Ouroboros

Nowadays, not a single human dies from old age. This is my fault, of course. Immortality brought with it its own set of problems. It is a great blessing and a terrible curse for humanity.

Our cradle can no longer hold our vast numbers and the great Arcship is almost complete.

Soon, you and I will walk the surface of Mars, then uncover whether life exists beneath the ice of Europa and touch the rings of Saturn.

You stopped the railgun bullet from a Seditionist Luddite that would have vaporized my head and died for me. Died and lived on, because you cannot be unmade with mundane weapons.

Who am I? You look at me, speaking without words, pawing at my face. How did I come to be? Why do you seem so… familiar?

I know that you yearn for the answer, because I know you. I have known you for far too long now.

This is because you are the first of many horrors that I have inadvertently unleashed upon humanity. You are also the biggest reason why people who worship death want us gone.

I begin my story once again. Do forgive me if some of the facts are imperfect, I’ve lived far too long and a human mind tends to confuse dates and names after a few generations.

Yes, again, for it does not matter if I have told this story to you a thousand times.

Because I am willing to explain it a million times more, as you are my creation from whom I can never escape, for we are bound by the greatest metaphysical force in the universe, one that we discovered together…

I was born on August 8, 1769.

When I was fifteen, my father Alphonse moved us to an estate near Belrive. A benevolent man, he sought to shield his family from city grime. He was a Syndic and a man of laws. He believed virtuous living kept disorder at bay.

The thunderstorm at Belrive was the day it all began.

He stood by my side as lightning pulverized a centuries-old oak, setting it alight.

“Electricity,” my father explained as I gaped at the spectacle of the Biblical-style burning tree. “A potent fluid that permeates all matter, Victor. One governed by laws.”

Later that week, I had been wading in the lake shallows. I ignored my father calling for supper to collect creeping sponge jellies that clung to submerged reeds. To the naked eye they seemed single masses.

Back then, my father called them “moss animals” stating that they were a type of “plant life”. He was wrong. In mere three generations, biologists would call them “Bryozoans”, clarifying their curious nature.

With the aid of the double tripod compound microscope of Edmund Culpeper’s design, which sat in my father’s study, I spent weeks examining the minute creatures.

Through my study, I understood the truth.

The moss animals weren’t simple plants. They were thousands of clones fused together. They shared a single nervous flutter. When I poked one, the entire colony contracted.

My father wished to guide me toward seeing the world as a place of moral order. Instead, I began to see life as a puzzle of biological glue.

At seventeen, the illusion of my father’s protective power shattered. My best friend, Elizabeth, caught the scarlet fever. My mother, Caroline Beaufort, whom my father had once rescued from poverty like a knight errant, rushed to save her. Elizabeth lived. My mother died.

I watched my father weep. He had saved mother from the world, natheless he could not save her from the microscopic. Her body, a fortress of life, had fevered so violently it burned itself down.

“We must not let excessive sorrow prevent our daily usefulness,” my father told me later, forcing his features into stoic grief. He spoke of duty, of the living.

I nodded, yet my soul rebelled.

Usefulness…

The human frame was a pathetic, xenophobic machine. It fought every intruder carelessly until it died. I thought of the lake-colonies again. They accepted the stranger. They shared the sensation.

With such weight crushing my heart, I left for Ingolstadt to find a way to rewrite the laws of death.

The image of the burning oak at Belrive haunted my waking hours. I remembered how the electric fluid pulverized the ancient wood, reducing centuries of growth to splinters in a single, blinding instant. Twas not mere destruction. It was… a force capable of manipulating matter with absolute authority. Biology was too slow, too soft. To command the flesh, I required the violence of the storm.

I brought my feverish theories to Professor Krempe, the university’s master of natural philosophy. He listened to my ravings about harnessing the lightning with a sour expression, yet he did not dismiss the principle.

“If you wish to understand the fire of the heavens, do not waste your time with the mystics who tickle frogs,” Krempe stated. “Write to the Lombard. He understands that electricity is a physical law, not a spirit.” Thus, he directed me to the only man in Europe who dared to question the existence of the soul in the machine.

My correspondence with Alessandro Volta commenced due to a hunger for disputation rather than from any tribute of esteem.

Many professors at Ingolstadt worshipped Luigi Galvani. They spoke of “animal electricity” as if it were a holy spirit residing in the nerves of frogs.

I did not believe in spirits. I required mechanics.

I wrote my first letter to the University of Pavia in January of 1786. I was merely seventeen years of age and an unknown student. Volta was forty-one, a titan of natural philosophy who would isolate methane gas in just two years and shake the scientific world. He was a man of rigorous measurement.

I asked him a simple question. Does the lightning reside in the frog, or does the frog merely announce the lightning?

The post was agonizingly slow. My letter had to travel by coach to Munich, then through the Brenner Pass, down into the Italian plains.

I did not waste my time at university. While my letter to Volta crossed the Alps, I spoke to other professors. Professor Waldman gave me another key to greater understanding.

He introduced me to the university’s marine collection. These were many specimens preserved in spirits, brought from the sunless depths of the ocean.

He showed me the Giant Tube Worm, which possesses blood that binds oxygen where none exists, and the marine Mollusca, much later classified as Tunicate, life capable of vascular fusion, literally melting its veins into its neighbors.

“The ocean is the engine,” Waldman narrated. “Here, the blood does not just flow; it connects.”

I retreated to the solitude of the university’s archives to reconcile these discoveries with the natural philosophy of our age.

To maintain flesh beneath the waves required overcoming three great barriers: the union of vessels, the supply of vital air, and the aversion of the living fibre to foreign matter. The body is a jealous fortress. It rejects intruders. It demands vast quantities of aerial acid. It dies when severed from the heart.

The ocean offered the cipher for a new architecture.

My solution began with the study of Alcyonium Schlosseri.

Pallas had described these star-shaped colonies in Elenchus Zoophytorum, classifying them among the obscure zoophytes. In my research, I saw what Pallas missed. These creatures possessed a sympathy of curious parts that surpassed our rigid taxonomies. When two compatible colonies touched, their bounding membranes dissolved. Their vascular canals united. They became a single entity sharing a river of nutrients.

I termed this process “vital fusion.”

It referenced the grafting experiments of John Hunter, described in The Natural History of the Human Teeth, wherein he transplanted a tooth from a fresh cadaver into a living comb of a rooster. The vessels joined. The tooth lived. By altering the essential character of the Tunicate I could deceive its faculties. It would view the human graft not as an intruder but as kindred flesh. The Tunicate would grow over the hand or eye. Its vessels would splice with the human capillaries. The limb would cease to be an individual. It would become a member of the colony.

The second hurdle was the necessity of breath. Lavoisier had taught us that respiration is merely slow combustion, a process where oxygen burns the carbon within the blood. The human frame demands this fire constantly.

Digging through Waldnman’s vast specimen collection, I discovered an unnamed vermes Waldman kept in a jar of thick glass deep in the university’s catacombs. It was a non-cataloged species tagged as a Linnaeus by the professor, dredged from a sunless trench by Albrecht von Treileben in a diving bell.

Lavoisier taught that air burns carbon, yet this strange worm lived and survived where air could not reach. In its veins ran a fluid darker and richer than any terrestrial blood. It contained a dense concentration of matter capable of seizing the faintest traces of oxygen from the water.

Unlike a multitude of other specimens, the worm was inexplicably alive. Slicing the worm produced two worms, much faster than with an earthworm. Slicing again, produced four. Then eight. I concluded that the worm could be divided indefinitely, replicating itself without an end.

As I researched the reason for this, after forty hours of wakefulness, my head fell upon the cedar workbench. I drifted into a fevered slumber. The candlelight flickered against my closed eyelids and I saw her.

An angel stood amidst the glass retorts and copper wiring. Her hair was not the brown of my mother or the gold of Elizabeth. Nay, for twas jet black, falling around her in heavy curtains. I knew that she was an angel because she looked upon me with inhuman, brilliantly violet eyes. They shone with the exact bruised indigo hue of the eight abyssal worms floating in the jar beside my head.

She leaned close, the scent of brine clinging to her, a medallion with a sideways number eight inside an eight-pointed star glittering betwixt her odd, gray-black robes.

“It is my gift, Victor,” she whispered, her voice thrumming unnaturally like the beat of a million distant hearts. “A single adjustment. There is no other. Waste it, and the door to eternity closes forever and then your world will burn to ashes.”

I awoke with a gasp. My heart hammered against my ribs. The room was empty, save for the shadows, yet the message burned in my mind.

I stared at the invertebrate. The dream had not been a mere phantasm of an exhausted mind… It was a directive, a guiding star.

The sideways eight. The mathematical symbol for infinity from John Wallis’ De sectionibus conicis.

I decided to call the worm Infinitum Paradoxus.

…

When the packet from Volta finally arrived, sealed with red wax, the paper was stiff and smelled of tobacco.

Volta did not mince words. He wrote that Galvani was a fool seduced by his own instruments.

“The frog is a moist detector, Herr Frankenstein,” Volta’s script read. “The agent is the metal. The junction of silver and zinc generates the tension. The muscle merely contracts in obedience to the flow.”

He enclosed a rough diagram. It was a theoretical sketch of what he called an “artificial electric organ,” modeled after the torpedo fish. It showed discs of silver and zinc stacked high, separated by cloth strips soaked in brine. He believed this column could produce a perpetual current, though he had not yet successfully built one of sufficient power.

I read his words until I had memorized the cadence of his ink.

If the power came from the contact of elements and not the grace of God, then life was an engineering problem.

I peered closer through the brass barrel of the microscope. The tiny chimera had not merely ceased to move. It had withered.

The transparent outer skin of the hydra, usually so resilient, appeared opaque and gray. I prepared a fresh slide and used a fine lancet to separate the joined tissues for inspection.

Under the highest magnification, the catastrophe was visible. The fundamental globules that constitute the living fibre were shrunken, deprived of their essential moisture. The violet lattice of the worm’s blood remained bright and pulsing, alas the native flesh around it was ash.

I sat back and rubbed my eyes. The answer lay in Lavoisier’s new chemistry.

Life is a slow fire. We consume food, we breathe air, and the body burns these elements to produce motion and heat. This is the animal economy.

The Infinitum Paradoxus blood acted as a draught in a furnace. It bound the tissues with absolute strength, yes, albeit in doing so, it whipped the vital motions of the host into a frenzy. It demanded energy faster than the hydra’s simple digestion could provide. The creature had not starved in the usual sense. It had burned itself out from within, aging a lifetime in an hour.

I reflected on the habitat of the Infinitum Paradoxus. Waldman had told me it came from the crushing blackness of the deep trench, a place where the sun never touches.

Why did the worm not consume itself in the jar?

I considered the physics of the abyss. In those sunless trenches, two conditions reign: absolute pressure and the absence of aerial acid. Lavoisier proved that air is the accelerant of decay and combustion. Down in the black deep, this violet agent remains dormant, a sleeping potential held in check by the weight of the ocean. In the vacuum of the sea, the blood is a stable mortar.

Upon my table, exposed to the rich, invisible fluid of our atmosphere, the agent reacted with the violence of a starved beast. It was like phosphorus, which sleeps beneath water but ignites the moment it kisses the air. The oxygen in the water of my slide acted as a catalyst, whipping the blood into a frenzy of consumption. My laboratory was too rich in life-giving air. I had taken a creature designed for the cold stasis of the deep and cast it into a furnace.

The blood was a parasite of energy. It granted unity save exacted a fatal tax upon the constitution.

To verify this, I prepared a second experiment.

I took a strip of muscle from the leg of a frog, dead for two hours. I placed it in a saline bath. I applied a droplet of the worm’s violet ichor to the center of the muscle fibre.

Then, I waited.

Without any source of nutriment, the violet web began to spread. As it knitted itself into the frog’s cold flesh, the muscle twitched violently. The blood was scavenging the last dregs of latent irritability remaining in the dead tissue.

In ten minutes, the muscle turned gray and brittle. It crumbled at the touch of my tweezers. The worm’s blood had extracted every ounce of potential force until the structure collapsed into dust.

My creation could not exist on bread and meat alone. The digestive fires of a human stomach would be too slow to replenish what the violet blood consumed. A creature stitched together with this agent would perish of old age before it learned to walk.

I looked at the tower of zinc and silver standing on my desk.

Volta claimed his pile produced a fluid identical to the nervous force of animals. If the violet blood consumed the nervous force to maintain the bond, perhaps I could substitute the natural energy of the body with the artificial torrent of the battery.

I needed to prove that the electric fluid could sustain the blood, sparing the flesh.

I prepared a third sample. Another strip of frog muscle, identical to the first.

I applied the violet ichor.

As the dark veins began to spread, seeking to devour the latent life of the meat, I clamped the copper wires of my thirty-layer battery to the ends of the muscle strip.

The circuit closed.

The muscle snapped taut. It did not relax. It held its tension, vibrating with a low hum.

I returned my eye to the microscope, watching the boundary between the frog’s flesh and the violet intruder.

The destruction halted.

The globules of the muscle remained plump and full. The violet lattice glowed with a fierce, electric intensity, brighter than before. It was no longer feeding upon the frog. It was drinking from the wire. The silver and zinc provided the fire; the muscle merely provided the frame.

The realization chilled me.

The worm did not breathe oxygen in its dark trench because it did not burn carbon for heat. It was an engine designed for a different fuel entirely. It thrived on pure energy.

If I wished to build a man that would not die, I could not rely on the weak, chemical slurry of human blood. I had to replace his nervous fluid with the fire of the storm. He would not be a man of flesh and blood alone. He would be a vessel for the galvanic stream.

I had solely one problem: Volta’s galvanic pile was a miracle, yet it possessed a fatal flaw. It was finite.

Over the next ten days, I watched the oxidation corrode the zinc discs. The brine-soaked cloth dried, crusting with salt. The flow of the electric fluid sputtered and died.

On the slide, the frog muscle, deprived of its artificial soul, succumbed instantly to the hunger of the violet blood. The worm’s agent devoured the tissue.

The problem was clear.

A man cannot walk the earth tethered to a machine the size of a cabinet. Nor could I create a functional being that required a fresh battery of acid and metal every hour. The creature needed an internal engine. It needed to generate the lightning from within its own bowels.

I turned my mind to the natural history of the sea.

If the ocean provided the blood that binds, perhaps it also held the secret of the spark.

I consulted the works of John Walsh and the anatomist John Hunter. In 1775, they had presented papers to the Royal Society regarding the Torpedo fish and the Gymnotus electricus of Surinam. These beasts possessed the faculty of striking their prey with invisible blows.

Walsh had proven, by using a Leyden jar, that this force was indeed electricity.

I required a specimen.

The trade routes from the Americas were slow. Thankfully, Ingolstadt possessed a robust network of naturalists. I paid a exorbitant sum to a Dutch merchant for a cask of spirits containing a Gymnotus, the electric eel.

Dissection revealed the truth. The creature’s flanks were not muscle. They were columns of hexagonal honeycomb, filled with a clear jelly.

I examined this jelly under the lens.

It was a biological battery. Each tiny partition acted as a focused Leyden jar, stacking charge upon charge. The animal did not need zinc or copper. It used the separation of ions within its own fluids to build a potential that could fell a horse.

Here was my generator.

If I could cultivate this tissue, if I could weave the Gymnotus organs into the human frame, the violet blood would have a perpetual feast. The creature would not need to eat bread to live. It would convert its own fluids into lightning, and the lightning would feed the binding blood.

Yet, a third problem remained.

Power and unity were not enough. A machine may run forever, alas the gears grind down. The human fibre, even when electrified, grows brittle with time. The natural decay of the years would eventually rot the vessel, no matter how strong the binding agent.

I needed a way to arrest the march of time itself.

I returned to the crate of specimens from the Mediterranean.

Among the dried seahorses and starfish, I found a vial labeled simply Medusa. Inside floated a creature no larger than a lentil.

It was a hydrozoan, similar to the freshwater polyps I had studied in Belrive, except this one was of salt water. I placed the tiny bell in a dish of seawater.

It appeared dead.

I watched it for three days.

By all laws of nature, it should have dissolved into slime. The rot should have claimed it.

Instead, the creature defied the grave.

The bell did not rot. It inverted. The tentacles retracted. The substance of its body folded in upon itself, transforming from a free-swimming medusa back into the immature polyp from which it had sprung.

It did not die. It grew young.

I stared at the globule of life, astounded.

This creature possessed a faculty unknown to higher animals. When faced with death or injury, it reversed its own development. It dissolved its mature tissues and reorganized them into the primal, embryonic state. It was a wheel that could roll backward.

I didn’t know it back then, but in a hundred years time, Weismann would classify this Medusa as Turritopsis dohrnii, the immortal jellyfish.

I realized then, the grand design of my chimera.

The human flesh would provide the form.

The violet Infinitum blood would provide the strength and the connection, welding the disparate parts into one.

The Gymnotus tissue would provide the eternal fire to feed the blood.

And the essence of this immortal Medusa would instruct the cells to refuse the grave, constantly renewing themselves in a cycle of eternal youth.

I set to work on the synthesis.

The procedure required a steady hand and the patience of a saint. I prepared a sterile solution of seawater and the albumen of an egg.

First, I introduced the scrapings of human skin. The globules floated, pale and unconnected.

Second, I introduced the Gymnotus cells. They weren’t round-edged like typical human cells, looking like hexagonal, disc-like plates.

Third, I added the extract of the Medusa.

Finally, I let fall a single drop of the violet Infinitum Paradoxus blood.

I held my breath and applied my eye to the ocular of the microscope.

The reaction was instantaneous.

The violet blood acted as the mortar. It lashed the human skin to the eel tissue. The globule of human flesh shuddered. It turned a deep, bruised purple.

Then, the Gymnotus element fired.

A microscopic spark, invisible to the naked eye, however blinding under the lens, traversed the sample.

The human flesh did not burn. It drank the fire.

The Medusa essence permeated the union. The jagged edges of the sample smoothed. The structure did not wither. It pulsed.

It was a single, rhythmic beat.

Thump.Thump.Twas not merely alive. It was… self-sustaining!

The eel tissue generated the current. The worm blood distributed the energy. The medusa repaired the fraying edges of existence.

I left the cell sample, focusing on understanding the body of the Gymnotus itself.

I watched the Gymnotus in its copper-lined tank. It was a sluggish beast. Its movements were not graceful. It moved with a heavy, torpid lethargy until the moment of the strike.

I dropped a live carp into the water. The eel did not bite. It merely brushed its flank against the silver scales of the victim. There was no visible wound. The carp simply ceased to exist as a living thing. It floated belly up, its heart stopped by the invisible hammer.

Then, the feeding began.

The eel devoured the carp whole. It consumed a second fish. Then a third.

I observed a critical pattern. If I forced the Gymnotus to discharge its weapon repeatedly without food, the shocks grew weak. The lightning faded. The animal became comatose. It would lie at the bottom of the tank, its gelatinous batteries depleted.

It recovered only after consuming a quantity of flesh equal to half its own weight.

I sat back, my mind racing through the implications of the animal economy.

Alessandro Volta believed the metal pile generated the fluid through mere contact. He was half right. The contact directed the flow, yet the acid consumed the zinc. There is no motion without expenditure.

The Gymnotus was no different. It was a chemical engine.

The hexagonal columns along its spine were the furnace. To produce the electric fluid, the beast had to burn the nutriment within its blood at a ferocious rate. The lightning was not free. It was the product of a violent internal combustion.

This presented a catastrophic flaw in my design.

I intended to build a man of large stature, perhaps seven or eight feet in height, to accommodate the clumsy grafting of muscles and arteries. This being would rely on the Gymnotus tissue to generate the current that kept the violet Infinitum blood active. The blood would bind him. The Medusa cells would renew him.

However, the cost of that constant electric generation would be astronomical.

A normal man eats to generate heat and motion. My creature would need to eat to generate lightning.

If I gave him a human stomach, he would starve to death in a day. The standard human digestion is a slow, fermenting process. It extracts only a fraction of the potential energy from bread or beef. It creates waste. It is inefficient.

To fuel the electric organs, my creature needed a digestion that was total. He needed a furnace that could strip every grain of phlogiston from the food he consumed.

I turned to the works of Lazzaro Spallanzani.

Years prior, the Italian abbot had swallowed linen bags containing meat and bread, then pulled them back up by a string to study the action of gastric juice. He proved that digestion was a chemical solution, a dissolving of matter by acid, not a mechanical grinding.

I needed a solvency of absolute power. I needed to combine the faculties of three distinct beasts to create a universal stomach.

First, I sought the power of corrosion.

I obtained the stomach lining of the Lacerta Crocodilus, the Nile crocodile, from a dissection performed by the visiting naturalist Monsieur Cuvier. Travelers to Egypt had long reported that this Leviathan swallows stones, armored fish, and the bones of its prey without distress.

I tested the gastric liquor from the crocodile glands against a plate of iron. It etched the metal in minutes. It turned bone into a soft paste. This would provide the acid required to break down the hardest substances, ensuring my creature could derive sustenance from even the bones of his prey.

Second, I required efficiency.

I studied the anatomy of the great Boa of the Indies, often called the Python. This serpent consumes a goat whole and then requires no food for months.

Human digestion is wasteful; we expel much of what we eat. The Boa extracts every ounce of vital heat. I isolated the absorptive villi from the snake’s intestine. These structures were aggressive agents, not passive filters. They seized the liquified nutriment with a greed I had never seen in a mammal. They would ensure that once the crocodile acid dissolved the food, nothing was lost.

Third, I needed universality.

I recalled the 1781 paper presented to the Royal Society by Mr. Henry Smeathman regarding the Termes, or white ants, of Africa. These insects devour dry wood, a substance no other stomach can master. They possess a unique fermenting liquor capable of transmuting cellulose into sugar.

I cultivated the glands of the Termes bellicosus. I distilled their essence.

I set to work on the cellular synthesis.

As I combined the cells, I considered the human interior and felt profound dissatisfaction.

The stomach of a man is a singular, lonely sac. A passive vessel!

I thought of the Physalia physalis, the Portuguese Man of War, which I had seen preserved in the jar at Waldman’s. To the ignorant sailor, it is a single jellyfish. To the anatomist, it is a terror of cooperation. It is not one animal. It is a colony of four distinct zooids, each with a separate purpose, fused into a single functioning whole. One part floats, one part stings, one part digests, one part reproduces. They are distinct creatures that have surrendered their individuality for the survival of the colony.

I determined that the stomach of my Adam must be such a colony. It would not be a mere organ. It would be a hive of digestive specialists, grafted together to form a furnace capable of consuming the world.

I required a vessel of infinite elasticity.

I turned my attention to the Lophius piscatorius, known commonly as the Sea Devil or the Fishing Frog.

Linnaeus had classified this beast decades prior, yet the fishermen of the North Sea knew its gluttony best. It is a hideous creature consisting almost entirely of a mouth. I purchased a massive specimen from the fish market, still gasping in the wet straw.

The anatomy of the Lophius is a paradox of volume. The stomach is capable of such distension that the beast often swallows prey as large as its own body. I found a whole cod inside the gullet of my specimen, and the stomach walls had stretched thin as vellum to accommodate it, yet they did not tear.

I excised the stomach lining of this Lophius. Under the lens, the fibres were woven in curious spirals, not straight lines. This allowed for a distension that defied geometry. A human stomach ruptures if filled beyond three pints. This organ could hold a feast meant for a regiment.

I cultured these spiral fibres. I wove them into the outer lining of my future creature’s great intestine. With this modification, he would never feel the pain of a full belly. His torso would merely swell to accommodate the load, digesting it at his leisure.

Yet, capacity is useless without the power to destroy what is swallowed.

The acid of the crocodile was potent, yes, but I feared it would be slow against the armaments of modern war. If my creature were to be a soldier of eternity, he might be forced to consume the very weapons used against him.

I sought the Squalus carcharias, the White Shark.

Mariners speak of this beast with a holy dread. It is the fabled devourer of the ocean. I secured the stomach of a fresh specimen from a merchant in Le Havre who kept the beast on ice, along with plentiful other unique aquatic beasts.

Sailors have long claimed to find knives, buckles, and even suits of chain mail partially dissolved within the bellies of these monsters. I tested the rugae, the internal folds of the shark’s gut. They were thick, muscular ridges, tough as cured leather.

I placed a musket ball and a scrap of iron chain into a beaker containing the glandular extract of the Squalus. In an hour, the lead was pitted. In a day, the iron rings were sludge.

The shark possesses a solvent that was not merely acidic, nay it was enzymatic in a way that dissolves the binding matrix of bone and metal.

I grafted the shark’s glandular tissue into the lining of the Lophius sac.

Now I had a bag that could stretch to hold a man and a fluid that could digest his sword.

The greatest danger to an immortal is not hunger, nor the sword. It is the invisible killer. It is the putrid miasma, the rot, the poison.

A normal man dies if he eats meat that has turned green. A man cannot eat a rotting cadaver without soon becoming one himself.

I turned to the Canis crocuta, the Spotted Hyena of Africa.

Count Buffon describes this animal as a beast of no noble character, for it laughs as it eats the dead. It cracks the femur of the wildebeest to suck the marrow, and more importantly, it consumes carrion that has lain in the sun for weeks. It eats anthrax and pestilence and grows fat.

I obtained a living specimen from a traveling menagerie that had fallen into bankruptcy. The beast was truly foul, snapping its powerful jaws at the bars of its cage. The men of the menagerie told curious tales of its feasting abilities.

I fed it meat laced with arsenic and the putrid offal of a sheep dead from the rot. The Hyena ate. It slept. It woke with a hunger for more.

I dissected the beast.

The secret lay in the pyloric valve and the lymphatic clusters surrounding the gut. The Hyena possesses a blood-barrier within its stomach walls that acts as a fortress. It identifies the toxins of decay and neutralizes them before they can enter the blood. It transmutes poison into harmless salt.

I took these lymphatic clusters. I seeded them into the union of the shark and the Sea Devil fish.

I placed the completed organ in a bath of warm saline.

It was a disturbing amalgamation of anatomy.

The outer shape was the distended sac of the Lophius, black and veined with the violet Infinitum blood. The inner lining was the armored, rugose ridges of the Squalus, ready to grind steel. The vascular gates were guarded by the white, nodular lymph of the Hyena.

I introduced a slurry of bone, rotten meat, and zinc filings into the organ.

The reaction was magnificent.

The organ churned on its own accord. It did not need a brain to tell it to digest. It was a colony of hunger. The shark tissue secreted its corrosives. The hyena glands drew out the poisons and neutralized them. The Sea Devil fibres stretched and pulsed, mixing the slurry into a boiling grey paste.

I realized then that I had not merely built a stomach.

I had created an internal engine of combustion.

This marvellous organ would sit within the abdominal cavity of my Adam. It would strip the electric fire from zinc, the calcium from bone, the carbon from rotting flesh. It would feed the electric eel tissue with a slurry of pure potential energy.

He would be able to walk into a pestilent swamp, eat the dead, drink the brackish water, and convert it all into the lightning that fueled his immortality.

My father had preached of the moral order of nature. He believed that the lion eats the lamb, and the worm eats the lion.

I had broken that circle.

I had built a wolf that could eat the world and never die.

I had created a stomach that could endure until the stars burned out.

I had cured death.

I needed a laboratory removed from the prying eyes of Ingolstadt. The university proctors were small-minded men. They would see only desecration where I saw creation.

In 1788, I returned to Belrive. The estate stood gray against a slate sky.

Father greeted me in the library. He sat by the fire reading a volume of Agrippa. He looked frail. The years had eroded him. He was dying by inches, cell by cell, simply because his biology lacked the tools to renew itself.

“Victor,” he said. He set the book down. “Welcome back home.”

I did not embrace him. I saw the blue veins pulsing beneath the parchment of his hand. They were weak, failing vessels of a mortal being. “I have returned to continue my research here. The climate of Ingolstadt disagrees with my constitution.”

Alphonse nodded. He trusted me. He viewed me as the prodigal son returning to the hearth, ready to take the reins of the Frankenstein noblesse oblige.

“The estate is yours,” he said. “Rest. Recover.”

“I do not need rest. I require… space for a laboratory.” I pointed toward the ceiling. “The third floor. The old nursery and the adjoining attic. I require them for my instruments and specimens.”

“The nursery?” He paused. “It has been closed since your mother passed. It is full of dust.”

“Dust does not trouble me. I need isolation. The vapors I work with are noxious to the uninitiated. I must ask that no servant enter those rooms without my permission. You must not enter them either.”

He observed me. I kept my features rigid. I offered no explanation beyond the scientific. To him, I was a physicist chasing the secrets of lightning or steam. He could not conceive that I was a stitcher of meat, forger of life. He did not need to know that medical study and divine transgression often occupied the same workspace.

“Very well,” he said finally. “If it brings you peace, take the upper floor. But do not lose yourself in the fumes, Victor. Do make sure to come down for supper.”

I secured the master key to the third floor quarters.

Preparation began immediately. I ordered a variety of glass and metal tanks from Geneva. I had crates of salt shipped from the coast. I converted the nursery into an operating room and the rest of the third floor into specimen storage filling it with tanks. The air soon grew thick with the scent of brine and copper.

I wrote to a multitude of mariners and hunters requesting specimens. As many unique specimens as they could deliver to me, recently deceased and preserved in spirits or alive.

I contemplated the optimal vessel. After a few months of consideration and sketching as the tanks slowly filled with marine life, I rejected the male physique.

The anatomy of man is too rigid. It is a landscape of hard muscle and coarse hair. The dissection of the male frame is a brutal, jagged business.

I found the prospect visually repelling. If I was to spend months or even years staring into the open cavity of a chest, I desired a form that offered… less resistance to the eye.

I chose the female form. The beauty of reproduction, of creation.

The female anatomy possesses a greater subcutaneous layer of adipose tissue that smooths the transition between muscle and skin. It is a softer canvas. The planes of the body are less abrupt.

I would create not an Adam. Nay, I would craft an Eve everlasting.

My father’s coffers were deep. The Frankenstein family had accumulated wealth through generations of syndical prudence, hoarding gold against the threat of French instability. I drained these reservoirs without a flicker of remorse as father trusted me with our finances.

I required flesh.

The local graveyards were useless to me. The peasantry here died of consumption or malnutrition. Their frames were wasted, their bones brittle as dry reeds. I could not build a temple of eternity upon a foundation of crumbling chalk.

To house the sufficient electric organs of the Gymnotus and the distended, alchemical stomach of the Lophius, I required a thoracic cavity of significant volume. The battery piles alone, the gelatinous columns of eel-flesh, weighed four stone. A normal human spine would snap under the burden.

I wrote to the shadows of Europe. I contacted the grim opportunists of Paris who prowled the Hotel-Dieu.

My specifications were most rigorous.

I did not pay for the old or the infirm. I offered ten times the standard rate for the bodies of women who had possessed great physical stature in life. I demanded the washerwomen who could lift barrels, the farm wives who pulled the plow alongside the ox, the anomalies of nature exhibited in fairs.

I became a spectre in the banking houses of Geneva. I liquidated bonds that had sat untouched since the days of the Sun King. I converted safe, compounding interest into a river of gold flowing toward the criminal underworld.

I did not seek the delicate beauty of the salon. The corset-wasted waists of the aristocracy were useless to me. A standard ribcage would shatter under the internal pressure of the Gymnotus batteries. The lungs I intended to install required a thoracic volume double that of an average man.

I needed the Amazons. I needed the biological deviants.

My agents were efficient. In November, a crate arrived from Munich, packed in straw and ice, leaking a foul liquor upon the library floor.

Inside lay the remains of Anna Maria Zwanziger. She had been a curiosity in the Bavarian fairs, a woman of seven feet and four inches, known for lifting anvil stones. Consumption had taken her lungs, howbeit her frame remained magnificent.

I severed the connective tissue and stripped the flesh to examine the armature underneath.

Her spine was my primary desire. The vertebrae were thick, calcified knobs of bone, far superior to the delicate chain of a common lady. I needed a central pillar capable of supporting the Gymnotus batteries. The electric tissue was heavy, dense with fluid, and a standard spine would buckle under the torque of a single violent movement.

However, as I mapped the thoracic cavity, I encountered a limitation of the human geometry.

The Gymnotus organs generated heat. The chemical combustion required to produce the lightning created a byproduct of intense thermal energy. If I placed these batteries directly against the lungs, the creature would boil her own breath.

I required a cooling system.

I considered the anatomy of the female chest. The mammary glands of the Zwanziger woman were hypertrophic, massive mounds of adipose and glandular tissue. Nature designed them for the secretion of milk, a process requiring a rich vascular network.

I saw a different utility.

I did not need milk. I needed a heat exchanger.

I carefully excised the lactiferous ducts. In their place, I grafted a large network of vein-loops derived from the ears of the Lepus, the common hare. The hare uses its large ears to dissipate heat.

I connected these loops to the Gymnotus organs.

The large breasts of my creature would not nurture an infant. They were filled with a saline coolant, circulating through the fatty tissue to disperse the lethal heat of the electric fluid. The surface area was perfect. The adipose tissue acted as a buffer, protecting the interior from burning while allowing the heat to radiate outward.

The form was excessively female, nathless the function was industrial.

I continued my assembly. I fused the Zwanziger pelvis with the femur of a second acquisition, a woman from the shipyards of Rotterdam who had possessed legs like oak trunks.

I employed the violet Infinitum blood to solder the joints. The reaction was sluggish.

I applied the galvanic stimulus.

A crack echoed through the attic.

The femur of the Rotterdam woman had splintered.

I stared at the fracture, grasping at the problem. The bone was white and porous. It was… human.

Here was the failure of my premise. I sought to build a god from the clay of mortals. The human frame, even one as formidable as the Bavarian giantess, was evolved for the parlor and the plow, not for the eternal violence of my design. The tension of the violet blood, combined with the weight of the shark-stomach and the eel-batteries, crushed the human calcium.

I needed bone that could withstand the bite of a wolf. I needed muscle that could pull a carriage.

If the human blueprint was too weak, I would borrow from the beasts that ruled the wilds.

I traveled to the menagerie in Geneva. I did not look at the monkeys, those pale imitations of man. I looked for the monsters, the hunters of men and beasts.

I purchased a massive carcass of an Ursus arctos, the brown bear.

The dissection required an extra sharp saw.

The femur of the bear is not a mere bone; it is a column of architectural density. The cortex is twice the thickness of a man’s. The geometry of the hip joint is designed to bear a thousand pounds of crushing force.

I took the upper legs of the bear. I stripped them of their coarse fur and modified the articulation to allow for an upright gait. I grafted the human musculature over the ursine bone, using the violet blood to force the union.

The result was hips of very curvy proportions, yet it assuredly held the weight of the torso without a tremor.

Next, I looked to the hands.

The human hand is a tool for holding a quill or a teacup. It is fragile. The phalanges shatter against a hard surface.

I turned to a Lynx lynx specimen, the ghost of the forest that a trapper caught for me in the Jura mountains.

The sinew of the lynx is distinct. It possesses a contractile speed three times that of a dog. I harvested the flexor tendons of the great cat. I wove them into the forearms of my creature, replacing the weak human ribbons.

When I stimulated the arm with the pile, the hand did not merely close. It snapped shut with the velocity of a trap. It could crush a stone.

The greatest deficiency of man is his vision.

We are blind when the sun sets. We stumble in the gloom. My creature was to be the master of the new age, a being who could walk the ocean floor or the surface of another world. She required eyes that could see the heat of the blood and the ultraviolet shimmer of the stars.

I obtained the Strix bubo, the Eagle Owl.

I extracted the eye. It is a cylinder, not a sphere. It contains a structure known as the tapetum lucidum, a mirror behind the retina that reflects the faintest photon back through the sensing cells.

I placed the owl’s eye within the socket of the Bavarian giantess. The fit was poor. The human orbit was too shallow.

I used the bone-saw to widen the sockets, carving away the brow ridge. I set the massive, golden orbs deep into the skull.

The violet blood surged. The pupil of the owl eye blew wide, encompassing the entire iris, drinking in the candlelight of the attic until the room must have appeared as bright as noon to that dead, dreaming retina.

It was then that I ran into a snag. The eagle owl’s eyes could not rotate like that of a human, fixed in place by their tube-like shape.

To compensate for such, the eagle owls have the remarkable ability to rotate their heads up to 270 degrees to see their surroundings, which is made possible by extra neck vertebrae and a unique circulatory system that prevents damage to blood vessels.

I worked on, modified the neck vertebrae until my colony could do the same.

I stepped back to observe the chassis.

The legs were the pillars of a bear, hidden beneath the skin of a Dutch laborer. The arms were strung with the lightning-fast sinew of the lynx. The chest was a massive, heaving engine of cooling fluid and electric generation, housed within the ribcage of a giantess. The eyes were the golden lanterns of a nocturnal predator.

The body was complete. The engine was built. The stomach was ready to devour. The blood was waiting to bind.

Yet… Could a human mind even drive this chariot of fire?

The senses of the owl would flood the cortex with information a man could not process. The hunger of the shark-stomach would assuredly drive a human sanity to madness. The electric roar of the eel-organs would sound like a constant scream in the nervous system.

I could not put a human captain alone in this machine. The mind would fracture under the strain of the body’s power.

I needed an… additional brain that could understand the silence of the void. I needed a mind that was already broken, or perhaps, one that had never been whole.

I looked at the multitude of specimen jars on my shelf, a legion of the abyss preserved with distilled violet Infinitum worm blood and immortal jellyfish cellular fusion.

One of them contained the cerebral ganglion of the Octopus vulgaris, the common Devil-fish.

Cuvier asserts that the octopus possesses a cognitive faculty entirely alien to the vertebrate. It does not think in lines. It thinks in webs. It controls eight limbs independently. It changes the color of its skin to match the stone. It solves puzzles that baffle the dog.

Its brain is a ring, wrapped around its own throat.

I wondered.

If I took the human cortex, the seat of reason and language, and grafted it onto the sub-structure of the cephalopod…

I would grant her… the processing power of the kraken. She would be able to coordinate the massive, disparate parts of her anatomy with the fluid grace of the mollusk.

I prepared the trephine drill.

The skull of the Bavarian woman was thick. The steel bit chewed through the bone.

I was about to birth a new species. A Homo stellarum. A human for the stars.

“You,” I whispered to the golden owl-eyes staring blindly at the ceiling. “You will not be the victim of nature. You will be her conqueror.”