Reborn (Frankenstein Book 1)

by Dean C. Moore

  His god-friend took a deep breath and let it out. “He can come out and play with us among the stars if he likes, once he’s built up enough nerve. He’s more bluster than anything right now. But yes, that is the plan.”

  “You that confident I can raise a god?”

  “I’m quite confident you’ll go the complete distance. We see more potential in you than we see in him. Together, you might well be unstoppable. Yin and Yang, you two. You need each other. And I don’t believe the cosmos will survive just one of you. Rest now, Soren. Heal.”

  His God friend hesitated, grimaced, clearly wondering if he should say more. “Hasn’t it dawned on you yet why your rational abilities have not diminished despite being in the tank? The news will come as a shock, I’m afraid. But you’ll get past this, I promise.”

  “With your help?”

  “No, I’m afraid this is something you must do on your own.” And with that his friend was gone.

  “You do seem sharper than normal when you’re in the tank, Soren. What’s up with that?” As soon as he’d articulated the words, he realized the answer.

  He was dead.

  His mind-chip was the one interacting with the god-wizard. It was why he could solve the god-wizard’s riddle so quickly. It was immune to the tank; it was just his biological brain that was susceptible.

  But his vital signs were normal, and he was breathing. What in the hell had happened to him that his brain had shut down entirely? Would it reboot the longer he soaked in the tank?

  No!

  That moron, Lar. He’d thrown him in here in an effort to get his body to heal, to accept his tweaks to his cyber-enhancements. And now that it was finished annealing him—it had locked in the sub-rational state that was the baseline for the tank—not for his normal waking state, when he was out of the tank. He’d be the moron, not Lar, the instant he stepped outside of it.

  ***

  Soren felt his body spasm in rage; he was already pulverizing Lar in his mind’s eye. And then he was paralyzed, just when he wanted to explode in anger.

  For whatever reason, the tank wasn’t done with him yet. It was taking him back to his childhood. Why? Nothing from his past now could possibly matter. Nothing from the future either, for he was now a man with no future.

  Oh, hell, no. He didn’t need a tour through this corner of his psyche. Not now, of all times.

  He’d had scoliosis of the spine pretty badly as a kid. Spent most of his life hearing things like “freak” and—from the more prescient ones—“Hey, it’s Frankenstein’s monster.” He supposed that’s when he developed his taste for helping others who couldn’t help themselves. Those were the memories rushing back to him now.

  The first girl he rescued, Esmerelda, had lived all her life in a wheelchair. She was kind of like a girlfriend, as much as “girlfriend” is a concept at eleven. He was determined to get her walking again. There were already various technologies around that could do that, in a manner of speaking, such as exoskeletons and, in some cases, spinal regeneration. But her particular medical condition prohibited either option. That’s when Soren alighted on the idea of attacking the problem with nanites. No one had yet devised any for such an application. Even if they had, her father was a religious freak, and would never have compounded her problems with “the mark of the beast.” And Soren was too poor to do anything but attack the problem from the vantage point of hi-tech graveyards where he could salvage for scrap.

  Soren used the pressurized liquid nitrogen in the canister to spray the chain link fence, cutting a hole big enough to wheel Esmerelda through. He paraded her down aisle after aisle of the mountains of morsels—odds and ends, mostly—as if they were shopping at Wal-Mart. She would point if he missed anything, and he’d pick up the item and examine it and say, “Yeah, this’ll work. Good eyes, Ez.” He’d rest the item in her lap and continue carting her and their booty down one aisle after the other.

  Until security got after them. “Hey, you two... . What the…? Get out of here, you freaks!” The black security guard sported grey whiskers that punctured his face along the edges, but, unlike acupuncture needles, those whiskers brought no healing to mind, body, or soul. In all his years, he hadn’t accrued a drop of humanity. It was all in his voice. “Get out of here, I said!” He threw more bric-a-brac at them—anything that was at hand—as if fearing to get any closer. Techa knows, what they were carrying might be contagious.

  Soren picked up speed and he and Ez had a bit of fun racing out of the compound, and away from the snapping dog that the guard unchained just for the satisfaction of seeing it take a chunk out of Soren’s ass. He and Ezzy laughed hard the whole time they were running for their lives.

  It was the last time Soren remembered Ezzy laughing.

  He was sixteen by the time he made any true headway with her problem. By then, his heart had swollen to the size of the moon with his determination to put a smile back on Esmerelda’s face with what he knew of the suffering she was enduring. But her heart had shriveled to the size of a pea. That was Soren’s first lesson that suffering didn’t wear as well on some people.

  By the time he solved the problem enough to test it on her and not just on the crippled rats, he was eighteen, and so was she.

  She responded well to the treatment. So well that nowadays she could be found playing supervillain around town. Minor league of course. The only thing major league about her was the hatred she carried over from her childhood. She thanked Soren for all he’d done for her, hugged him, and that very day the cure took, she was gone. She’d been exercising—as opposed to exorcising—her rage on all those who ridiculed her in youth ever since. It must have been a long list, because in over a year she’d never returned, not for one visit; Techa forbid she take a break from her well-tended vendetta-list of names.

  He had suspected things would go as they did for her. But he had to try; he had to see if living without suffering would finally put a smile back on her face, get her heart to plump up again. The success of the surgery did put a smile on her face, of course, only a menacing one.

  About the one good thing to come out of the experience was that Soren didn’t have much additional work to do to apply his fix to himself. And after the rebirth—what would be the first of many—he was all set to play superhero.

  Little did he know, the monster he was determined to leave behind would follow him forever, always in a different guise, only growing more powerful, in its own way; as if he shared a shadow soul with Esmerelda, his old girlfriend in the wheelchair. She’d come to let her monster rule her; the most he could hope for perhaps from now on was to share the stage equally with his monster; but how many more of those fights would he win before he, too, lost the battle entirely to the beast within?

  He hadn’t thought about Esmerelda much in a long time now; it took losing his first battle with the monster in him to bring any memory of her back at all. He was, after all, partly responsible for what she’d become, and so it was simply less painful to put her out of his mind.

  But now that he no longer had the high moral ground relative to her, and now that guilt ruled him no more and was but a distant recording on his mindchip, now that there was little separating the two of them, memories of her were surging back.

  And like rain splattered on a seed in the desert, the monster agitated into life by the memories, broke through to the surface.

  ***

  Soren rose out of the tank with a roar so loud it shattered the overhead windows. Evidently, as they were just being put back in. Player was levitating the last of the panes, and Lar, so he could work upside down to caulk the last of them. Player lowered Lar back to the ground.

  His family, all in attendance, anxiously awaiting his rebirth, looked hopeful, if only for a second. But then he shouted, “You’ve condemned me to roam among the walking dead. I’ll kill you! I’ll kill every last one of you for doing this to me!”

  ###

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  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  So much research goes into even a highly speculative book of this kind. As much as you’d be tempted to believe it’s all imagination, it’s not. To this end I’m indebted to far too many souls to name. But the short list would have to include:

  Those witting and unwitting souls who share their work so freely on the internet. In particular, those folks whose discoveries or reportage thereof weighed heavily in granting my prose that extra realism factor.

  My primary Facebook newsfeed folks who keep their nose to the ground for all breaking technology news, especially those pertaining to the transhuman era. Gareth John, Marco Santini, Sergio Tarrero, René Milan, Louisa Baqués, chief among them, but there are literally hundreds of others.

  And, of course, to the many transhumanist Facebook groups to which I belong, whose mind-trust is invaluable. Not just for the sharing of great intel, but for the willingness of all participants and experts in their fields to answer questions.

  A debt of thanks too great to repay is also owed to my loyal beta readers, and to my writer’s circle. They help me to get outside of my own head and help to illuminate all my blind spots when it comes to editing and fact checking.

  And last but not least, a great thanks to a beta reader, Lori Bower, who read the manuscript not once, not twice, but three times. If you’d like to thank her, you can reach her at lori.brower.edit@gmail.com.

  That said, all errors are entirely my own. As the buck stops with me.

  AFTERWORD

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