Monster

Chapter 20 - The Beginning

Walt is dead: I made sure of that. Clerval is dead: probably Walt's doing, in his own mad attempt to make the world a better place. I am dead: at least officially. With Alphonse's help, everything was willed to Jake Harris, the identity I have now adopted for the foreseeable future. It is very easy to fake your death when you have billions of dollars at your disposal and a privately-funded medical research facility hidden below a village that is, for all appearances, abandoned.

I bought this land and opened this lab twenty years ago, just a few years after our success with brain transplantation. I owed much of it to Francesca and Karalyn, really. Francesca's pioneers in human cryopreservation and Karalyn's use of stem cells to regrow my neural pathways inspired my research on repairing brain tissue damaged during the transplant process. Our team had a doctor – Dr. Felix DeLacey – who specialized in nerve damage and had already done some amazing things with spinal column regeneration. He was the true star of our achievement in transferring the brain from one human body to another.

Dr. DeLacey and his wife, Agathe, run this research lab. He and I started it together, and she was one of our first research assistants. The facility is owned by Transivefacen Co., which is in truth, me. Every time I'm here, I feel my soul swell with the pride and awe of what we have accomplished, and the feeling is greatest now, on the cusp of my magnum opus, my great victory.

Reading the message Agathe sent me just over a year ago never fails to fill me with the thrilling tingle of excitement, that burning flush of readiness to begin:

Dr. Von Stein,

A match has been found.

Clerval thought he was Your greatest student, but he was so very wrong. I was always Your greatest student – no one knew that You taught me everything about cryobiology and preservation. No one knew that I was Your true protégé, just as they didn't know that I was Your creation. You gave everything – Your knowledge, Your wealth, Your love – to me, and I have used it for this.

That knowledge and wealth, combined with my skill in neurosurgery and brain transplant, were all I needed to bring You back to me. Now I am the creator, I am the God. I found You the body of a young woman who was comatose after a ruptured blood clot and pronounced brain dead. Felix and Agathe determined her to be a good match for transplant. That night I put You into drugged sleep and brought You here, where we switched Your beautiful brain with hers, then took the same steps You took with me to freeze and preserve You.

This body is almost as lovely as Your old one. I ache to touch You, to trail my fingers along Your frost-pale skin behind the plastic wall that separates us, to run my hands through that long red-brown hair that is so like what You used to have. Even the eyes are similar, and now, decades after You reanimated me, we know how to keep them from melting. Soon, I will be able to see You as you open those eyes for the first time, looking at me from a form You will not recognize.

But now, story time must end. Very soon, all we have waited for will be over. I have made sure to reconstruct all the essential elements of my creation: the woman was preserved in hopes of finding a way to repair her broken brain, and then frozen again after the brain transplant. Her heart was stopped at the critical point during the second cryo, as happened with mine. Today, with my shoulder broken by Walt's bullet, I will watch as Your new heart is transplanted.

Please forgive me, my Love, for hiding my plans from You, for taking Your brain to give You everlasting life. But now You will awaken with your memories intact, and we will rise, God and Goddess side by side. We will be together forever, my Francesca, my Galatea.

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(Word count: 694)
(Total word count: 25,173)