Sacred Forces: A Superhero Story

Chapter 4: Fake

Part One: The Prototype

My name is Ersatz. Actually, my name is not really a name; more like a designation. It goes something like "Bio-Medical Testing Apparatus Ersatz Prototype Blah-Blah-Blah Random-Number-Random-Number Something-Something." I don't really want to go around being called by some long, drawn-out, confusing list of big words and numbers, so I picked out the word Ersatz from it. I liked the word. It means "fake" or "artificial"; I looked it up in the dictionary. Of course, nobody cares where I got the name, right? It's just a name. Just a name.

So I'm pretty much unlike anything you've ever seen before. I mean it. In this day and age, when they're making movies with robots and realistic-looking fictional characters that are completely computer-based, like those Pixar movie cartoons, you probably think you've seen just about everything that there is to see. Me? I'm different, trust me.

You see, I wasn't meant to exist. I wasn't meant to be what I became. I wasn't created in the lab of a crazy, insane, Frankenstein doctor who was intent on making an artificial life form concocted from the hides of dead people or put together like a jigsaw puzzle from a bunch of dead bodies. No, no, no: I ain't like that. I was made originally to be a pin cushion. I don't know all the scientific mumbo-jumbo but I'll try to explain it the best way I can, okay?

A while ago some morons in lab coats wanted to try and test a bunch of new vaccines and cures for diseases. You can't really test a vaccine on a monkey anymore because some bunch of whiny hippies somewhere hugged too many trees and bonded with that gorilla from the movie Congo and now they can't test stuff on animals anymore except for rats (which doesn't always work out for them, either). So the geniuses in the lab coats decided, "Hey! Since we can't test our stuff on real people, why don't we test it on fake people?"

"Fake people?" someone asked.

"Yeah, fake people!" lab coat genius cheered. "What if we made an artificial person, gave it a bunch of diseases, and then tested our new medicines on it to see if they work?"

That's what they did. They put their ambitious brains together and whipped up an artificial being that they could use as a guinea pig for their experiments. They wanted it to be accurate, as accurate as possible, so they started with the basics. They synthesized human cells using embryonic stems cells and stuff. They created organs and tissue and all the crap that's inside a normal person and put them inside of this thing that they've created. They put artificial bones inside of it, filled it up with this liquid goo that is like blood and plasma. Basically, they made a human being made up of artificial stuff.

But the geniuses didn't stop there. They had to get it just right, they said. "Oh, yeah, wouldn't it be great if the thing was alive?" they said. "What if we were to give it artificial life and see if it is affected by stuff in the brain?" As if the lab coats weren't pleased enough with themselves in making a flippin' fake human being they wanted to one-up themselves and give it life. And, like idiots, that's what they did. They created this sophisticated brain for the thing, made it as real as they could, and stuck it inside the thing's head. Instead of letting it be just that, they kept going.

"What if it could think?"

"What if we could see how it reacts?"

"What if it could talk?"

Those numbskulls could not stop themselves. They kept going and going, testing and testing, making and making, until they put human brain matter and a bunch of other stuff into a synthesized human body and POW! "Look, guys! We made a humanoid! Let's give it more stuff and see what it does!"

So on and on those butt-munchers went until, somehow, someway, through some scientific muddling and a bunch of technological hullaballoo that I have no idea how to explain, I came about.