Paenitet

I turned my gaze to the massive longcase chronometer mounted above the hearth. The brass escapement clicked with a steady, mechanical lethargy. The calendar dial registered November.

November… 1791.

The season outside the window was winter. The glass was frosted. Had nearly three years truly evaporated? The realization struck me with dull surprise. The months had dissolved into a gray fugue of surgery and sutures.

I had lost track of reality.

My memory of the intervening time was a collection of disjointed vignettes.

I recalled the nocturnal visits at the cellar door. The flesh-hunters arrived under the cover of the new moon. They were rough men with soil beneath their fingernails and the stench of formaldehyde clinging to their wool coats. They accepted my father’s silver without comment. They handed over burlap sacks heavy with the requested biological slurry. I took the wet parcels. I locked the door. I returned to the table. These dark transactions were devoid of humanity. It was commerce.

More intrusive were the occasional daylight interruptions when Henry Clerval and Elizabeth Lavenza invaded my sanctuary.

Henry, my schoolfellow and singular friend, possessed a mind composed of romantic poetry where mine was built of slate.

This morning, he once again stood in the doorway, his eyes scanning the disarray of my workspace. He held a bucket of soapy water. Elizabeth stood beside him, clutching fresh linens.

I scrambled to conceal my masterpiece. I threw a heavy canvas tarpaulin over the zinc table.. The thick weave smothered the azure glow of the bioluminescent blood. The colony became a mound of silent shapes beneath the sheet.

“How are you, Victor?” Henry asked.

“I am working,” I said.

My throat felt dry. I had not spoken in days.

“You are rotting, my friend,” Henry corrected. He stepped into the room. He did not ask for permission. “Your father worries. Elizabeth worries. Even I, who knows your moods best, find this seclusion excessive.”

Elizabeth began to wipe the grime from the windows. While she cleaned, she lectured me on the virtues of sunlight and fresh air.

“You are pale, Victor,” she observed. She touched my forehead. “You burn with a fever of the mind.”

I tolerated their ministrations, all of my thoughts preoccupied with the colony. I stood between them and the covered form. I offered monosyllabic replies to their inquiries regarding my health. Henry spoke of his language study at the University of Geneva. He spoke of Persian poetry, Arabic, and Sanskrit and the beauty of the changing seasons and of his grand plans to be an explorer of the Orient.

He tried to tidy the piles of notes I had scattered across the floor.

I blocked his path into the converted nursery.

“Leave it this room as it is,” I commanded. “There is an order to the mess.”

Henry studied me.

He looked at the canvas sheet. He looked at the jars of distinct organs and jellyfish lining the shelves. He did not understand. He saw an unshaven madman collecting glowing fish living in squalor.

They swept the dust of bone shavings into pans. They did not know they were sweeping away the debris of a god. My friends saw disorder where I built a cathedral of flesh. They worried for my sanity while I rewrote the definition of existence.

Elizabeth stayed for a while longer, as usual, entertained by the many specimen tanks filled with preserved body parts and marine life. She attempted to talk to me about many mundane things, but the conversation kept dying out.

When the lock finally clicked behind them, I exhaled. I returned to the center of the room. I pulled back the sheet. The blue light washed over me again.

The silence of the house returned. It was just the two of us.

The creator and his masterpiece.

Her body lay on the copper-plated table.

She was a magnificent ship bereft of a captain.

The nerves were laid. The battery was charged. Yet the seat of reason remained empty. She was a locked room full of potential energy waiting for the spark of intent.

Her mind could not be common gray matter. The sliced, open skull I had gradually reinforced with beetle-chitin could not house the mind of a dullard or a poet. I needed a mind of high fidelity to take control of the octopus brain sitting below.

The knock came at the scullery door three weeks later.

The rain hammered against the oak panels. I slid the bolt back. A gust of wind extinguished my candle. The lightning illuminated the figure of flesh-hunter Konrad Krell standing on the threshold, my most reliable local procurer. Konrad was a man who viewed the grave not as a resting place but as a warehouse of inventory.

He stepped inside. Water pooled around his heavy boots. He did not remove his hat. He held a lead-lined box against his chest with both hands.

“You have it?” I asked. I did not offer him a seat. This was commerce.

“Fresh from the undertaker,” Konrad said. His voice was a gravel rasp. “A spinster from the university district. Died of the lung fever today.”

He set the box upon the slate table. He tapped the lid with a dirty fingernail.

“A quiet one,” he muttered. “The landlady said she was a tutor. Taught cyphers and star-charts to the children of the gentry. A woman of method, she was. Even as she passed, she arranged her medicine bottles in a perfect row upon the nightstand, largest to smallest. Died sitting upright, waiting for the end with her hands folded.”

“Who was she?”

“Agatha Myrriam. Daughter of a clockmaker,” Konrad answered. “They say she kept the books for the Royal Observatory of Geneva before the new Ammann ordered her dismissed for her gender.”

I felt a surge of appreciation. This was not a mind clouded by sentiment or madness. It was a mind honed by order. She had organized her environment even in the throes of death. It required a brain capable of total, serene focus.

“Show me,” I commanded.

Konrad lifted the heavy lid.

Inside, resting in a bath of chilled spirits, sat a human head.

“Excellent,” I whispered. “How long ago did she die?”

“Two hours ago,” the flesh-hunter answered.

Two hours. In my experiments with the pigs, the threshold was 2-3 hours. A pig’s head could be kept on ice for a few hours and then the brain could be exhumed and inserted into another pig’s body pouch and become rejuvenated with the Liquor Vitae.

“She lived and died by the ledger,” Konrad narrated, watching me inspect his grisly merchandise.

I nodded, smiling.

I did not fear the mental rigidity of a mathematician. I desired it. I needed a mind that saw the world as a series of soluble equations. A woman who viewed existence as a geometry problem was the only pilot fit for the intricate architecture of my creation.

I went to the secretary desk and unlocked the drawer. I counted out the thalers. I added a few extra coins for the pristine condition of the tissue.

Konrad scooped the money into his coat pocket. He nodded once and turned back to the storm.

I bolted the door behind him shut.

I carried the box upstairs to the nursery. The room glowed with the soft, rhythmic azure light of the body on the table.

I carefully removed the brain from the skull of the woman. I placed the brain on a tray beside the open cranial cavity of my creation.

I used a trephine to widen the foramen magnum, ensuring the spinal cord would fuse seamlessly with the brain stem.

I lifted the analyst’s brain once more. It held the memories of Euclid. It held the silence of numbers. It assuredly held the capacity to process the immense physics of the body I had built.

I lowered it into the cradle of the skull.

Now came the most delicate work. I adjusted the lens of my monocle. I selected the finest silver needles. I had to stitch the dura mater. I had to fuse the twelve pairs of cranial nerves.

The work consumed hours. I connected the vascular supply first. I spliced the internal carotid arteries to the vessels I had grown from the worm-fluid.

I released the clamps.

The blue luminescence rushed into the new organ.

I watched through the magnifying glass. The dark gray matter began to drink the glowing blood. The deep folds of the cortex lit up from within. Thanks to the Liquor Vitae, the brain did not reject the foreign fluid. It accepted the offering, became an integral part of the colony, its general.

The blue veins pulsed against the white matter, becoming one with the brain of the octopus below.

I stepped back. The connection was complete. The colony was whole. She possessed the immortality of the medusa, the speed of the leopard, the finger snap strength of a lynx, the sight of the owl, the strength of a bear, the jaw of a shark and the regeneration of the starfish and earthworm, and now, hopefully… the absolute, priceless logic of the arithmetician.

I sealed the skull using silver brackets. I drew the transparent skin taut over the sliced cranium and fused it shut. The operation was a technical triumph. The brain sat secure within its fortified case.

I checked the chronometer. The graft had taken nearly the entire day. She was complete.

Only one task remained…

I had to wake her up.

The time for the final infusion had arrived.

The delivery mechanism was complex. I had inserted forty-seven copper needles into specific points across her body—the base of the skull, the hearts, the solar plexus, major nerve junctions along the spine. Each needle connected to my apparatus via insulated wires. The current would enter through the skull, energizing the brain and cascade through the nervous system, forcing each organ to remember its function.

The rain hammered against the stained glass windows. My candle had burned low, the wax pooling on my workbench. I checked my pocket watch.

1:11 AM.

The capacitors were at full charge.

I threw the first switch.

The machine groaned to life. Gears turned, controlling the flow rate from the capacitors. I adjusted the first dial, watching the current-tracking needle climb. From my many experiments with pig brain implantation, I knew the exact charge that would be required. Too little would fail to activate the dormant tissue. Too much would cook it.

The humming grew louder. I counted under my breath, watching both the chronometer and the electric-fluid measuring needle. At twelve seconds, I cut the first circuit and immediately engaged the second.

Her chest arched upward from muscular contraction as electricity flooded her cardiac tissue. I had calculated the exact charge needed to restart the three hearts I set into her chest.

The chronometer ticked. I smelled burned flesh and heated copper. Her fingers twitched, the nerves firing randomly as current passed through them. The second circuit completed. I threw the third switch.

This was the dangerous part. I needed to energize her entire nervous system simultaneously, creating a cascade effect that would force her body to recognize itself as a unified organism under threat.

I gripped the master control dial, monitoring three different gauges at once. The wires glowed red. Her muscles locked rigid.

The capacitors were draining faster than anticipated. I compensated by increasing the voltage, which meant decreasing the duration. Nineteen seconds. Twenty. Twenty-one.

Her fingers closed into fists.

Twenty-two. I cut the power.

The workshop fell silent except for the rain puttering at the windows. Smoke rose from several of the needles where the connections had overheated. I stood frozen, watching her chest.

Nothing.

I moved closer, checking the pulse point in her neck. Nothing. I pressed my ear to her chest. The hearts had stopped.

Failure. Three years of work, years of assembly, a mountain of my father’s gold—

Her chest expanded. The trio of hearts pulsed.

I jerked backward. Her chest fell, then rose again. Breathing. Shallow and irregular… breathing.

I grabbed a candle and moved it close to her face.

The eyes opened. Massive, gold pupils blinked at me, framed by jet black, inhuman sclera.