Quicksilver

by Dean Koontz

The seer said, “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.”