“And Dr. Turner—he’s in San Francisco? Where is he?” the president asked.

Dick Lamson answered, “We don’t know.”

“Now that I have you here, Hammond,” the president said, “I want you to tell me clearly and simply, exactly what in holy hell is going on!”

“Aliens came—”

“Aliens came and Turner kiped some of their technology for the Hybrid Project. How many did he make? What are their vulnerabilities? How can we defeat them, Hammond? Because this list of protocols is appalling. These creatures amount to an advanced species. They’re an evolutionary leap!”

“They’re not a species, they’re machines. Sexual reproduction is impossible for them. They have to be grown in artificial wombs.”

The president slowly shook his head. “What God hath wrought is no big deal. It’s us. It’s what man hath wrought around here that’s the problem. Tell me, the two that infiltrated our system—that male, Bryson—”

“Bryan. Mark Bryan and Gina Lyndon are generation one and two, respectively. Bryan was the first. He was brought to term in a human mother. Lyndon was matured to the age of twelve in an artificial setting, then programmed with consciousness. Until the termination of the program, they were kept together at Turner’s lab in San Francisco. Afterward, he separated them and gave them normal human identities, somehow faked, I suppose.”

“We need to kill them. Find them and kill them. Major priority, because they look human and can function in our world. That’s the greatest danger I can imagine.”

For a moment, George was too shocked to reply. “Sir,” he said at last, “they’re half-human, and I’m pretty sure of their loyalties. Gina is certainly loyal.”

“They’re programmable. So what if somebody alters the program?”

“They would fight it, I think. Dr. Turner’s problem with them, according to the notes we obtained at his house yesterday morning, was that they could defeat programming they didn’t want to follow. Not acceptable, in other words.” George paused for a moment, thinking back on Tom’s scratched handwriting in the journals the investigators had found behind a bookcase in his study. He hadn’t even been willing to commit those thoughts to a computer, he was that security-conscious.

“But we can’t know where they stand. And they’re both geniuses. I want them gone. Simple as that. They’re to be terminated.”

“I have worked with both of them,” George said. “They are people.”

Lamson added quickly, “They’re monsters with hearts, Ritchie.”

“So, human seeming but not actually human. So legally we’re in the clear.”

“Sir?”

“You’re about to take on a field mission, Mr. Bureaucrat. And a big part of it is getting rid of every damn hybrid we can. Including those two.”