Captured Souls (16 page)

I slowly stepped out of the tub; being covered in warm mud with a champagne head rush makes it a dangerous business, so I had to be very careful. I went over to Specimen 3 and hauled her limp, heavy, mud-clad body from the tub. I laid her down on the floor, and cleared her nose and mouth. Then I carefully stepped over to the desk, leaving clumps of mud in my wake, and rang for an attendant.

“Hello?” I called out, my voice frantic. “Can anyone help us? Help us!”

I waited for a while, pulled at Specimen 3 again, slapping at her face, turning her over to let the mud roll off of her.

“Anyone?” I screamed as I pressed the emergency bell again. The only sound was the miniwaterfall crashing beside me.

It was five minutes before anyone came and Specimen 3 was long dead.

The attendant was rightfully horrified and couldn’t imagine what happened. It wasn’t my fault no one heard the bell that I rang several times. I played the distraught partner very well, hysterical in my grief. But nothing would bring back my beauty.

It was a relief.

Journal

I asked the funeral home to ship the body to me at the university morgue until I was able to locate a relative to take her body.

At the university, I was able to take several molds of her body in several positions for various classroom studies. I was actually getting a reputation of casting better molds than some of the big companies who were rushed and careless. My molds were carefully crafted from the specimens. Over the years, I’d explored several techniques to replicate the living. Many of my attempts resulted in perfection as magnificent as any mortuary or Hollywood FX team.

Building up inventory, while slipping in two molds to take to my home laboratory for my own devices, was normal protocol. All the bases had been covered years ago. My portfolio. My creatures.

Once I had replicated the beautiful creature who lay in repose in the coffin, I was able to perform a sleight of hand for the security cameras. The illusion was that I had taken home two artificial bodies, not one fake and one real.

Specimen 3 floats in a pool of fluids, the components of which are detailed more thoroughly in my other journal. The implants still pulse, multiple tubes pierce her in various parts of her body, a labyrinth linking her life flow to a computer. Her beauty is all around me, filtered through the electrodes and pulsing into my own bloodstream. She is here, only her soul is gone. The heart has stopped for now.

Even now, as I write in this journal, I can feel her long, slender fingers tickling the back of my neck, sending shivers up and down my spine in that playful manner unique to her.

“I wish it hadn’t come to this,” I told her as I stared at her floating in her fluid. “It’s my fault. I grew sloppy.” So entranced with my own grandeur because of my success with the first two specimens that I had miscalculated with the third one, for the female hormones, for the hollow lack of empathy.

Specimen 3

She had been immersed in the fluids for long enough without proceeding with the experiment. I had needed time to think and catch my breath. As I get older, it seems to take longer and use up more energy to do the tasks that came so easily in my youth. However, after more pondering, I was up to the task to begin the next phase.

It was time to slowly reprogram her essence back into her physical body. I turned on the MP3 player, the surround sound in the room cranked at full blast. Multiple speakers were attached to the glass and sometimes the water would tremble slightly if a piece with heavy bass was routing through the system, both on the overhead system and through the water. She was being bathed in the new program.

Her flesh twitched and tremored where the multiple electrodes were affected, jerking like a frog-leg experiment. I hummed along as I made notes about the recordings and vital signs in the other journal. It would take an indeterminably long time for the switchover to happen. It might be days, weeks, perhaps even months. Patience is one skill that I need to continue to hone in order to persevere with these experiments.

The fluids were mostly a conducting gel that gently routed the electromagnetic currents to various parts of her body. Her brain was being rerouted, new paths for the synapses to fire on. Her heart began to vibrate once more. One tremor at a time. A false life. An illusion created by machinery and technology. The first trick would be capturing her essence. The second trick, if at all possible, if time and money and patience would allow, would be to see if she could be salvaged and reprogrammed with a new essence.

The second part I am completely skeptical about, never seeing reports or even hints of success in any papers, books, blogs or journals that I’d ever read. Sure, there was the reattaching of limbs, growing a few new body parts, cloning and the like. But if I removed her essence, could she be reanimated, and if so, what would she be like? I am completely skeptical that anyone has attempted the exact experiment that I am contemplating, once this first experiment is complete.

After fourteen hours there were small changes. Limbs moved slowly in the fluids like an embryo in the uterus. She was breathtaking and I photographed her many times.

I framed one of the pictures and hung it in my bedroom. The photograph shows her face in sweet repose, lips demure, high, sharp cheekbones and, somehow, an air of innocence. Sleeping Beauty in her crypt. The photograph is blurry because of the fluids which give the observer a sense of being underwater. There were two tiny cables entwining, floating by the side of her face, woven from the bottom of the picture towards the top. It was as if she was being born all over again, the fluids both giving and removing her life force.

Captured in that one photographic moment was all that I loved and despised in my beauty.

Journal

Specimens 1 and 2 are bored and boring. No matter what combinations I try, the initial
joie de vivre
isn’t there. Sure, they still fuck like rock stars and that’s why it’s always so difficult to make logical decisions.

I grow weary of their day-to-day routines. Specimen 1 does his weird hours of writing, Specimen 2 is off at the crack of dawn to jog or bike or swim. Around nine o’clock at night, we fuck for a couple of hours or go clubbing. I go back to research. Specimen 1 goes back to writing. Specimen 2 goes to bed.

Wash. Rinse. Repeat

The point isn’t settling.

The point is perfection.

And one person’s perfection isn’t another’s.

How do you activate the part of the brain that makes a person perceive perfection?

And what do you do when your idea of perfection mutates?

To them, the boys, they have perfection. They watch TV and play video games to their hearts’ content, eating and drinking at will, indulging in their muses for a time and getting fucked on a regular basis in various ways.

But this is my world and my perfection. These are not the men that stirred lust in me. These men have become complacent, and in turn, so have I.

And I must not settle.

I don’t want to send them into the next phase of the experiment just yet. I can’t let either one of them go until I’m certain it will be a success.

Journal

My specimens utterly exhaust me. For two days and two nights, I had nothing to do with any of them. I drugged and shackled them, and there they will stay until I’m ready to soldier on.

I need the break. Tending to them is exhausting and thankless. My mind needs to focus on other stimuli to refresh. Even someone as focused as me can suffer burnout.

For nearly forty-eight hours, I left my bedroom suite only to rummage for food in the kitchen to put into my room fridge. A few bottles of red wine were also brought in. The bed was the perfect sanctuary and so were the specialty stations that my big-screen TV was showing. I lost myself in old movies—
King Kong
, several versions of
Frankenstein
, a few
Dracula
s and
Creature Features
. I moved on to Marilyn Monroe’s
Seven Year Itch
and then a Shirley Temple movie. I ate poorly, drank too much booze, smoked too much pot and thought of nothing but what was on the screen before me.

Once I had my brain-cleansing decompression session, I was ready to move forward.

My biggest issue is that I’m falling prey to my lust again.

I want something exciting to happen, and everything is routine and boredom now. This is how it always turns out.

Since I’m in charge and what I say goes, there’s no sense of surprise or playfulness.

Is the answer truly to start the search again? Does this mean that the experiment is a failure?

Though I’ve not completed the next phase yet, it’s still too early to know if the experiment could be a success. However, do I have the passion to carry on with my current specimens?

Journal

I made the decision as I stood in the shower, the pelting of hot water on my skull pounded in another component to my experiment. I needed to find a new specimen. It was time to stir the pot. So the combination of beauty, brains and brawn didn’t work out this time. Perhaps I’m very close to another combination. Or maybe I’m missing an element I’d not considered before. There is always so much more to learn the very minute that we believe that we’ve unlocked the puzzle.

Instead of presenting to myself a detailed schemata of who the next specimen would be, I’d let fate decide. Perhaps I’d choose the first one I meet. Perhaps I’d need to examine several possibilities until I decided on the next honored guest in my sacred family.

Once I pampered myself with a day of self-mani-pedis, lounged around in a terry-cloth robe dying my hair a one-off magenta, the plan began to formulate in my mind.
 

I returned to the sex club. This time, I was solo.

From the moment I showed up at the door, I was greeted warmly, as if I were the most important person in town. The doorman knew me by name, the desk clerk gave me my single-lady bracelet and I didn’t even have to pay. Ladies night. Fate was on my side.

I stood staring around the club, happy to see many single guys walking around. There appeared to be a few options.

The idea was to add a component into the family that had been missing. I had three but in my haste to begin my research, I didn’t consider in any real detail that there are always more and how our yearning for components mutates. Should there be more finance? How about an artist? Perhaps a computer programmer would be most handy with all of my equipment.

The cosmopolitans went down easy and soon the dance floor was flush with pickings. Sure, everyone was milling around this early in the night, but soon there would be dancing.

Standing at the bar, waiting for another cosmo to be made, a tall, buff, scruffy, blond guy with multiple earrings and tattoos stood very close to me. He had a very young face.

“You’re new,” he said, with a not-quite-convincing façade.

“I beg to differ,” I said. “You’re the one who’s new.”

He took a sip of his drink.

“Are you even old enough to drink, young man?” I whispered to him playfully.

“I love to play with cougars,” he said with a smile.

He bought me a drink, which actually surprised me, but I gave him points for having manners.

“What’s your name?” I asked him.

“Brad,” he said. “What’s yours?”

“Miriam.” We shook hands and laughed. We stepped away from the bar, towards the dance floor which was beginning to fill with couples gyrating lasciviously. I watched a couple, regulars I'd played with
 
many times,
 
in front of us dirty dancing. The man was snaking his hand right up his wife’s legs, under her miniskirt and into her G-string. The boy stared at the couple as if watching his first porn movie.

“What do you do? Are you still in high school?” I teased, running my fingers along his firm bicep. His hair smelled fresh and fruity, with a dash of musk and a bit of nervous sweat. The smell of prey, ripe for the picking. Is this the type of specimen I need or will he just be a toy for the night?

“I’m done with high school. In fact, did a year of college, but now I’m freelancing.”

“Oh really? Doing what?” The couple in front of us was now necking, the man’s hands massaging her ass while they rocked into each other to the chants of Lady Gaga. They looked at me. I smiled. I remembered them, Cassandra and Felix, and raised my glass in a toast. I turned my focus back to Specimen 4.

“I’m a musician,” he said rather sheepishly.

“Oh… So how can you afford to pay one hundred twenty dollars to come in here on ladies’ night, not to mention the ten-bucks-a-pop drinks?”

“I’m a session musician. When big groups come to town, they hire locals and I get steady work. Bands and movies are my gigs. Sometimes a commercial. Of course, I also play my guitar in a nightclub. But it’s not my only trick. I play a lot of instruments.”