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asked.
    “I’m alive. I’m alive but cannot walk. I’m alive but have no hands. I’m alive but cannot smell or taste. I’m alive but I have no … have no … have no …”
    Deucalion placed one immense hand on the glass that housed Annunciata. The cylinder was warm. “Tell me,” he encouraged. “You have no what?”
    “I’m alive but I have no life. I’m alive but also dead. I’m dead and alive.”
    A stifled sound from Lester drew Deucalion’s attention. Anguish wrenched the janitor’s face. “Dead and alive,” he whispered. “Dead and alive.”
    Only hours earlier, from a conversation with one of the New Race, Pastor Kenny Laffite, Deucalion learned these latest creations of Victor’s were engineered to be incapable of feeling empathy either for the Old Race they were to replace or for their laboratory-born brothers and sisters. Love and friendship were forbidden because the least degree of affection would make the New Race less efficient in its mission.
    They were a community; however, the members of this community were committed not to the welfare of their kind but to fulfilling the vision of their maker.
    Lester’s tears were not for Annunciata but for himself. The words
dead and alive
resonated with him.
    Annunciata said, “I have im-im-imagination. I am so easily able to envision what I w-w-w-want, but I cannot have hands to touch or legs to leave here.”
    “We never leave,” Lester whispered. “Never. Where is there to go? And why?”
    “I am afraid,” Annunciata said, “afraid, I am afraid of living without a life, the tedium and solitude, the solitude, intolerable loneliness. I am nothing out of nothing, destined for nothing. ‘Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee.’ Nothing now, nothing forever. ‘Waste and void, waste and void, and darkness on the face of the deep.’ But now … I must organize the appointment schedule for Mr. Helios. And Werner is trapped in Isolation Room Number Two.”
    “Annunciata,” Deucalion said, “are there archivesyou can tap to show me engineering drawings for the cylinder that contains you?”
    Her face faded from the screen, and a diagram of the cylinder appeared, with all the tubes and wires labeled. One of them infused her cerebral tissues with oxygen.
    “May I see you again, Annunciata?”
    Her lovely face appeared on the screen once more.
    Deucalion said, “I know that you are unable to do for yourself what I am now going to do for you. And I know that you are unable to ask me for this deliverance.”
    “I am honored, honored, honored to serve Mr. Helios. I have left one thing undone.”
    “No. There is nothing more for you to do, Annunciata. Nothing but accept … freedom.”
    Annunciata closed her eyes. “All right. It is done.”
    “Now I want you to use the imagination you mentioned. Imagine the thing you would want above all others, more than legs and hands and taste and touch.”
    The virtual face opened its mouth but did not speak.
    “Imagine,” Deucalion said, “that you are known as surely as every sparrow is known, that you are loved as surely as every sparrow is loved. Imagine that you are more than nothing. Evil made you, but you are no more evil than a child unborn. If you want, if you seek, if you hope, who is to say that your hope might not be answered?”
    As if enchanted, Lester whispered, “Imagine….”
    After a hesitation, Deucalion pulled the oxygen-infusion line from the cylinder. There could be no pain for her in this, only a gradual loss of consciousness, a sliding into sleep, and from sleep to death.
    Her beatific face began to fade from the screen.

CHAPTER 7
    IN THE MONITORING HUB that served the containment chambers, Ripley studied the control console. He pressed a button to activate the camera in the transition module between the hub and Isolation Room Number Two.
    The real-time video feed on one of the six screens changed, revealing the thing that had been Werner. The so-called singularity