As he turned the left side of his face became visible — and it was horrifying, all the muscles and blood vessels clearly visible, as if, somehow, he'd treated his skin with a chemical that had turned it transparent. The young man's right hand was covered over with an exoskeletal glove, extending his fingers into long, mechanical digits terminating in glistening surgically sharp silver points.

"I said pick that up!" snapped Gaston in French — or, at least it was his voice; he had no sense of willing the words out. "As long as I'm paying for your clothes, you'll take good care of them."

The young man glared at Gaston. He was positive he didn't know him, but he did bear a resemblance to… whom? It was hard to tell with that ghastly half-transparent face, but the high forehead, the thin lips, those cool gray eyes, that aquiline nose…

The pointed tips of the finger extensions retracted with a whir, and the boy picked up the jacket between mechanical thumb and forefinger, holding it now as if it were something distasteful. Gaston's gaze tracked with him as he moved across the living room. As it did so, Gaston couldn't help noticing that a lot of other details were wrong, too: the familiar pattern of books on the shelves had changed completely, as if someone had reorganized everything at some point. And, indeed, there seemed to be far fewer volumes than there should have been, as though a purge had been done of the family library. Another robot, this one spiderlike and about the size of a splayed human hand, was working its way along the shelves, apparently dusting.

On one wall, where they used to have a framed print of Monet's Le Moulin de la Galette, there was now an alcove, displaying what looked like a Henry Moore sculpture — but, no, no, there could be no alcove there; that wall was shared with the house next door. It must have really been a flat piece, a hologram or something similar, hanging on the wall and giving the illusion of depth; if so, the illusion was absolutely perfect.

The closet doors had changed, too; they slid open of their own volition as the boy approached. He reached in, pulled out a hanger, and put the jacket on it. He then replaced the hanger inside the closet… and the jacket slipped from it to the closet floor.

Gaston's voice lashing out again: "Damn it, Marc, can't you be more careful?"

Marc…

Marc!

Mon Dieu!

That's why he looked familiar.

A family resemblance.

Marc. The name Marie-Claire and he had chosen for the child she was carrying.

Marc Beranger.

Gaston hadn't even yet held the baby in his arms, hadn't burped it over his shoulder, hadn't changed its diaper, and yet here he was, grown up, a man — a frightening, hostile man.

Marc looked at the fallen jacket, his cheek still flashing, but then he walked away from the closet, letting the door hiss shut behind him.

"Damn you, Marc," said Gaston's voice. "I'm getting sick of your attitude. You're never going to get a job if you keep behaving like this."

"Screw you," said the boy, his voice deep, his tone a sneer.

Those were baby's first words — not "mama," not "papa," but "Screw you."

And, as if there could be any doubt remaining, Marie-Claire entered Gaston's field of view just then, emerging through another sliding door from the den. "Don't speak to your father that way," she said.

Gaston was taken aback; it was Marie-Claire, without question, but she looked more like her own mother than herself. Her hair was white, her face was lined, and she'd put on a good fifteen kilos.

"Screw you, too," said Marc.

Gaston rather suspected that his voice would protest, "Don't talk to your mother like that." It did not disappoint him.

Before Marc turned back around, Gaston caught sight of a shaved area at the back of the kid's head, and a metal socket surgically implanted there.

It had to be a hallucination. It had to. But what a terrible hallucination to have! Marie-Claire was due any day now. They'd tried for years to get pregnant — Gaston ran a facility that could precisely unite an electron and a positron, but somehow he and Marie-Claire had been unable to get an egg and a sperm, each millions of times larger than those subatomic particles, to come together. But finally it had happened; finally God had smiled upon them, finally she was pregnant.

And now, at last, nine months later, they were soon to give birth. All those Lamaze classes, all that planning, all that fixing up of the nursery… it was soon going to come to fruition.

And now this dream; that's all it must be. Just a bad dream. Cold feet; he'd had the worst nightmare of his life just before he got married. Why should this be any different?

But it was different. This was much more realistic than any dream he'd ever had. He thought about the plug on the back of his son's head; thought about images being pumped directly into a brain — the drug of the future?

"Get off my back," said Marc. "I've had a hard day."

"Oh, really?" said Gaston's voice, dripping with sarcasm. "You've had a hard day, eh? A hard day terrorizing tourists in Old Town, was it? I should have let you rot in jail, you ungrateful punk — "

Gaston was shocked to find himself sounding so much like his own father — the things his father had said to him when he was Marc's age, the things he'd promised himself he'd never say to his own children.

"Now, Gaston… " said Marie-Claire.

"Well, if he doesn't appreciate what he's got here… "

"I don't need this shit," sneered Marc.

"Enough!" snapped Marie-Claire. "Enough."

"I hate you," said Marc. "I hate you both."

Gaston's mouth opened to reply, and then—

— and then, suddenly, he was back in his office at CERN.

After reporting the news of all the deaths, Michiko Komura had immediately gone back into the front office of the LHC control center. She kept trying to phone the school in Geneva that her eight-year-old daughter Tamiko attended; Michiko was divorced from her first husband, a Tokyo executive. But all she got was busy signal after busy signal, and the Swiss phone company, for some reason, wasn't offering to automatically notify her when the line became free.

Lloyd was standing behind her as she kept trying, but finally she looked up at him, her eyes desperate. "I can't get through," she said. "I've got to go there."

"I'll come with you," said Lloyd at once. They ran out of the building, into the warm April air, the ruddy sun already kissing the horizon, the mountains looming in the distance.

Michiko's car — a Toyota — was parked here, too, but they took Lloyd's leased Fiat, with Lloyd driving. They made their way out of the CERN campus, passing by the towering cylindrical liquid helium tanks, and got onto Route de Meyrin, which took them through Meyrin, the town just east of CERN. Although they saw some cars at the sides of the road, things looked no worse than they did after one of the rare winter storms, except, of course, that there was no snow on the ground.

They passed quickly through the town. A short distance outside it was Geneva's Cointrin Airport. Pillars of black smoke rose to the sky; a large Swissair jet had crashed on the one runway. "My God," said Michiko. She brought a knuckle to her mouth. "My God."

They continued on into Geneva proper, situated at the westernmost tip of Lac Leman. Geneva was a wealthy metropolis of 200,000, known for ultra-posh restaurants and wildly expensive shops.

Signs that would normally be lit up were out, and lots of cars — many of them Mercedes and other expensive makes — had veered off the roads and plowed into buildings. The plate-glass windows on several storefronts had shattered, but there didn't seem to be any looting going on. Even the tourists were apparently too stunned by what had happened to take advantage of the situation.