Stellarum

Do forgive me, I have gotten slightly ahead of myself.

I have forgotten to tell you of my marvelous Immobile Biocrucibles!

To forge a creature assembled from disparate human and animal parts suspended in a state between death and life, I obviously needed more than jars, bellows, and galvanic arcs. What I needed was an intermediate organism, a living factory in which organs could be fed, perfused, and shaped before their final union.

Toward this end, I have selected the common woodland pig of which our estate had aplenty.

The pig is a creature with a large abdominal cavity, docile under laudanum, one capable of consuming nearly anything.

In my design, the pigs were to become immobile chimeric biocrucibles, capable of sustaining implanted organs while their own bodies acted as filters, pumps, heaters, and waste managers.

I learned early that even a gentle galvanic current coursing through the body of my host animal risked arresting the heart, disrupting the “vital principle” in a single convulsion.

My initial Biocrucible attempts gave me pig bodies that remained warm and incorruptible, held in a sort of electrical stasis, not rotting, but dead, their organs no longer functioning. This was fine until I noticed that they were no longer filtering the metabolic wastes of the implanted tissues.

This failure forced a conceptual breakthrough: the preservative fluid had to be energized outside the host, not through its heart. Thus, before any incision was made, the host pig would undergo a slow, deliberate transfusion.

Drawing upon Guillaume-François Rouelle’s early work on bodily salts, John Hunter’s experiments in transfusion, and Luigi Galvani’s notes on “animal electricity,” I exsanguinated the pig only partially while replacing the withdrawn portion with activated violet blood, a mixture electrically charged in glass vessels prior to infusion. By soaking the creature’s vessels in this charged medium, I rendered its internal environment unusually tolerant of foreign tissues and hostile to putrefactive forces.

Only when the pig’s circulation ran violet and steady, when the violet tint of the perfusate lent a coloring to the thin membranes of the ears, did I proceed.

To preserve the host and avoid lethal trauma, I abandoned the early practice of removing organs wholesale.

Instead, I created:

A surgically fashioned internal pouch beside the stomach and liver, made by separating rather than excising the peritoneal layers. A sealed biological bag, crafted from intestinal membrane and Medusan collagen, in which I placed the organs or tissues destined for the colony. Tiny channels sutured between the pig’s mesenteric vessels created a limited vascular anastomosis to feed lines of the organ-bag, permitting passive perfusion.

The pig’s own heart pumped nutrient-rich, violet blood into the grafted organs. The host ate, digested, and excreted waste normally and additionally I diverted the waste from the vivarium itself.

Through a short loop of gut drawn to the surface, I installed a crude pipe. Twas more architectural than surgical, allowing the waste filtered from the violet blood to exit through a small window in the creature’s flank. This solved the foundational problem of earlier failures: the implanted organs no longer drowned in their own metabolic byproducts.

To keep the pigs immobile yet alive for weeks, I used heavy laudanum sedation, confinement in a padded cradle, and strategic tendon severing at the ankles. Such were quite grim, albeit effective measures for stillness without killing the pigs. Science required sacrifice and I sacrificed many local pigs to the altar of creation of my Eve.

As the Biocrucible work progressed, I assessed the organ function through “Color and Motion”.

If peristaltic or muscular twitching responded to galvanic stimulus, the tissues were considered viable.

I also examined the diverted effluent by evaporation and acid precipitation, rather crude methods inspired by Hilaire Rouelle’s work with urea, to ensure the host properly filtered the metabolic byproducts.

A living, eating pig was proof enough that the system remained stable. Declining appetite signaled impending failure.

Through pigs, I thus solved my earliest engineering problems: the maintenance of organs; the prevention of rot; the circulation of a vital, electric medium.

Only after nearly a year of mastering the art of living chimeric cultivation could I attempt the greater work, my Magnum Opus—assembling a being whose every part had first lived inside the bellies of pigs, waiting for their time to be united in marriage of the flesh.

My biggest achievement was a long sequence of anatomical, chemical, and electrical manipulations—a multitude of procedures performed at the boundary of what late 1780s science could theorize and what only the unique violet blood could enable. In designing the early nervous system, I stitched together knowledge from Galvanism, early Vitalist neurophysiology, and the biological truths I gleaned from marine organisms.

I preserved as much of the original giantess’s neurobiology as possible, primarily her brainstem, spine and peripheral nerves. The peripheral nerves allowed me to link up the muscles to the brain and the organs to the brainstem, which, together with the violet blood, would have kept them at the bare minimum level of function in the final hours leading to the implantation of the creature’s new brain and its activation via an electric surge.

The dullard instructors of my time at Ingolstadt, the powdered anatomists and dogmatic surgeons, treated the nervous system as a tangled root, a messy web branching from the spinal marrow. They were well aware of the routes, yes, alas the specific function of each silver cord eluded them.

How, then, did I know that the nerve to the eye must be severed and spliced to the auditory organ?

I knew this because the Violet Blood showed me. The process of creation itself, the infusion of the Galvanic Spark, burned away the academic blinders, revealing the truth in its grand splendor.

Having passed out after the three days of ongoing initial implantation test of the octopus ganglia, I witnessed a bewildering fevered dream of what I could only dub as an “Astral Ocean” of sorts.

Myriads of violet eyes in the infinite darkness. A shawl of stars whispering to me the truth, helping my mind visualize the nature of the nervous system of every creature within my grasp.

As the stars spiraled across and through me, I saw the brainstem naught as flesh, but as a vast, switching mechanism, radiating outward. In my vision, the nerves were wonderous conduits, each pulsing with a unique current, a specific color.

The thick muscular nerve flashed sickly green. It branched into the face, the muzzle, the jaw, and the tongue. When I saw this nerve; I thought only of “Presence”. It was the nerve that screamed “I am Here and This is Hot”. I realized that it was the channel for temperature sensing and tactile judgment.

Two finer, delicate, blue-tinged ribbons, governed the grimace of the face and the chemical flicker of the tongue. I understood that these carried the Gustatory Judgement, the primitive reject/accept signal direct to the brainstem. They were… Chemical Messengers.

The thickest cord of all, flashing scarlet, plunged into the neck and ran the length of the tongue. This was pure Motor Command. When I saw it in the dream, I knew it controlled the muscle-rope and that it must be fused perfectly for the tongue to pour forth and seize.

I awoke from the fever, dripping with sweat and jotted down these revelations as notes, pinning each to my wall.

The octopus brain is a relatively soft, cartilaginous structure. Fusing it around the dense, highly organized, and critical structure of a mammalian brainstem would be an extraordinarily difficult endeavor. The brainstem is compact and houses vital centers; even slight pressure or damage during the procedure would result in immediate death of the creature’s lower functions.

I went with a less fatal approach, capitalizing on the octopus’s decentralized ganglia and the violet blood’s aka “Liquor Vitae” as I dubbed it, ability to create chimeric links.

I slowly created what I called the “Neural Synchronization Ring” using the octopus’s ganglia.

For this, I harvest the primary nerve ring and the dense stellate ganglia from several large octopuses. Then, I surgically implanted this ring of ganglia directly onto the dura mater, the tough membrane covering the brain and spinal cord, just below the brainstem, in the uppermost part of the spinal column.

Using the Liquor Vitae, I fused the octopus’s ganglia to the major exiting Cranial Nerves, which control the essential organs. This new, chimeric structure would act as an “Autonomic Buffer/Amplifier.”

It would use the host’s intact brainstem for basic commands while leveraging the octopus ganglia’s robust, semi-autonomous nature.

This helped stabilize the function of the various organs until a proper “master” brain could be implanted. It also prevented rejection or chaotic signaling by providing a “neutral relay” for all autonomic traffic between the foreign organs and the host brainstem.

This approach kept the essential host brainstem intact while introducing the octopus’s neural processing power exactly where it is needed—to synchronize the peripheral autonomic functions.

I worked on my construct, improving everything, adding more. I was not merely building a woman. I was crafting a reef.

The human frame, for all its aesthetic symmetry, was a contrivance of weakness. Even back when I studied human anatomy at university, I grew resentful of the natural human fragility, obsessing over the flaws.

Skin tears under the slightest friction. Bone shatters under moderate impact. The brain, that seat of wondrous reason, sits encased in a shell no stronger than pottery. To grant this creature eternal life while leaving her encased in such pathetic materials seemed a fool’s errand.

Immortality required a fortress, not a house of cards!

I looked toward the lower orders. The arrogance of man places him at the pinnacle of creation, yet the beetle survives the fall that kills the king.

I began to scour the natural histories for traits superior to our own. I consulted the works of Jan Swammerdam regarding the anatomy of insects. The Coleoptera, the beetle family, possessed an exoskeleton of chitin capable of deflecting steel. I studied the Aranea, the common spider, which spins a silk with tensile strength surpassing the finest iron wire produced in Sheffield.

Why limit my creation to the failing blueprint?

I acquired a crate of stag beetles. I dissolved their carapaces in acid to isolate the hardening agents. I infused this solution into the radius and ulna. The bone absorbed the mineral, turning a dark, burnished gray that ignited with emerald-ruby iridescence when light hit it. The bone would not snap. It would not splinter.

I sought the regenerative temper of the salamander. Lazzaro Spallanzani had documented their ability to regrow limbs in 1767. I extracted the glandular secretions from the Salamandra and introduced them to the marrow. This would be the engine of repair. If the flesh was cut, it would boil over and knit itself shut.

The work progressed, howbeit a new frustration plagued me.

I had constructed a complex hydraulic system within the torso to circulate the immortal worm-fluid. I had grafted the Tunicate heart to the human aorta. Yet, once I sutured the skin, the mechanism vanished from sight.

I was a clockmaker forced to work with a blindfold. I could not see if the anastomosis held. I could not see if the fluid reached the extremities, I could not enjoy the sight of the entire colony in its full, brilliant splendor.

The opacity of human skin was a shroud. It hid the very miracle I sought to manifest and observe.

I needed a… window.

Again, I turned to the Portuguese man of war and also another specimen from the Atlantic, the Leptocephalus, the larval stage of the eel. A ribbon of pure glass. One can read a text through its living body. Its tissues possess the same refractive index as seawater.

I harvested the collagen from the jellyfish sacks I kept in the nursery tanks. I treated the human dermis I had collected, stripping it of melanin and steeping it in a solution derived from the Medusa. I worked the skin until it lost its muddy pink hue and became a thick, clear parchment.

Perfection.

I draped this transparent membrane over the raw musculature of the arm. It held. Through the clear sheath, I saw the red muscle fibers, the white gleam of the modified bone, and the dark vessels waiting for blood.

It was functional, yet another obstacle remained.

The interior of the body is a cavern of shadows. Even with a glass hull, the engine room remains dark. I could not discern the flow of the nutritious fluids in the deep tissue. I needed the machine to declare its own function.

The human body already contains a great deal of fluid. What if this fluid was replaced with another?

Again, the ocean gave me the answer.

In the darker months, the waves off the coast sometimes glow with a cold fire. Mariners call it sea-sparkle. I knew it as animalcules, later classified as Noctiluca. Life that produces light without heat.

In the summer of 1789 I procured and cultivated these phosphorescent animalcules in a broth of salted beef. They multiplied until the flask shone with a spectral blue radiance. I did not want them to merely exist in the blood; I wanted them to become the blood.

I filtered the worm-fluid. I introduced the glowing bacteria to the mixture. They did not perish. They fed upon the sulfur in the artificial plasma. The liquid in my beaker turned a vibrant, pulsing violet-blue.

I primed the pump.

I connected the main artery of the creature to the reservoir. I turned the valve.

The fluid rushed into the vessel.

The effect was absolute. The colony on the table ceased to be a dark cadaver and became a constellation. The heart filled with blue-violet fire. The arteries ignited, became rivers of light tracing their way down the arm. I watched, breathless, as the minute capillaries in the fingertips ignited one by one, mapping the circulation in real time.

Through the transparent skin, every function lay exposed. I saw the valves open and close in a rhythm of luminous pulses. I saw the synthetic blood wash over the beetle-hardened bone. She was no longer a woman. She was a living schematic, glowing in the darkness of the converted nursery, a beacon of biological truth.

I extinguished the candles. The room remained bathed in the violet and azure light of her internal combustion. I stood over her, watching the silent, glowing machinery of her being.

The moralists would call it a monstrosity. I called it clarity.

“Beautiful,” I whispered to the glowing female form splayed on the work table. “A universe of one.”

The creature did not respond.

She could not. She possessed no lungs yet to draw breath, no larynx to shape sound. But her silence was temporary. I had already designed the respiratory apparatus and preserved it in a pig. The lungs I designed were a set of gill-like structures derived from the axolotl, capable of extracting oxygen from both water and air. They would fold beneath the ribcage, expanding and contracting in a rhythm that mimicked human breathing while maintaining the efficiency of aquatic respiration.

I didn’t stop at lighting up my colony.

I blessed all of my pig-crucibles with simple windows to monitor the organs they kept within. For such, I removed a broad oval of abdominal skin while avoiding major vasculature. Then I replaced it with a hand-worked Medusan-treated membrane, sewn edge-to-edge with waxed gut sutures and sealed the junctions with warm collagen paste that dried glassy.

I lit up the new versions of my pig-crucibles as well, making each pig a wondrous spectacle.

Through each pig-crucible window, I could see the soft peristaltic shifts of the displaced viscera. Such transparent vivariums were an irresistible sight to me, allowing me a greater understanding of what my instructors at Ingolstadt called the humors.

The illumination within the veins of my human-animal colony revealed more than just the flow of vital fluids. It exposed the inadequacy of the scaffolding.

It highlighted more mundane geometry of the human skeleton. The femur was a clumsy lever. The ribcage was a fragile basket.

The great naturalists, Buffon and Linnaeus, classified beasts by their shape and habit. I classified them by their mechanical advantage.

One by one, I began to dismantle the other inferior human systems. I sought replacements from the aristocracy of the animal kingdom.

Speed was the first necessity. The human quadriceps is a sluggish aesthetic lump. It is designed for endurance, not the violent burst of capture.

I turned to the Felis jubata, the hunting leopard of Africa.

An agent of mine acquired a leopard specimen from a menagerie in Lyon that had succumbed to the cold.

Upon receiving the leopard and paying the hunter, I dissected the hindquarters. The density of the fibers was remarkable. I stripped the slow, red meat from the woman’s thighs. I grafted the pale, fast-twitch musculature of the cat in its place. I wove the tendons of the cheetah into the human patella.

Borelli, in his De Motu Animalium, calculated the force of a muscle is proportional to its cross-section. By layering the feline tissue, I tripled the potential torque of the knee. She would not merely walk. She would launch.

I decided that the architecture of the foot required total revision.

Man is plantigrade. We shamble on our heels. It is a peasant’s gait. The rulers of the wild are digitigrade. They walk upon their toes, the heel elevated, the leg acting as a loaded spring.

My masterpiece would wield only the very best.

I severed the Achilles tendon. I broke the tarsal bones and reset them at a severe angle. I lengthened the metatarsals using bone grafts from the ostrich, the swiftest of bipeds, a specimen of which another agent of mine was able to acquire for me. I sculpted the foot to arch permanently.

She would never again touch her heel to the ground. She would stand poised, the potential energy stored in the elongated calf, ready to release.

I looked at her hands.

Fingernails seemed like vestigial insults. Luckily, I still had preserved grizzly bear parts kept alive sewn to my pigs. I surgically removed the distal phalanges of her fingers and toes. In their place, I anchored the curved keratin of a grizzly bear. Waste not want not.

I stepped back to survey the silhouette.

A frown marred my satisfaction.

The physiology was superior. The mechanics were sound. Yet the aesthetic felt… incomplete.

The bare skull gleamed under the daylight spilling through the window. I contemplated on why it felt so wrong and unnervingly grotesque to my eye.

It took me a few minutes to realize that it lacked the titillating follicles necessary to deceive the eye of the beholder.

A bald female form suggests the penitentiary or the asylum fever-wards. It evokes pity rather than awe. My Eve looked less like a goddess of the new age and more like a patient prepared for the trephine.

I could not abide it. The sublime demanded beauty!

I considered a wig of human hair. The idea was immediately repellant. To glue the dead, shorn locks of a cadaver onto this masterpiece was an insult. It was the work of a doll-maker or a taxidermist. Dead hair does not truly grow. It does not react.

My creation required a crown that lived, reacted.

I turned my gaze once more to the aquatic tanks.

The ocean does not produce hair. It produces filaments, tentacles, and cilia. It produces translucent, glowing ribbons that wave in the currents.

Mentally going over the Systema Naturae of the great Linnaeus and my collection, I picked the Beroe ovata, listed among the Zoophyta. They possess no stinging cells. Instead, they move by the rhythmic beating of thousands of microscopic cilia arranged in longitudinal bands. When the light strikes these beating ribs, it fractures. It splits into the most incredible spectrum of the rainbow.

However, a significant barrier remained.

The Beroe is a creature of the sea. Exposure to the atmosphere dries its delicate tissues within minutes. To plant a marine organism upon a terrestrial head required a vessel to hold the moisture.

It required a… biological sheath.

I collected fifty large specimens of the Beroe. I also harvested Tubularia indivisa, the oaten pipe hydroid. This zoophyte grows inside a stiff, chitinous tube, a straw of organic horn that protects the soft animal within.

I spent three days preparing the graft. I carefully extracted the Beroe tissue, preserving the ciliated bands. I stripped the Tubularia of its living polyp, retaining only the hollow, translucent outer casings. These tubes would serve as the conduit. They would be the veins that held the sea against the air.

I mashed the Beroe essence into a slurry mixed with the worm blood and a heavy measure of glycerin to retard evaporation. I injected this viscous, shimmering paste into the hollow Tubularia tubes.

I implanted the produced organism onto the pigs, one by one until I had produced sufficient “hair” for the colony’s head.

It was not an immediate transformation. It was a slow, agricultural process.

On the ninth day, the circulation fully established itself on each pig.

I watched through my magnifying glass as the violet blood pushed its way up into the base of the tubes. It mixed with the glycerin and the jelly. The stagnant paste inside the tubes began to churn.

By the second week, the rigid chitin of the tubes softened. The violet blood had digested the hard outer shell of the hydroid, replacing it with a pliable, living membrane. The quills drooped, becoming flexible.

They gradually lengthened. The internal pressure pushed the tubes outward. They grew two inches a day.

By the end of the month, the process had matured.

The tubes had become thick, gelatinous ropes. The Beroe heritage inside the tubes awoke. The microscopic cilia lined the interior of the hollow strands.

As the pig’s heart pumped the violet blood, these cilia began to beat within their casing, igniting with surreal rainbows.

…

The scalp required extensive preparation.

I took my scalpel and carved a pattern into the skin of her head. I cut a series of eight-pointed stars, arranging them in concentric circles from the crown to the nape of the neck. I peeled back the flaps of skin. I used a fine drill to bore through the outer table of the skull, exposing the diploe, the spongy bone where the blood vessels run thick.

I removed each Tubularia tube from the pigs and inserted them into the drilled sockets. I packed the space around them with a putty made of bone dust and the violet ichor. I sutured the skin flaps tight around the base of the tubes.

On the pigs, the mane of Tubularia was quite frankly extremely freakish and alien, like floppy worms. On a woman’s body, the effect was hypnotic, framing the face far beyond my initial expectations.

Ripples of light traveled down the length of each wet, heavy strand. Red, then gold, then green, then violet. The light did not just come from within. It came from the refraction of the room’s candles against the moving cilia suspended in the clear fluid.

I watched the movement. The hair was not passive. When I brought my hand close to a strand, the cilia beat faster. The hair sensed the heat of my flesh through the membrane.

“Sensory tendrils,” I noted in the ledger. “The colony protects the head.”

I examined her once again, going over everything and contemplating the geometry of my creation. A flaw in the physics became evident.

By altering the ankle to the digitigrade configuration, I had shifted the center of gravity forward. The torso, laden with the heavy Gymnotus batteries and the massive, fluid-filled cooling breasts, possessed significant mass. Without a counterweight, the creature would fall upon her face the moment she attempted to stand.

She required ballast.

I recalled the journals of Sir Joseph Banks from his voyage with Captain Cook. He described the Macropus, or Kangaroo, of New Holland. This beast sits upon a tripod formed by its legs and a massive, muscular tail. When it leaps, the tail acts as a rudder and a balance, keeping the heavy chest elevated.

I needed a tail!

To graft a hairy, opaque appendage to this crystalline masterpiece was unacceptable. It would mar the aesthetic of the glass goddess.

I required a spine of clear gristle.

One of my flesh-hunters procured serveral Great Sturgeon specimens, Acipenser sturio, from the fishmongers at the Limmat river.

The sturgeon does not possess a skeleton of bone. Its frame is entirely cartilage, tough yet flexible.

I excised the spinal columns. I stripped the flesh.

Cartilage is naturally a milky, opaque substance. To render it transparent, I employed a technique I had learned from the artisans of Florence who work in alabaster. I soaked the vertebrae in a bath of oil of wintergreen and the digestive enzyme of the Squalus shark.

For three days, the acid chewed away the cloudiness.

When I removed the vertebrae, they were discs of pure glass. They were tough as oak and clear as water.

I threaded the spinal cords of the sturgeons through these crystal discs. I grafted the base of this new spine to the sacrum of the Zwanziger woman and bear hips.

For the tail musculature, I could not use the red meat of the mammal. It would ruin the transparency. I returned to the Leptocephalus eel larvae, their bodies bandeau of clear muscle. I layered thousands of these transparent fillets along the length of the sturgeon spine, wrapping them in the clear collagen sheath I had crafted.

I sutured the tail to the dorsal region.

It was a magnificent appendage, five feet in length, thick at the base and tapering to a fin or hook-like reinforced end. It lay coiled upon the slab like a serpent of ice.

When the violet blood rushed into it, the tail did not simply turn purple. Because of the density of the cartilage, the light refracted. The tail glowed with a soft, lunar luminescence. I saw the spinal cord pulsing within the center, a thread of electric blue lightning encased in glass.

It was lovely. I examined the colony’s face and spotted a multitude of deficiencies there.

My creation was deaf to the subtle frequencies of the ether and blind to the scent of the wind.

I had given her the eyes of the owl to pierce the dark, yet what good is vision if the enemy approaches from behind, masked by silence? The human ear is a stagnant cup. It collects sound, ableit does not reach for it. It cannot swivel. It cannot focus!

I required an acoustic collector of greater precision.

For such, I went to the several barn owl specimens I kept in an owlery attached to one of the estate’s towers. I noted that owls were basically acoustic machines, recalling that they are able to hunt solely by sound in total darkness. Presumably, the owl’s brain area was a seat of acoustic reception and spatial calculation. The key was transplanting the “acoustic vitality” of the owl’s nervous system along with the nerves to my colony.

I excised the owl’s auditory center and integrated it into the colony’s head structure, positioned near the ganglia ring. This owl cortex would act as a dedicated “localization captain”, taking the signal from the octopus ganglia and translating it into usable spatial awareness before feeding it to the colony’s final, higher-function brain.

I then remembered my Fennecus zerda, the desert fox specimen, which I had learned about in a text of the Swedish naturalist Sparrman.

The beast possesses ears of enormous surface area, dissipating heat and capturing the scuttle of a beetle beneath the sand.

Such large ears would assuredly capture sound better than the ears of an owl buried beneath feathers.

However, I could not graft the fleshy, furred ears of a mammal onto my glass masterpiece. It would be a vulgarity. The opaque cartilage would ruin the crystalline silhouette.

I needed a material that was porous to the air, capable of capturing vibration, yet transparent to the eye.

I turned to the Porifera. The sponges.

One of such specimens was the Venus’ Flower Basket. A sponge made entirely of silica. It builds its own skeleton out of glass spicules, weaving a lattice so fine it resembles spun sugar or lace.

I cultivated more of Venus’ Flower in a high-pressure tank saturated with silicate salts.

I harvested the living glass fibers. They were not brittle. They were flexible filaments of silica, coated in a thin layer of living jelly.

I constructed the auricular framework. I built two large, parabolic dishes, extending from the temporal bone. They were not ears in the human sense. They were acoustic mirrors of living lace, sitting high atop the head, superior to the human ears.

I allowed the Euplectella fibers to grow wild and dense. The result was a texture of glass fur.

These ears were large, rising six inches above the skull, yet they were ghostly. They appeared as tufts of white mist or frost.

I engineered this “living jelly” to contain the hair cell mechanoreceptors and their support cells. The millions of silica filaments would directly vibrate this jelly coating, mechanically stimulating the embedded hair cells, which were then wired directly to the barn owl’s auditory nerves.

To complete the auditory system, I went with a Central Receiver idea. Basically, the vast “acoustic mirrors” would gather sound, which is then directed via all the glass fibers into a small, central, fluid-filled chamber… like a tympanic cavity built near the temporal bone. This chamber contained the owl’s cochlea. This central structure translated the collective vibration of the “glass fur” into nerve signals.

My “living lace” required a fluid-filled sheath to survive in the air. The delicate glass fibers and the living sponge cells had to be immersed in a silicate-saturated fluid to remain “flexible filaments”. I encased the large, parabolic structures in a thin, transparent biological membrane, a modified amnion, and filled the whole thing with the Liquor Vitae.

The vast, parabolic surface area and the sheer number of millions of vibrating silica filaments would hopefully compensate for the signal loss due to the fluid, functioning as a hyper-sensitive, liquid-coupled acoustic sensor.

Just in case my over-crafted experimental ears failed catastrophically, I also kept the pair of human ears, as small stubs, covered by a thin skin membrane.

Backup ears, in case of being in a really loud locale, I mused tiredly.

I looked then to the mouth.

The human jaw is a pathetic hinge. It allows for speech and the chewing of cooked grain. It cannot crush bone. It cannot reach out like a hand.

I recalled a terrifying specimen brought to the Royal Society by a whaler who had dredged the abyssal depths off the coast of Japan. He called it the Tengu, after a long-nosed demon of the orient. It was a shark of a hideous, flaccid pink, possessing a snout like a trowel.

Its jaw was a true nightmare for which I paid the Mariner well.

In most beasts, the maxilla is fused to the skull. In this Tengu shark, the jaws float freely, suspended by elastic ligaments. When the beast senses prey, the tension is released. The entire mouth structure shoots forward from the face, like a trap sprung from a casing, snapping shut upon the victim before retracting.

I determined to gift this projectile mechanization to my Eve.

I removed the fixed human mandible entirely.

I constructed a floating framework using the elastic cartilage of the sturgeon and the tension-bands of the ostrich leg. I anchored the maxilla to a sliding track of lubricated gristle.

I employed the retractor muscles of the Cyprinus carpio, the common carp, which can extend its mouth to suckle food from the mud, but I amplified the force using the explosive twitch-fibers of the lynx.

When at rest, the mouth appeared human. The lips were pale and sealed, mundane. The structure sat flush with the nose.

I knew the truth of the hidden engineering and stimulated the masseter nerve with the zinc probe.

The reaction was a blur of motion.

The entire lower face catapulted forward. The jaw shot out nearly a foot from the skull, the teeth snapping together with the sound of a pistol shot.

Marvelous!

Due to the rows of lynx teeth and a dark dog-style nose, the unfolded form looked almost vulpine or perhaps canine. It reminded me of the lovely crystal Lupa Capitolina sculpture depicting a scene from the legend of the founding of Rome sitting on my father’s desk.

A mouth that captures must also taste!The human tongue is a stiff, small wedge. It sits behind the teeth like a prisoner. It is useless for anything beyond the shaping of vowels and the rolling of wine.

I required an organ of manipulation. I needed a limb that could exist within the mouth, soft enough to cushion a variety of captured prey against the teeth, yet strong enough to pull it down into the gullet.

I studied the anatomy of the Myrmecophaga jubata, the great anteater brought from the New World to the Royal Cabinet in Madrid which one of my hunters obtained for me.

This beast possesses a tongue of extraordinary volume. It is a rope of pure muscle, devoid of bone, capable of bending in any direction and extending to a length that defies the size of the skull.

I harvested the lingual muscle of the anteater.

However, the anteater’s tongue is narrow, designed for the ant hill. I needed girth. I needed a cushion.

I combined this musculature with the tissues of the Aplysia depilans, the sea hare. This large marine slug possesses a body that is soft, yielding, and covered in a protective, sensitive mucus. It is a creature of absolute fluidity.

I grafted this amalgamation into the floor of the projectile jaw.

The result was a massive, boneless pillow.

It did not possess the jagged teeth of the lamprey or the rough rasp of the cat. It was smooth. It was a velvet hammer.

When the jaw was closed, this great tongue filled the entire oral cavity. It was a wet, violet cushion of flesh, pulsating with the light of the Noctiluca blood.

I touched it with my gloved finger. It was yielding and soft as the belly of a frog.

When I applied the galvanic stimulus to the nerves, the organ woke.

The tongue rolled out of the mouth like a living liquid, thick and muscular. It expanded as it left the confinement of the teeth, becoming a broad, flat ribbon of soft muscle. It could wrap around an object with the gentleness of a mother’s hand or the suffocating grip of a python.

I coated this soft muscle with the sensory nodes of the Ictalurus, the catfish.

She would not need to bite to know her enemy. She could simply touch them with this extra soft limb, tasting their chemistry through the contact of her saliva.

Like with the ears and eyes, I made sure that the octopus ring would receive the signals from the tongue, which would hopefully allow my creation to be the best taster on Earth, able to determine if something was poisoned, like the poison-tasters of medieval European kings.

…

I stood back to admire the entire silhouette of my industry. I had corrected the errors of Genesis. I had taken the dust of the earth and forged it into steel.

The ancient historian Diodorus Siculus wrote of an inscription on the base of a colossal statue in Egypt. The words rose unbidden to my lips as I looked down at the supreme being awaiting the spark of intelligence.

“Look upon my works ye mighty and despair, for I am the king of kings, Victor Frankenstein!” I declared jubilantly, butchering the quote for my amusement.