The Final Moments of the Auto-Frankenstein (A Cautionary Tale)
He recomposed himself with each step, little pellets of skin and tissue the size of post-its dislodging and relodging themselves onto his limbs as he ran.
Creation had been a simple enough task – he was endowed with the command, and he merely needed to speak it. Of course, acquiring the separate body parts, and planning out how they were going to connect and work together, required some planning.
But the final process he had been prepared for: those long years of study and surgical training in the back-alleys, hidden from view of the police and health inspectors.
Inevitably, though, he ran out of test subjects, and was left with himself. The decision itself wasn’t a tortured one: he had always been a pragmatist at heart, and the move simply made sense. He plugged his veins with wire, tied his legs around and put a ball-gag in his mouth, and hit the switch.
Like his projects, he was turning into a non-being who would strive to contain, understand, and extend into being, simply for the sake of it.
It was only when his flesh was tearing away as he tried to run, little ribbons trailing across the hallway, his screams enveloping the building, when he realized that the execution of the plan may have needed some reconsideration.
The wires did a paltry job at keeping his organs in their re-organized slots. But the first spike of horror raced through his brain as his teeth began to cave, one by one, dropping away from his mouth with the ease of cherry blossoms, but transported on their journey through a sharp pain that brought to mind sandpaper mistakenly scraping on skin, or chalk maliciously pressed on blackboards.
He collapsed, eventually. If he felt a twinge of scientific revelation, it was to be recorded in the kaleidoscope of pain that passed through him. The rich mix of sensations, were it to be recorded appropriately, would have offered a unique insight – he had transmuted foreign organs, and lived a few short minutes stuffed with them like a celebratory turkey.
Sadly, however, the only remnant of this was the testament of a young boy who happened to be playing in the snow outside the laboratory and to whom the subsequently-monickered (with the glib inaccuracy that only journalists are capable of), ‘Auto-Frankenstein’ had run towards and screamed an incoherent waddle of sounds to, before dropping into the ground, the snow rapidly unshaping whatever attempt at shape the scientist had aspired to.
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This makes a nice juxtaposition to the Marry Shelly original. This time the Dr literally is the monster and his own hubris destroys him directly. Well done!
Thanks Scott! Shelley’s novel is one of my favourites so it was quite exciting to play around with some of her concepts, glad you appreciated my stab at them!