Chapter 48 - The Architect's Madness
She was dressed in a pristine white hospital gown, but it was ruined, splattered with streaks of dark, dried blood. Her golden hair, usually styled with immaculate, architectural precision, hung in matted, sweaty clumps around her hollow cheeks.
Her hands were covered in surgical gauze, and on the rolling tray in front of her sat the silicone prosthetic belly Nathan had kicked across their living room two nights ago. But it had been sliced open with a scalpel, its internal micro-circuitry and synthetic amniotic bladders gutted like a slaughtered animal.
In her right hand, Vanessa held a heavy stainless-steel bone saw. In her left, she clutched a sealed titanium cryo-vial marked with a glowing red biohazard symbol.
"You're late, Nathan," she said. Her voice was terrifyingly sweet, the identical melodic tone she used to ask him how his coffee was on Sunday mornings. "The nursery isn't ready. You promised me you would paint the baseboards before the baby arrived."
"Vanessa," Nathan said slowly, keeping the shotgun leveled at her chest as he took a cautious step forward. "Drop the saw."
Vanessa smiled, a slow, grotesque stretch of chapped, blood-stained lips. Her eyes were completely dilated, black voids reflecting the cold LED monitors behind her. "You never understood the scale of it, darling. You thought you were just an architect building glass houses for rich men. But I was building an empire that could never die."
She turned her gaze toward Eli, who stood motionless in the doorway. "Look at him, Nathan. Isn't he magnificent? He has Harold’s hippocampus. Harold’s cognitive mapping. But he needed one more thing to become complete. He needed Harold's master seed."
She held up the titanium cryo-vial. "Forty years of research. The complete epigenetic sequence to reverse cellular senescence. Worth twelve billion dollars on the secondary sovereign market."
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"You killed him," Miller snapped, pointing her gun directly at Vanessa's forehead. "You pulled Harold Caldwell off the vent."
Vanessa let out a sharp, hysterical bark of laughter that echoed hideously off the glass walls. "Harold was already dead, Agent Miller! He died five years ago! That thing on the bed was an empty shell—a biological hard drive I kept pumping with synthetic adrenaline just to harvest his neural codes!"
