Deficiency by Andrew Neiderman Page A

it was still within them, the women especially would know to run from him. Fortunately for him, it was not, or it was too dormant to ever be awoken.
    Some, however, were trying to rediscover or restore it or something akin to it. He had read about and even met people who talked about positive and negative energy forces around them. It wasn't something tangible, but they claimed they could sense it. They were right of course, but they had no idea how right they were. One woman (he could no longer remember her name or even her face) told him she deliberately avoided people who were full of negativity. They were a threat to her own happiness and well-being, she said.
    For a while he thought she would sense the danger to her that was in him, but she didn't have that much ability, none of them had. They were on the right track, but they had a long way to go and in his opinion, they would never reacquire what had been lost. It was too late for them. The truth was they were becoming less and less of what they were created to be. Their technologies, their artificiality, their virtual reality, all of it was quickly turning them into just another part of the machinery they were creating. Pure beings like himself would be so rare, one could search the globe and produce only a handful, he concluded with that delicious arrogance he so enjoyed.
    From what well he drew all this wisdom, he did not know, and although that didn't bother him, he was becoming increasingly concerned about the loss of some memory. He used to be able to recall events that had occurred a year or so ago, and then it became less than a year, months, until now, he was having trouble bringing up vivid recollections of events that had occurred less than six months ago. It was only after a good feed, like the one tonight, that he was able to remember what he had done in the immediate past.
    He gazed over the pond into the moonlit darkness that wrapped shadows about the naked trees and wondered if he was not becoming a shadow himself. Was that his final destiny, to disappear into the night and be unable to touch, to feel, to smell, taste, or hear anything? He could almost see himself looking back at himself in this chair, looking back with a deep longing, an ache that turned into a primeval howl heard only by the wildest, yet untouched creatures that roamed the rim of civilization.
    Who am I? he wondered and it occurred to him that he had not wondered or cared about that very much until just recently. Who could he ask? Who would know? The answer hung out there. He sensed it.
    He turned quickly and looked back to the road that led up to the tourist house, a narrow, pitted, and cracked rope of macadam that snaked through the woods, up from this hamlet of Loch Sheldrake, another little community that went into hibernation after Labor Day with most of the shop owners drawing the curtains on their front windows and the ones who remained looking like cemetery caretakers gazing vacantly at the highway of the dead.
    There was a lake, of course, one with an amusing history if he was to believe some of the old timers he had met at a local bar. They told him bodies were still being discovered under the water, bodies deposited years and years ago by ruthless gangsters who had an organization notoriously known as Murder Incorporated.
    What a funny idea, he thought. Did it enjoy the benefits of a corporation? He
asked one of the nearly toothless balding men if it was an S-corp or a C-corp. They looked at him as if he was crazy, and then he laughed.
    "Laugh all you want," one of them said angrily, "but this is a place with history."
    Okay, he thought. I'll add to your history.
    He continued to stare at the road that ran by the tourist house. Someone or something was coming, he thought. It was as vague a thought as usual at first, but it grew stronger, more insistent. He took a deep breath. He wouldn't be able to remain here much longer. He would have to move on to new territory. That