distance of about eighteen inches, pointed it at Harley Coltrane’s face. He was startled to discover that he also had slipped his finger off the guard and onto the trigger itself and that he was going to destroy this thing.
He hesitated. Coltrane was, after all, still a man—at least to some extent. Who was to say that he didn’t desire his current state more than life as an ordinary human being? Who was to say that he was not happy like this? Sam was uneasy in the role of judge, but an even uneasier executioner. As a man who believed that life was hell on earth, he had to consider the possibility that Coltrane’s condition was an improvement, an escape.
Between man and computer, the glistening, semiorganic cables thrummed. They rattled against the skeletal hands in which they were clamped.
Coltrane’s rank breath was redolent with both the stench of rotting meat and overheated electronic components.
Sensors glistened and moved within the lidless eye sockets.
Tinted gold by the light from the screen, Coltrane’s face seemed to be frozen in a perpetual scream. The vessels pulsing in his jaws and temples looked less like reflections of his own heartbeat than like parasites squirming under his skin.