After all, he had a mother, a birth, a life as a child. In 1986, he’d actually been born. He had a babyhood, first memories, a life in childhood’s timeless days, but her childhood was a fiction written by an anonymous hand and programmed into her.

She was feeling her artificiality, and with it the same sort of panic that had, perhaps, driven the hybrids to their desperate sense of vulnerability. But she was not alone, and she embraced Mark, and he her, and for a moment they rode the nightmare together.

But only for a moment.

“We have to keep on,” he said.

“Do you have any real idea what you’re doing?”

“Yes.”

“No, you don’t. We didn’t come here, our programming brought us here. You, too, Mark.”

“There’s an atomic weapon—”

“You heard a lot of static and you got an idea, Mark. Where did that idea really come from? Ask yourself that.”

“I know that the bombs are bait. I also know that the bait is here.”

“I want us to live, Mark. I want us to have a future, and—oh, Mark, I just want us!”

He hardly heard her because he was looking deeper into the facility, behind the familiar machines, at something dark in the back, a gnarled complication of a thing that struck him with deepest fear.

The editor. In it you could be turned off and on like a little light, and die and die and die. That was where they’d been put for memory editing, where their love and their hope and the future they had planned together had been gouged out of their souls by a genial woman on a keyboard, Dr. Emma.

He understood that this had been done for their own safety, but he could never forget it, not now that he remembered it, the hideous claustrophobia of being alive and aware, but no longer in his body—no longer him.

There was movement behind it, a sleek shadow emerging from its complicated shadows. He felt Gina grip his arm. He aimed the fluttering beam of his flashlight.

Pinioned in it was a slim figure in a dark, carefully tailored formal army uniform, very unlike the disheveled hybrids. The figure’s face was narrow, but human. His skin was that of a man. His movements as he stepped forward communicated great precision.

He said, “I’m fourth generation.”

No response came to Mark’s mind.

“You will help me because this has all gone horribly wrong, and there isn’t anybody else who has the power to do what you can do. I’m physically able, but I don’t trust my own programming. I’m two generations away from the flexibility of the human mind.”

“What are you driving at?”