The flesh in the furnace

That blob of stuff?"
        The light was green.
        Sebastian touched the knobs carefully and began to experiment with them. They slid easily in either direction, as far as he wished to turn them. It was curiously comfortable sensation to hold those soft, rounded instruments cupped in the palms of his hands, as if they were more than extensions of a machine, as if they offered him an intimacy with some personality which had no identity wafer but was every bit as real as the puppets.
        The light became amber.
        "There's something happening now," Noname said, pointing.
        The synthetic flesh curled and sought a form. But there was something about the agonizing struggle beyond the glass which bespoke sickness. It was more like a cancerous tumor burgeoning larger and larger than a healthy puppet coming to life. It squirmed and flushed with the colors of rot.
        "Soon," Noname said.
        But the amber was all wrong, and the idiot switched the knobs back and forth, both clockwise, both counterclockwise, now each opposed to the other in the direction of its turn. There should be crimson next, he knew, and finally the brilliantly pure white of a successful creation. As he sought those hues, his hands became more and more frantic with the knobs, and panic slowly replaced caution.
        "An arm!" Noname reported, as if all were going perfectly well and Bitty Belina would be with them in short order.
        But the arm was much too long, all out of proportion, with four knuckles in every finger, the fingers themselves deformed and twisted in a useless tangle.
        The amber blended with yellow into fierce brightness.
        The yellow became orange.
        This new development made Sebastian feel better, for the orange was closer to red than anything he had thus far produced. But the deformed hand remained there all the same, and the other arm looked even worse. It was too short where the first had been too long. The fingers were intact, but the elbow joint was swollen with useless cartilage and unfunctioning bones. It curved in against the jelling body, as if the puppet were clutching its stomach in pain.
        "A face," Noname Said.
        It was a girl's face.
        It was her face.
        "Hair," Noname said.
        Yellow hair crinkled below her smooth stomach, on the top of her bald head, curling down to her bare shoulders, tickling her pert breasts. He noticed one breast was set too far to the side.
        "No," he said, very quietly, very softly. A disgust rose in him, possessed him, and he wanted to break things.
        "Almost finished," Noname said. He did not hike the looks of what he saw, and he stepped back from the glass.
        "Bitty-" Sebastian said.
        As if that were a cue, she opened her eyes. She never should have been able to do that while in the womb, but she did. There was no eyeball in her left socket. The other blue gem watched him without expression.
        "No," he said, speaking more loudly now.
        She tried to get up from the forming tray, levering with her good elbow and her tiny feet. Still behind the glass, she seemed more like a part of a film than something real. She was still watching him in that way that told him nothing.
        "Stay," he said.
        She chattered. It seemed senseless.
        She managed to stand, and her face was pressed tight against the viewplate, directly beneath him. She tried to speak, but the words were not clear, even if they did contain some meaning.
        He turned and ran from the truck, into the darkness, gagging and sputtering, unable to get a clean breath. In the woods, lying on wet, dead grass, he began to weep.
        He watched Ben Samuels whittle and sketch. He spent long hours sitting quietly in the woods, waiting for the squirrels who were engaged in a last flurry of activity before winter set in. He watched the sky be blue and sometimes sat in the rain, feeling it. Nearly a week passed before he could bring himself to return to the Furnace and begin his experiments again. Even then, there was a horror waiting just below the surface of his mind, ready to possess him at the slightest opportunity.
        He decided against using Bitty Belina's identity wafer until he had the process conquered. When he could bring her back in her full beauty, then it would be safe to use her disc.
        "Which do you want to use?" Noname asked, sitting by the stacks of