Gen three had not only survived, they’d made some sort of monstrous advance. This hybrid looked exactly like a man who had recently been killed and who appeared to have been skinned.

Had they learned somehow to meld human skin to their bodies? They must have, but how was it even possible? It couldn’t be possible!

Vast knowledge. Stratospheric intelligence. Of course it was possible.

He turned and he ran.

But his light played across a crowd of figures. There were at least a dozen of them, some female, some male, in various developmental stages. He saw two Epsilons, a Zeta, a Gamma, behind them three Deltas and an Alpha.

“Hello, Father,” they all said together. So they were also networked.

Then he understood why he had been outwitted like this, and what he understood filled him with a black wave of dread. No matter how cleverly or quickly a chimpanzee acted, or how much it managed to understand of a given situation, it would always be outwitted by a human being and would never be able to gain insight into the human mind.

Similarly, he would never be able to understand how his own creation had survived, or what it had done to replicate itself, or how it had defeated the problem of its scaled body surface, a problem that had completely stumped him.

They’d outthought him and outwitted him.

He wanted to run, but there was no place to run. He wanted to scream, but there was nothing to be gained from that.

“Time to go, Father,” one of the creatures said. So much complexity was in that voice—regret, finality, strength … and laughter. Wherever he was going, there would be no return, that was clear.

“People are waiting for me.” He pointed upward. “If I don’t turn up, they’re instructed to take appropriate action.”

In the split of an instant, one of the creatures was standing face-to-face with him, its strangely cool breath washing over him. Then it took his flashlight, which flickered and went out as it crushed it and threw the parts to the floor.

“Thank you for the thermal vision, Father,” a voice said in the dark.

He had worked a long time on that. They had receptors taken from the Plains blind snake, a tiny Texas snake with the most superb temperature-sensing eyes on the planet.

“TRPA1,” he said. “That’s the gene.”

“Come on, Father, it’s time.”

“Time? Time for what?”

“We’re going deep. A lot deeper than you went. The Hybrid Project is going into the depths. Remember saying that?”

He’d said it as the containment had been sunk.

“But … where were you? On the ship?”

“The six died in the containment,” a voice said. “We were in the editor.”

So they had left versions of their minds in the editor, how clever. He hadn’t even thought to glance at it after he’d returned.