“Drossen, you magnificent bastard,” Rhyme said to herself as the disembodied head started to wake up. The muscles in the jaw and face were moving in a fashion reminiscent of a machine going through a system check on start-up… a comparison that was fairly close to the literal truth.
A few minutes alone up close and personal with the head had been enough to tell her just what a fool Clevenger… or her clone… had been, and what a fool Webmistress had been for dealing with her. Doubtlessly the archvillainess thought of “Science!” as a big monolithic, amorphous thing, but a genetic engineer should hardly have been her first choice for reanimating any decapitated head, much less one that had as much hardware as wetware in it.
The elderly cyberneticist had been an old man in the days of World War II, and he’d kept himself alive and well-preserved in the intervening decades. Rhyme would have been surprised to find anything resembling a conventional heart and lungs in his body… his head had shut down not from a lack of oxygenated blood but from a lack of power.
Once Rhyme spotted the severed conduit in his spinal column, it had been child’s play to rig up an adapter running off the emergency lights. She was almost disappointed by the fact that she didn’t need to stretch her insight any further than that.
“Rhyme? Are you saying he’s alive?” Webmistress asked over the intercom.
“Time will tell,” Rhyme said. “And when it does, I’ll tell you.”
“What do you mean?”
Rhyme ignored her, instead focusing on the cybernetic organism. It was a little premature to declare success… so far all she had seen was mechanical movement, with no indication of an underlying consciousness or mind. The fact that the head was manifestly going through a “wake up” procedure indicated to her that Drossen had anticipated a time when he might go dormant and to be revived later, which was promising.
The facial contortions had slowed and then stopped. The eyes… which were obviously mechanical when viewed up close…closed and then opened, the irises slowly expanding in response to the dim purple light, though the orbs themselves were simply staring straight ahead, unfocused. Rhyme stepped to the side, out of sight. A moment later, the mouth of Karl Drossen, also known as Drosselmeier, opened up and let out a short, rasping scream.
“Something amiss, Herr Doctor?” Rhyme asked, from out of sight.
“It is a shock, awakening to find my body missing,” Drossen said. There was an audible sucking sound and a mechanical whine underlying his speech, which was raspy and weak. “I always wondered what he felt… the absence of feedback from anything below my neck is a little, I guess you would say ‘jarring’… the sensation is interpreted as something analogous to pain.”
“Oh, believe me, I know the feeling,” Rhyme said.
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