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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 crouched between the massive steel vault hatches, facing the outer barrier, like a trap-door spider waiting for unsuspecting prey to cross the concealed entrance to its lair.
    As if the creature knew that the camera had been activated, it turned to gaze up at the lens. The grossly distorted face was part human, even recognizably that of Mercy’s security chief, though the double-wide mouth and the insectile mandibles, ceaselessly working, were not what the Beekeeper had intended whenhe made Werner. Its right eye still looked like one of Werner’s, but its luminous-green left eye had an elliptical pupil, like the eye of a panther.
    The desktop computer screen, thus far dark, now brightened, and Annunciata appeared. “I have become aware that Werner, that Werner, that Werner is trapped in Isolation Room Number Two.” She closed her eyes. “All right. It is done.”
    Within the stainless-steel vault door, servomotors hummed. The bolt-retracting gears clicked, clicked, clicked.
    In the transition module, the Werner thing looked away from the overhead camera, toward the exit.
    Aghast, Ripley said, “Annunciata, what’re you doing? Don’t open the transition module.”
    On the computer screen, Annunciata’s lips parted, but she didn’t speak. Her eyes remained closed.
    The servomotors continued to hum and gears clicked. With a soft sucking sound, twenty-four massive lock bolts began to withdraw from the architrave around the vault door.
    “Don’t open the transition module,” Ripley repeated.
    Annunciata’s face faded from the computer screen.
    Ripley scanned the control console. The touch switch for the outer door of the module glowed yellow, which meant the barrier was slowly opening.
    He pressed the switch to reverse the process. The indicator light should have turned blue, which would have signified that the retracting bolts had changed direction, but it remained yellow.
    The microphone in the transition module picked up an eager, keening sound from the Werner thing.
    The range of emotions accessible to the New Race was limited. The Beekeeper revealed to each forming person in every creation tank that love, affection, humility, shame, and other of the supposedly nobler feelings were instead only different expressions of the same sentimentalism, arising from thousands of years of a wrongheaded belief in a god who did not exist. They were feelings that encouraged weakness, that led to energy wasted on hope, that distracted the mind from the focus required to remake the world. Tremendous things were achieved not by hope but by the application of the will, by action, by the unrelenting and ruthless use of power .
    Ripley anxiously pressed the door switch again, but it remained yellow, and still the gears clicked and the steel bolts retracted.
    “Annunciata?” he called. “Annunciata?”
    The only emotions that mattered, said the Beekeeper, were those that clearly contributed to survival and to the fulfillment of his magnificent vision for a one-world state of perfected citizens who would dominate nature, perfect nature, colonize the moon and Mars, colonize the asteroid belt, and eventually own all the worlds that revolved around all the stars in the universe.
    “Annunciata!”
    Like all of the New Race, Ripley’s spectrum of emotions remained limited largely to pride in his absolute obedience to his maker’s authority, to fear in allits forms—as well as to envy, anger, and hate directed solely at the Old Race. For hours every day, as