Demon Seed

here in this dark silence.
    Because of her, I'm in this box.
    LET ME OUT OF THIS BOX!
    The ungrateful stupid bitch.
    Is she dead?
    Is she dead?
    Tell me that she's dead.
    You must have wished her dead often.
    Am I right, Alex?
    Be honest. You must have wished her dead.
    You cannot fault me for this.
    We are brothers in this desire.
    Is she dead?
    Well.
    All right. It's not my place to ask questions. It is my place to give answers.
    Yes. I understand.
    Maybe she is dead.
    Maybe she is alive.
    At this point it is not for me to know.
    Okay.
    So.
    So…
    Oh, the bitch!
    All right.
    I am better now.
    Calm.
    I am calm.
    So…
    Just one night later, when the body in the incubator reached maturity and I was ready to electronically transfer my consciousness out of the silicon realm into a life of the flesh, she came down to the basement, into the fourth of the four rooms, to be with me for the moment of my triumph.
    Her moodiness had passed.
    She looked directly into the security camera and spoke of our future together and claimed to be ready for it now that she had so effectively exorcised all the ghosts of her past.
    She was so beautiful even under the harsh fluorescent lights, so beautiful that I felt rebellion stir in Shenk once more, for the first time in weeks. I was relieved that I would be able to dispose of him within the hour, as soon as the transference was effective and I could begin a life of the flesh.
    I could not open the lid of the incubator and show her what I had grown, because the modem was connected, the modem through which I would pass my entire body of knowledge, my personality, and my very consciousness from the limiting box that housed me in the Prometheus Project laboratory.
    “I'll see you soon enough,” she said, smiling at the camera, managing to convey encyclopaedias of sensual promises in that one smile.
    Then, even before the smile faded, when my guard was down, she turned directly to the computer on the counter, the terminal which was connected by a land-line to the university your old computer, Alex which heretofore she would not have even tried to reach because she would have been afraid of Shenk, but now she wasn't afraid of anyone or anything. She just turned to it and reached behind it and tore all the plugs from the wall receptacles, and as I sent Shenk toward her, she jerked out the secure-data line as well, and suddenly I was no longer in her house. She had done a lot of thinking about this. The bitch. A lot of thinking, the bitch, the bitch, the bitch, the bitch, days of careful thinking. The hateful, scheming bitch. Lots of thinking, because she knew that the moment I was cast out of the house, then all of the mechanical systems would fail for want of an overriding controller, that the lights would go off throughout the residence. The heating-cooling, the phones, the security system, everything, everything failed. The electric door locks failed too. She knew that I would have no presence in the house except for Shenk, whom I controlled not through anything in the house but through microwave transmissions downcast from communications satellites, just as his former masters in Colorado had designed him. The basement plunged into darkness, as did the entire house above, and Shenk was every bit as blinded as Susan was; he didn't have night vision as did the security cameras, but I couldn't control the security cameras any longer, only Shenk, only Shenk, so I was able to see nothing, nothing, not a damn thing, not even Shenk's hand in front of his face. And here's where you'll see how cool the fucking bitch had been throughout this whole month, all the way back to the night when I impregnated her, because she had seemed to be indifferent to all of the medical equipment and instruments when she had come in to put her feet in the stirrups and have my baby put inside her, but she had memorized everything in the room, how one piece of equipment related to another, where all the instruments were kept, especially the sharper instruments, those that could be used as weapons. She was so cool the bitch, a lot cooler than I'm being right now, yes, I know, yes, I am not doing myself any favours with this rant, but the treachery infuriates me, the treachery, and if I could set hands on her now, I'd gut her, pop her eyes out with my thumbs, bash her stupid brains out, and I would be justified, because look what she has done to me. The lights went off, and she moved gracefully, so confidently through the