Quicksilver

by Dean Koontz

How can a just world be shapen to allow such outrages? Why aren’t we designed to be unable to harm one another? Why aren’t our brains wired so that we can’t kill or rape or steal or lie or deceive? Why are we formed with the capacity to hate and envy? They say that this world and life in it are a gift, but how can it be a gift when it so often subjects us to fear or even terror, and to unbearable sadness?

“Increasingly, everywhere in the world, people are not governed by those who wish to serve them, but ruled by those mad with power and determined to have total submission. They seem ever more fiercely inspired to greater ruthlessness. They call their hatred justice and see it as a virtue.

But when those who govern us achieve absolute power, it always and everywhere leads to insanity and mass murder. Regardless of the numbers arrayed against us, we must resist. If we fail, then the sane among us will die in holocaust after holocaust, along with the madmen and madwomen who hate us for not sharing their delusions.”

“Could it be that Heather Ing-wen Han, Corrine Rainking, and the unknown young woman who left Quinn’s bassinet on that highway weren’t our mothers? Could it be that they were merely the vessels, surrogate mothers, by which we were brought into the world, and that we share no DNA with them? I suspect that we’re fatherless and motherless in a basic biological sense, that we were created—engineered—by some mysterious maker and that the sequences in our DNA that alarm authorities aren’t from an extraterrestrial race, but are from the Rishon of the first universe. If we have in us genetic material that provides us with a watered-down version of that race’s special gifts before they grew arrogant and destroyed their world, if we have no biological roots in this world, maybe we don’t exude the scent of prey, so to speak. We’re not recognized by the Nihilim as potential targets. Because they aren’t drawn to us either to kill us or make us suffer. They aren’t concerned with us at all—and so we may therefore stalk them.”

Our gifts assist us, but they don’t control us. We distinguish ourselves by the efforts we make, by taking the initiative whatever the risks.”