E. Frankenstein or the Postmodern Prometheus Book One of Two (Title to Chapter 1, Page 1

E. Frankenstein or the Postmodern Prometheus

BOOK ONE OF TWO

Charles A. Metzner

Copyright © 2024 by Charles A. Metzner All rights reserved
No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means–electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or other–except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without prior permission of the author.
Paperback ISBN: 979-8-8229-3557-0 eBook ISBN: 979-8-8229-3558-7

For Apichart “Un” Nantasaeng and all the future archeologists out there.

“Here are deep matters, not easily dismissed by crying ‘Blasphemy.’” — William Buehler Seabrook, The Magic Island

“Hell’s boiling over, Heaven is full, we’re chained to the world, and we all gotta pull…” — Tom Waits, Dirt in the Ground

PREFACE

“The beginning is always today.”
—Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

In the seventeenth century both Sir Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wil- †
helm von Leibniz (the third of three modern rationalist philosophers ), invented calculus. However, von Leibniz published first. At least one of Newton’s friends accused von Leibniz of plagiarism though many of Leibniz’s notes reflected that he’d arrived at the arithmetic differently. At the same time, there was evidence that Leibniz had acquired some of Newton’s notes, which, though written in Leibniz’s handwriting, sug- gested there might be something to that.
Then again, both were aware of the other as contemporaries, had shared pieces of their progress with each other—if only secondhand— and likely influenced each other’s work, howbeit indirectly. There was no talk of Newton suing Leibniz for intellectual property theft, but there were hard feelings on at least one side, when it was entirely possible (and arguably obvious) that they’d both arrived at it not independently but interdependently and thus near simultaneously. Calculus was the next mathematic model to help express physics and economics—evidence for a demand. Each party was attempting to address and act as a supply for a growing amount of it. At the end of the day, certainly these days, it seems little is invented that isn’t a team effort. But “The beginning is always today,” according to Mary Shelley, anyway.
Before the internet (originally dreamed up in 1898 by Mark Twain in his sci fi short story From the ‘London Times’ of 1904), it seemed there was a collective unconsciousness, á la Carl Jung, coalescing around the planet. In this age, the world adopted an industrial model of progress. Said milieu acted like the troposphere, in that, little abrasions—like storm clouds colliding in this layer—built with greater concentration. As the population became denser problems sought a diversity of solutions, hence the academics vied to discover the next paradigm of progress.
And Friedrich Nietzsche rose from the pews, exploding with ap- plause. The more complex we get, the more lightning is thrown.

† The preceding two being Baruch Spinoza and René Descartes.
Prologue I Omen

Here I live in my tie-dye tent villa, wearing a tie-dye dress inside my own mandala-adumbrated tie-dye pavilion, staring at my witchboard, quartz crystal ball, and old stack of tarot cards. It’s quiet in here with only the remote mumblings of my fellow villagers in earshot. The smell of cooking ground beef and steak tripe seeps past the bead-curtain composing my tent’s entrance way.
I don’t normally read for myself. Few soothsayers do. Bad enough to be pigeonholed, worse still to pigeonhole oneself. Whether or not you believe in augury and whatever divining tools you use to get there, it’s viewed as amateur by elder seers—and nothing at all predictive.
But I was a curious cat. What harm could it do?
I saw a storm coming to town. Bad news for tent dwellers like me. At first, the storm will be welcome. We’re now in the doldrums, and a town like Daresti, or Bucharest for that matter, will say, “Providence!” Great for the crops. Lightning is forking and thunder clap- ping, only this storm doesn’t come from warm or cold fronts.
So little has moved over the course of my life. Customs overshad- ow everything. My mother and father soak in it, as do my siblings. I foretold my own engagement before my betrothed had courted me, also a Gypsy. He’s a dye collector. The rest of my clan call him Three Sheets behind his back. He drinks like a fish, smokes like a chimney with its flue rusted shut, and is thirty years my elder. This the ball foresaw. Then the storm moved toward our Walachian villa, and the images stopped rendering clear. Mayhap curiosity hadn’t killed, but it had effectively blinded me. One down, eight to go.
I fake it these days, like my orgasms. How else to make a living besides abject debauchery?
But no storm lasts forever, and this one ought pass over like the eponymous Hebrew holiday. I expect my visions will begin again in earnest, and it may be a frightening day. What If they initially fall on a monster? Would it not visit me first, forecaster of fates, so no fair warning could come? Worse, what if this monster is one who looks like we do? A harbinger no one sees coming?
On this day all custom will plummet from the sky like hail. There will be neither order, border, nor quarter.

—EB, Stargazer’s Almanac, 1796, year of our Lord, entry 379, translated from Romani

Prologue II Apocalypse

Erdogan had rallied his Osa, and I’d rallied mine. Boa skin needed to be collected for the ritual, but our houses were not full. A servant from mine and another from his were gone. These defectors were both females within our retinue, and it had occurred to us that each had been deprived of the jimsonweed cucumber for too long. To that end, we reequipped and gave chase. Not with the horses. Their clamor would betray our position, enabling their escape, and the clan of the rainbow serpent would not suffer desertion any more than I. The two had a head start, but we were master hunters, Erde and I, blessed with the ability to read the ground and spy disturbances in the forest—a broken branch here, a blood trail there, a spiral of dirt someplace else. Of course, we’d brought our bows, but neither of us had intended to kill them, and though my feet often betrayed me the Osa would not outrun us both.
There, the dirt was rustled in a quagmire by the pond. Scant interruptions
were evident, and the two had clearly headed off west of it. At a clearing Er- dogan and I took high ground and peered through tall grass.
There they were bathing in yonder pond. Had this been where they’d gradu- ally washed themselves free of the weed? I nodded to Erde, and he nodded back. Our bows flexed; the strings made taut. The sunlight of dawn glimmered off our arrowheads, and then each silently launched across the pond in a mild arc. Erde’s had missed its target, but mine sang true and pierced her calf. The other saw my missile, and both screamed, one paralyzed by injury and the other stark fear.
Gathering them up took little time as Erde and I were master swimmers, and neither of our Osa would expect we’d taken so direct or silent a route. We freed our now soaked flogs and gave both so sound a thrashing that they would lose their will to fight, their ability to think. They’d become delirious with the sap.
Further violence would be unnecessary. They’d been cowed, and Erde bound his servant ’s leg in weeds and loam to stanch the bleeding. We’d later flog all our servants. So clearly deprived of the cucumber, they were all made duly submissive and bewildered, once more made ready to grapple with snakes soon to shed. The skin is in itself not the agent but a spell trapping to develop the Silt’s proper texture. With these we’d be able to cultivate more servants who’d till the soil for all our pri- mary, secondary, and tertiary components—so as to fight the enemy.
Erde had spotted a moon snail and scolded his servant to pick up more of them. It contained the Narcisse. Though injured, she picked. I spied yagé vine and told my own to pull these florae down in handfuls. At my direction she then pissed on the site to mark it.
I summoned her housebound to my hut so that he might witness.
“Why did you run when you know it ’s only here with me that the Silt might
be made? Would you truly flee your own creed?”
She did not know and told me thus. Her head hung low, and her house-
bound trembled in a corner. Best now to test them.
“It’s with the mixture that our clan is the strongest. You realize this. The
white devil has come to kidnap you for a far worse fate than I could ever bestow. You are under my protection, yes?”
“Master, we know.”
“Yet you’d run. Even knowing what had happened to your younger, you’d run.”
“I have no explanation,” said she, abashed.
“Show me. Show me you’d devote yourself to our clan, Osa.”
And show me she did. Though hesitant, with her housebound eyeing her, her
mouth engulfed me, and she took long draws, her eyes connecting with mine, sowing tears. And I took her. There was no better way she might demonstrate her fidelity, that he might demonstrate his. And upon coming, I shot white jets into her housebound’s face.
After a momentary shudder, I decreed, “Let this baptism be a warning to you both. Our will is law. There is no better way than our way. There is no better hope than our hope. Your spirits belong to the Igbo. They had been for genera- tions. They always will be.”
“So we say,” said the Osa.
“So we act,” said her housebound, jism dripping off his chin.
“Now get out,” I said, concluding my reprimand. “And think on the harm
your actions have cost the clan.”
I later heard tell that her housebound beat her so hard that my Osa took
ill the following day. She died the following week—bad air—or moon snail oil, poisonous and lethal at the dose she’d hypothetically taken. She thought escape was possible, but her ouanga will haunt her in the afterlife. So say we. So we act. I now need to resupply. The day after, her housebound made an attempt on my life, but Erde saved me, clubbing him over the head with the end of a yew branch caked in cement. The Osa survived but was hence an idiot.
The following month we were all invaded by the ivory faces who spake their foreign tongue. I now scratch these notes into ship planks with a nail I’ve man- aged to free from one, as I’ve been deprived papyrus. These daemons all bore their metal pipes that could let sparks and metal issue fly.
My clan was stripped of their effects. My mother was raped in front of me, as was foretold. His spunk flew into my face like a cloud of gnats, as was fore- told. I was chained with an Osa fastened to my left and an Ohuhu to my right, speaking their savage cant and laughing at me.
I knew how to act among white men. This much my masters had taught me. But the blanche daemons had themselves not been taught our way. They had not yet been taught our hope. And I will retain this invisible parcel as a secret to journey with me.
Later this day we’ll all set adrift into unknown waters.

—Æ, My Chronicle—Blue Moon, translated from Oyigbo

PROLOGUE III Discursus

Dweller of Geneva, hail:
A fortnight ago, my next-door neigh- bor came home from work to discover his wife and children strewn about his house, strangled and distorted in un- speakable ways. I learned from both rumor and our constabulary that your kin were the source of recent evils. The police will soon investigate your family’s activities, Alphonse, but your neighbors will not be that patient. And comeuppance will not be that pretty. There will be a reckoning for you and your issue, sure as I sit here. You now have a running head start to heed this epistle. Flee.

Diary Entry 1
Monday, September 11, 1797, year of our Lord.
Welcome, one and all, to the contents of my head. By the time
you find this record, I’ll be long gone. It’s ticking now—time. I’m running out of it, and no contemporaries have addressed a crisis growing at the globe’s four corners, thus drafting me to said crisis. It rings of hubris, I know, deluded with airs/grandeur. But few outside my pedigree have the gift or inclination to effect real change amid a world turning in reverse. Colonist nations embracing barbarity are all the evidence one needs, and I am the last of my bloodline.
Ernest Frankenstein, archaeologists. Charmed. Always a bliss to see my name in print as I cannot utter it aloud. My family name is condemned thanks to my elder sibling’s activities. Most all his sins were ones of omission. Like so many of the world’s recent voyagers, he’d cast himself out into great depths with insufficient data. We live in such enlightened times, yet to damn oneself—one’s own family— with one’s persona…
However, are we not all operating with a lack of data regard- ing the stars and the planets, the depths of the sea and infections, the locust cycles and the heart of Africa—regarding so many things? I forecast exploratory surgery will one day be regarded, much like grave robbing, as barbarism. And the human animal will not free itself from ignorance no matter how much data it acquires. By the thirtieth century he will still be operating bereft so many needs, yet barbarism is the bridge over which we must cross before we modernize medicine, education, trade, politics, and wholesale culture.
Victor wrote me nary a letter during his hours of convalescence and strain. I understood then and now, of course. He didn’t bond with me the way he had to with the rest of the family; to our younger brother, William; to his nanny, Justine Moritz; to his best friend, Henry Clerval; or to his bride, Elizabeth Lavenza. Beside my parents (so I’m told), they died by his monster’s hand or its machinations. I suspect I survived assault because the creature knew that, of my family, I had the weakest connection to sever with its master.
This didn’t mean I never cared. I cared dearly for my family, Victor in particular, but he was so distant, and my father always told me to “mind my place.” It took more time for me than others who’d call themselves Frankenstein for the gravity to register.
I was born seven years after him and somewhat numb, admittedly self-absorbed, and a lagging riser. I poked my head out of the sand only after it was too late. Something of a bully, my elder brother demeaned me even as I glowed about him. Elizabeth became my mother figure after my real mother (Caroline) had surrendered to an infection she would hence pass on to me, one to which I nearly succumbed myself. Papa and Elizabeth were frequently harsh guardians.
For a little while I tried out for the track and field Olympic games (javelin), but I was too weak to truly compete, and my father wasn’t pleased by my failing to persevere.
Not-so-gradually I became persona non grata at Castle Frankenstein, so I dropped out of school (I’d lost so much time there anyway) and chased a more global education. I roamed a bit before returning to Europe. Victor was going mad and needed months of alienist ob- servation, much more than his mess of notes.
I have them now, captured in a cowhide tome, bound with a formidable lock to dissuade others from spying his cookbook to future cuisine. The key hangs around my neck like a guilty criminal.
I sit in my lab. Its ceiling is a glass astrodome. My guest sleeps in after a most brutal journey from Bulgarian jewel Varna. It’s gaslit in here and gaslit well, an innovation not five years old. I’m amid slab after granite slab fit with magnesium torches, each to the other act as applied heat for mixing variable A with B. There is life here in captivity—mussels and clams, frogs and salamanders, mice and rabbits. Two pink cockatoos (whom I named Romeo and Juliet) become disturbed in their cage as I pull the shroud off of it. Each screech with powerful little lungs and flay their wings, mostly to bat the other. There are cultures of molds and bacteria. Several fungi and plants are here, adorning the room if not part of actual science experiments.
And look, there they are, labeled Crocus (though just a couple of naked bulbs) and Azure Monkshood in near full bloom.
Victor was a crocus, a prodigy and early bloomer. His youth was a short one, but before it was over he had a fleshed-out idea of his occupation. He knew that he was going. He couldn’t anticipate to where, but he knew his future lay in harnessing electricity and conductive chemicals to reanimate dead bodies, eventually human bodies, raising both the dead and a world in hibernation. However, after he’d executed his burden, he became horrified with what he’d wrought and abandoned it immediately before circumstances relat- ed to his desertion resolved him to destroy it. My brother: unsure whether his path lay in beginning again or relinquishing it all as folly.
His creation though. Corresponding to my brother’s notations, it exhibited cunning every bit as much as its creator exhibited genius. It fought to live even as it had known itself to be a twitching abortion. And though my brother had shunned it, it sought to learn free from its creator, deciding if humanity would cast it down as anathema, it was, at the very least, entitled to company. It threatened my sibling to make it a female companion, or it would reciprocate Victor’s whim and seek to destroy him utterly.
Thus was Victor’s skewed foresight made manifest. Were he to make his monster’s female counterpart, it could result in a new race, cultivating themselves indefinitely until their numbers were adequate to go to war with the Homo sapien. Given its size, strength, speed, and intellect, it was a foregone conclusion that its descendants might well wipe us out. Why it never occurred to Victor that he could easily assemble this counterpart as infertile simply by leaving
out the ovaries, I surely don’t know. I think my birthrighted sibling was, at this point, under so much stress that so simple a solution was beyond his ken. Clearly he wasn’t operating with enough sleep, and according to his report, the thing was superhuman. Were Victor even to cast a bullet at it, this effort was no rejoinder to his crisis. But he could have reanimated more flesh, gifted his creature with what it asked, and deposited them on Eurydice (the Antarctic Peninsula), saying it was Patagonia. Intelligent as Victor’s begotten might have been, it was also surely naive. Eventually nature would address what my brother wasn’t physically up to, but by then the pressure his off- spring had placed on him and his upcoming nuptials no doubt made him sun blind to obvious answers. Had he consulted me…Had I been informed enough to advise him…
The creature’s first victims appeared shortly after my blessed mother died of scarlet fever (a strange heirloom to pass on, but she was the only Frankenstein to lavish me with affection), and it was likely thanks to her attentions that I survived my brain fever. Poor Willy expired by strangulation, and his nanny was blamed as though the forensic evidence could bear out Justine’s tiny hands being the mitts responsible for that. Not too long thereafter Victor was jailed for Henry’s murder, but just as Victor was directly innocent of that crime, he was also innocent of his betrothed’s. And in both cases, they were (reportedly) asphyxiated by this creature. Our father, unable to take the bad news, perished alongside the family from a weak heart. By then, I’d learned all this in absentia as I was on holiday. But I mourned—in my own way.
Victor now allegedly hunts his creature full tilt through the Norwegian mountains. Until what—? The isle of Spitzbergen? His creature would evade him until he slept—only to kidnap him, returning him to his lab so that, under duress, he’d keep his promise.
Of course Victor never meant to soil our family name, but if I made no overture, it would have been marred forever. There was naught what could be done about it apart from involving myself, so I reclaimed that burden and these notes for yours truly. What my brother had produced once he could surely manage twice without this grimoire. I think he’d be glad to be free of it. Before I left to globe-trot, I scattered notes about his lab, identifying female organs he could omit from his last reanimation so that he could complete it, his monster none the wiser. Then they could go live out their last days sequestered far from here. Should my elder brother read those notes, I’d left them coded in Burgundian. I don’t believe he knows that extinct language. I know I don’t. I’d only composed them using old reference materials, and I’m sure he’d decode it similarly, assum- ing he survived his arctic jaunt. Granted, he’d need to abandon our surname, as I have, so he’d not be sought out by vigilante justice. But despite how badly he’d denatured it, we’re still family, and I’ll always offer mine succor.
All water under the bridge now.
My name heresy, I had to sell our shared estate back to the bank (a thing I achieved by epistle as I was on the lam). The bank would have a challenging time foisting the property on any besides uninformed aliens, but it was a sturdy house and a coveted location. I transferred it as quickly as possible before a crowd surrounding it might curdle into a mob. This liquidated, I placed the lion’s share of my family’s estate inside Mayer Amschel Rothschild’s Frankfurt am Main bank branch under the guise of Dr. Ēgor Aptor. Victor liked playing with electricity. I like playing with other things, words and names being among them. There is power in these cheap baubles.
The combined family value was 2.38 million Swiss francs, rounded up. Victor was on a self-destructive path, but if he wanted to enjoy his inheritance, I had no aim to deprive him of it.
I’d since hired a reputable real estate agent to find me lodg- ings in the Balkans, where a sizable laboratory could be built. It’s from here I compose this entry. I told him to buy me a plot of land whence I could farm. Of course, that’s a threadbare summary of how I planned to develop it, but better the less he knew.
It is now I should explain how, while my brother’s activities would heavily influence my own, I had other goals. Thus, my ap- proach (and produce) would differ. It was one where my own wealth would need to swell if I was going to effect change in my day, my age.
I gaze now at the Aconitum fischerie, known vulgarly as the azure monkshood, simply nonpareil. Its time to blossom is between September and October. My specimen stands inside a vase etched with pictographs of Prometheus’s myth; Epimetheus’s myth; that of his wife, Pandora; that of their daughter, Pyrrha, and her husband, Deucalion. The monkshood is thus named because its flowers ap- pear like the headwear of a monk, and it, like me, is a late bloomer.
Where the crocus is benign and beautiful, the autumnal monkshood is blue and utterly poisonous, from its roots to its flowers to its very sap. Likewise, where Victor’s intentions were snow-pure, mine qualify otherwise, but we shall see whose animus rears the most valuable results. Just as Prometheus and Victor, I intend to provide the planet a gift, though it will be at a cost to itself.
By philanthropy or atrocity, I will make our surname meaningful again. Thanks to his failure to provide humanity fire, it might have wound up being but an endnote in history; however, I think he may well have thanked me for my delayed initiative. One appanage to being the younger: last licks.
And “what,” as Shakespeare invoked, “is in a name?”
Everything, my guests. It’s absolutely everything to those seek- ing immortality in the ledgers of the world. It’s branding. Everyone judges a book by its cover whatever else they may be told, whatever else they may believe.
Upon my return from abroad, I intercepted threatening mail and am now in exile, barred from my native homeland just as Victor and his creature have been. And I’ve taken an interest in population segment thus thrust from their native homes, shunned into a hostile world feared, dispossessed, reviled, scorned, scapegoated, and vulnerable. They are also special. Their existence is a commodity that those of unchallenged birth secretly covet and not so secretly capitalize on. The exiled are the metaphorical fuel that turn the earth, the living incarnation of musical chairs where a subculture is unseated and left standing. India’s untouchables are easily the people whose story this resounds loudest—15 percent of its population, just shy of twenty-six million people. But, of course, there are other examples.
The Jews’ standing in Europe? Obvious. However, they actually had a home in Israel and Judaea before it became Palestine in their absence. Now they live in diaspora, not legally enfranchised to own property in Europe, but in every noble court (only a few centuries before Reformation) there was the post of “court Jew” because it was illegal to lend money with interest for the Catholic or the Muslim. And though the Jews could not lend at usury to one another, their Tanakh made it kosher (ha!) to lend at interest to gentiles. At least it didn’t prohibit it. And so, other than doctor (ubiquitously legal for which to aspire since there were—and still are—so precious few of them), the Jew could pursue no profession other than tax collector or lender. Both of these callings? Disgraced, as was the Hebrew, for these “filthy” occupations and would develop an ever-vicious cycle of stigma between the gentile and the Jew as a gold digger. They are but a fifth of a percent of world population, estimated by the preeminent social scientist Msgr. Thomas Malthus (I’d visited a symposium whereat he’d spoken).
There are the Cagots, outcasts from France and Spain, born about the Pyrenees Mountains. There is no religious nor ethnic distinction from others in this region of the world. They’re simply unfortunate clans, families whose names had become synonymous with cretins, sexual deviants, sorcerers, cannibals, lepers, and lycanthropists. Many have sought (and still seek) to change
their surnames as affiliation with this creed means shunning. How many of these outcasts exist is unknown, but they too have spread throughout Europe or fled for the Americas and other corners of the world.
There are the Yemeni Akhdām. An estimate of 15 percent of every Yemeni is outcast. The Yemeni have this saying: “If an animal were to lick your plate, you wash it. If al Akhdām were to touch it, you break it.” Is there something to this 15 percent figure? Is it phenomenal?
Indeed, in Nigerian lands, there are over two hundred fifty cultures (speaking twice that number of languages), but the top three included the Hausa, Yoruba, and Igbo people, who have their own tribes of outcastes—the Osu and Ohuhu people. These are regarded as unclean, untouchable, strangers, subhumans, and slaves to their more fortunate neighbors.
And there are the Far Eastern nations—China’s Tanka boat people, Japan’s burakimin, Korea’s baekjeong, and Tibet’s ragyabpa. Untouchables all, some because they take on unclean professions such as fisherman, executioner, midwife, or whatever. Most no longer remember even why they’ve been cast out.Their status has no known written history, and they’re simply damned to cultural banishment.
Since banking my funds, I’d transferred wealth with gold coin and ingot to various parts of the world. I haven’t gotten to see Australia or New Zealand yet, but I’m beginning to get around. I’ve seen much of the Near, Middle, and Far East, including New Guinea. I’ve plumbed parts of the Dark Continent, especially the Slave Coast; the Americas; the West Indies; and Saint-Domingue on the Caribbean Island of Hispaniola. I even attempted to sail to Antarctica, only to be thwarted by bad weather. I got to see much of South America. Making my way through, I traveled by way of Central America and arrived in Mexico to find the ruins of Mayans and Aztecs. I headed northeast and encountered Alabama, the Florida panhandle, and Georgia, climbing my way up the plantations.

There, I saw a familiar people subjugated by yet another familiar people, and as I combed these lands, I learned American customs of the pioneer, the entrepreneur, and the ghosts of Adam Smith: the invisible hand, free markets, and economic libertarianism.
It was at the point I sailed to Long Island that I saw an Igbo in chains, sandwiched between an Osu and an Ohuhu. My mind began moving like the purple storm on Jupiter (discovered by Gian Domenico Cassini in the seventeen century).
The human being’s first conquest—the first resource he’d process—would be his own food in the fertile crescent. Chemicals grown from plants and animals were harvested, metals and minerals as well, but he who controlled the spigot of nutrition or fashion (tobacco, rice, hemp, indigo, wheat, oats, and cotton) dominated trade.
Big plantations vied against smaller plantations, and I observed a developing phase overcoming this young nation. Fierce competition is a force Americans foster. Just as I watched the rich youth become educated in medicine and law, the poor youth take up weaponry and marksmanship, and the tax-paying landowners cultivate their acreage to muscle for position in the markets, so did I watch an old market, only getting older, struggle up to compete for the sun: cheap labor—slaves, obviously, being the cheapest of which to be had. There was always demand for this, but as the population grew, so did it. The American plantation owner of the South saw its supply overseas, the unindustrialized lands of the Dark Continent.
It wasn’t everywhere, of course, not so much North Africa whose Moors had already discovered the rifle. It was mostly the southern and western parts, which meant good safari hunting, fur trapping, and the naked black man with his comparatively impoverished cultures.
However, I didn’t see impoverishment. I saw a rich ethnic diversity and an avalanche of culture. I was overwhelmed by the range of languages in Nigeria alone, though there were well over fifty countries that made up this cradle of humanity.
The slavers saw but one that mattered, an endless supply of unarmed “subhumans” darkened by the sun and thus conveniently adapted to outside labor.
The transatlantic slave trade had begun three centuries prior, thanks to the Portuguese. It was a hideous thing to watch, but the auctions for slave flesh were ramping up every year. When the boats came it meant a great separation from the living and the dead who didn’t survive the journey, the separation of villages, of clans, of tribes, of families, of child from mother in awful repetition. It was a heartless, ceaseless industry that took husband from wife, wife from her own dignity, and both husband and wife from education, agency, legacy, or transcendence—a holocaust.
There was much hideousness to observe the world round, and though Denmark had made overtures to ban the practice five years ago, there are still enough nations reluctant to do so. What could I do about it? This question had ceased being solely a fancy for me but idée fixe. The answer appeared to involve the culture’s very adoption of Adam Smith’s philosophy.
While I visited Okinawa, I learned a little about jujitsu. The martial art was elegance incarnate. I watched an eighty-pound woman, with subtle movements, overtake men more than twice her size by using their own weight against them. This technique—could a Frankenstein, achieve this in a more global, wholesale way?
My mind moved like clockwork. I had my brother’s tome. In America I’d watched as universities and churches rose to compete with one another. I watched human ingenuity become transforma- tive. First, an invention was patented. Shortly thereafter, a system of management was developed, and factories were built for the gun, the bullet, boots, paints, dyes, inks, solvents, glues, and so on.
So obsessed with his invention’s beauty and morality, Victor had dismissed he was its master—that he could have, over time, addressed its beauty and morality. He could have been its sovereign teacher, but he squandered these promises, not because he lacked for intelligence. Rather, it was his gut. His own invention had disgusted him at the moment it was most vulnerable. My sibling had been robbing graves and suturing dead cadavers together. Had he expected an Adonis? At this critical moment of its reanimation, he could have tamed it, trained it, eventually reproduced it, and repeated.
Nowhere in his notes did he address what his next steps were after the success of reanimation. He had no agenda. No plans to panel test, to patent, to publish in scientific journals, to seek peer review, to prepare for bulk manufacture, to market his product, or indeed deter- mine its value and range of applications, even though two centuries of invention follow this pattern. Just from last century and this one:

– 1600—Zacharias Janssen invents the first microscope.
– 1608—Hans Lippershey invents the refracting telescope.
– 1624—William Oughtred invents the slide rule.
– 1625—Jean-Baptiste Denys invents gear for blood transfusion. – 1629—Giovanni Branca invents the steam turbine.
– 1636—W. Gascogne invents the micrometer.
– 1642—Blaise Pascal invents the adding machine.
– 1643—Evangelista Torricelli invents the barometer.
– 1650—Otto von Guericke invents the air pump.
– 1656—Christiaan Huygens invents the pendulum clock.
– 1668—Sir Isaac Newton invents a reflecting telescope.
– 1670—Dom Pérignon invents Champagne.
– 1671—Gottfried W. von Leibniz invents the first calculating
machine.
– 1675—Christiaan Huygens follows up and patents a pocket
watch (though Peter Henlein, a locksmith, was first to develop
one in 1510).
– 1676—Robert Hooke invents the universal joint.
– 1679—Denis Papin invents the pressure cooker.
– 1690—Edmond Halley, of the titular comet, invents the
diving bell.
1698—Thomas Savery invents the steam pump.

And, inexorably, it just kept coming.

– 1701—Jethro Tull invents the seed drill.
– 1709—Bartolomeo Cristofori invents the piano.
– 1711—John Shore invents the tuning fork.
– 1712—Thomas Newcomen patents the atmospheric steam
engine.
– 1714—Gabe Fahrenheit invents the thermometer.
– 1723—Ambrose Godfrey invents the fire extinguisher.

– 1733—John Kay invents the flying shuttle, recasting the
weaving wheel.
– 1745—E. G. von Kleist invents the Leyden jar, the first elec-
trical capacitor.
– 1752—Benjamin Franklin invents the lightning rod.
– 1755—Samuel Johnson publishes the first English language
dictionary.
– 1757—John Campbell invents the sextant.
– 1758—Dollond invents the achromatic lens.
– 1761—John Harrison invents the navigational clock or marine
chronometer for measuring longitude.
– 1764—James Hargreaves invents the spinning jenny, which
(along with John Kay’s apparatus) is the first device that has
industrialized spinning cotton into fabric.
– 1767—Joseph Priestley invents carbonated water.
– 1768—Richard Arkwright patents the spinning frame, which
has made yarn produced on the spinning jenny stronger.
– 1769—James Watt invents an improved steam engine.
– 1770—Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot develops the first steam-pow-
ered land vehicle able to travel as swiftly as a man, seven years
before I was born.
– 1774—Georges-Louis Lesage patents the electric telegraph.
– 1775—Alexander Cummings invents the flushing toilet, Jacques Perrier invents the steamship, and David Bushnell builds the combat submarine.
– 1779—Samuel Crompton invents the spinning mule, further industrializing fabrication.
– 1780—Benjamin Franklin invents bifocal eyeglasses, and Gervinus invents the circular saw.
1783—Benjamin Hanks patents the self-winding clock. Henry Cort invents the steel roller for steel production. Joseph- Michel and Jacques-Étienne Montgolfier invent the hot-air balloon. And Louis-Sébastien Lenormand allegedly invents the parachute.

Notice how many more things were being invented as years drew closer?

1795—Nicolas Appert invents the preserving jar for food

1796—Edward Jenner creates the smallpox vaccine.

1797—Whittemore patents a carding machine, yet another feather in the cap of textiles while Samuel Benthem patents plywood, and Henry Maudslay invents the world’s first lathe.

Although that brings us current, many more inventions are to come—and much faster, at that. Though I am no scientist, I am a child prodigy, like my sibling.
I’ll be a lot of things to a lot of people, and that will include being a hypocrite to so many for so much, my learned archaeologist. This memoir attempts to shower light over dark matters. I’ll be a catalyst for intelligentsia endeavoring to demonstrate great powers and shape futures. They may abound from my brother’s grimoire, but it will only be the beginning. Most people will condemn me for the methods inside this opus; however, you yourself will bathe in hypocrisy should you fail to consume it without context. You’d judge me with insufficient data, the very sin I charge my peers. Obviously, I can’t wait to hear what I have to say, but this doesn’t make my message meritless.
Could I, a Frankenstein in exile, make a worthy product to compete? Would I, middle born and now last best hope for redemp- tion, take up this burden? Should I, the one who got away, become among our world’s first moral entrepreneurs?
I resolved today that I could, would, and should—for tomorrow. Amen.
Sworn on my parents’ name. There is much in a name.

-E. Frankenstein

E. Frankenstein Book One of two

Chapter One Exodus

About seven weeks prior.
Ernest returned the cap on his ink vial and embedded his quill
back in its case. He’d just arrived at an auction, not in Richmond, Virginia or Baltimore, Maryland, but OysterBay, NewYork. The SS Molly, armed slave ship on its eleventh voyage (sailed by Captain John Tobin), retreated from a north-squalling hurricane off the coast of Hispaniola, home to sugar cane exporter Saint-Domingue (later called Haiti), and it climbed the American east coast until the storm attenuated against Long Island’s south shore wetlands. Recourse was plotted for the Long Island Sound. Drowned Meadow (later called Port Jefferson) and Great Cow Harbour (later called Northport) waved them on, but Oyster Bay’s port authority received them happily. Over two hundred slaves (and a few of the crew) had died in transit as the Molly’s provisions did not outlast the detour.
Clams, mussels, and oysters were served with local North Fork wines and cheeses, and the crew gorged themselves. The cargo would have to wait. The auctioneer spoke more rapidly than passersby could register, just slow enough for the bid callers to follow and raise their paddles when the price was right. Scaffolding placed the auctioneer and the merchandise some six feet higher than the crowd. Those who stood in the auction pit were dressed sumptuously with a hat on every head. It was a windy and overcast day. Sea salt was in the wind, and seagulls flew about, cawing to inform their flock when they’d struck nutritional gold, though they’d have settled for lead.