Dead and Alive

his fingers, he shredded the brisket. Themeat felt greasy. Although the beef was well-cooked, he could smell the blood in it.
    No matter how much he ate, Ripley gained not a pound. His remarkably efficient metabolism kept him always at his ideal weight.
    Overeating, therefore, was not an indulgence. Ultimately, it was also not a distraction. He couldn’t stop thinking about Werner, the security chief at the Hands of Mercy.
    Hours earlier, Werner suffered what the Beekeeper described as “catastrophic cellular metamorphosis.” He stopped being Werner, stopped being by all appearances human, and became … something else.
    Upon his creation, designed to be a physically imposing security specialist, Werner had been given selected genetic material from a panther to increase his agility and speed, from a spider to increase the ductility of his tendons, from a cockroach to ensure greater tensile strength for his collagen…. When Werner suddenly became amorphous, those feline, arachnid, and insectile forms began to express themselves in his flesh, first serially, then simultaneously.
    Mr. Helios had called Werner a singularity. This calamity had not occurred previously. According to the Beekeeper, it could never occur again.
    Ripley was not so sure about that. Maybe nothing
exactly
like what happened to Werner would happen again, but there might be an infinite number of other calamities pending.
    As a chief lab assistant to the Beekeeper, Ripley was too well-educated to be able to repress his anxiety.In the creation tank, by direct-to-brain data downloading, he received a deep education in the physiology of human beings as nature made them and of superhuman beings as Victor Helios made them.
    None of the Old Race could metamorphose into a beast of many natures. This grotesque fate should have been just as impossible for one of the New Race.
    Werner’s transformation suggested that the Beekeeper might be fallible. The Beekeeper’s surprise at the change in Werner confirmed his fallibility.
    Having finished the brisket without either satisfying his appetite or quelling his anxiety, Ripley left the kitchen to roam the halls of Mercy. Mr. Helios had gone home. But even in these post-midnight hours, in a maze of labs, Alphas conducted experiments and carried out tasks according to their maker’s instructions.
    Staying largely in the corridors, for the first time nervous about what he might discover in the labs if he entered them, Ripley eventually came to the monitoring hub serving the trio of isolation chambers. According to indicator lights on the control console, only Isolation Room Number Two was currently occupied; that would be the luckless Werner.
    Each room featured six closed-circuit video cameras offering different angles on that space. A bank of six screens allowed the simultaneous monitoring of all three holding facilities or gave a half dozen views of a single chamber. Legends at the bottom of all the screens indicated they were now tuned to Isolation Room Number Two.
    The floor, walls, and ceiling of the twenty-by-fifteen-footwindowless containment cell were constructed of eighteen-inch-thick, poured-in-place, steel-reinforced concrete. They had been paneled with three overlapping layers of steel plate that, with the click of a switch, could deliver a killing charge of electricity to the occupant.
    The Beekeeper sometimes created exotic variants of the New Race, some of which were intended to be warriors, living death-machines that would assist in the efficient obliteration of the Old Race when at last the day of revolution arrived. Occasionally, problems with their prenatal programming left these creatures undisciplined or even disobedient, in which case they needed to be sedated and transferred to isolation for study and eventual destruction.
    He who had been Werner did not appear on any of the screens. The six cameras covered every corner of the chamber, leaving nowhere for the thing to hide.
    Strewn around the room were the dismembered remains of Patrick Duchaine, one of the Beekeeper’s creations who had been sent into the isolation room to test the capabilities of the Werner thing.
    A transition module connected the monitoring hub to Isolation Room Number Two. At each end of the module was a massive round steel door made for a bank vault. By design, both doors could not be open at the same time.
    Ripley looked at the vault door on this end of the transition module. Nothing on Earth, whether