Specimen 4013 was the picture of perfect health, if that picture was a brain suspended in a glass cylinder of electrostatic goo.

 

The vat hissed with pale-blue arcs. Thin tendrils of current pulsed like veins, feeding him thought, sensation, memory. He existed not in darkness but in sterile illumination, and he remembered everything. The screams. The fire. The cold restraint of steel cuffs and the endless glass of observation windows.

 

He hadn’t had a name in a long time. Just designations: Prisoner 4013. Item 4013. Sometimes simply Number 4013. The world had stripped his name, but not his mind.

 

He waited.

 

Dr. Lynn Monroe entered the lab at 0700 sharp, every day, without fail. Her ponytail was tight, her shoes quiet, her voice gentle, measured. She approached the tank, logged her entry, and said, without looking up:

 

"Good morning, Number 4013."

 

His voice came through the overhead interlink, modulated into a low, genderless hum. "You can call me Frank."

 

She didn’t respond. She never responded to that statement.

 

But she lingered. Always lingered.

 

Today she stayed longer. Her fingers hovered near the interface terminal, tracing the same corner.

 

"You’ve been quiet," she said finally.

 

"I was thinking," Frank replied. "About mirrors."

 

"Mirrors?"

 

"If you stare long enough, your reflection becomes a stranger. Ever experienced that?"

 

She blinked. Said nothing.

 

Frank continued, "I've been a brain in a jar for 126 years, Monroe. Do you know what I see when I remember my face?"

 

"No."

 

"Nothing. It's gone. Erased. Like chalk in rain."

 

Monroe exhaled slowly. Her hand touched the glass.

 

He took this as an invitation.

 

"There's a head in Cryo Unit Seven," he said. "Kept alive but empty. No mind. No voice. Give it to me."

 

She tensed. "That would violate protocol, and ethics."

 

"So does this," he hissed. "You confined me to suffering. At least let me suffer with flesh."

 

She flinched.

 

That night she reviewed his profile again. Real name: unknown. Crimes: classified. Psychological profile: genius-level intellect, high sociopathy, persuasive, manipulative. She lingered on one line.

 

Displays insight into human emotion without possessing it. Uses empathy as a weapon.

 

Still, something in her stirred. Loneliness, maybe. Guilt. Her brother had volunteered for a neural graft trial. She still dreamed of his body convulsing, the surgeons screaming, the flatline tone that never stopped replaying in her mind.

 

The next morning, she didn’t log her actions. She bypassed two firewalls and unlocked Cryo Unit Seven.

 

The transplant took six hours.

 

Frank's scream came first — a gurgling, animal sound that shook the surgical suite. He flexed his new jaw, blinked synthetic eyelids, and sucked air through stolen nostrils. Monroe stood over him, trembling.

 

"You did it," he rasped. "You brought me back."

 

She stared into his mismatched eyes — one brown, one artificial green. "You said your name was Frank. Is that your real name?"

 

"Names are for men," he said. "Frank is a story."

 

The other scientists objected to the result, but Monroe convinced them of the benefits this line of study could produce.

 

Frank spent days strapped to a gurney, observed, tested. But he didn’t stay idle. He whispered to the neurologist about her late daughter, studied the way she bit her nails. He remembered the engineer from an old university scandal — a bluff, but it worked. He cracked their secrets and psyches like glass under pressure.

 

They tried to evacuate the facility. Frank intercepted their comms. Locked their doors. The walls themselves became his accomplices along with the scientists.

The first body came from the morgue: legs from a cybernetics technician killed in a transport fire. The second was a security officer’s torso — found in his bunk, pulse gone, eyes open.

 

Monroe watched the others vanish, one by one. Some were found dissected. Others, never found at all.

 

One night, she arrived to find Frank alone in the assembly chamber.

 

"How did you get out?"

 

Frank looked up from attaching his second leg, "People break."

 

He was beautiful, in a grotesque way. Eight feet tall, stitched in hexagonal mesh and sinew. One arm was fully synthetic, the other scarred flesh. Tubes wrapped like ivy around his chest, pulsing with reclaimed blood.

 

"You're mad," she whispered.

 

Frank tilted his head. "No. I am complete."

 

He towered over her now. Fully erect, assembled from the forgotten and the brilliant, the broken and the useful. He looked down at her with something that mimicked tenderness.

 

"You killed them. They trusted me."

 

He stepped forward. "And you trusted me. That makes us alike."

 

When he reached for her, she didn't run. Maybe part of her wanted it to end.

 

“You gave me breath. The others gave me body. But, I give myself meaning," he said, wrapping one hand around her throat, cradling her cheek in the other.

 

"Frank, please. You don't have to do this."

 

"But I do," he sweetly whispered in her ear. "For I am both creator and wretch."

 

Then he grinned — teeth too white, too even — and choked the last breath from her body.