Frankenstein: City of Night Read Free Page B

of science at Harvard or MIT. The style was operatic Art Deco, the ambience Hitlerian.
    Victor admired Hitler. The Führer knew talent when he saw it.
    In the 1930s and ’40s, Victor had worked with Mengele and others in Hitler’s privileged scientific class. He had made considerable progress in his work before the regrettable Allied victory.
    Personally, Hitler had been charming, an amusing raconteur. His hygiene had been exemplary; he always looked scrubbed and smelled soapy.
    A vegetarian and an ardent animal lover, Hitler had a tender side. He would not tolerate mousetraps. He insisted that rodents be captured humanely and turned loose in the wild.
    The problem with the Führer had been that his roots were in art and politics. The future did not belong either to artists or to politicians.
    The new world would not be built by nazism-communism-socialism. Not by capitalism, either.
    Civilization would not be remade or sustained by Christianity or by Islam. Neither by Scientologists nor by the bright-eyed adherents of the deliciously solipsistic and paranoid new religion encouraged by
The Da Vinci Code
.
    Tomorrow belonged to scientism. The priests of scientism were not merely robed clerics performing rituals; they were gods, with the power of gods. Victor himself was their Messiah.
    As he crossed the vast lab, the ominous-looking machines issued oscillating hums, low pulsing throbs. They ticked and hissed.
    He felt
at home
here.
    Sensors detected his approach to his desk, and the screen of his computer brightened. On the monitor appeared the face of Annunciata, his secretary at the Hands of Mercy.
    “Good morning, Mr. Helios.”
    Annunciata was quite beautiful but not real. She was a three-dimensional digital personality with an artificial but wonderfully smoky voice that Victor had designed to humanize his otherwise somber work environment.
    “Good morning, Annunciata.”
    “The corpse of Detective Jonathan Harker has been delivered by your people in the medical examiner’s office. It awaits you in the dissection room.”
    An insulated carafe of hot coffee and a plate of pecan-and-chocolate-chip cookies were on Victor’s desk. He picked up a cookie. “Continue.”
    “Randal Six has disappeared.”
    Victor frowned. “Explain.”
    “The midnight census found his room deserted.”
    Randal Six was one of many experiments currently living at the Hands of Mercy. Like his five predecessors, he had been created as an autistic with an obsessive-compulsive tendency.
    Victor’s intention in designing this afflicted creature had been to determine if such a developmental disability could have a useful purpose. Controlling an autistic person by the use of a carefully engineered obsessive-compulsive disorder, one might be able to focus him on a narrow series of functions usually assigned to machines in contemporary factories. Such a worker might perform a repetitive task hour after hour, weeks on end, without error, without boredom.
    Surgically fitted with a feeding tube, catheterized to eliminate the need for bathroom breaks, he might prove to be an economical alternative to some factory robots currently on the assembly lines. His food could be nutritional pablum costing a dollar a day. He would receive no pay, no vacation, no medical benefits. He would not be affected by power surges.
    When he wore out, he would merely be terminated. A new worker would be plugged into the line.
    Victor remained convinced that eventually such machines of meat would prove to be far superior to much current factory equipment. Assembly-line robots are complex and expensive to produce. Flesh is cheap.
    Randal Six had been sufficiently agoraphobic that he had not been able to leave his quarters voluntarily. He was terrified to cross the threshold.
    When Victor needed Randal for an experiment, attendants brought him to the lab on a gurney.
    “He can’t possibly have left on his own,” Victor said. “Besides, he can’t have gotten out of the