Monster

Chapter 13 - Bucharest, Romania

Arriving in Bucharest, the first thing I did was go shopping. I'd deliberately left my clothes and toiletries in the Paris hotel room in case housekeeping didn't get the "do not disturb" memo. I wanted it to look like I was staying there. I had left an obvious trail to Paris for my Shadow to follow. He would have realized by now that I had left Munich, and possibly that I'd gone to Paris. Hopefully it would be a few days before he realized that I was not actually staying there.

I bought some essentials, a week's worth of clothes, a new surveillance camera, and a mobile Wi-Fi port using the Justin Moritz credit card, then found a decent hotel with vacancies and checked in under the same name and with the same card.

This was my first time using one of my "Non Stein" identities, as Francesca had playfully called them. There were four of them, bringing my total list of identities to seven. I had seven birth certificates from different countries, but only six passports and identification cards – the first Victor Von Stein had a death certificate (heart attack, naturally) instead of a passport or ID.

Though we told people that Henry had died if they inquired after him, the truth was we'd never had him declared dead, and few enough people in our daily lives had met him for that to be an issue. This was how I'd been able to live under that name in Munich, even with the threat of meeting someone I had known in the past while I'd lived as him.

All of my identities had a bank account except for the first Victor, and each one had its own corresponding credit card. There was also a bank account in China under the name Victor Von Stein that was untraceable and used simply to funnel money from one account to another. It was how I split the monthly income deposited into my account in New York to my other accounts.

My first task after checking into the hotel was to scan my surroundings. The room was small, which suited my need for subtlety. I was on the top floor and there was no balcony. The windows were sealed shut. This meant I only had one entrance to watch. I looked out the window and took stock of the shops across the street and the busy road, and any places that could have visual access to my room. Unfortunately, there were many, so I closed the curtain for the rest of my stay.

I connected the mobile Wi-Fi port and created a secure, encrypted network and logged on with my computer, phone, and the camera. I placed the camera in the corner of the room, getting a view of as much of it as possible. Then I checked the feeds for the cameras in Paris. I had enabled them remotely on the way to the airport, and they had not sent any footage, implying that nothing had tripped their motion sensor. I turned on the live feed anyway, just to be sure. The room was just as I had left it, so I turned off the feed and set a notification to alert me if the sensors were tripped.

Finally, I sent a request to the cleaning service in Munich to visit my apartment in a few days and clean out the refrigerator. I did not know how long I'd be away. Then I laid down and closed my eyes, the adrenaline and nearly constant activity of the past two days having exhausted me.

---------------

When I say that my internal organs all aged while my external appearance did not, it's not exactly true. My teeth had been straightened and were frequently cosmetically whitened due to the amount of coffee I drank, but had never weakened. My eyesight had never faded. And my brain, most definitely an internal organ, had shown no signs of aging either. In fact, it seemed to have the ability to retain nearly everything I had learned since becoming Victor Von Stein, and the vast majority of the knowledge it had accumulated prior to that point.

One of the greatest benefits of never aging or getting sick or worrying about dementia is how much time you have to study and learn as much as you want. I'd gone to medical school twice in the eighty three years this brain had been alive, gone to culinary school, and finally college for sports medicine. I had taken photography courses, but I wasn't very good at it. I had taken computer engineering courses and found that I had, maybe not surprisingly, an adeptness for it.

I spent much of my time in Bucharest putting that digital savoir faire to use. A little hacking into Dr. Clerval's cloud storage account confirmed that his current project was in fact an attempt to "Unlock the Key to Immortality." I snorted at his poor word choice. If he couldn't tell the difference between a key and a lock, what hope did he have of figuring out how to achieve said immortality?

But that unlocked the mystery before me. He had been suspicious of me and my identities as Henry and Victor the First. While he was undoubtedly an idiot, he was also undoubtedly a genius – Francesca hadn't been joking when she'd called him Her protégé. He had somehow figured out, or at least suspected, the truth about me. While I am not truly immortal, not aging is definitely a good starting point for someone trying to find the key to immortality.

I myself had spent years trying to ferret out just what had caused the strange phenomenon. I believed it had something to do with the cryopreservation process, specifically with my heart stopping when it did and then being replaced before the rest of the organs could die.

While I couldn't exactly find a correlation between that and the stasis of my appearance, a few tests on rats showed a similar reaction. It was, however, less permanent in the rats. This could be due to differences in biology, or the possibility that extra cryoprotectant had been applied to me in order to freeze me a second time, after the first heart transplant failed. The only way to know was by recreating the experiment exactly on another human being, and that had not yet been tested.

At any rate, it seemed clear that Clerval had enough interest to send someone to observe me. What wasn't clear was what the spy's entire plan entailed. Would he continue to seek me out? What did Clerval want exactly: to retrieve me? Would he want me alive so he could study and/or question me?

Or was the plan to kill me?

---------------

I got my answer a few days later, after I'd managed to hack into Clerval's email. His cloud storage only contained work information, and I'd already read through its entirety, learning everything he had been studying and hoped to study. I had gotten into his work email easily enough, but that had nothing useful to me either. It was his personal email correspondence where I hit the jackpot.

The man was stupid enough to hire and communicate with a bounty hunter through his regular email address. The bounty hunter, who simply went by the name "Walt," was smarter and used a burner address probably specifically for this particular job, and encrypted his emails. Unfortunately for them, Clerval did not encrypt his replies, and often quoted Walt in them, so I managed to read the majority of their brief correspondences.

Clerval, with Walt's help, had extrapolated definitively who I was, and astonishingly, how I was created. One of them must have managed to weasel the information out of one or more of the Prometheus Project members. I'd have to find out who had broken the agreement and why. Clerval's intention was for Walt to first observe me and report his findings, then capture me and deliver me to Clerval's greedy little arms.

It was unclear whether Clerval planned to study me, or just kill me at that point. If he wanted to kill me, he would assumedly just have Walt do that rather than cart me halfway across the world. Most likely the intention was for me to wake up in Clerval's lab, naked and strapped to a table.

One thing was very obvious though: Clerval planned to out me to the world as a monster. After getting whatever information he thought I could give him, he was going to use me as the poster boy of his great project and write papers about my condition.

To say I was enraged was an understatement. If anyone were to find glory in my creation it would be my creator, my Goddess, not some self-important, overcompensating imbecile with a desperate need for attention.

I am not a monster. I am a man. I am a man created for the sole purpose of loving one incredible, divine woman, and I have fulfilled that purpose with everything in me. I am a man with an intelligent mind, a passionate heart, and a deep desire to live.

And I will do whatever it takes to continue living.

**********
(Word count: 1,543)