I'm Recording This Because I'm Dead

*Click,* and the metal tape rolls in the recorder, plastic cogs turning round behind clouded, aged plastic. Breath crackles over the whirring sound, then cuts to a second of crisp silence. A voice hums against a backdrop of static.

This is Professor Taylor Barns, PhD. I'm recording this because... I am dead.

Thirty years ago, I had a dream...

I pictured a machine as clear as if I were standing before it. The exact schematics, down to the original parts - some of which did not yet exist, but I knew how to make them. I'd been estranged from religion for years, yet I had no scientific explanation for what I saw. Is it mad to suggest it had been a vision from God?

I woke in a sweat and biked to my office in my dressing gown and slippers. Working until dawn, I put my design to paper in as much detail as I could recall. My colleagues met me with a pint of black coffee, checking over what I had made. There was confusion, disbelief, and curiosity. You might be wondering, what would this machine do? I couldn't say exactly how, I simply knew for certain it would work.

This machine would cure death.

One of my fellow professors, who was particularly pious, warned me against it. No good could come from meddling with the dead, for that was business of the divine domain, and not for us mortals to tamper with. He was the first of many to turn against me.

I began by scouting for donors. Such technology would take vast resources to build. Most of the institute's partners laughed me away at my presentation. Only three aristocrats remained. Those with the most to lose apparently had the most to preserve if only they could overcome death.

Back then I had six lab partners and six apprentices as my assistants. The first prototype was completed in a year - for all those mysterious components required inventing first, before the real work could be done. Our first test subject was a man of science - who'd offered his body to the institute to further our collective mission on behalf of humanity. Mr. Edgar Wells, as he was known in life. The prototype caught fire, and would have incinerated him had we not been ready to drag him out of it. The institute used what they could spare of him to teach human anatomy to biology apprentices.

Two apprentices aged onto their own lab. One partner quit after our second failed attempt. He decided, "this science is far beyond our current capabilities. Better to wait until technology advances." I disagreed, as did our benefactors.

Three, four, then five years had passed. We invented more new technology in those five years than most would manage over a lifetime. Our seventh attempt looked promising, but demanded too much power. Back to the drawing board again. Two of our lab partners quit - selling our components for profit. "We've already made a difference in the world. These components could revolutionise medical tech, why not quit while we're ahead?" No words I had for them could make them feel any worse about the seven-figure profit they sold our designs for.

Over the next three years, I had something of a relationship with one of my lab partners, Dr. Smith. She believed in my dream more than anyone, or so I thought. She stayed the late nights, helped with calculations, assembled the parts, wrote up our findings... She told me she wanted her name to be on the greatest invention in the history of mankind. I admired her passion. We went out for coffee, then for dinner, and one thing led to another. Before I knew it, we were engaged, with a child on the way.

But children and marriage tend to demand one take a step back from their life's work, and I wasn't about to give it up. I thought that was what she liked about me - why we ended up together in the first place. To save our relationship, she moved onto another project. To save herself, she left her engagement ring atop my desk.

With her departure, one by one, the other lab partners left as well. The project was going nowhere. It never worked, and we just didn't have the resources to keep going. Twelve years of my life, nineteen prototypes later, and everyone else had given up on my dream. In my quest to cure death, I had escaped life for over a decade. I missed my own wedding, my daughter's birth, her birthdays, and her first day of school.

All the same, I couldn't give up now. Not when I was so close.

I had no more assistants, no partners, and was forced to sell my apartment to cover one last attempt. Alone in that empty lab, I built my machine. I had no test subjects... except myself.

I rigged it up to trigger on a timer. If my vision was real, and my invention worked, I would be alive again just thirty minutes after dying.

Was I afraid? Honestly, yes. What if the machine malfunctioned or didn't work? At the time, I suppose I was distracted by the thrill of scientific discovery. If it worked, I wouldn't just be the inventor of the Revival Machine, or RVM, I would be the first corpse given life since the monster in Shelley's Frankenstein. And of course, the first that wasn't fictional.

I lay inside the machine, waiting for the poison to take effect. I would be dead soon. I prayed to gods I did not believe in that my machine would revive me. I recorded the entire ordeal from beginning to end, capturing the final seconds of my life.

Sickness. Darkness. And...

Cold. That was the first thing I felt when I awoke again. I had imagined it would feel like emerging from sleep, as science fiction hypothesised. The truth was far more horrifying. I had not been sleeping. As I learned, death was a fade. Memories erased, senses dulling, light waning.

Anyone who tells you death is peaceful is a goddamn liar. Perhaps it looks that way from the outside. Maybe most would consider ignorance peaceful. But for a mind like mine, it was maddening. Terrifying. I had been conscious as my brain had begun to die, severing nerves and connections crafted over a lifetime. Aging in reverse, time flowing backwards as thoughts and facts and feelings were snatched up in a haze creeping across the fold. Like fire spreading across a diary, or white light overexposing a photograph. Fully aware that I could not catch the memories. Conscious of the lack of taste, then smell, then touch, then sight, then sound. I broke into pieces.

The machine was supposed to fix me.

As I came to, I emerged as someone else. A fragment of myself, a false impression, a ghost. The machine did not mend those broken parts. It had sparked life into me again, though what had been lost would remain so. I was reborn, and I would have to figure out how to live.

For the first few days, I relived infancy. I tried to reforge those lost connections, not knowing whether they were truly erased and in need of replacement, or simply asleep, waiting to awaken. I re-learned how to walk and talk, how to eat, dress myself, and the rest of it.

Weeks went by, and I grew to understand the limitations and boons of undeath. I felt no pain, nor any strong emotion. Things I feared before had no hold over me. My digestion remained slow, though I barely experienced hunger. I still forced myself to eat and drink - noting how my appearance deteriorated over time. My skin grew taught, my body thin and frail, my hue paled, my eyes sunk back into my skull, and my hair and nails appeared longer, though in fact they did not grow at all.

And the strangest of it? I could not die. I figured that out after one terrible evening of despair. I still bore the wound, and so I took to wearing a scarf to hide it.

I didn't see another human being for over a month. An ex-apprentice of mine returned seeking a recommendation for a new position. When she saw my face, she jumped out of her skin, then studied me with that scientific curiosity we shared. That side of her leapt for joy at the fact I'd accomplished it. Her human side instinctively kept me at bay, holding tight to the holy symbol around her neck. Whatever I had become defied both the natural order and the imaginings of creatives.

She alerted the others, summoning as many of the old team to gather and observe what I had become. I was in equal parts monster and marvel - angel and demon. Some returned to the program to test me in a bid to reclaim their stake in my research. I had gone from head scientist to lab rat.

Because I had no instinctual limits, my body unlocked its full capabilities. Even in my frail state, I could lift more weight than ever before, take greater hits without sustaining injury, and I became completely immune to all poisons.

I also stopped aging in the traditional sense. Instead, I began to rot.

And I felt it all. Not painfully, but it's difficult to ignore the sensation of maggots breeding under my skin - all their wriggling and chewing. I had to sleep in a bath of ethanol nightly to kill them off. Something always came back. And the smell... God, the smell. I washed four times a day yet could still smell it.

The new team assembled around my discovery insisted on showing me off to the scientific community. They hired mortuary employees to help preserve my tissues and dress me up to look somewhat presentable. I met with researchers, then my sponsors. Their efforts were exemplary, because in the hour or two my audience spent with me, they did not notice the negatives, only that I appeared alive and well. The wound to my neck served as proof of my condition to those who couldn't believe me at my word.

Then the testing began. Samples proved I was a walking corpse. The compounds in my nonexistent bloodstream -instead coagulated in a lump around my heart- were incompatible with life. I had no pulse. I didn't even need to breathe.

But as the success of my invention gained traction in the scientific space, it came to the attention of the public as well. Between interviews and meetings and award shows, I had pious protesters waving placards - describing my existence as one in violation of the sacred. I'd been godless alive, though only to myself. Now what was I? The press named me "Frankenstein" as a joke. Anyone who knew the literature knew that Frankenstein was the scientist, not the creation. Yet I was both. And Frankenstein himself was far more monstrous than what he created. Frankenstein was I indeed.

If they were to accuse me of being a monster, would I prove them right? I'd try not to. I improved my etiquette, recruiting specialists in proper speech, posture, and poise. I had many suits tailored (with as few fittings as possible), and so I turned up to those interviews as my best self, a gentleman by every regard. Some were convinced, others doubled-down, for the devil was also known to speak and present himself as gentile.

Dr. Smith attended one of my interviews. I caught sight of her in the audience with our daughter at her side. I waited for her to approach me first, not wishing to spook them. What she said to me will haunt me beyond the grave. "What have you done to yourself?" Not, "what have you become?" Or, "I see your machine works." No - 'what had I done to myself?' The way she said it came with such grief.

I'd worked myself to death for this project. Death and back again.

When I returned to the lab, my only desire was to destroy the machine. I envisioned it clear as day. My office chair crashed into the side, a fire axe hacked into the metal, cables and screws flying. But the first thing I noticed was the red file on my desk - the written agreements for funding the project. People wanted this. Maybe I wasn't too late. Maybe I could still fix it. I was a successful subject, yes, however I'd only achieved the first step. The machine needed perfecting - to have it restore true life, not whatever I was.

With a proof of concept staring back at me from the mirror, I recruited a larger team of assistants. We'd pull it off, we had to. If I was to be cursed with this eternal undeath, I'd spend it fixing my mistakes.

The millennium arrived, and as everyone left early to celebrate, I remained in the lab to admire what we'd achieved. It had been tested on a mouse. Dead by poison, then restored to life. I watched it puzzle about its cage for a while. For several hours since revival, it had behaved normally. It ate, slept, ran in its wheel, groomed itself, and all that any living mouse would. But there in the quiet, at the stroke of midnight, it paused, and looked directly at me, eyes meeting mine.

I knew what it was asking...

"What have you done to me?"

I thought back to the dream - the beginning of all this. A machine to cure death - surely a vision from God? I gazed at the mouse and it back at me... No, this wasn't divine.

If I had cured death, what was the purpose of life? Why did this mouse now live eternally? It had no good reason to. If it didn't need to eat, or sleep, or reproduce and pass on its genes, what was the point? What was it living for? What was I living for?

To prove that I could?

To become God?

Or something else...?

It was one thing to impose this on myself. Upon an animal - that was true cruelty.

I knew it would hurt it, still it was the best option I could think of. I put the mouse in the incinerator. I'd not switched it on yet. I left it in there with my plans, my notes, my books, and after dismantling my machine, there'd be one last thing to add...

I put together a simple timer to trigger the switch on the outside. I leave a note for my daughter, and this recording for anyone who may return to the lab looking to recreate my machine.

I hope now that you've heard my story, you'll understand why I had to do this. This technology will not save lives. It merely imposes undeath. And that is a burden I would wish no one else to bear. Do not make my mistake. If you value life, then live - as well as you can for as long as life will allow. Treasure each moment. Death is a part of us too. It is what gives meaning to the madness, and the one true cure to all ills. I hope she has kept her door open for me. I run from her no longer.

A clattering sound is heard as the recorder is set down. In the background, there is a faint shuffling of papers, as well as a quiet voice.

There there, my little friend. You will be free soon. We both will be.

After a few moments, a timer beeps, and a heavy door shrieks closed. Igniters spark. A muffled roar echoes in the quiet. The recorder reaches the end of the tape with a *click.*