Gamut Magazine
Issue #7

The Mind of the Unbound Prometheus

By: Nick Kolakowski

Originally published in Dark Moon Digest.

1.

Doctor Carl Howell rushed down the sedate hallways of Green Building 1 with a freshly severed pig head in his arms. Students gawped and laughed in his wake; a few must have assumed he was preparing for the university’s annual Prank Week, scheduled to begin the next day. But Howell was in no mood for laughter—he had an experiment to run.

The head was wrapped in plastic sheeting bound with duct tape, but a thin stream of blood and fluid nonetheless leaked from the folds and onto the tile. He almost slipped as he rounded the corner to his laboratory, where a cluster of researchers stood around a table lined with machines. They wore surgical gowns and caps, ready to work.

His nearest colleague, Ellie Stamper, stepped forward with a long tube as Howell dumped the head into a large sink. “Time,” she said.

“Twenty-eight,” Howell gasped, leaning over so he could catch his breath.

“Not the worst.” Snapping the tape, she peeled away the plastic. “You didn’t use the cooler?”

“I did.” Howell straightened. “But the damn thing tipped when I was getting out of the car. Ice everywhere.”

“No worries.” Flipping the head onto its side, Stamper plugged the end of the tube into one of the pig’s arteries. A machine on the nearby table thumped and gurgled, and blood poured from the head’s other holes. 

Turning to the other three people on the team, Howell clapped his hands. “Come on, people. Who’s got that saw?”

Howell’s colleague Rick Jones, a large man with an equally expansive beard poking around the edges of his surgical mask, raised his hand. “On it.”

Howell nodded. “Chamber ready?”

On the other side of the room, two graduate students nodded. They stood on either side of a plastic contraption the size and shape of a microwave, topped by a translucent dome. Tubing wrapped in aluminum foil ran from the back of the device to a set of dark blue tanks lining the far wall. 

On the counter beside the device, they had laid out a selection of surgical tools: scissors and scalpels and other blades. Now one of them—Thomas Leery, the best anatomist in the lab—picked up a scalpel and joined Jones beside the table in the middle of the room. The other, Joyce Pema, grabbed a pair of pliers.

With the excess blood drained from the head, Stamper moved it from the sink to that central table. Jones activated his oscillating saw, which whined as he lowered the blade to the dead flesh. This was his thirtieth brain, and he knew to cut as slowly as time allowed, chewing through skin and bone at a millimeter pace. The skull cracked open, and he gently peeled bits away with his fingers, while making a point of leaving certain sections intact—they had learned a long time ago that a brain best held its structure when a bony framework still supported part of it.

As he worked, Howell moved in, cauterizing tool at the ready. He burned loose vessels and arteries shut, working completely from memory—this was his forty-first brain. By the time he finished, Jones had shut off the saw. The two graduate students lifted the brain and carried it to the device, where they deposited it inside the translucent dome and plugged tubes into the arteries that Howell had left open. That task accomplished, they placed electrodes and a forest of sensors onto the cerebrum in a tight pattern.

“Shall we?” Stamper called from the other side of the room.

The graduate students nodded.

“Do it,” Howell said.

Stamper threw a switch, and a machine hummed. Red liquid—not blood, but a mix of antibiotics and nutrients in a saline solution—swirled through the device, up the tubing, and into the brain, which began to turn a deep pink. The tubing shook slightly with each pulse of the liquid. A metal block beneath the dome kept the brain itself at a living temperature.

Stamper flicked a second switch, which delivered a sedative mix—including propofol, a consciousness-killing drug—via a second line. She flashed a thumbs-up sign, and one of the students shut and sealed the dome.

Howell turned to a nearby workstation and shook the mouse until it woke up. Typing in his password, then a few commands, he noted the columns of data inching up the screen. “Take a breath, everyone,” he said. “Might take some time before we see anything like activity.”

“You mean anything more than zero.” Stamper said it with a grin, but he caught the edge in her voice, hinting at the late nights spent in the lab, the messy failures, the creeping sense that this experiment was a waste of time and resources.

“I’ll even take a one or two.” Howell grinned back, thinking nobody in this room has any right to be upset. None of you have the worst job: driving to the slaughterhouse, waiting for a pair of irate workers to drag a head—still warm, practically still blinking—to your car, and then driving all the way back to the city with that steaming, stinking thing rolling around in its cooler in the back seat…

“Well, I don’t know about the rest of you,” Jones said, snapping off his gloves and surgical mask, “but I’m going to grab a beer down at the Spigot. Anyone care to join me?”

The team looked at Howell questioningly. He beckoned toward Jones. “We had a good run today,” he said. “Might as well blow off some steam. Let’s just clean this place up.”

When they had disposed of the unused parts of the pig’s head, and sanitized the sinks and tables, Howell checked the stats on the computer monitors one last time. No activity. A feeling of faint despair threatened to swarm up his gut, and he beat it back with a single thought, repeated like a mantra—science takes time.

The despair flailed back—but it shouldn’t! You’ve been working so long!

That was true; he had. And maybe it was his residual exhaustion from the frantic drive, or a deeper fatigue from the months in this tiny, windowless lab with his increasingly worn-out team—whatever made his bones feel heavy also injected a sense that things needed to move much, much faster.

The others had left the lab. Howell tapped a few commands on the keyboard before putting the computer to sleep. On the other side of the room, the hum of the pumps changed, settling into a faster rhythm. 

2.

It had started with the rats.

When Howell was a wet-behind-the-ears grad student, he had ended up in the lab of Doctor Sarah Koch. He spent a summer testing for postmortem electrical signals in the neurons of dead rats—and by September, discovered the course of his future career. 

Maybe if some kind soul had told him about the difficulties of securing funding for this kind of research, he might have chosen a different path. As it was, you said the words “brain revival” and checkbooks instantly snapped shut, unless they were held by eccentric billionaires with delusions of living for thousands of years.

Fortunately, one of those billionaires—Alexi Hanson, a man who made one of the largest fortunes in the world from video games in which you killed thousands of faceless soldiers, died, and were revived to kill again—funded Howell’s considerable needs. And would do so for the foreseeable future, provided Howell found anything useful. His team was on a slow clock, but it was ticking nonetheless.

Best not to think about that now, though. Howell needed alcohol, and the best place for that was the Spigot, one of the few bars on campus. It was a windowless box two stories underground, its wooden walls plastered with stickers, scratched by decades’ worth of knives and pens, and stained by gallons of spilled beer. 

Jones had managed to land a wide table in the back, along with two pitchers of cheap slosh. Howell arrived just as the team’s conversation fell into silence, everyone staring into their pint glasses with the glazed-over eyes of the truly exhausted.

That silence reigned as Howell took the one empty seat, poured himself a beer, chugged it down, and poured another. Under normal circumstances, he usually nursed a pint through an entire evening, but stress had a way of making him thirsty.

“Doctor, I have a question?” It was Gary Wick, one of the grad students. He was the newest of their wild bunch.

“Speak, lest ye be spoken to,” Howell said, realizing that the beer was already taking hold.

“So we get these pigs from the slaughterhouse…”

“That’s right. I have to drive down, wait for them to kill one cleanly enough for our purposes.” Howell shuddered slightly. “They let me set up a little cubicle where I have one of those portable pumps, and I get a lot of the blood out before I get the head in the car, just to stop as much clotting as possible. Drive like hell back here.”

“Well, I was thinking,” Wick paused, wary of questioning a professor’s judgment. “Why don’t we set up a lab down there, in the slaughterhouse? We start working on the brain faster, less chance of clotting, cellular damage…”

Howell nodded. “I thought about it. Even asked the slaughterhouse manager. He looked at me like I’d sprouted a pair of horns from my forehead. No way they let us set up down there. They already think what we’re doing is…weird.”

Slugging the last of his beer, Jones chuckled, “Wait until we bring a pig brain back to full consciousness. That manager won’t even know where to begin wrestling with his existential crisis.”

A hush fell over the table.

Jones flexed his hands on his glass, his knuckles popping white. “Hey, we’re going to have a long, messy debate about this at some point. Surprised we haven’t had it already, frankly.”

“I had some thoughts,” Stamper said. “Wrote up some bullet-points, just in case we get, um, a result sooner than expected. You know how bioethics panels freak out when—”

Howell thumped his glass onto the table. The sound was louder than he anticipated, a hollow boom that drove Stamper to silence.

“We have the syringe,” Howell said. “It’s right next to the machine. Any reading above ten—hell, any reading that’s not one or two—and we perform an immediate shutdown, okay? We might not have plunged into the full ethical conundrum, but we talked about that.”

“Can someone remind me,” Wick said, “at what level we hit, ah, awake?”

“A hundred. Even something like seventy is like being under anesthesia. No dreams,” Howell said, rubbing his forehead. “We haven’t seen anything remotely close to anything. Just electrical interference.”

“Okay.” Jones burped. “Sorry I brought it up. Anyone want another beer?”

They had another round. Afterwards, Jones and Wick went to play a few games at the pinball machine in the corner, while Artie vanished in the scrum of graduate students at the bar. As Howell stood to leave, Stamper’s thumb brushed the back of his hand.

Glancing around to make sure no colleagues were watching them, he found her fingers and squeezed.

She squeezed back, then let go.

“My place?” she murmured.

He offered her a slight smile, his eyes bright with exhaustion.

3.

Before heading to Stamper’s house, he returned to the lab. Opened the door and stood there, listening to the humming darkness. He wasn’t the only person in the building (you could always find a few researchers working late), but in that moment he felt like the lone soul for a hundred miles around.

Shaking off that melancholy, he switched on the overhead lights and sat at his workstation. A keyboard tap awakened the desktop, and he typed in his password.

Data jumped out at him—endless streams of red numbers writhing like snakes.

The sight sobered him instantly. At first he thought that something had gone catastrophically wrong with the experiment—maybe a sensor out-of-whack, or a crimped line. It had happened before. But as he examined the scrolling numbers, he realized this was something different altogether.

Something had gone right.

In a little box on the bottom of a screen, a single number ticked rapidly upward: 20…then 30…then 35 on its way to 42.

His gaze flicked from the screen to the device in the corner, humming and thumping away. Although it looked no different than during the other forty experiments, he knew that, beneath that plastic shell, within the web of tubes pulsing fluid, the brain was alive and working. Perhaps it wasn’t conscious in a way that anyone would understand, but that gray matter still crackled with electricity, its neurons and dendrites lighting up like the Fourth of July.

It took every ounce of Howell’s self-control to not yell with joy. Pulling out his phone, he flicked through his contacts until he hit the one labeled “Ellie Stamper.” His thumb hovered over the “Call” button.

He remembered Stamper in the bar, her voice wavering as she mentioned bioethics. As much as he wanted to tell her about this amazing breakthrough, how could he do so without telling her that he’d stopped the flow of sedative before heading out for beers? She was the moral type; they really had something together (or at least, he hoped they did), but she would burn all that down in an instant if she thought he had committed some kind of ethical infraction.

But what did I really do wrong? Run some fluid through a dead pig brain?

In simplest terms, yes. And he could explain all that to her, face-to-face. If nothing else, Howell prided himself on his ability to persuade people. It had worked with the billionaire, the dean, and however many university committees, right?

His finger tapped “Call.”

Five rings, and it went to voicemail.

“Hey,” he said. “It’s me. Sorry, I was running a little late. I’ll be there in twenty.”

Thunder boomed, and the first drops of rain smacked the windows of the hallway outside the lab.

4.

            It was a thunderous downpour by the time Howell climbed into his car. His back seat smelled faintly of pig.

            As he fumbled his key into the ignition, his phone rang. He checked the screen—Alexi Hanson, his pet billionaire. He desperately wanted to send the call to voicemail, but Alexi had a nasty way of calling and calling until someone finally picked up. Plugging the phone into its dashboard holder, Howell hit “Answer,” followed by the button for the speaker.

            “Alexi.” Howell tried to force as much cheer into his voice as he could. “How goes it?” 

            “How goes it with you?” Alexi chuckled. “I saw your request for additional funds.”

            “That’s right,” Howell said, trying to keep his voice even. “Listen, we’re on the verge of something really big, I feel…”

            “That’s what you said last time. And the time before that.”

            “Well, science takes time.” Reversing out of his parking space, Howell exited the lot and turned onto University Avenue, his windshield wipers struggling to beat back the buckets of rain hitting the windshield. “It’s like game development, you know? Trial and error. But when you get it right…perfection.”

            That analogy had worked before, but this time Alexi grunted and sighed. “My bank account can take only so many attempts at perfection, doctor.”

            But you’re worth billions, Howell wanted to shout. Instead, he said, “We have activity. Nobody else knows. You’re the first I’ve told.”

            A long pause. Howell turned from University onto 59th, gaining speed as he headed toward the highway onramp a few blocks away.

            “If that is true,” Alexi said, “we must commercialize as soon as possible, do you understand? Rapid testing. Human brain.”

            “Human testing is a whole different ballgame, Alexi.”

            “Ballgames are won with money.”

            That’s a rich bastard for you—cutting right to the chase. “I understand,” Howell said, thinking of how he stretched his household budget every month to keep himself in food and on top of his student loans and rent.

            “How long until we can move to the next stage?” Alexi said.

            Howell took a deep breath, held it, exhaled. “Maybe a year?”

            “Not good.”

            “That’s science. We’re dealing with consciousness, the trickiest thing there is. Right now, we have a brain in a jar. We want more, it’s going to take more time.” He paused. “And more money.”

            “I take your hint.” Alexi grunted again. “I am happy to provide additional funding, but only if there’s a clear path forward. Call me on Friday, we’ll talk again, yes? When I have my screens in front of me. And my lawyers.”

            “Okay.” The onramp approached, a smear of color amidst the blackness. Howell squinted, hoping traffic on the highway would be light.

5.

Howell rushed down the hallways of Green Building 1 with a freshly severed pig head in his arms. Students leapt out of the way, giggling and pointing. His muscles burned under the weight, and the slippery plastic threatened to escape his grip. He took the corner to the lab at a high rate of speed, banging his hip against the wall, and plunged through the doorway with a grunt.

Stamper stepped forward with a long tube as Howell dumped the head into a large sink. “Time,” she said.

“Twenty-eight.” Howell bent at the waist, gasping for breath.

“Not the worst.” She peeled away the plastic. “You didn’t use the cooler?”

“I tried, but it tipped over in the parking lot. Ice everywhere. So I took the head and ran.”

“Bet that made quite a sight.” Grinning, Stamper flipped the head over and plugged the big tube into the appropriate artery. Blood poured from every hole, driven by the nearby pumps.

Howell turned to the anxious team, clapping his hands. “Come on, people. Who’s got that saw?”

Jones raised his hand. “On it.”

Howell nodded. “Chamber ready?”

The graduate students nodded.

“Then let’s get to work.”

6.

Howell slammed his beer on the table, which had the appropriate effect. The rest of the table fell silent. Stamper, cut off in mid-sentence, looked ready to kill him, but he figured they could patch it up later. He knew what she liked.

 “We have the syringe,” Howell said. “Right next to the machine, remember? Any reading above ten, and we inject that mega-dose of sedative right into the cortex while we perform a controlled electrical shutdown. Come on, we’ve been through this.”

 “Someone please remind me,” Wick said, “at what level we hit, ah, awake?”

“A hundred. Even something like seventy is like being under anesthesia. No dreams,” Howell said. “We haven’t seen anything remotely close to anything. Just electrical interference.”

In the corner, a young student with long black hair must have scored big at pinball, because the machine exploded with light and noise that drowned out all conversation for ten yards around. Howell leaned back in his seat, trying to meet Stamper’s eyes, but she kept her gaze fixed on the deeply scratched table between them.

7.

Red data vomited across the screen, a slurry of numbers that told Howell one thing—he had finally gotten it right.

Standing, he walked over to the device. It hummed and thumped along, nothing unusual, and yet he knew that the brain inside was crackling, its cells blooming with power.

Behind him, in the little box on the bottom of the screen, one number sped through 35…42…55. A box popped open with a red warning on it, only to disappear.

He placed his hands on either side of the device, expecting it to feel warm, only mildly surprised at its coolness. He had never touched the plastic during the experiment; not because it would have violated protocol, but because he had a superstition, held since his student days, that even actions of no consequence might tip a process in ways he couldn’t anticipate.

He wondered if the brain was dreaming. Could it remember? If the numbers climbed high enough, what would “awakening” feel like? Could a mind without any physical inputs—no eyes, no tongue, no body—even begin to comprehend its situation?

What if it relived its last moments over and over again? Closing his eyes, Howell imagined the stink and noise of the slaughterhouse, the chaos of the killing chute, the roughness of human hands gripping a neck—and then that final burst of pain like a lightning bolt, plunging the world into black.

He opened his eyes and saw the syringe in its plastic case beside the device, loaded with enough sedative to disrupt every process in the cortex. To kill the pig’s mind—again. Part of him wanted to reach for it, to end whatever suffering this thing might be feeling, but his hands seemed welded to the sides of the device.

8.

Howell leaned over the head, his cauterizing tool crackling arteries shut. It was a delicate dance with Jones, who stepped back and forth as he carefully sawed skull away from the graying cerebrum. Howell could sense the graduate students hovering behind him, anxious to carry the brain to the device, which stood open and ready.

The last artery sealed with a puff of smoke, Howell stepped back. “Do it,” he said.

The students rushed the brain to the other end of the room. Depositing it into the dome at the top of the device, they plugged in tubes and sensors.

Always meticulous, Jones cleaned the edge of his saw with alcohol. “Maybe it’s the fatigue,” he said, “but I’m having a lot of trouble remembering how many times we’ve done this before.”

“A hundred,” Howell said.

“Not possible,” Stamper called out.

“I’m sorry?” Howell’s eyebrows crashed together.

“Best I can recall,” Jones said. “I think you’ve done forty-one, and I got thirty. How could we have done hundreds?”

Howell locked gazes with him. “I know what I know.”

Jones shook his head. “I know we need to de-stress. We’re running ragged, man.”

The head went into the device. Stamper flipped the two switches, sending a flood of sedative and nutrients into the brain, the tubes pulsing in time like a heart. The students lowered the dome, flipped the plastic locks that kept everything sealed tight, and stepped back.

Howell stood by the sink, rubbing his forehead. He smelled ozone, like it was raining hard outside the lab, but the rain wasn’t supposed to start for another few hours, right?

Am I having a stroke?

He flexed his fingers and toes. No loss of movement, no numbness. But something was definitely off nonetheless. He wanted to sit down, to breathe, but it was impossible to fill his lungs. Even though he was standing still, he felt like he was running—

9.

Howell sprinted down the hallways of Green Building 1 with a freshly severed pig head in his arms. Students dodged him, laughing. He could barely hold onto the dead meat, and the wet plastic kept wanting to slide from his hands. He cornered at high speed, the lab just ahead—and slipped on the tile.

Crashing to the floor, he let out a high-pitched squawk. The pig head thumped and rolled onto its side, those dead eyes staring at him with reproach from behind their translucent shroud.

“What’s happening to me?” Howell asked the pig, which denied him an answer.

Rising to his knees, then his feet, Howell dusted himself off. The door to the lab was just ahead, so it was curious that none of the team had come into the hallway to see what was wrong. Hadn’t they heard him fall?

“Guys?” Leaving the pig head in the middle of the hallway, he stepped into the lab and found it empty and dark, lit only by the glow of the computer monitor in the corner. Red data poured down the screen.

10.

He drove through grayness. The highway was empty, its edges misty. The humming silence interrupted by a rustle behind him.

            The rearview mirror framed the pig’s head, wrapped in clear plastic sheeting. Wait—where was the cooler he placed the specimens in?

            There were no other cars on the road. That simply wasn’t possible, not at this time of day, not this close to the city. None of this made any sense. He had just been at the lab. How…

            “This is a dream,” he announced, to nobody in particular—and to his horror, the pig in the back seat answered back:

            “Yes.”

            The pig spoke with a wheezy rasp, which wasn’t surprising, considering how badly the workers at the slaughterhouse had mangled its throat during the final butchering. Under normal circumstances, a severed head talking to him might have sent Howell into a screaming panic, but nothing about this was normal at all. In fact, he felt oddly calm.

            “Every time, it’s been a dream.” He tried to recall how many times he had driven this route to the lab, delivered the head, headed out for drinks with the team—dozens? Hundreds?

            “Yes.”

            “I don’t understand.”

            The pig’s voice rose from a faint rasp to a boom that shook the car’s windows. “One hundred milliseconds for the brain to process images from the eyes. Too slow to see the accident coming.”

            “What accident?” Howell waved a hand at the empty road. “What are you talking about?”

            But the pig had fallen silent. Maybe to let Howell put the pieces together himself. What happened after the drinks? He visited the lab, saw the data from the brain, headed over to Ellie’s house, made the call to Alexi, and—

            What?

            Yes, he was remembering a little bit more. Rain that shattered his view through the windshield into a chaos of shapes and color. And then there was—there was—

            “Oh God,” Howell said.

            “Yes.” The pig sounded pleased.

            “There was an accident? A crash?”

            “Yes.”

            “And so I’m in the…device. My brain. In there.”

            “Yes.”

            Howell snorted. It sounded almost like a sob. “How did they…retrieve me in time?”

            The pig stayed silent, because it only had Howell’s own memories to draw from.

            “How do I break this loop?” Howell loosened his grip on the steering wheel, and the car drifted across the lanes, angling toward the guardrail. A whisper of memory told him that he had tried this before—many times, perhaps. How could anyone die in their own dream? Things would just sort of…reset.

            Howell’s heartbeat accelerated, which was odd because he no longer had a heart. Maybe it was the pulse of liquid through the device, speeding up as it responded to his brain’s signals.

            He remembered Alexi saying that they needed to commercialize the technology as fast as possible. Billionaires were waiting to live forever. Had they already begun the process with other people? What if this was what awaited them—waking dreams that never stopped?

            “I didn’t mean for this to happen,” Howell said, realizing how useless the words sounded. “I was just trying to advance the science, you know?”

            “Yes.”

            “This loop…” He fought to keep his voice even. “How do I?”

            “Wake up?”

            “Yes.”

            They hit a bump, and the pig’s head tilted up. Its black eyes filled the rearview mirror, promising a future that was always the past. A future with no death, provided someone always kept the electricity and the fluids running. And wasn’t that grand? Wasn’t that what Howell had spent his whole life working towards?

            From this new angle, the pig seemed to smile. “No wake up,” it said. “No wake up.”

Nick Kolakowski is the author of several horror and crime novels, including Absolute Unit (Crystal Lake Publishing) and Love & Bullets (Shotgun Honey). His short stories and nonfiction essays have appeared in various anthologies and magazines, including CrimeReads, Noir City (the magazine of the Film Noir Foundation), Mystery Magazine, Shotgun Honey, Rock & A Hard Place, and Best American Mystery & Suspense 2024. He lives and writes in New York City.

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