Calypso

I woke to the smell of rot.

For a moment I couldn’t place it. Then consciousness returned fully and with it, horror when I opened my eyes.

The laboratory looked like a battlefield. Every specimen jar had been opened. Every container upended. Every tool, out of place. Cabinets torn open, door hinges broken. The slightly chaotic order I had maintained for three years was utterly destroyed.

My creation stood in the center of the battlefield, glowing happily, something dark and dripping clasped in her hands. Her stomach looked very round and full.

“No,” I said. “Oh no. What did you—”

She turned at the sound of my voice, her face lighting up with unmistakable joy. She rushed toward me with disturbing, too-fast movement and thrust her offering forward.

It was a cadaver arm.

Specifically, the arm I had been saving for potential future experiments, preserved in distilled worm blood. It had been a good specimen with minimal decay and excellent muscle definition.

She had eaten most of it.

The forearm was gnawed down to bone in several places. She had apparently tried the bicep, decided it was acceptable, and was now attempting to share her bounty.

Like a cat bringing home a dead bird.

“Ahhhhh!” she vocalized, shoving the arm toward my face. Offering. Sharing. Look what I found, her expression seemed to say. Food! Eat! Eat the arm, Victor!

I pushed it away, my stomach turning. “No. No, I don’t… humans don’t eat that. We don’t eat dead tissue. We don’t—”

I looked around her at the laboratory.

The cell cultures were gone. She had apparently drunk them, petri dishes and all, based on the broken glass near my specimen cabinet. The tissue samples I had been maintaining in preservative solution were missing. A three-month-old lung experiment, destroyed. A well-preserved section of cerebral cortex, gone.

She had even found my failure specimens, the early attempts at reanimation that I kept sealed. She had broken, chewed or tore through the locks and consumed them. I could see the evidence in the broken steel-reinforced chests below the tables.

“You ate everything,” I stated bluntly, “every biological sample in the entire laboratory. You ate everything that was even remotely alive. Christ.”

She vocalized again, pleased with herself. Her jaw snapped out and she took a bite of the cadaver arm. Her teeth went through bone like it was soft cheese.

That modified jaw strength, the reinforced teeth built to crack through shell and carapace, now applied to human remains.

I sat down on the floor, suddenly unable to stand.

Then the worst realization of all struck me.

The Infinitum Paradoxus! She had eaten all of my Infinitum Paradoxus worms from their cultivation tank. There would be no way to build another person like her without them, no way to move forward! No way to…

But then again. The blood of the worm now flowed inside her and the pig-crucibles in a barn in the back. Perhaps by extracting the blood, I still could…

The bone crunched in front of my face, making me gag harder.

She had the appetite of a great white shark. Which made sense as I based parts of her stomach on masters of digestion. Efficient, brutal, capable of processing almost anything organic.

She moved closer, holding the arm, and persistently tried again to feed it to me again. When I refused, she made a concerned sound and attempted to physically place it in my mouth.

“Stop! No!” I batted it away. “Listen! That’s not… Not edible by humans! We need to establish some boundaries. Starting with: do not feed me corpses. That’s rule one. Rule one is no corpses for breakfast!”

She sat back on her haunches, confused. The arm dangled from one hand. Her head tilted in a bird-like way.

I rubbed my face. “What am I going to do with you?”

She smiled in a too-wide smile and took another bite of arm, clearly hoping I would be inspired to join her grotesque feast.

Outside, I heard the first birds beginning their morning songs. Dawn was coming. My father would be awake soon, expecting me at breakfast. The servants would be moving through the house.

And I had a giant, naked, glowing woman in my laboratory who clearly spent the night devouring three years worth of research specimens and was now currently trying to share a cadaver with me like it was a romantic picnic.

I stood up with a sigh and stepped around her, surveying the carnage.

Every jar, every specimen, every carefully labeled container—gone. Three years of collection, cataloging, and preservation, consumed in what couldn’t have been more than six hours.

She had even found the appendix collection. I had seventeen preserved appendices from various donors, each one demonstrating different stages of inflammation.

She’d eaten them like oysters.

“Right,” I said, trying to inject some authority into my voice. “New rules. Many new rules. First: you don’t eat anything unless I specifically tell you it’s food. Can you understand that? Food comes from me. Not from jars. Not from the trash. From me.”

She blinked with luminescent-gold-yellow eyes.

“Second rule: we really need to work on your table manners before you meet anyone else. And by table manners, I mean the basic concept of tables, and manners, and not eating human remains in front of polite society.”

She took another bite of the arm. A piece of radius bone crunched between her teeth.

“You’re not listening to me at all, are you?”

“Aaaaahhhhh,” she agreed, bobbing enthusiastically.

I walked over to her, carefully extracted the cadaver arm from her grip. She resisted briefly, then let go when I used my stern voice. I threw the arm into the waste bin. She immediately moved toward the bin, reaching for it.

“No! Bad! BAD! That’s…” I caught myself. “I’m not training a dog. You’re a person. A person who currently has the intellect of a very hungry infant, but still… A person.”

She straightened up at my tone, looking chastened. Or possibly just confused. It was hard to tell.

“We’re going to try names again,” I decided, mostly to distract her from the waste bin arm. “You need something to respond to. Something I can call you when you’re eating things you shouldn’t.”

I pulled over a wooden stool and sat down, looking up at her. She loomed. Everything about her loomed. It was like naming a monument.

“Let’s see… Persephone?” I tried. “Goddess of the underworld? Seems fitting given your diet.”

She tilted her head.

“Demeter? Athena? Aphrodite?” Nothing. “Hela? Morrigan?”

She made a gurgling sound and reached past me toward the specimen cabinet, where she had apparently missed a small jar of preserved eyeballs.

“No! Focus!” I stood up and physically turned her to face me. “This is important. You need a name. You need identity. You need…” I paused. “Do you even understand what I’m saying? Any of it?”

“Aaaahhhhh,” she said, which could have meant anything from ‘yes, I understand completely’ to ‘there’s a moth near the ceiling.’

“Let’s try simpler ones. Eve?” I pointed at her. “Eve? You could be Eve. First woman, new creation, biblical implications that will definitely not cause problems later?”

She grabbed my pointing hand and examined it with great interest, turning it over to look at the palm, the fingers, the veins visible beneath the skin. She seemed fascinated by the fact that I didn’t glow and wasn’t transparent.

“I’m going to take that as a no on Eve.” I extracted my hand. “What about… Mary? Simple, classic, definitely won’t draw comparisons to any famous Marys who also had unusual conceptions?”

She stuck my finger in her mouth.

“That’s unhygienic!” I yelped, pulling away. “You just ate a cadaver arm! You can’t just… we’re establishing rule three: no putting people in your mouth. That’s rule three.”

She looked disappointed.

“Charlotte?” I tried, wiping my finger on my coat. “Jane? Elizabeth? Catherine? We could go literary—Juliet? Ophelia? Beatrice? Galatea?”

For each name, she just stared at me with unblinking, round eyes, expressions ranging from vacant to mildly interested in the sounds I was making.

“This is hopeless. You’re not responding to anything. How am I supposed to name you if you won’t even—”

She suddenly lurched forward and wrapped her arms around me again in a tight, full-body embrace that lifted me slightly off the ground. She made her happy humming sound, the vibration traveling through both our bodies.

“Lily?” I tried weakly, my face pressed against her shoulder. “Rose? Violet? Any flowers? No?”

She just hummed louder.

“What about naming you after scientists? Ada? Marie? Émilie?” I paused. “Actually, naming you after Émilie du Châtelet seems presumptuous. She was brilliant. You eat body parts.”

“Mmmmmm,” she said contentedly, swaying slightly while holding me.

“Magnolia? Dahlia? Iris?” I was running out of air. “Petunia? Daisy? Dandelion?”

She released me enough that I could breathe.

“You’re going to make this difficult, aren’t you?” I sighed.

“Aaaahhhhh,” she said, which I interpreted assuredly as ‘yes, and I’ll do it again.’

I slumped back on my stool. The sun was rising quickly, golden light streaming through the windows and making her bioluminescence less obvious. In daylight she looked almost normal. Almost. If you squinted a lot, ignored the height, the rainbow hair, the tail, the translucent skin, and the fact that she was currently trying to reach the ceiling to acquire the moth fluttering there.

“Calypso!” I said suddenly, feeling like I was trapped in my own home with a mindless idiot.

She paused mid-reach and looked at me.

“Calypso,” I repeated, watching her face.

Her head tilted. She lowered her arms slowly and turned to stare at me.

Her mouth made a noise that sounded like “Caaaaa-aaaa-eeee-aaaa.”

“Yes! That’s… That it! Yessss! You’re trying to say it!” I stood up excitedly. “Calypso. Can you try again? Calypso!”

“Caaa-aaaa…” She struggled with producing the word. “Leeee…”

“Close enough! We’ll work on it.” I felt absurdly pleased, like a parent hearing their child’s first word. “Calypso. That’s your name. You’re Calypso.”

“Caaa-Leee,” she managed.

“Exactly! You’re Calypso, and I’m…” I pointed at myself. “Victor. Vic-tor. Can you try that?”

“Vfffnnngggh,” she voiced, which wasn’t even close, but I appreciated the effort.

“We’ll work on that too.” I smiled. “Calypso is a… nymph from the Greek myth. She lived on the island of Ogygia, where, according to Homer’s Odyssey, she detained Odysseus for seven years against his will.”

Calypso reached out and patted my head like I was a particularly clever pet. Her hand covered my entire skull.

“I’m explaining classical mythology to you and you’re patronizing me,” I observed dryly. “This relationship is already going wonderfully.”

“Mmmmmm,” She made her happy humming sound and leaned down to press her forehead against mine, an oddly gentle gesture from something so large with so many teeth.

“Also,” I added, “there’s the small matter of me being utterly exhausted, covered in cadaver residue, and standing in a laboratory that looks like a hurricane hit a morgue. So perhaps we should—”

The door opened.

I froze. Calypso froze. We both turned slowly toward the entrance.

Henry Clerval stood in the doorway, one hand still on the handle, his mouth open in an expression of such complete shock that it would have been comical under any other circumstances.

“Victor?” he choked. “What in the name of Christ and all the saints is that?”