Chapter 1: The Twitching Experiment
The study room smelled like old parchment and the faint, medicinal astringency of Viktor’s experimental supplies. Nemo adjusted his round glasses, their lenses fogging slightly against the chill of the room’s late-autumn air. Around them, the university’s old stone walls groaned under the weight of centuries, their stained glass windows whispering stories in fractured light. Somewhere beyond the heavy oak door, a janitor’s mop squeaked against the tile, and the faintest thump—*too slow, too heavy*—vibrated through the walls. Nemo pretended not to notice.
He had learned, over the past three months of sharing a suite with Viktor, that some things were better left unexamined. Like the way Viktor’s lab coat always smelled faintly of ozone and something metallic, or how he sometimes hummed under his breath while dissecting things that were *not* part of the biology curriculum. Like the way he kept twitching his fingers, as if counting something invisible.
The dorm study room was supposed to be a sanctuary—a place where Nemo could lose himself in the dense, comforting logic of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, where the world outside could fade into a blur of ink and paper. Instead, Viktor’s muttering was a relentless counterpoint. It wasn’t words, not really, just a stream of chemical formulas and low, guttural sounds that sliced through Nemo’s concentration.
“‘Phenylethylamine derivative, cross-chain with a neural peptide… synaptic bypass must be total…’”
Nemo focused harder on the page, tracing a sentence with his finger. ‘Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.’ The words blurred. A new smell cut through the dusty air, acrid and unmistakable—the sweet, greasy scent of burning hair, followed by the deeper, more visceral punch of searing flesh.
His stomach clenched. He looked up slowly, over the top of his book.
Viktor was hunched over the far end of the scarred wooden table, his back a tense arch. His wild hair seemed to crackle with static in the low light. In his gloves hand was something small, dark, and spasming. He placed it on a folded lab cloth with a disturbingly tender precision.
It was a rabbit’s foot. Not the lucky charm kind. This one was freshly severed, the ragged end glistening. Tiny copper wires, finer than hair, were threaded along the length of the fur, soldered into the exposed nerves and tendons at the cut. They sparked against the tip of Viktor’s scalpel with minute, blue-white flares. Each spark made the foot twitch in a grotesque, skipping parody of life.
“Viktor,” Nemo whispered, his voice thin. “What are you doing?”
Viktor didn’t look up. His intense eyes were fixed on the miniature horror, his pupils dilated. He leaned closer, his breath fogging in the chilly room. “Fascinating, isn’t it? The peroneal nerve retains electrochemical activity for seventeen point three minutes post-severance. The wires just… give it a voice. Listen.”
He touched the scalpel to another junction. A sharper spark zipped. The foot jerked, the toes splaying wide in a silent scream.
Nemo’s chair screeched on the floor as he pushed back. The moral imperative in his book felt like ash in his mouth. “That’s… you can’t do that here. That’s…”
“Ethically complicated?” Viktor finally glanced at him, a smile playing on his lips that didn’t touch his cold eyes. “Don’t worry. The subject was already terminated. This is just residual data. Energy looking for a path.” He turned back to it, mesmerized. “Like a ghost in the machine.”
Another thump echoed from the hallway outside, heavier this time, making the door in its frame rattle. Nemo stared at the door, then at the twitching knot of fur and wire, then at Viktor’s rapt, blissful face. The sanctuary was gone, replaced by a circles of hell Dante forgot to mention.
He shoved his book into his bag, the pages crumpling. He couldn’t articulate his revulsion, the profound wrongness that vibrated in his teeth. Words failed him. He just had to get out.
“Suit yourself,” Viktor murmured absently as Nemo fled, his attention never leaving his sparking, twitching prize. “The interesting part is just beginning.”
Later, in his own room across the suite, Nemo sat on his bed, knees pulled to his chest. He’d tried to read, tried to sleep, but the image of the convulsing foot was etched on the backs of his eyelids. The air in the suite was thick, pressurizing. A low groan of wind built outside, and the first fat drops of rain smacked against the window.
Then the sky ripped open. A white-blue flash illuminated the entire quad, freezing the thrashing trees in a snapshot of agony. The instantaneous, skull-rattling boom of thunder followed. And beneath it, sharp and clear from Viktor’s room down the hall, came a laugh. It wasn’t a laugh of amusement. It was a staccato, triumphant sound, unhinged and giddy, punctuated by another earth-shaking crack from the heavens. It was the laugh of someone who saw the storm not as chaos, but as applause.
Nemo pulled the pillow over his head, blocking out the light, the sound, the laughter. He focused on the smell of clean cotton, his own quick breath. He didn’t move until long after the storm had settled into a steady, weeping rain and the laughter had subsided into an eerie silence.
Morning light was gray and weak, slicking everything in the room with a damp sheen. Nemo moved slowly, the lack of sleep a sandbag behind his eyes. As he pulled a clean t-shirt over his head, the fine hairs on the back of his neck prickled. He froze, the cloth stuck around his ears.
He was being watched.
He yanked the shirt down and spun around. His room was empty. The door was shut. But the feeling was a physical pressure, a cold spot on his skin. His books stood in their usual orderly rows on the shelf. His desk was neat. Nothing was out of place. Yet everything felt subtly off, as if the angles of the room were slightly wrong, as if the air had been breathed by someone else while he slept. He dressed fast, fumbling with his buttons.
He just needed to get to class. To normalcy.
He opened his door and stepped into the suite’s common area at the exact moment Viktor’s burst inside.Viktor filled the doorway. He looked like he hadn’t slept at all, but he was vibrating with a terrifying, electric energy. His eyes were wide, bloodshot galaxies. In his hand, he dragged a heavy, army-green duffel bag. It was stained dark in patches, and it bulged with angular, weighty contents. It didn’t clink with the hard sound of textbooks or lab glass. It thudded. It scraped. A low, metallic shifting, like chains being dragged, emanated from within.
“Nemo!” Viktor’s voice was too loud, a cracked bell. “Perfect timing. I need a correlate.”
He grinned, a stretch of skin showing too many teeth. He hoisted the bag with a grunt, the sound from inside resolving into a dull, heavy rattle-thud. Not quite chains, Nemo convinced himself, trying to make sense of it.
“I’m late,” Nemo choked out, sidestepping, his back scraping against the wall as he edged toward the suite’s exit.
Viktor’s manic gaze tracked him, the grin not fading. “Late is a relative term. This,” he said, shaking the bag, another sickening scrape from within, “this is absolute.”
Nemo didn’t answer. He turned and practically ran down the hall, the sound of Viktor’s unsettling chuckle and the dragging, loaded weight of that bag following him all the way to the stairwell.
He turned and practically ran down the hall, the sound of Viktor’s unsettling chuckle and the dragging, loaded weight of that bag following him all the way to the stairwell.
The week that followed was a study in forced normalcy. Nemo went to his lectures on Kant and Descartes, he highlighted texts until his fingers were stained blue, he ate bland pasta in the dining hall overlooking the rainy quad. But the ordinary world had developed a thin film, a persistent static. He felt the gaze.
It was there in his room late at night , a pressure between his shoulder blades that made him whirl around to find only empty aisles. It was in his suite’s common kitchen, where he’d open the fridge and find a single, perfectly placed Petri dish of blooming green mold, or discover the carton of milk smelling faintly of formaldehyde. He’d hear rhythmic, wet scraping sounds from behind Viktor’s door, followed by long periods of absolute silence more disturbing than any noise.
He ignored it. He packaged the fear, wrapped it in rational thought, and buried it under essays on moral philosophy. Paranoia was illogical. Evidence was anecdotal. He repeated this like a mantra.
Thursday night found him sprawled on the common area’s ragged sofa, a fortress of open textbooks and index cards built around him. The overhead light buzzed, flickering at infrequent intervals. He was wrangling with the concept of phenomenological reality when Viktor’s door opened.
The smell hit first. Coppery, organic, cut through with the sharp, salty tang of stale sweat. Nemo looked up.
Viktor stood in his doorway, framed by the darkness of his room. He was shirtless, his lean torso slick with a sheen of perspiration and smeared with long, rusty streaks of what could only be blood. It was under his nails, in the fine hairs of his forearms. His eyes were two pools of black ink, wide and unblinking, fixed on a point somewhere beyond the physical walls. He was breathing in quick, shallow pants.
“Nemo,” he breathed, the word a puff of strained air. “You’re here. Good. You have to see. You have to understand.”
Nemo slowly closed his book. Every instinct told him to be still, to be small, something that came natural to him at only 5’6. “Viktor, you’re… are you hurt?”
A smile split Viktor’s face, too wide, too many teeth. “Hurt? No. Transfigured. The transduction… it’s elegant. It’s perfect. I mapped the pain pathways, Nemo. Not just recorded them. I… I redirected them. I gave them a new destination. Do you know what that means?”
He took a step forward, leaving a faint, damp footprint on the linoleum. “It means the substrate is irrelevant. Flesh is just a temporary housing. The signal is everything. And I can control the signal.” His voice was rising, cracking with hysterical euphoria. “I am the conductor. The composer. Do you see? Do you see the genius of it?”
Nemo saw a madman covered in blood. He said nothing. He just stared, his mind blank with a terror so complete it was peaceful.
The silence seemed to enrage Viktor. The euphoria on his face curdled, collapsing into something fierce and jagged. “You don’t see,” Viktor whispered. He took another step. “You’re not even looking. You’re just sitting there with your dead words.”
“I’m looking, Viktor,” Nemo managed, his voice a dry leaf.
“No. You’re judging. With your little philosopher’s mind. You think this is messy. You think it’s wrong.” Viktor’s hands clenched and unclenched at his sides. “This is the only thing that’s ever been right! This is life unchained! This is me!”
Nemo’s survival instinct finally overrode his paralysis. He moved in one clumsy, frantic motion, sweeping his books aside as he scrambled off the sofa. His only thought was his own room, his lockable door. He took two stumbling steps.
The much taller Viktor moved faster. A guttural sound ripped from his throat—frustration, fury, madness—and he lunged.
Nemo fumbled with his doorknob, his slick fingers slipping. He felt Viktor’s heat, smelled the metallic sweat, just as the door gave way. He fell through into the darkness of his own room.
It didn’t matter. Viktor was on him, a wave of frenzied strength. A hand fisted in the back of Nemo’s shirt, yanking him off-balance. He was spun around, and then the world tipped. The back of his head struck the edge of his desk with a sickening, muted crack before he slammed onto the hard floor.
Vision swimming, ears ringing, Nemo saw Viktor crouch over him, a darker silhouette in the dark room. He felt a knee drive into his chest, knocking the wind from his lungs in a ragged whimper.
“You will see,” Viktor hissed, spittle landing on Nemo’s cheek. His eyes were wild portals. “You will acknowledge it. I have remade the grammar of being. I am speaking a new world into existence.”
Nemo tried to buck, to twist, but the weight was immense, the pain in his head a blossoming nova. Black spots flecked his vision.
Viktor leaned down, his face inches away. The whisper was fervent, possessive, absolute. “I am God here.”
A fist, or perhaps the heel of a hand, connected with Nemo’s temple. The nova exploded into a silent, vast, and welcoming black. The feeling of being watched vanished, replaced by nothing at all.