Sunday, March 20, 2011

Pirth

Alia Jones watched. She always watched. The blue-green veins in her face pulsed sickeningly. And Ajax Pirth regretted creating this monster from the eyes of his lost love. Simple chemistry, he had thought. Now, as he looked back on his decision, remembering how he had created this being, his heart hung heavy in the jar on his desk.

Alia Jones kissing him…promising to be his bride…falling, falling from that cliff after her…trying to save her…failing…then his seemingly brilliant idea, to re-create her from her eyes…his tears that he had survived the plummet from the cliff, and she had not…then his work in the lab, perfecting a serum that would keep her eyes alive…and then creating her, this strange, fearsome woman.

His hands shook as he carefully removed the eyes from the small bowl of serum, as he saw how they still moved, still saw, how they remembered. He, Ajax Perth, had found that the eyes were the storage-sheds of the brain, like two memory chips lodged firmly in the skull. He sighed as he slipped them into a bath of iodine, to purify them before insertion. Before him on the slab was a beautiful woman…Alina’s doppelganger, created from the DNA in her eyes. A blue-green bloodlike fluid pulsed in her veins. A metal heart beat in her breast, crafted from pure silver. He slid the eyes into the sockets left empty. And she blinked.

He set his cup on the desk and sighed. After that, everything had gone wrong. She became a monster, but worst of all she hated him. She blamed him for her predicament.

“Alia?”

“…yes…” her voice purred from the lamplit hallway from where she had been watching him.

“help.”

“…why…” she whispered

“help me fix my mistake, Alia, please.”

“…no...I like the way I am, Ajax. I never wanted to die…you…you kept me from that.” She sounded close to tears. Pulse, pulse…the blue-green under her skin shone in the light.

“I could fix my mistake, Alia. I know what went wrong.”

“…no…”

Ajax fell off his chair. The-girl-who-was-once-Alia Jones watched, but did nothing. She could remember feeling love for the man inn front of her, but that was gone. She had not wanted to die, yes, but she had not wanted to be recreated either.

Ajax felt his heart fall to pieces in the jar on his desk. He sighed as his mind fled, his eyes growing bright, then dimming.

“I’m…sorry” he said with his last breath. And he was gone. But his eyes remembered. Alia knew this, and took advantage of it.

Her long, curved fingers gently plucked them out and slid them into a bowl of greenish almost-liquid.

They would keep for long enough. All she wanted were his memories, after all.


(c) 2011

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