“I know where you are, Chango,” came Benny’s voice, from below. She could hear him scraping along the gutter, and then he rounded the gable and stood there, one hand steadying himself against the gable’s face, the other holding his gun, pointed at her. “Found you,” he said. “Tired of playing hide and seek?”
Chango kicked out with both feet, connecting with his knees. His shot went high, and he buckled backwards. Without thinking, she was up, pushing him squarely in the chest, adding her weight to his backward momentum. The coping caught him behind his shins and she ducked down, out of the reach of his grasping hands as he flipped backwards and sailed over the edge of the tower. Chango gripped the coping with trembling fingers and pulled herself up, craning her neck over the precipice to watch him get smaller and smaller, until he hit the ground far below. oOo
Despite all that Lilith had told him, Hector was unprepared for what happened when the Lilim took over the GeneSys network. The blackout he attributed to the blue poly in the electrical system. The worst part was the voice. The voice would drive anyone crazy.
It sounded as if it were made up of all the voices of all the GeneSys employees, and it probably was. Anyone who worked for GeneSys for a month or more would have had their voice printed for use by the speech recognition controls on the multi-processor brains. There were millions of voice files in the company databanks, and GeneSys was using all of them to scream.
Hector kept catching himself listening to it, trying to find his own voice in the shrieking babble. The red-haired woman found hers. She got up on her desk, as he had, and started shouting over and over again, “I’m dying. Get it off me!”
Hector tried to tell everyone to turn off their transceivers, but most of them were beyond listening to his single voice. He started going from desk to desk, turning off every transceiver he could find; grabbing an occasional accountant to switch off a wrist console or lapel receiver. He started going through one of the desks, furiously opening and shutting the drawers, searching for his lost data card. But after about the twelfth circuit of the desk’s compartments, he realized it wouldn’t be here. Hyper had his card.
He reached for the power button on the transceiver that lay on top of the desk, but stopped midway, gazing at the images on the hologram. Bodies rolled over one another, fighting or making love, he couldn’t be sure which. He realized they were tetra bodies. Lilith’s daughters. Their images resolved into a row of them, standing against a black background with their hands clasped in a criss-cross pattern. One of them lay on her back feigning sleep.
One of the tetras broke from the row to dance at the feet of the sleeper. Hector knew that dance, he remembered it from the dream he’d had of Lilith.
The sleeper rolled over on her stomach, and the dancer walked nimbly up her spine, pausing at her shoulders to lean over, and touch one finger to the sleeper’s lips. She somersaulted off the sleeper’s shoulder to stand — arms outstretched — at her waking, rising head.
Cutting through the babbling multi-tonal voice was a softer, calm voice, Lilith’s voice. “They say it began in a garden, but there was no garden. It began with a dream. the dream I dreamed of the dreamer’s face.”
The dreamer. That would be him. Lilith was telling the story of her own creation, her version of it. Galvanized, Hector turned to a woman nearby who was trying to lift a filing cabinet onto her wheeled office chair, presumably so she could wheel it out of there like an insect abandoning a doomed hive, trying to take everything she could with her.
She grappled awkwardly with the double file and Hector took it from her, set it back down on the ground and put his hand on her shoulder to turn her towards the hologram. “Look,” he whispered close in her ear, pointing to the pantomime creation story, which had started all over again. “Look at the story. See them dance? This is not death, it’s birth. Look at what is being born today. Isn’t she beautiful?”
The man with the perfect hair wandered by, clutching a stack of mylar forms and muttering, “Have to deliver the specs to audit. They’re late. The specs are late to audit.”
Hector stepped in front of him. “I’ll deliver these for you,” he told him, taking the forms from his hands.
“Look at this. See them dancing? They call themselves the Lilim. Before they came into the world, they were in the void, dreaming themselves into existence. They were born through the dream of a man who worked for GeneSys. They are the best of his work, and the company’s best hope for the future. They are going to take us to levels of competitiveness and innovation previously unheard of.”
Another accountant had given up senselessly over-watering her cactus and turned to listen to Hector.
“We are not dying,” he told her. “We are being reborn.”
Chapter 23 — The Gonging of Extinction
Lilith sat in her vat with the multiprocessor brain in her lap. Her daughters sat in a circle around her, their arms linked. Coleanus and Nicar, the two closest to her, held her lower hands so they were all connected; thinking their thoughts, telling their story.
She could feel Helix too, far off in the network, struggling with GeneSys, trying to subdue it with the force of her mind. The behemoth battered her with a thousand hands, and Helix hung on, kicking and punching. Her upper left fist connected with its midsection, and GeneSys exhaled sharply in a gust of shock. Helix could feel Lilith and all her sisters with her, and they breathed in the hot breath of the giant and began to sing, and Helix opened her mouth and the song came forth.
It was a lullaby to put GeneSys to sleep, and weave for it a dream of a new incarnation. Lilith had always thought she would have to kill GeneSys, but that was not precisely the case. Hearing the song, the giant’s limbs slackened, and its eyes fluttered shut.
In the darkness inside the elevator, Anna Luria furiously punched the number for maintenance on her transceiver. “Before the garden, there was I, swimming in the blackness between worlds. I dreamed the dream of the dreamer’s face,” said a voice. The hologram was a sea of static which cleared momentarily to show her a nightmare vision of multi-limbed creatures locked in mortal combat. “Stop it! Stop it!”
screamed that strange voice, “Get them off me!” Panicking, Anna hung up. She tried another number, the personal code for the senior maintenance supervisor, Harriet Gorski, but again all she got was the voices, and a crazed stutter of images — children on a playground, a vat full of women, all of them with four arms. The freakish ranting of the voices was drowned out by a song, wordless and strange. On the holo, all the women were singing. It was a sound like the beginning of the world, and hearing it, Anna slumped to the ground, curled in a corner of the elevator and closed her eyes. oOo
By the time Lilith began to sing her lullaby, Hector had some thirty or so members of the Department of Procurement avidly watching the Lilim’s creation story. One by one they curled up on the floor or on top of their desks and went to sleep, lulled by the tidal rhythms of Lilith’s song. It tugged at Hector as well, but he did not allow himself to sleep. He didn’t really need to, he’d already had the dream. Instead he walked about the office, righting upturned chairs and unstacking precariously tall piles of mylar forms. It wasn’t long before people started to stir, and when they woke, many of them turned to him expectantly, as if he could tell them what to do next. Well, he supposed he could, under the circumstances. If the panic had been bad here, he could only imagine what had happened in the rest of the building, where there was no one to explain anything. Chances were, a lot of people out there needed help right now.