Prodigal Son

abandoned hospital converted to serve his primary work and staffed with men of his making, he pursued the creation of the new race that would replace flawed humanity.
        Here, behind the pantry, measuring twenty by fifteen feet, this retreat provided a place for him to work on small experiments, often those on the leading edge of his historic enterprise.
        Victor supposed that he was to arcane laboratory equipment what Santa Claus was to gizmo-filled toy workshops.
        When Mary Shelley took a local legend based on truth and crafted fiction from it, she'd made Victor a tragic figure and killed him off. He understood her dramatic purpose for giving him a death scene, but he loathed her for portraying him as tragic and as a failure.
        Her judgment of his work was arrogant. What else of consequence did she ever write? And of the two, who was dead-and who was not?
        Although her novel suggested his workplace was a phantasmagoria of gizmos as ominous in appearance as in purpose, she had been vague on details. Not until the first film adaptation of her book did the name Frankenstein become synonymous with the term "mad scientist" and with laboratories buzzing-crackling-humming with frightening widgets, thingums, and doohickeys.
        Amusingly, Hollywood had the set design more than half right, not as to the actual machines and objects, but as to ambience. Even the studio behind the pantry had a flavor of Hell with machines.
        On the center worktable stood a Lucite tank filled with a milky antibiotic solution. In the tank rested a man's severed head.
        Actually, the head wasn't severed. It had never been attached to a body in the first place.
        Victor had created it only to serve as a braincase. The head had no hair, and the features were rough, not fully formed.
        Support systems serviced it with nutrient-rich, enzyme-balanced, oxygenated blood and drained away metabolic waste through numerous plastic tubes that entered through the neck.
        With no need to breathe, the head was almost dead still. But the eyes twitched behind the lids, which suggested that it was dreaming.
        The brain within the skull was self-aware but had only the most rudimentary personality, sufficient to the experiment.
        Approaching the table, Victor addressed the resident of the open Lucite tank: "Time to work, Karloff."
        No one could say that Victor Helios, alias Frankenstein, was a humorless man.
        In the head, the eyes opened. They were blue and bloodshot.
        Karloff had been selectively educated by direct-to-brain data downloading; therefore, he spoke English. "Ready," he said, his voice thick and hoarse.
        "Where is your hand?" Victor asked.
        The bloodshot eyes shifted at once to regard a smaller table in a far corner of the room.
        There, a living hand lay in a shallow bowl of milky antibiotic solution. As in the case of the head, this five-fingered wonder was served by numerous tubes and by a low-voltage electrical pump that could empower its nerves and, thereby, its musculature.
        The systems sustaining the head and those sustaining the hand were independent of each other, sharing no common tubing or wiring.
        After reading the status displays on the equipment and making a few adjustments, Victor said, "Karloff, move your thumb."
        In the dish, the hand lay motionless. Motionless. And then… the thumb twitched, bent at the knuckle, straightened again.
        Victor had long sought those genes that might carry the elusive psychic powers that humankind had sometimes experienced but had never been able to control. Recently he had achieved this small success.
        This ultimate amputee, Karloff, had just exhibited psychomotor telekenesis, the control of his entirely detached hand strictly by means of mental exertion.
        "Give me an arpeggio," Victor said.
        In the shallow bowl, the hand raised on the heel of its palm and strummed the air with all fingers, as if plucking at the strings of an invisible harp.
        Pleased by this display, Victor said, "Karloff, make a fist."
        The hand slowly clenched, tighter, tighter, until the knuckles were sharp and white.
        No emotion showed in Karloff's face, yet the hand seemed to be an exquisite expression of anger and the will to violence.

CHAPTER 15
        
        NEW DAY, NEW DEATH. For the second morning in a row,