You Will Reap What You Sow

There exists a small check within the human spirit, a nagging voice is how some might describe it. One that warns of an unspoken line being crossed, that going any further would be akin to playing with flames until flesh falls clean off the bone. However, I am incapable of hearing such a voice, which is why things began to accelerate the moment I gazed into those beautiful amber eyes. Those eyes that were now my own, and yet not...

Back then, I wept. It wasn’t two hours, twenty minutes, and thirty-one seconds after the procedure when I wailed in a fist-clenching rage, shattering a vanity mirror painted with the sharp afterglow of those perfect eyes. Within my mechanical heart raged two separate feelings, each powerful in its own way.

First, that I would never again gaze upon the world with the flawed, albeit natural eyes that my mother gave me, or feel the unstable thumping warmth of the mass deep in my chest. Hidden within that bodily cavity, now, was a clattering echo. The second of my feelings, however… giddiness. A clear step over the line outside of normalcy, of which I could never again hope to cross back over. A glowing sign of telltale progress, signaling to me that I, Dr. Stein, was well on my way to hard-wrought perfection.

. . .

I cut a striking figure in the mirror, the mirror I had freshly replaced after shattering the last two or so. I simply couldn’t help it when my mood swings were increasing with every fresh, fleshy piece of the puzzle that I applied to my body. Ever under construction, the gears in my brain turned with what to add next. A flat smile tugged at the corners of my newly formed lips, full and luscious.

I proceeded to trace my jawline with my index and middle fingers, sharp enough to chip a razor blade, and took mental notes of where the hair follicles were sprouting the first bits of stubble. I had always fancied a beard, and the moment I saw that man in the catalogue, I just knew I had to have his face for my own. It was easy enough to make a few calls to an acquaintance who owned a shaving company to hire him as a model, and collect the hairs from the shoot for replication synthesis.

​

You’d be surprised just how many favors I was owed in the business world. There was quite a demand for fully rendered clones, of those both willing and unwilling to forfeit their DNA to create. The numerous ethics debates aside, our lab facilities were rolling in fresh funding for our experiments, not excluding my own personal transformation project. And as for my wife…

“Hey there, Dr. Stein, or should I call you Dr. Smoulder?”

She didn’t seem to mind.

My wife, Shelley, snuck up behind me, just barely managing to wrap her thin arms around my shoulders from behind. She peered around me with a seductive smirk, crossing gazes with me in the mirror. I felt like how a dish in the microwave might feel being watched while rotating, at risk of being devoured any second.

But I didn’t mind either. ​

“It turned out even better than you thought, huh?” She asked, eager to share in the joy of a job well done.

“I don’t know…” However, I had a rare instance of self-doubt creep into my mind suddenly. “Sure, the graft took better than anyone estimated, but, just maybe… It’s still not quite enough. By discovering those that have what I don’t yet possess, my mind surges with the possibilities, and yet I’m also reminded of my ever-present imperfections.” ​

Not to mention the naysayers and those terrified of scientific progress. Small-minded fools that they are, they wouldn’t understand. ​

“Imperfections? Such as?”

“Such as—? I mean, look at me.”

“I am looking.” My wife said without missing a beat. “And would you like to know what I see?”

I knew she would come right out and tell me, so I elected to humor her and let her explain what she meant.

“I see the man I fell madly in love with, and that’s all.” She warmed up the room with that smile of hers, maybe the only woman in the world who could lead me around so effortlessly with just a word, and so hopelessly was I in love with her for that fact. “Sure, you’ve got some nice upgrades since we first met, that beautiful brain of yours hasn’t changed one bit.”

It is rather beautiful, isn’t it? ​

“In other words, I’m proud of you, my dear.” She squeezed me tight. “You’re so brilliant, I know you’ll find exactly what you’ve been missing, and then maybe you can grow to love yourself as much as I do… just kidding.” ​

“What I’m missing… huh?” I muttered inaudibly to myself, my hand drifting instinctively to the left side of my chest. ​

“After all, I love you to the moon and back…” She continued while I was lost, deep in thought at something she had said.

All the brilliance of even my brain paled in comparison to one key feature of my wife’s. The red, pulsing organ within her bosom. Her heart. Perhaps the greatest irony was that her strong, gorgeous, and kind heart was just the sort of piece I envied so. Being that mine was in such a state of disrepair. More than the face of a model, or the eyes of any sharpshooter.

A thought crossed my mind, a thought I swiftly buried, lest Shelley see the darkness swelter over my calculating gaze. Suddenly, however, I smiled more warmly than ever before and gave my wife a deep kiss on the lips. Though still numb from the procedure, a slight sensation still overtook my carefully crafted face. ​

When we parted, I leaned in to whisper something in her ear, hoping that she would humor me in turn with a promise. She answered without a moment’s hesitation, and with the same beaming smile as always.

“Of course, my dear. Have a great day at work!” ​

With that, I was out the door in my fanciest attire and into my luxury sports car. Today happened to be a day of extreme import, and I wanted to make certain everything went as perfectly as possible. When compared to such events as my wedding and the day I first synthesized a human limb from scratch, I’d probably place it somewhere between the two on the scale of importance.

Of course, I was referring to Stein Tech’s annual investor meeting. In terms of material wealth, my liquid assets were worth somewhere in the billions in stock and crypto trading, but it takes actual—tangible—assets to pay for lab equipment, and organic materials to experiment on. Not to mention staffing the company with only the best minds.

And paying them enough to keep their lips sealed.

That ever-present need for money is where the stuffy old fools in their wide-breasted suits come in. The investors. The kind of men who got rich from old money, oil, and not through any hard work or effort of their own. Their minds are simple. They care for nothing, aside from their profit margins, but that matters little to me. If they didn’t help keep the lights on at Stein Tech, I’d have a mind to call them buffoons to their plump, greasy faces.

I pulled into the parking garage with exactly eleven minutes to spare, the same as always. The walk from the garage to the reception desk took eight minutes, and another three to the conference room on the second floor. It was imperative that I open that door right at the agreed start time, 11 am. Not a moment sooner or later, I was warned on one occasion when I had a stapler thrown at me in anger. Imagine that the CEO of a multi-billion-dollar enterprise is taking orders from nepotism’s greatest stooges.

However torturous it is, though, I play nice all in the service of my dream. ​

I took a deep breath, my hands pressed flatly against the mahogany door. My mind counted down the thirty seconds before I’d make my grand entrance, and I heard my personal assistant, Arthur, yammering in his usual nervous manner on the other side. A man like him, alone with those ravenous wolves, I needn’t leave him to butter them up a moment longer than necessary. ​

“Hello, folks! Why don’t we go ahead and get this presentation started… already.“ I took a few steps toward the end of the conference table, but there was something clearly off about the atmosphere in the room.

“H-hello, sir.” Arthur greeted me quietly, his eyes clearly downcast. The man was pretty smart in his own right, but he had a bad way of concealing whatever trifling feelings were swirling around in that head of his.

“Alright, what’s going on here?” I scanned the room like a hawk, wondering how Arthur had managed to sour the moods of our guests in such a record-breaking amount of time. “Did the intern forget to put fresh coffee in the pot again? I thought I told her—”

“Sit down, son.” Emotionless and cold, the biggest fish of the bunch of cashmongers commanded me, his chin jiggling beneath his walrus-like mustache. The rest simply glared at me, putting on airs in their overpriced tuxedos.

I did as I was told, not quite knowing the gravity of what was about to occur. The portly man stood up, walking over to where I was now sitting, and slapped a newspaper down in front of me. I shot him an incredulous look; the atmosphere was beginning to get on my nerves. ​

“The morning paper, are you serious?”

“Read it, smartass, and tell me what it says.”

“Whistleblower exposes illegal human cloning…” My eyes widened.

“Keep reading!”

I clenched my fists, nearly crumpling the page.

“Stock down nearly 60%, SteinTech accused of blatant consumer antitrust, biological material theft, and ethics code breaches… But, how, WHO would—!?“

“One of your sick buddies didn’t hide the meat muppet he had made of his housekeeper well enough, and she found the damn thing stuffed in the closet.” The head investor explained to my shock. “We can ignore all the freakazoid operations on yourself, but we can’t ignore this. We’re pulling the funding, Doctor. It’s over.”

“Pulling the—!?” ​

The investors, in one swift motion, all stood up to leave the conference room. However, I jumped up and quickly tried to block them from escaping, now desperate to hold onto their patronage for even another moment.

“Let’s not be too hasty about this, gentlemen, maybe we can come to some other sort of—“

“Unhand me, freak!” With a surprising burst of strength, the walrus-like investor yanked me by my suit jacket, tossing me chest-first into the conference table with a loud crash. My artificial heart beat irregularly as I pointed my outstretched hand at the door, now inching closed. Arthur, meanwhile, scrambled to call for an ambulance, and the world around me grew cold. ​

I lost several things that day. My fortune, my makeshift heart, and the last trickling drops of my already-dwindling sanity. What I didn’t lose, however, was the burning desire to see my life’s work come to fruition. To achieve perfection in body and spirit would have made all the doubts and pains of living worth it. I withdrew from my circle and got to work on my final set of upgrades.

Without grant funding, and public trust in our research shattered, human specimens might be hard to come by going forward, as well as keeping the staff necessary to perform operations on myself. But I wasn’t entirely without options. After all, specimens come in all shapes and sizes…