“Found me?” Surprised, she took away her hands.

“Yes, you’d been driven from the — the nest quite shortly after you were born. I don’t think you can remember.”

Her eyes went cold again, this time not with anger but with hatred. “Oh, I don’t think you want to know what I remember,” she said, her voice shaking. She turned from him, her four fists clenched, her arms stiff. “I remember torture, you bastard! I remember being a pathetic little specimen, picked on and beat up for what I was. Now I find out I’m really some kind of laboratory experiment gone awry, and none of that really happened. None of that shit I based who I was upon ever happened. I don’t exist. I’m somebody else. Why didn’t you just tell me all of this? No, you had to make me hate myself, instead!

How could you,” she turned towards him again, “how could you do that? You made me think you were the only one in the whole wide world who cared about me, and all along, you were the one who had hurt me.”

Hector sank to the floor and bowed his head over his knees. She was absolutely right. That was what he had done. That his intentions had been otherwise, that he had reasons for making up her past made no difference. In trying to save her he had betrayed her. He had burdened her with the memories of a childhood that was not her own.

“You’re right,” he said, finally, out of the depths of his inner darkness. “You’re absolutely right.” He looked at her, but made no other move. Just forced himself to look at her without flinching. She stared back at him hollowly. She was more lost than he was, which felt impossible, but there it was.

“Why didn’t you want me to know what I am?” she asked. “Is it so horrible?”

“No! Oh, no, Helix. That’s not it at all. I thought I was protecting you. The project wasn't going well. I knew it was only a matter of time before the project was canceled. In the eyes of someone like Graham, it was a useless waste of funds. He wouldn't even stop to consider that it was a new species of intelligent beings which he was eradicating with the flick of his pen." Hector trembled, with anger, he realized. "I didn't care that the project failed its objective. As far as I was concerned, it was a complete success. I didn't want the beings I'd helped bring into the world to disappear without a trace, and with you, I knew I had a chance at seeing them survive.

“I knew someday you'd have to leave here, and I didn't want you to go back to the nest of your birth. They drove you out, and I didn't think they'd let you in again. And if you tried to find out more about the project, you'd be discovered. So I made you think you were human, and I taught you to fear people and hide what you are so you could remain undetected for as long as possible." Helix shook her head in confusion. She turned to the couch as if she would sit down. Broken glass lay scattered on the upholstery. She picked up one of the larger shards to toss it onto the pile debris that had been his table. It sliced her hand and she dropped it. “Because of you my first memories were of hostility. Why did I have to start out like that? Not knowing who I am, forced to find out by myself in a world that didn’t welcome me.”

Anger flashed through him again, surprising and sudden. He stared up at her. “Don’t we all start out like that? Where do you think I got the material for your memories? Do you think I could have made them that vivid for you if I hadn’t experienced them myself?”

She stared at him, nonplussed, blood dripping unheeded from her lower left fingertips. “You were never in an orphanage.”

“No,” he said, standing. “But I did go to school, and I was different, and kids are like that.”

She sighed and shook her head, "But you could have told me the truth, and together, we could have reached the same conclusions."

"Maybe, maybe not. I couldn’t take the chance."

"No, you just had to decide for me,” she retorted hotly. “You had to manipulate me, make all my choices for me. If you'd treated me like a human being, instead of just making me think I was one, maybe I wouldn't hate you now."

He laughed bitterly and began making his way around the wreckage to the dining alcove. "It's really not important how you feel about me, Helix. What's important is that you survive. Hate me if it helps you, but don’t punish yourself.” He pulled a chair out from the dining table and looked back at her. “I made the mistake, not you. Take what help I can give you now, I beg of you.”

She looked at him with more sadness than anger. “What help can you possibly give me?”

He nodded at her bleeding hand. “For starters, I can bandage that.”

Amazingly enough, she sat at the dining table and allowed him to wrap her hand with cello tape. She knew almost everything now. To fill the silence between them, Hector told her the only thing left that might be of value to her. “I had a lot of trouble with the project,” he said, gripping her hand more firmly when he said ‘project’ lest she try to pull it away. “I was working off a multiprocessor brain. Trying to design a body with a sensory system and motor control reflex that it could use. Overlaps in the gene splicing caused your double set of arms and your enlarged eyeteeth, but the real problem was the sensory input. All multiprocessor brains have to do is think. The creature I was trying to create had to use all the physical faculties. I was beginning to think I’d taken the wrong tack, starting with the brains.”

He looked at her, staring hard into her eyes as if by the force of his gaze he could make her understand.

“And then one night Lilith came to me in a dream. I saw her, saw for the first time what she would look like, and she looked into my eyes. She looked into my eyes, Helix, and I knew how to do it.”

She winced and he realized he was squeezing her hand. He loosened his hold, and went on. “The next day in the lab I stopped trying to build sensory systems onto the multi brain, and instead I just grew the cerebral cortex larger, and let the sensory nerves map onto it on their own. The senses of the body created their own intelligence. Within weeks she was born.”

"Born?"

He shrugged, "Call it what you will. She came into the world through me, and through her, I learned how to bring her here."

Reluctantly he finished bandaging her hand. He wished time would stop. He wished he could keep her here with him, but he’d already done that, and he’d already lost her some time ago. “And now you know everything I know.” he said, releasing her hand. “And you should leave. You’re in danger here. Take the airplane ticket, Helix. Get away from here.”

“I can’t do that. I need a vat, Hector.”

He sat back. Of course she did.

“Maybe I can remedy that,” said a voice from the living room. Hector turned to see Graham stepping out of the hallway, a young man with dark hair and sideburns close behind him. “Good of you to leave the door open, Martin,” said Graham as he raised his arm and squeezed the trigger of a tranq gun. The dart struck Helix in the shoulder and she crumpled to the floor. Hector was up and out of his chair.

“Get out of here Graham! Aren’t you in enough trouble already? Do you want to add assault and breaking and entering to the charges against you?”

Graham smiled at him. “So you want to play lawyer, huh? You should have stuck with that assault story you peddled to Anna. You don’t have the goods to pin attempted murder on me. I don’t know how you pulled the security clearance to bring me in on nothing but your say so, but it isn’t going to happen again. My lawyer can beat up your lawyer any day of the week.

“Besides,” Graham glanced to where Helix lay unconscious on the floor. “Murder and assault are offenses against human beings, and that’s not what we’re dealing with here, is it?