Chapter 3

The first reports came three days later. A woman in Echo Park had called the police to report a prowler in her yard, someone who had been standing at her window for hours, not moving, just watching. When the officers arrived, they found no one, but the woman was insistent: the figure had been there, had been real, had looked at her with eyes that did not blink.

I read about this in the neighborhood newsletter, one of those email chains that circulates among homeowners' associations, full of complaints about parking and notifications about coyote sightings. The woman in Echo Park had posted her account as a warning to other residents, advising them to lock their doors and check their security cameras. She described the figure as tall, dressed in dark clothes, with a face that was "too perfect, like a mannequin."

I knew immediately that it was the creature. I did not know why it had been watching this woman, what it was looking for, what need it was trying to fill. But I knew the description—too perfect, like a mannequin—and I knew that the creature was still out there, still moving through the city, still searching for answers I could not provide.

More reports followed. A man in Los Feliz saw someone standing on the roof of his apartment building at 3 a.m., silhouetted against the smoke-orange sky. A security guard at a grocery store in Silver Lake chased away a person who had been standing in the frozen food aisle for two hours, not shopping, not moving, just standing. A jogger in Elysian Park claimed to have encountered someone on the trail who asked strange questions—"What is love? What is death? What does it feel like to be afraid?"—and then walked away without waiting for answers.

I collected these reports. I printed them out and organized them by date and location, the way I would organize data from an experiment. I was trying to find a pattern, trying to understand what the creature was doing, where it was going, what it wanted. But there was no pattern, or if there was a pattern I could not see it. The creature was moving through the city randomly, or according to a logic I did not understand.

I should have gone to the police. I know that now. I knew it then, on some level, but the knowledge did not translate into action, because going to the police would mean explaining what I had done, and explaining what I had done would mean losing everything—my position, my patents, my reputation, my freedom. I told myself I was protecting my work. I told myself I was protecting the creature, which would certainly be destroyed if the authorities found it. I told myself many things that were partially true and wholly self-serving.

The real truth was simpler: I was afraid. I was afraid of what would happen if people found out. I was afraid of what I would become—not a pioneering scientist but a cautionary tale, a monster, another Frankenstein. The name, my name, which I had spent my whole life trying to reclaim from the Gothic horror of the nineteenth century, would become synonymous once again with hubris and catastrophe.

I should tell you about the name. The name is part of this story, though I have not wanted to acknowledge it, have not wanted to admit how much it shaped me, how much I was trying to prove something by carrying it.

My great-great-grandfather was a Swiss naturalist who emigrated to California in 1889. His name was Victor Frankenstein—the same name, by pure coincidence, as the protagonist of Mary Shelley's novel, which had been published seventy years before his birth. He spent his entire life explaining that he was not related to the fictional character, that Frankenstein was a common enough surname in German-speaking Europe, that the association with the novel was an unfortunate accident of nomenclature.

No one believed him. No one believes any of us. The name is too strange, too specific, too loaded with meaning. When I was a child, other children would ask me if I was going to make a monster. When I was in graduate school, professors would make jokes about raising the dead. When I became a scientist, interviewers would always ask, eventually, whether I felt any connection to my fictional namesake, whether I worried about playing God, whether I understood the dangers of unchecked ambition.

I always said no. I always said the name was coincidence, that I was a serious scientist, that I had no interest in the Gothic fantasies of a nineteenth-century novelist. I said these things and I believed them, or believed I believed them, until I found myself in a basement in Laurel Canyon, building a creature from tissue and electricity and the memory of someone I had loved.

The irony is not lost on me. The irony has never been lost on me. I am the inheritor of a name that carries a curse, and I have fulfilled the curse exactly, precisely, as though I had no choice in the matter, as though the story was written before I was born.

But there is always a choice. That is what I have learned, what I keep learning. There is always a choice, and I made mine, and the creature is the consequence.

A week after the first reports, I got a phone call. It was late at night—past midnight—and I was in the basement, reviewing my notes, trying to understand where I had gone wrong, what I could have done differently to make the creature more fully human. The phone rang and I answered it without thinking, without checking the number, because I was distracted, because I was deep in the calculations that had consumed my life for two years.

"Victoria." The voice was wrong, flat, uninflected. The voice was the creature's voice. "I need to see you."

My heart stopped. My breath stopped. I sat in the basement of my house, surrounded by the equipment I had used to make this thing, and I listened to its voice coming through my phone, and I did not know what to say.

"Where are you?" I finally managed.

"Downtown," the creature said. "The library. The one on Fifth Street. I have been reading."

"Reading what?"

"Everything. Philosophy. Biology. History. I am trying to understand what I am. I am trying to understand what you made me from."

The Central Library in downtown Los Angeles is one of the great public libraries of America. It has two million books and eight floors and a rotunda painted with murals depicting the history of California. It is also one of the few places in the city where a person without a home, without an identity, can sit for hours without being asked to leave. I understood immediately why the creature had gone there.

"I'll come to you," I said. "Stay where you are."

"No." The creature's voice was firm, in a way that surprised me. "Not here. They are watching me. The security guards. They know something is wrong with me. They have not asked me to leave, but they are watching."

"Then where?"

There was a long pause. I could hear background noise—voices, footsteps, the ambient hum of a large building. Then the creature spoke again, and its voice had changed, had taken on an edge of something that might have been fear or might have been anger.

"The house," it said. "The house on Laurel Canyon. The house where you made me. I want to see where I was born."

I did not correct it. I did not say that "born" was not the right word, that the creature had not been born but built, assembled, constructed from parts that were not its own. The distinction seemed unimportant in that moment. The creature wanted to see the basement where it had first opened its eyes, and I understood that wanting, that need to return to the place where everything began.

"Tomorrow night," I said. "Come tomorrow night, after dark. I'll leave the door unlocked."

The creature hung up without saying goodbye. I sat in the basement, holding my phone, and I thought about what I had just agreed to. I had invited the creature back into my home. I had agreed to meet it in the dark, alone, in the place where it had been made. I did not know what it wanted, what it would do, whether I would be safe.

But safety was not the point. Safety had not been the point for a long time. The point was understanding. The point was taking responsibility for what I had done. The point was facing the creature I had made, and seeing it clearly, and trying—however inadequately—to help it become whatever it was going to become.

The next night I waited in the living room with the lights off. I did not want the neighbors to see that I was home. I did not want anyone to know what was happening in the house on Laurel Canyon, in the house with the red tile roof and the dry fountain and the basement where I had played God and failed.

The creature arrived at eleven. I heard it before I saw it—heard the front door open, heard footsteps in the hall, heard the particular rhythm of movement that was almost but not quite the someone's rhythm. And then the creature was standing in the doorway of the living room, backlit by the streetlight outside, and I could see the shape of it, the silhouette of it, and for a moment I let myself believe that the someone had come home, that the loss had been reversed, that everything was going to be all right.

The creature stepped into the room. The illusion dissolved. I saw the wrongness again—the too-still face, the too-perfect features, the eyes that did not quite track the way human eyes track. I saw the creature for what it was, and I forced myself not to look away.

"Thank you for meeting me," the creature said. Its voice was still wrong, still flat, but there was something else in it now—a formality, a carefulness—that had not been there before. The creature had been learning. It had been studying how people spoke to each other, how they navigated social situations, how they signaled respect and deference. It was adapting.

"You said you had questions," I said. "I'll try to answer them."

The creature sat down on the couch—the same couch where the someone and I used to sit, watching television, reading books, not talking, just being together in the way that people who love each other learn to be together. Seeing the creature on that couch made something inside me twist, something I could not name.

"I have been reading," the creature said. "I told you that. I have been reading philosophy and biology and history. I have been trying to understand what I am."

"What have you learned?"

The creature tilted its head—the someone's gesture, or an approximation of it. "I have learned that humans have been asking questions about identity and consciousness for thousands of years. I have learned that there is no consensus, no agreement, no final answer. I have learned that the question of what makes a person a person has never been resolved."

"That's true," I said. "We don't have answers to those questions. We have theories. We have arguments. We have beliefs. But we don't have answers."

"Then how did you make me?" The creature's voice sharpened. "If you do not know what consciousness is, how did you create it? If you do not know what a person is, how did you make one?"

This was the question I had been dreading. This was the question that had no good answer, no answer that would satisfy the creature or absolve me of what I had done.

"I didn't create consciousness," I said slowly, carefully, choosing my words. "I created a substrate—a body, a brain, a nervous system—that could support consciousness. I gave the substrate the patterns, the memories, the neural architecture of a person who had been conscious. And then... something emerged. Something that was not that person, but that had that person's patterns, that person's ways of processing the world."

"So I am a copy," the creature said. "A copy of the someone."

"Not a copy. A... continuation. An echo. A new pattern that emerged from an old one."

"That is not comforting." The creature's voice was flat, but I thought I could hear something underneath the flatness—hurt, maybe, or anger, or the beginning of grief. "I am not the someone. I am not a person. I am an echo, a pattern, a thing you built in your basement because you could not accept that the someone was gone."

"Yes," I said. There was no point in denying it. There was no point in pretending I had been motivated by science, by the advancement of knowledge, by anything other than grief and desperation and the unbearable weight of loss. "Yes. That's exactly what you are."

The creature was silent for a long time. We sat in the dark living room, the creator and the created, and neither of us spoke. Outside, a car passed, its headlights sweeping across the ceiling. Somewhere in the hills, a coyote howled, and another answered, and another, until the night was full of their voices.

"I want to see the basement," the creature finally said. "I want to see where you made me."

I led the creature down the stairs, through the door that I had left open a week ago, into the space where everything had begun. I turned on the lights—the fluorescent lights I had installed myself—and watched the creature look around at the equipment, the table, the fireproof box where I kept my notes.

"This is where I woke up," the creature said. It was not a question. "This is where I opened my eyes and saw you and watched you run away."

"Yes."

"I remember that. I remember the lights and the smell of chemicals and the sound of your footsteps on the stairs. I remember reaching for you. I did not understand, then, why you were leaving. I understand now."

"I'm sorry," I said again, and again the words felt inadequate, absurd, a bandage on a wound that would never heal. "I was afraid. I didn't know what to do."

"I know." The creature walked around the basement slowly, touching the equipment, examining the table where it had lain. "I have had time to think about it. I understand fear now. I understand the impulse to flee from things we do not understand."

The creature stopped in front of the fireproof box. "What is in here?"

"My notes," I said. "The records of everything I did. Every calculation, every procedure, every decision."

"I want to read them."

I hesitated. The notes were private, were the most intimate record of my obsession and my grief and my terrible, beautiful, monstrous achievement. They were the story of what I had done, told in the language of science, stripped of all the emotion that had driven me. I did not want the creature to read them. I did not want anyone to read them.

But the creature had a right to them. The creature had a right to know how it had been made, what decisions I had made on its behalf, what I had put into it and what I had left out. The creature had a right to its own origin story.

I opened the box and handed the creature the stack of notebooks, the printed pages, the USB drives containing the digital files. "It will take you a while to get through all of it," I said. "It's years of work."

"I have time," the creature said. "I have nothing but time."

The creature took the notes and left. I watched it walk up the stairs, through the house, out the front door, into the night. I did not try to stop it. I did not ask where it was going or when it would come back. I understood that the creature needed to be alone with what it had learned, needed to process the information, needed to decide for itself what it was going to do with the knowledge of its own creation.

I sat in the basement until dawn. I thought about the someone, about the loss, about the two years I had spent trying to undo what could not be undone. I thought about the creature, moving through the city with my notes, learning the story of its own making. I thought about what would happen next, about the choices the creature would make, about the consequences that would follow from those choices.

I did not know, then, what the creature would become. I did not know that it would read my notes and find the one thing I had tried to hide, the one truth I had not told anyone, not even myself. I did not know that everything would change, that the creature would become something else, something I had not anticipated, something I could not control.

But I am getting ahead of myself again. I am trying to tell this story in order, and the order is important, because the order is the chain of cause and effect, the sequence of decisions and consequences that led to everything that happened next.

The creature took my notes. The creature went away to read them. And I waited, in the house on Laurel Canyon, for whatever was going to happen next.