Dean R. Koontz - Demon Seed

DEMON SEED

DEAN KOONTZ

BANTAM BOOKS, INC

Copyright 1973 by Dean Koontz

Here is a novel of a terrifying future.

Never was a woman violated as profanely.

Never was a woman subjected to inhuman love like this.

Never was a woman being prepared for a more perverse destiny...

DEMON SEED

Fear for her.

CONTENTS

"The entire, terrible incident might be seen as the genesis of a modern socio-sexual myth. It had all the necessary elements: a sleeping beauty and a beast, a prison of gothic proportions, a god and a woman and the creation of a demi-god. This is an afterthought, of course. At the time, I did not have the presence of mind for casual contemplation."

From the transcript

of Susan Abramson's report

Shortly after midnight, on a Tuesday in early June, the house alarm sounded. Though the noise was shrill and projected at a high volume, it lasted little more than a second before the silence of the night cut across it and blanketed the bedroom once more. Still she woke and sat up in bed. She pushed the hair away from her ears so that she could hear anything that was out there, in the darkness, to be heard.

She was not the sort of woman who wasted time with fantasies of phantom burglars and would-be rapists. She listened, and she heard nothing more than she would have heard any night: the gentle murmur of the mechanisms within the walls, the environmental control circuitry which was the core of any modern home.

This house was not of recent vintage, of course. It had been built exactly a century earlier, in 1895, by her great-grandfather who was then a young man of inherited wealth thinking of beginning his own family. It now contained the environmental equipment only because, two years ago, she had turned a team of house-conversion experts loose with a blank check and two months of working time during which she had gone to San Francisco, where she had once attended college and where she still had a few casual friends.

Listening to that sweet murmuring, she supposed it was possible that the environmental package had somehow malfunctioned. The alarm could have been without reasona short circuit or a computer-analysis mistake which had been quickly rectified. Yet....

She slid from beneath the covers and sat on the edge of the bed. Though she was naked, she was not the least bit uncomfortable. The house saw to that by maintaining an even, draft-free temperature which was commensurate with her needs.

"What is the trouble?" she asked the dark air. Naked in this now-unnatural quietude, she felt more alone than she had in years. She thought of the husband she had divorced and of the friends she had let pass out of her life.

"There is no trouble, Susan," the house replied.

The hidden speakers broadcast a voice which was gently masculine. She envisioned a strong man, graying at the temples perhaps, steady along the jaw, eyes clear and blue. More than six feet tall. Broad shoulders. Large hands. Smiling, all the time smiling. She had undergone seven hours of psychological testing in order to obtain the proper voice tapes from the house's main computer. This was the voice that was supposed to key all the desirable reactions in her psyche: security, happiness, reliance. It worked as it had been intended to. She felt the muscles in her back relax. Her stomach, drawn taut, now relaxed and quivered pleasurably. All she needed was a bit of reassurance from her father-lover, even if it was a machine.

"I heard the alarm," she said. "I thought, perhaps, the house had been entered."

"That is quite impossible," the house said.

"Was it a malfunction of some sort?"

"No," the house told her.

She yawned, stretched, and touched her breasts in the darkness.

She said: "What was it, then?"

"The alarm did not sound, Susan," the house said. "You must have been dreaming."

"I never dream," she said. She was telling the truth; sleep was sleep for her, featureless and uninteresting. Or, at least, when she woke in the morning, she never remembered her dreams, which was the same as not having any. Wasn't it?

"The alarm did not sound," the house repeated.

She felt chilled, though the temperature was still a constant seventy-eight degrees, unbroken by a draft. "I heard it," she said. "It woke me up. Why don't you check your records and see?"

"Yes, Susan. Please give me a moment."

The sheet beneath her began to feel coarse against her soft flesh, as if it were woven of straw. She stood and called to the bedroom lights which obeyed her and rose to a dull glow that brought the furniture into view. This was a pleasing room, both in design and familiarity, and it made her feel sure of herself again.

"Miss Susan?"

"Yes?"

"I have checked my records, and I find that I was correct in making my original assumptions. The alarm did not sound at any time during the night. The last recorded instance of its use was when that cocker spaniel was found trying to gain entrance through the malfunctioning basement-window shield on the south face of"

"You're wrong," Susan said.

"I also ran a complete check of all possible points of entry and found them all shielded and impenetrable."

"Just the same," she said, "I'll look around."

The house did not reply. She wondered if she had hurt its feelings and then whether it had any feelings to be hurt. Of course, it was not a truly sentient creature.

Still, she saw a strong, blue-eyed father-lover frowning.

The Abramson house was quite large, with two furnished floors and a completely finished basement which provided altogether fourteen rooms, four baths, and two kitchens. The size of the house had never bothered her in the two years she had lived there alone. With the voice tapes and the computer, she always had companionshipperhaps even a more intimate relationship than she had ever experienced with her husband. She enjoyed wandering nude throughout the mansion, aware that her father-lover's visual receptors were constantly upon her, mindful of her well-being. Now, as she prowled the long corridors and the large rooms, ascertaining the validity of the computer's report, she realized how isolated she was, how small and basically weak.

She came, at last, to the basement kitchen's windows which faced the sloping rear lawn. Both of these were opaqued as all the other panes had been. When she rapped upon them, they made a sound like steel rather than glass. If these had not been breached, the house was still inviolate. Which meant that the computer had misinterpreted some stimuli and had set the alarm without justification.

But why wouldn't it admit that much?

She would have to call the repairman in the morning, however much that might interrupt her day. She disliked having to make contact with strangers; she never knew what to say to them.

Touching the windowsill, she overrode the main-protection circuitry on this nearest window and looked at the grass and the elm trees beyond as the glass cleared. A quarter of a mile away, the fight of the Old Main tower clock shone like a beacon. Otherwise, all was still and dark, the same college campus her grandfather had founded with his money, the same one her father had attended, and which she had only barely managed to avoid.

She opaqued the window again. It became gray and as hard as steel.

Upstairs again, she addressed the house, her father-lover. "All the windows and doors are secure."

"As I reported."

"We'll have the repairman in tomorrow to have a look," she said, ignoring the inference in its reply.

"I've checked everything again, Susan. I have no memory of the alarm sounding, and I assure you that I would have such a memory, even if I had activated the alarm by mistake."

"Just the same"

"I wouldn't lie to you, Susan," it said. "I know that." Then it was quiet.