35. Karma #2
None of my past creations live up to this. Not the rat with chicken legs, not the birds with reptile skin, not even the human flesh I’ve pieced together before. This one… I can sense it. It will learn. It will grow. It will be trained.
Alas, I am no fool. I shan’t have a repeat of last time. I have a failsafe in case this docile behaviour wears off and it attacks.
But I am hopeful.
Hopeful that I have finally created the star of my circus.
The creased pages are fragile as I turn them, but so far, it hasn’t informed me of anything I don’t know. Although I don’t quite understand what he means by ‘last time’.
The next diary entry takes place three days later.
I have done it!!!
I neglected jotting down every piece of information I gathered, so swept up in my creation. She is magnificent. Obedient. Flexible. A quick learner.
But I have already discovered the first negative.
Animal meat and vegetables do not sate her. She is hungry, starving, but nothing I give her is enough. I tried her on a live one, and she seemed to enjoy that more than the dead and cooked, but it still wasn’t enough.
I need to keep looking.
-
Humans. It’s humans she requires.
My creation attacked one of my performers today. An acrobat who hasn’t been with us for very long, and I can’t say I cared terribly, but it was exactly what she needed. A live human.
That is dangerous.
It seems I haven’t yet figured out how to create a living dead person who can fit into society. Despite her blue flesh and stitches, she was learning and expanding her mind. But we’re at a standstill. She is a cannibal, and I can’t figure out how to change that.
When it comes to my human creations, they seem to require something devilish to sustain themselves.
But it wasn’t as chaotic as last time. I feel, if I can monitor and isolate it, I may be able to keep this one pieced together this time.
-
Four weeks have passed since I brought my showgirl to life. There have been no other accidents, no other deaths aside from the humans I’ve picked and stolen from the audience after the show. She is maturing.
I am aware that she needs more. She likes the hunt and the kill, and I’ve found that I can bribe her with anything particularly silver and shiny.
But now I need to decide what to do with her.
My eyes narrow as I read that line, over and over. When I continue, that horrid sinking feeling in my stomach intensifies, mixing with what I now understand to be sadness.
I can’t figure out where the bloodlust, the cannibalism, and the kleptomaniac tendencies come from. Her mental state is not like a human’s. There are deformities that I can’t identify, deep in her brain, likely caused by the high voltage that keeps her existing.
Her limbs still fall off occasionally, and it keeps her reliant on me, keeps her coming back.
And as for whether she can die…
I have no idea.
The last one couldn’t. Splitting them apart and trapping them in a chained box was the only way to certify that kind of monstrosity wasn’t brought back again. Until I recreated them. Until Karma.
I’m either studying her natural demise or conducting a series of tests to see what kills her first. Both will make for extraordinary research.
Karma is trainable, and she does listen to me. No one else.
I put bells in her hair so I can hear her coming. I do not trust she won’t attack me one day, despite the invisible leash I have around her neck.
She may be my favourite creation and the star of my show, but Karma is nothing but Project Human 2.0. And just like Project Human 1.0, there will come a time where she won’t see the light of day anymore.
She is the karma for Chaos.
I stare at the open book in my palm.
It starts vibrating, shaking with my hand, but there’s no fear.
There is anger. Pure anger. Not the desperate hunger I feel when I hunt, or the annoyance that Spiral once brought out of me, but pure, unfiltered anger. It mixes with the sadness, the betrayal, and my whole body whirrs to life.
Teeth bared, I throw the book to the floor, grabbing the second one. More studies about me. More tests performed on me. More reactions examined on me.
I throw it to the floor and grab the third.
More words. More betrayal. More hurt.
It skitters across the floor as I pull apart the bookcase one by one. My throat burns with the need to scream and shout, and my fingers itch to pull skin apart.
There’s a book dedicated to Spiral.
I laugh, an exasperated, furious sound, as I read the tests he performed on my man. My clown. Because laughing is the only thing that’s stopping me from destroying.
His pain. The pain he told Spiral he couldn’t figure out. He lied.
Kreo knows how to cure it, but he won’t. He writes about how it keeps Spiral complacent, waiting for the final fix that’ll never come.
How dare he? How dare he lie to Spiral, keep him on a leash like he does me?
I nearly rip the pages as I flip through them, trying to figure out what the answer to his pain is, but it doesn’t say. No causes. No reasons. No cures.
Nothing.
Kreo holds the answer in his mind.
Spiral will be devastated.
I drop the book to the floor, and it lands on another I’d thrown in anger. But I didn’t see it before.
I fall to my knees and pick it up, reading the spine that says ‘Chaos’. This book is older than the others. Worn, darker leather, pages that have rips along the edges, and dust coating the top and bottom.
When I open the book, I can tell many pages have been torn apart and thrown away. The first one is scribbled in so badly I nearly can’t make out what it says.
I have made a monumental mistake.
This thing should have NEVER been created.
She was supposed to fill that void the death of my wife and daughter created.
I gave it eyes and hair as black as night. Skin from the bodies I dug up. I’d created it to be mine. A daughter.
But what I created… is a monster.
A true monster.
The devil.
Made of pure evil that can never see the light of day again.
It killed my entire circus. I have to rebuild everything.
My one reprieve is that whilst I may not have succeeded in taking back the life I gave it, I managed to pull apart the creation and lock it away in a box, never to be found. No one will enter that trailer. No one will touch that box.
Chaos will live on in wood and metal, and it’ll never be able to take another soul again.
I wasn’t the first.
‘Chaos’ was the first.
But Kreo couldn’t control it, so he locked it away and tried again with me.
I’m Project Human Two.
Because I’m never number one. Never his first. Just his second attempt.
Fury fuels my movements.
I tear the books apart. Pages fly as I rip them open.
I’m hurt. So goddamn fucking hurt that I don’t know how to handle the emotion.
Kreo blames the electricity for the fact I didn’t become normal. The fact that I’m ‘deformed’. But I’ve grown as a human surrounded by Soren, Arlo, Micha, and even Spiral.
They proved that I am capable of growth, that Kreo is wrong about me. He didn’t care for me. He studied me. He didn’t nurture or teach; he blocked and hid.
Kreo may have brought me to life, but it was never my life.
It was his.
I fall to my hands and knees. I groan as the pain I never thought I’d experience again surges back. I cry and whine, pummelling my fist into my stomach, begging it to stop.
I prefer the pain Spiral injected into my veins.
This is so much worse.
Because it’s not real.
It’s caused by feelings that can’t be cured and realisations that have changed my world on its axis.
And I want to die.
My legs bend and crack as I stand. I grab the metal table, steadying myself against the electricity firing a mile a minute around my veins. I lean on it, dragging myself to Kreo’s desk. His godforsaken desk.
I scream out as I throw it across the room. I topple the damn metal table that caused me all this hell. The one I was brought to life on. I slam my fists into the rectangular contraption with buttons and switches and voltage signs. But it does nothing. Means nothing.
I mean nothing.
My eyes catch the glint of metal scissors on the floor. I pick them up and stare.
Then I bring them to my face.
I cut the first stitch pulling up my permanent smile. It snaps and breaks away, the skin dropping an inch.
I do the second, ignoring the distant footsteps approaching this room of death.
My invisible leash loosens with every thread cut.
Concerned voices reach my ears, but they’re muffled.
I keep cutting, severing, pulling.
The left side of my smile dips, and freedom I didn’t think I needed surges inside of me.
I sever the right side with less care.
People flood the room. I’m too focused on escaping my mind, escaping Kreo.
Someone shouts my name.
Hands find my shoulders.
And the final tie is severed with a flick of the sharp blade through thread.
My smile drops.
Freedom.