Dead and Alive by Dean Koontz Page B

death, death everlasting. The New Race recognized that no realm existed beyond the material, that the world was not a place of mystery but instead a place of unambiguous cause and effect, that applied rationalintellect could reason its way to the simple truth behind any apparent enigma, that they were meat machines just as the members of the Old Race were meat machines, just as every animal was a meat machine, and that their maker was also only a meat machine, albeit a meat machine with the most brilliant mind in the history of the species and with an infallible vision of a man-made utopia that would establish a Million-Year Reich on Earth before spreading to every habitable planet circling every star in the universe.
    This creed of absolute materialism and antihumanism had been drilled into Bucky and Janet as they formed in the creation tanks, which was an immeasurably more effective way to have learned it than by watching
Sesame Street
and reading a series of dull grade-school textbooks.
    Unlike members of the Old Race, who could be comfortable for decades with the philosophy that life had no meaning, only to become God-besotted in middle age, the New Race could take satisfaction from knowing they were so indoctrinated with hopelessness that they would never have a doubt about their convictions. Father told them that unassailable hopelessness was the beginning of wisdom.
    But now the dog.
    His disturbing forthright stare, his judgmental attitude, the fact that he
knew
they were impostors, that he followed them through the night without their knowledge, that he did not slink away from the danger Bucky and Janet currently posed to any living thing not of their kind, that instead he came to confrontthem: Suddenly this dog seemed to be something more than a meat machine.
    Evidently, the same perception troubled Janet, for she said, “What’s he doing with his eyes?”
    “I don’t like his eyes,” Bucky agreed.
    “He’s like not looking at me, he’s looking into me.”
    “He’s like looking into me, too.”
    “He’s weird.”
    “He’s totally weird,” Bucky agreed.
    “What does he want?”
    “He wants something.”
    “I could kill him so fast,” Janet said.
    “You could. In like three seconds.”
    “He’s seen what we can do. Why isn’t he afraid?”
    “He doesn’t seem to be afraid, does he?”
    In the doorway, Duke growled.
    “I’ve never felt like this before,” Janet said.
    “How do you feel?”
    “Different. I don’t have a word for it.”
    “Neither do I.”
    “I just suddenly feel like … things are happening right in front of me that I can’t see. Does that make sense?”
    “Are we losing more of our programming?”
    “All I know is, the dog knows something big,” Janet said.
    “Does he? What does he know?”
    “He knows some reason he doesn’t have to be afraid of us.”
    “What reason?” Bucky asked.
    “I don’t know. Do you know?”
    “I don’t know,” Bucky said.
    “I don’t like not knowing.”
    “He’s just a dog. He can’t know big things we don’t know.”
    “He should be very afraid of us.” Janet hugged herself and seemed to shiver. “But he’s not. He knows big things we don’t know.”
    “He’s just a meat machine like us.”
    “He’s not acting like one.”
    “We’re smart meat machines. He’s a dumb one,” Bucky said, but his uneasiness was of a kind he had never experienced before.
    “He’s got secrets,” Janet said.
    “What secrets?”
    “The big things he knows that we don’t.”
    “How can a dog have secrets?”
    “Maybe he’s not just a dog.”
    “What else would he be?”
    “Something,” she said portentously.
    “Just a minute ago, I felt so good killing in the nude, so natural.”
    “Good,” she echoed. “Natural.”
    “Now I’m afraid,” he said.
    “I’m afraid, too. I’ve never been so afraid.”
    “But I don’t know what I’m afraid of, Janet.”
    “Neither do I. So we must be afraid of …