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    Frankie
    Frankie
    Frankie
    Ebook103 pages1 hour

    Frankie

    By Michelle Grotewohl

    ()

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    About this ebook

    Its the year 2029. Dr. Victoria Frankenstein has spent years working on a formula that will save the human race from extinction. She's the only one who can do it, utilizing work her great-uncle had started over two hundred years ago. She just needs a fresh specimen to test it on. One day, Victoria gets lucky, and finds the perfect man. Little does she know, he's perfect in more ways than one...

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMichelle Grotewohl
    Release dateMar 24, 2019
    ISBN9780463251683
    Frankie
    Author

    Michelle Grotewohl

    I currently reside in Colorado with my husband and three children. I would love to hear from my readers, as writing has always been a dream of mine, and I am thrilled to finally be published! Thank you so much to everyone who has downloaded or purchased a book for supporting my lifelong dream!

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      Book preview

      Frankie - Michelle Grotewohl

      Frankie

      Smashwords Edition

      Copyright 2019 Michelle Grotewohl

      Smashwords Edition, License Notes

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

      2029-

      Humans are killing the planet Earth. It wasn't something we set out to do. It was never intended for all our ‘great progress’ to cause so much damage. But it’s happened, nonetheless.

      Religious fanatics believe it is God telling us that we have become a sinful and hedonistic race and we deserve to be punished- In other words, wiped off the face of the Earth.

      Personally, I think that’s ridiculous. And not just because God is not real and was most likely created by a man who believed people needed something omniscient to believe in to feel more secure about an existence they didn’t understand. But think about it: If you were an all-powerful being who had created the most intelligent and complex creature Earth had ever seen, would you destroy it because it had behaved badly? Yeah, no. That would be like a parent killing their toddler for drawing on the walls.

      Anyway, Earth is going down in a bad way. But there is hope: Secret scientific advancements in the last twenty years have given us space travel outside of our own solar system, and we have found another planet very much like Earth that is capable of sustaining human life. We’re calling it Thera (Yes, Earth’s letters rearranged. Original, right?)

      It has its own life forms similar to those on Earth, namely animals that can be harvested for food. But there are no ‘intelligent’ beings. At least, none that we’ve found. It’s very possible that they’re out there, and we just haven’t been able to explore far enough to find them.

      The problem: Something in Thera’s environment causes the cells in the human body to deteriorate at an extremely rapid rate. The astronauts that we’ve sent there haven’t been able to stay long, experiencing a flu-like illness after less than a week, and death in less than a month. We lost two men before we figured out why they were dying.

      The solution: Me, Dr. Victoria Frankenstein. I am a cellular physiologist, specializing in cell reconstruction and regeneration. Most call me Vic.

      You may be familiar with the name. My great-times-five uncle was the Victor Frankenstein everyone knows. I’m named for him, as have been at least one person in every generation of my family since he became famous. Or, infamous.

      Most people believe that his work died with him, but that was not the case. You see, he was quite clever in many things, not just giving life to dead things. He had created a sturdy metal box that he’d put copies of all his work into and buried under his lab, and only his brother- my great-times-five grandfather- knew where to find it.

      After Great-Grandpa recovered it, he couldn’t bring himself to look at what was inside it, but his youngest son found it shortly after Great-Grandpa died, and he had no such qualms. Since then, Uncle Victor’s research has been kind of a family obsession, with a few of us over the years trying it out for ourselves, though with more caution than good old Uncle Victor.

      Every one of them failed.

      I believe I know why: They weren’t accounting for expansion. When cells regenerate they go from shriveled to full. If a body is dead and only has shriveled cells, there’s nothing to keep it ‘inflated’, so to speak, and it shrinks, too.

      When the cells are ‘re-inflated’, the body has to expand, but dead flesh doesn’t really have that capability. It’s dead.

      The good cells eventually completely fill the body and start suffocating each other, and the body continues to deteriorate until it is still ‘living’ but is half-full of dead cells. This causes decreased mobility and a lack of mental power, which means the ‘creature’ becomes stiff and thoughtless: As with Uncle Victor’s ‘monster’, it thunks around and kills people for ‘vengeance’.

      Uncle Victor had the right of it, though, with ‘the fresher the corpse, the better’, but unfortunately the time he lived in just didn’t allow for the kind of freshness we have today, nor access to entire bodies without drawing attention, hence the pieced-together, ragdoll look of his creature. And every Frankenstein after him just followed his lead and dug up bodies that had recently died, some of the later ones using the whole corpse rather than pieces.

      Where I work, we have freezers for that kind of thing, so I have access to ‘fresh’, complete bodies.

      I work at EarthSci, the science lab that does the majority of the research and development for the Thera program. I was hired two years ago when they couldn’t figure out what was killing the astronauts- I had already made quite a reputation for myself in my field, despite only being twenty-three at the time.

      I was originally brought in as one of many that were assigned to figuring out the issue with the Thera astronauts, but when I figured it out, and promised that I could fix it, they fired everyone else and tripled my salary (Smiley face).

      I’ve been working on the project ever since, and while I’ve made progress, it hasn’t been enough to satisfy me, or the people who pay me. I am repeatedly getting ‘threats’ of loss of funding, and I can’t blame them- I’m not holding up my end of the deal.

      The problem I face is that even with the freezers, the specimens I test my serum on aren’t fresh enough. What I’d like to do is test it on a living subject, because that’s what it would be used for, anyway, but I understand that that is too risky until I know it works the way it should and won’t kill people (Worst case scenario: The fresh cells overfill, and the person explodes. Literally.).

      But even with dead test subjects, I’m getting closer every day, and I believe I’ll have a viable, testable serum within a year.

      Naturally, there are those who think what I do is blasphemy, and while I understand they’ve been religiously lobotomized and are therefore permanently ignorant, it annoys the hell out of me.

      Unfortunately for them, I am the only thing standing in the way of imminent death, not God.

      Luckily for everyone, I can do as I say I will, with time and resources.

      Like there are persecutors, there are also people that I work with who want to ‘help’ me, which for most of them means steal my work, or at least some of the credit, as it’s both groundbreaking and vital.

      That is not going to happen. My uncle basically invented this branch of science, and if anyone is going to perfect it, it’s me.

      One such person is Jason Boseman, a neurobiologist that thinks we should ‘work together’. He doesn’t understand that my field of study has nothing, or very little, to do with the brain itself. He doesn’t realize that I understand that he doesn’t actually want to work with me, but rather get his hands on my research and use it for his own awful purposes.

      When I first came to the lab, he hit on me, asked me out several times. But science is my only love, and there was nothing about him that said, ‘I’m who you want’, even for the moment, so I turned him down. There was just something about him that rubbed me the wrong way, and he made this annoying grunting sound when he was deep in thought- maybe endearing from someone else, but from him it made me crazy.

      Since he realized I wouldn’t be going out with him, his desire for me has transformed into an ugly, mean-spirited monster. He’s

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