Frank makes that nasty discovery and has some feelings which disturb his normally icy intellectual equilibrium. Bad news for someone...
The Black Pool
Some time in the 1980s Frank had dragged the tank into this forgotten room. He had set up a basic laboratory and, following a half-term trip to Edgeøya, had filled it with water rich in the nutriment. Frank VII had then been initiated, inception coming from a cell he had removed from...
He had no idea where. He shivered with mental fatigue and the horror of the new reality of his decay. More than the new body which was vital, he needed a new brain which was essential. He reached into his jacket and found the phial. He remembered the getting of the contents and smiled. As usual he would enjoy this particular victory over the one who had thought to use him; who had the arrogance to imagine that he was superior to Frank. Every second of each of his campaigns had given him the warm satisfaction of knowing in just whose farmyard the chickens were going to shit, as Professor O’Connell, the contributor to Frank III had often said.
This particular contributor to the Greater Frank had been a brilliant bio-chemist in the traditional Western mode and a ruthless businessman. His enormous wealth had allowed his interests to wander along the more obscure by-ways of science and so, like most of the others he had found Frank and come to him with his ambitious requests. It had taken Frank less than five minutes to decide that Michael Driscoll’s cerebral vigour would one day be his, although if he had realised then how risky and futile the operation was going to be he may well have opted for a more immediate harvest. He’d had his fingers burnt, he didn’t mind admitting it, but it was only a blip. The big plan, as personified by the Greater Frank was unaffected. He knew that Frank VII would by now be full formed, a perfect clone of himself suspended in the nutriment, waiting only for the cognitive serum that would enable the transfer.
He loved the sub-basement for a number of reasons. The academic nostalgia was important of course, but also the convenience of the school’s neglected boiler, easily reached by the platform, and into which Frank VII would place his current body sometime tomorrow for a rapid and discrete incineration. He filled his trusty Victorian syringe with Driscoll’s mental essence and turned to the tank. Back in the Nineteenth Century he had used opiates to crush the ache of bleeding himself out into the nutriment, but these days that drowsiness was the twenty year kick for which he waited with an edgy passion. To die, to spill the life-blood and experience everything dissolving in the dark liquid, to cease in every sense. He sighed and sought himself in the tank. He felt the cold slippery flesh of his chest, moved his hands up to grip his body under the arms and lifted it into the yellow light.
His breath stopped suddenly, prematurely, painfully. His perfect clone’s skull was grotesquely malformed, a huge crack had been opened in the back of the skull and the brain was a slushy mass of stinking grey mud. His mind reeled at the recognition of his own abortion. An immense unmoveable gate had slammed shut over the future. It was to be weeks before the shock would recede enough for him to be able to focus not on the end of the Greater Frank; his failure and consequently fairly imminent death, but on who had been the agent of this disaster and yes, why not? On revenge.
The Black Pool
Some time in the 1980s Frank had dragged the tank into this forgotten room. He had set up a basic laboratory and, following a half-term trip to Edgeøya, had filled it with water rich in the nutriment. Frank VII had then been initiated, inception coming from a cell he had removed from...
He had no idea where. He shivered with mental fatigue and the horror of the new reality of his decay. More than the new body which was vital, he needed a new brain which was essential. He reached into his jacket and found the phial. He remembered the getting of the contents and smiled. As usual he would enjoy this particular victory over the one who had thought to use him; who had the arrogance to imagine that he was superior to Frank. Every second of each of his campaigns had given him the warm satisfaction of knowing in just whose farmyard the chickens were going to shit, as Professor O’Connell, the contributor to Frank III had often said.
This particular contributor to the Greater Frank had been a brilliant bio-chemist in the traditional Western mode and a ruthless businessman. His enormous wealth had allowed his interests to wander along the more obscure by-ways of science and so, like most of the others he had found Frank and come to him with his ambitious requests. It had taken Frank less than five minutes to decide that Michael Driscoll’s cerebral vigour would one day be his, although if he had realised then how risky and futile the operation was going to be he may well have opted for a more immediate harvest. He’d had his fingers burnt, he didn’t mind admitting it, but it was only a blip. The big plan, as personified by the Greater Frank was unaffected. He knew that Frank VII would by now be full formed, a perfect clone of himself suspended in the nutriment, waiting only for the cognitive serum that would enable the transfer.
He loved the sub-basement for a number of reasons. The academic nostalgia was important of course, but also the convenience of the school’s neglected boiler, easily reached by the platform, and into which Frank VII would place his current body sometime tomorrow for a rapid and discrete incineration. He filled his trusty Victorian syringe with Driscoll’s mental essence and turned to the tank. Back in the Nineteenth Century he had used opiates to crush the ache of bleeding himself out into the nutriment, but these days that drowsiness was the twenty year kick for which he waited with an edgy passion. To die, to spill the life-blood and experience everything dissolving in the dark liquid, to cease in every sense. He sighed and sought himself in the tank. He felt the cold slippery flesh of his chest, moved his hands up to grip his body under the arms and lifted it into the yellow light.
His breath stopped suddenly, prematurely, painfully. His perfect clone’s skull was grotesquely malformed, a huge crack had been opened in the back of the skull and the brain was a slushy mass of stinking grey mud. His mind reeled at the recognition of his own abortion. An immense unmoveable gate had slammed shut over the future. It was to be weeks before the shock would recede enough for him to be able to focus not on the end of the Greater Frank; his failure and consequently fairly imminent death, but on who had been the agent of this disaster and yes, why not? On revenge.
1 comment:
and yes, why not? On revenge.
Haha xD I should hope so too, Fracito
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