Curarum

I momentarily considered yelling something like “She’s alive!”

Like… Greek mathematician Archimedes, who supposedly leaped out of his bath and ran naked through the streets shouting “Eureka!” to celebrate his scientific discovery.

But I was exhausted and felt wrung to the bone.

The inhumanly radiant, gold eyes looked about with the random scanning motion of a newborn, taking in light and shadow without comprehension. Her mouth opened. She made a sound, air passing through her vocal cords, something between a sigh and a gasp.

I started removing the needles, working quickly. She did not react to the pain. Her nervous system was assuredly receiving signals but her brain did not yet know how to interpret them as suffering.

When the last needle was removed from the front, I stepped back to observe.

She breathed. Her eyes continued their unfocused wandering. Her fingers opened and closed randomly.

She was alive, but in the most primitive sense… A functioning biological system with no consciousness, no awareness, no understanding that she existed.

I had created life.

The rest… funny enough, I hadn’t even considered the rest. There was no “the rest”. Perhaps a part of me had never expected my mad work to succeed.

I considered what I had truly made.

She was a colony organism wearing the shape of a woman.

Like a Portuguese man o’ war, which appeared singular but consisted of four separate creatures fused together, each performing different functions. Like a coral reef, where thousands of polyps acted as one. Like a slime mold, individual cells that could separate and reaggregate, that could split apart and come back together, functionally immortal because death had no meaning when the organism was already plural.

I had made her to last forever.To never age. Never sicken. Never die. To persist through any injury, any disease, any deterioration that would fell a normal human being. She would outlive empires. Outlive nations. Outlive the very memory of the civilization that had created her.

And now she lay before me, pulsating, glowing “hair” spreading across her shoulders, her body warm and alive and utterly, terribly real.

What had I built?

A woman who could not die meant a woman who could not hide. Who would watch everyone around her age and perish. Who would be hunted, studied, dissected by every natural philosopher and anatomist who learned of her existence. Who would be locked in a laboratory forever, poked and prodded and tested to understand the mechanisms of her immortality.

Or worse.

What if someone weaponized her? Took her cellular samples, her regenerative tissues, and tried to replicate them? Tried to build armies of undying soldiers, platoons of immortal warriors who could be cut down and rise again?

What if the Church got hold of her? Declared her a demon, an affront to God’s natural order? They would burn her, and she would regenerate. Drown her, and she would revive. Cut her apart, and her pieces would grow back together. They would torture her forever, trying to destroy what could not be destroyed, and her suffering would never end.

I had built something that should not exist.

I looked down at her hands, at the way her muscles and veins glowed beneath the transparent skin, at the structure of her bones and tendons. I could see the enhanced blood vessels, the reinforced joints, the modified tissues that would never break down.

“Agatha Myrriam,” I said, addressing the mind sealed within the immortal body.

She didn’t reply.

I leaned forward, my heart palpitating. I searched the geography of her transparent face for the soul of the clockmaker’s daughter. I looked for the woman who organized the stars.

“Agatha. Calculate the sum of seven and two.” I tried basic arithmetic.

The great owl eyes blinked. The nictitating membranes slid across the yellow irises with a wet click. She stared at the space I occupied. There was no recognition. The geometry I prized, the ordered shelves of her mind, appeared ransacked.

She did not see a man. She saw an obstruction of light.

“Agatha,” I repeated. My voice cracked. “Lady Myriam!”

She moved.

It was not the groggy awakening of a human patient. It was the snap of a spring. The cheetah and bear muscles in her thighs contracted. She leveraged her torso upright without the aid of her arms. The remaining wires tore free from her skin. They fell to the stone floor with twinkles.

She sat upon the zinc edge. Her posture was wrong. The spine curved too deeply. The modified feet, built for the digitigrade stance, dangled above the floor tiles. The tail swayed behind her. She tilted her head, massive, transparent ears moving left and right to catch the sounds of the night outside my father’s estate.

The crown of jellyfish tentacles hung heavy and wet against her neck. They resembled the matted, roped locks of a Spartan warrior, or the heavy plaits of a drowned woman. The rainbow refractions and blue bioluminescence pulsed through these dense cords like an eternal aurora borealis at the Northernmost frontier of Earth.

She made a chirping sound in her throat. It was the vocalization of a bird or a cat, not a woman.

She extended a hand. The motion was fluid. The arm did not tremble. It flowed. Her fingers, tipped with the bear claws, brushed against my chest. She let out a small grasp and batted at the buttons of my waistcoat.

It was a testing motion. A tactile query. She was a tiger cub swatting at a leaf. She was exploring the physics of the object before her.

I grabbed her wrist to stop the inspection. Her skin was warm. The vibration of the worm-fluid hummed against my palm, a million microscopic bioluminescent stars igniting where my fingers touched her, responding to my body heat.

She did not resist. She merely stared at where my hand touched hers. She observed the pressure. She analyzed the friction. But she did not recognize the gesture as human contact.

There was no Agatha.

The ledgers were burned. The star-charts were dust. I had preserved the brain, but I had failed to capture the ghost. The electricity had jump-started the engine, but it had wiped the slate clean.Damn it all!

She pulled her arm back. She leaned forward, sniffing the air near my neck. The heavy, glowing, flickering locks swung forward, brushing against my cheek with a wet dampness. Her pupils dilated, swallowing the yellow iris. She was not calculating the distance to the stars.

She was calculating the distance to the jugular.

I swallowed nervously.

She vocalized again, animalistic sounds without meaning.

She had no template for language. No knowledge of what sounds meant what. She would need to be taught everything.

How could I even teach her how to speak? How could I bring her into society? A seven and a half foot woman who glowed in the dark, whose eyes reflected like an owl’s, whose strength was beyond human measure? She would be recognized immediately as something other.

Something alien and wrong.

I could hide her. Keep her in the laboratory. But for how long? Forever? Would I lock her away for my entire lifetime, this creature I had made to be immortal, and waste her endless life in isolation?

She was strong too. Too strong. Possibly strong enough to snap any manacles, to tear iron links.

My thoughts became frantic.

I could destroy my notes. Burn everything. Flee Geneva with her, take her somewhere remote. Scotland perhaps, or the wilds of Eastern Europe. Somewhere we could disappear.

But even there, she would be noticed. The surreal luminescence couldn’t be hidden. The proportions, animalistic feet and claws couldn’t be disguised. And her inability to speak, to function as a human woman should, would mark her as different to anyone who saw her.

She leaned harder against me, sounding like she was purring now, some biological contentment in the contact. Twin auxiliary hearts pulsed visibly in her chest, the rhythm slightly out of sync with her primary heart below. The effect was hypnotic. A triangle of three separate beats, three separate organs, all working together to keep her massive frame oxygenated.

Beautiful, I thought distantly. She was beautiful in the way a deep-sea creature was beautiful. Alien and luminous and perfectly adapted to an environment that didn’t exist on land.I had created a monster…

She wasn’t a monster in the sense of evil or malice. She had neither.

She was innocent as a newborn, aware of nothing but immediate sensations.

Nathless, she was monstrous in the truest sense. A thing that violated natural law. A thing that should not be. A proof of concept that would damn me and anyone who learned of her existence.

The candle on my desk guttered and went out. The laboratory plunged into darkness except for her glow. The blue-green luminescence of her skin and rainbow hair lit the room in soft radiance, turning everything nearby into an underwater grotto.

She lifted her head from my chest and looked at me. Yellow eyes catching and reflecting the bioluminescence, shining back at me.

I attempted a smile.

She smiled back at me. A too-wide smile with too many cheetah and shark teeth visible through her transparent jaw. I shuddered.

I was suddenly aware of how utterly exhausted I was. I had been awake for… how long? Thirty hours? Forty?

Why didn’t I do this in the morning?Because I wanted her brain to fully function, to remain wise and clever and… and ultimately achieved none of that.

“Right,” I said aloud, more to hear a human voice than anything else. “Sleep. I really need sleep.”

She tilted her head at the sound, the predator-bright gaze tracking my mouth as I spoke.

Curious. Learning.

I moved toward my simple wooden frame cot in the corner of the laboratory—a concession to the many nights I had worked through sunrise. She followed.

Of course she followed. I was the only thing in her universe that moved and made noise and radiated warmth.

“I don’t even know what to call you,” I muttered, sitting on the edge of the cot to remove my boots and top pettycoat. She stood over me, looming, bioluminescence casting soft flickers. “You need a name. Something.”

I tried a few, watching her face for any reaction. “Victoria?” Nothing. “Francesca?” A slight head tilt, but that could have been coincidence. “Promethea? Eve? Eva?”

She just stared, yellow eyes unblinking.

“Franklynn?” I tried, somewhat desperately. Her mouth opened and she made a sound—“Aaahhhh.” Sadly, it seemed more like she was imitating my vocalization than responding to the name.

“We’ll work on it,” I decided, too tired to care. I lay back on the cot, which was only long enough for my six-foot frame.

She immediately attempted to join me. The cot creaked.

“No—wait—” I tried to protest, but she was already climbing onto the cot with all the grace of a newborn giraffe learning to walk. The wood frame groaned. She was seven and a half feet of enhanced muscle and bone density, and the cot had been built for a single person of normal proportions.

She arranged herself on top of me like a blanket, ignoring my noises of protest. A massive, glowing, breathing blanket that weighed roughly two hundred and fifty pounds and didn’t understand the concept of personal space.

“This is not… I can’t…” I tried to shift her weight, but she just hummed contentedly and draped one arm across my chest. Her hair spread everywhere, glowing, rainbowy filaments covering my face, my shoulders, cascading off the sides of the cot like luminous waterfalls.

I was pinned. Completely and utterly pinned.

Her face was inches from mine, gold eyes reflecting back my own exhausted, shocked expression. She blinked slowly, a cat-like expression of contentment. One of her hands found my hair and began pulling at it with gentle curiosity, the way an infant might discover their own toes.

“You have the intelligence of a sea sponge,” I informed her. “A very affectionate sea sponge. A sea sponge that weighs as much as a small horse.”

She made a pleased sound and nuzzled closer.

The cot creaked ominously again. I briefly calculated the odds of it collapsing entirely and decided I was too tired to move even if it did.

Let it break. Let the floor break. Let the entire estate collapse into Lake Geneva. I would deal with it in the morning.

Her glow softened as I watched, shifting from bright blue-green to a dimmer, warmer shade.

Bioluminescence responding to her relaxation, perhaps. Or some circadian rhythm I had accidentally built into her cellular structure. Through her translucent skin I could see the movement of her organs. The three hearts beating their syncopated rhythm. The lungs expanding and contracting.

And deeper, if I focused, I could see individual cells. Tiny sparks of light, organelles firing, producing energy in microscopic bursts. Like watching a galaxy through a telescope. Thousands of points of light, each one a small universe of biological activity, the stars closest to me responding to my warmth.

It was hypnotic. Captivating…

Like always. I’ve fallen asleep to the luminescence of her body for a year now, but she was never… this damn close. Never this… alive.

Her breathing slowed. Mine slowed to match it.

The laboratory faded around us—the copper wires, the galvanic jars, the tables and walls covered with surgical implements and anatomical drawings. There was only the soft light, the three-part heartbeat, the inescapable warmth of something living that I had made.

I fell asleep watching infinite constellations ignite and wink away beneath her skin.