**the chapter below is recorded for your listening ease.
Four years earlier (before the rest of the story begins) —
His eyes snapped open, and with a single convulsion of his abdominal muscles, he rose bolt upright to a rigid sitting position, legs straight out ahead of him, toes pointing straight up to the ceiling. A white wall faced him. A cold metal table supported him. A sweat-drenched white sheet lay over the lower half of his naked body.
A mechanical beeping drew his attention to an array of monitors and screens on his right. Green lines against a black screen bounced up and down like a video game, numbers and abbreviations glowing brightly like a real-life score and game level.
The newly awakened man scanned the room, searching for someone to orient him to what had happened. For a terrifying moment, he was a man without history. Without identity.
Then, as if his internal monitor screen of consciousness had finally flickered to life after the hard reboot of his body, it came back to him. The top-floor rooms of the downtown Geneva office building he had converted into a laboratory and surgery, the months and years of research and study, the equipment he had purchased and re-kitted to specialize for his own particular needs. The experiments he had performed on lab rats and small animals. And finally, the experiment he had performed on himself.
Victor looked back at the monitors, then to the window, still black with night.
Or again black with night? He assumed at least 24 hours had passed since he had initiated the procedure. It was dark outside, as when he had gone unconscious, but rain no longer hammered at the window. His head throbbed with a clenching hangover, but he hadn’t drunk any alcohol. His sinuses bore the pressure of congestion, but he wasn’t sick. His every joint ached as though inflamed with arthritis, but he was too young for the cartilage between bones to have worn away.
He put one hand to his sternum as if he would feel his heart’s wild drumming through the cage of his ribs, throbbing up and down in his chest, but he felt only the rise and fall of his startled breathing. Blood rushed through his body, every artery working twice as hard as usual. He pulled the blood pressure monitor off his finger and one of the jaunty lines on the monitor flatlined.
The adrenaline, he realized. Something must have triggered the injection of adrenaline. That’s why his heart was pounding, and his ears rang. Victor had configured his equipment to monitor and administer his experiment independently of a second person’s supervision. But, considering the dangerous nature of his work, he had included some emergency measures, one specifically for the unlikely and undesirable possibility that his sleep might dip too deeply below the surface into the unwaking darkness beyond. If, for any reason, his brain function should go below a carefully determined minimum threshold of activity, he had engineered a deadman’s switch that would activate and inject a staggering dose of adrenaline straight into his bloodstream.
Victor inspected the monitors and focused on the automated log readout of what an untrained eye would see as medical hieroglyphs.
02:18 AM: Adrenaline injection triggered by precipitous drop in brain function.
Worst-case-scenario planning had saved him. He had literally brought himself back to life.
Like a robot whose movements betrayed the mechanical imprecision of non-lifeforms, he slowly turned himself on the table. With awkward hands, he pulled the IV from his wrist, disconnecting the blood-doping machine and all the other cables he had used to monitor the most daring experiment of his career.
Freed from the chains of his work, he arranged his stubborn legs over the table’s edge and gingerly put each half-asleep foot squarely on the floor. I need to stand up, perhaps stretch a bit, he told himself.
He fumbled to dress himself from the clothes draped across a stool at the table’s side. He stepped into his underwear, one foot at a time, then one stumbling pant leg, a near-fall from imbalance, then the second pant leg, then a shirt with so many buttons, his thick fingers revolting against their closing.
Cold water, he thought, cold water on my face would help.
He shuffled to the lab sink in the corner of the room. With the lurching movements of an infant not yet in control of his appendages, he turned the faucet on. Victor studied his hands under the running water, turning them over, back and forth. They looked larger, with veins that seemed so much more pronounced than he remembered, worming blue-green pathways toward his heart.
He bent down and splashed the icy winter water on his face.
It hurt.
His face was terribly bruised.
He willed himself to stand up straight like the adult in his prime that he was, rather than stoop like the old man that he felt like. As he rose, his eyes came level with the mirror on the wall. With a start, he took a step back. The beast that gazed back at him was hideous. The watery, yellow eyes returning his stare matched the yellow hue of the skin pulled tightly across the swollen features of his face. The white teeth he had been so proud of, now gaped back at him in the glass, catching the light and highlighting the sickliness of his features. Black hair that shone dark and glossy in the glaring lights of his laboratory hung over his ears, contrasting with the same pallor of a patient in the last throes of kidney failure. The creature in the mirror held up one hand as if to detain him, its jaws moving with inarticulated sounds. If they were words, Victor did not understand them. Horror crept through the veins of his body, creeping back toward his heart like poison down so many drains and canals to the city pumping station. In the glass, he saw the miserable monster he had created.
With the reflex of a caveman fleeing a saber-toothed tiger, Victor fell back a step, pivoted on his heel, and fled the surgery. Grabbing only a scarf from the coat stand in the hall, he escaped from his top-floor rooms, running down the back stairs and into the icy winter air of the courtyard of the Swiss building.
Victor had long accustomed himself to the deformed face he’d been cursed with at birth, a work ever unfinished, as if he’d been born before nature had finished forming him. He had always thought himself ugly, failed by nature, tampered with by unskilled hands, and now swollen and misshapen by his work. With shaking hands, he wound the scarf gently around his neck and head, covering his features up to his eyes. Mercifully, the winter predawn demanded no pretense for hiding a face even Marilyn Manson would have shrunk from.
He paced the icy courtyard, looking up at the lit windows of his top-floor rooms. In his mind’s eye, he saw the ghost of his old self preparing his equipment for the fateful experiment—loading a chemical here, adjusting a knob there, filling a syringe, and releasing the air bubble from the needle tip. All that had happened repeated itself vividly in his mind as if it was still playing out in the rooms above. Victor shivered. His thin button-down and pants were insufficient for the late January wind that blew straight through to his bones. He crossed his arms tightly over his chest and approached the gate to the street.
Barely differentiating the silhouettes of buildings against the early morning twilight, Victor made his way down the street, unwilling to face the specter in the mirror upstairs and retrieve his coat. Trance-like, he walked down the minor street away from his building and onto the next major thoroughfare, mindless of where he was headed, unaware of crossing the footbridge over the Rhine and into the downtown.
The streets were deserted, save a few bakery delivery vans and a handful of night laborers returning from jobs unseen. Two cleaning women hurried past him, but they were as invisible to Victor as the air he breathed. His mind writhed with dilemmas so muddled he could find no words to sort them out. The outer shell of man had been only the first step toward his ultimate goal. He intended to reform the human animal completely, from his mind to his smallest toenail. But how could he proceed in such a state? Had his experiment failed so miserably? He could hardly stomach the face that was now his.
After a madly determined walk to an undetermined destination, he found himself in the dark heart of Geneva’s old city, where cobbled streets climbed and dropped into narrow, pedestrian-only passages without forewarning. He emerged from the bottom of a slim staircase and stopped in front of an art gallery, its door still shuttered for many hours.
He gazed through the gallery window at the landscape paintings showcased on easels and strained to see the larger pieces that hung on the walls behind, the darkness of the morning rendering their images in greyscale. The paintings were mesmerizing, marrying the same ideas to which he’d dedicated his life of scientific research. He straightened up a little and peered closer through the glass. His theories were displayed before him on canvas with the beauty and grace of living nature.
The pieces depicted forests, gardens, trees, lakes, and rivers—but with a shadowy steel scaffolding, like the bones of a skyscraper, supported the delicate layers of biological life. It was as if a human hand had tried to reproduce a natural garden by first shaping wire and I-beams to support the foliage too weak to hold itself up otherwise. But that was a simplification, Victor thought. It was not a clumsy human replication of nature, the way an engineer might build an awkward robot that poorly mimicked human form and function. It was instead a human understanding of the fundamental structure of nature, of which the delicacy and ephemeral beauty of life and its complexity laid itself on top.
Victor’s vision adjusted focus, no longer looking through the window but at it, seeing his reflection again mirrored in the glass. Above the awkwardly twisted scarf, his eyes, rimmed with the dark circles of physical neglect and mental obsession, had sunk deeper into his face, receding under the shadow of his brow. He forced his focus back to the paintings behind the glass, his image blurring out of sight.
Unbidden, a sense of peace overwhelmed him. His experiment had yet to finish its course. He realized that he had woken to only the middle stages of the treatment before the procedure had completed itself. The tissue had not yet healed and settled. He knew, even as terrifying as his monstrous image now was, that he had not been unsuccessful.
He put a gentle hand on the scarf, his eyes refocusing again the image on the surface of the glass. The swelling would go down, the pockets of blood would clear, and even where the treatment had not succeeded, he would continue to mold it until his image was flawless.
Then, he would go deeper. He would change the very nature of man.
“It is good,” he whispered to the being in the glass.
After many months of dogged labor, he felt a quiet calm for the first time. The promise welcome of coming success, like a warm fire waiting in the hearth for a tired traveler, soon to arrive.
Dear Readers,
So many things have come together these last few weeks to make it possible for me to commit to getting this sequel out for you. So much so that I feel confident I can commit to making this happen every week without reneging on any promises.
It’s a great feeling to be back writing and releasing stories. To feel the momentum building behind me, and to enter this story-space again. Not only am I editing this and sharing it, but I’m writing another book I hope will be ready when this release is over.
There have been times over the last couple years where I was questioning if I really even was a writer anymore, or if I ever could be again. But I’ve come to realize that sometimes you have to live through things, and only afterwards is there space to write again. At least, this is how I find it to be with fiction writing.
So here I am, making stories again.
I’m also excited about this method of early release because hopefully I’ll also get more feedback from you first readers directly. Let me know what you think and experience as you go through this story with me!
And now, without further delay, —
Can't wait to see where you take this.
Good to see you back.
"It was instead a human understanding of the fundamental structure of nature, of which the delicacy and ephemeral beauty of life and its complexity laid itself on top" Wow.