~2008~
It was a pretty normal day in October, the sky was the color of iron, and it was raining a little. I was on the public bus going to see the doctor, it was nothing serious, just a bad cold, but I was hoping to get something for it. When I saw my stop, I pulled the cord to get off, and exited through the rear door. The wind was starting to blow hard and it made the trees move, the hospital seemed almost as if it were a living creature, from a distance the walls seemed to be breathing, though it was only the climbing ivy that grew up the walls moving with the wind.
I entered the lobby and took a seat. I attempted to read a magazine, but it was so dull that I couldn’t go on, it was filled with makeup and perfume ads, and the “scent samples” were making my headache worse. Why would they put those in a golf magazine? Why would they even make a magazine about a subject as dull as golf? Damn cold. So i just stared out the window at a Blue jay who was perched in an evergreen just feet from me outside the window. I thought those kinds of birds flew south for the winter, its strange to see one here this time of year, but such a rare sight has a beauty about it, the colors of both the bird and the tree were made more vibrant by the grey sky. The nurse called my name.
As I entered the office, the doctor instructed me to sit down. He was Asian with long hair tied back in a ponytail and thick rimmed square glasses, the word “Nerd” came to mind. His name was Dr. Henry Sung. After sticking strange instruments with lights on them into every hole in my head, he informed me that i seemed to be pretty healthy, except for a cold, or possibly some sort of seasonal allergy. Only one thing left to do, a blood test to find out what I’m allergic to exactly, if anything. He tied a tight rubber strap around my arm and promised it wouldn’t hurt. And that was the first time I had ever believed a doctor who said that, the rubber strap was so tight that I had lost all feeling in my arm anyway. And as it turned out I was wrong, it did hurt. Weird how that happens. He told me that I should expect to get a call from them with the results of the blood test within a week, but not to expect anything, I seemed pretty healthy.
And then 4 days later my phone rang. I answered it and it was Dr. Sung calling with the results of my blood test. He sounded quite excited for some reason. He told me that I had a disease that was like nothing anyone had ever seen before, something completely new, they didn’t have a name for it. He also told me it would be fatal, but as he said this he sounded as though he was close to laughing. I asked if he was joking, I couldn’t believe it. He said no. I asked how long I had. He asked me how long I wanted. I told him I wanted to live to the end of my natural life. “You got it” he said. I asked if he had a cure for it, he told me he didn’t, and he didn’t plan to research one either. I was confused. If I had a fatal disease how could I finish my natural life span? He told me that I was being too pessimistic on the subject of diseases. Though most would destroy their host faster than time would, this one would do the opposite. It would actually slow down the rate that cells decay, and cause me to live longer. He said I definitely had over a hundred years to live, maybe two hundred, maybe a thousand. Since no one had ever had it before, it was impossible to know. It would kill me in the end, but the benefits outweighed the consequences. It wasn’t contagious, and it appeared to be something that could never be spread or created except in a very specific environment, only very few people could support it. He said i could name it if i wanted to, but if not, he would. I told him he should name it, i was no good at this sort of thing, he’s the doctor, i just asked that he didn’t name it after me. After a minute of silence he said “How about Ignarus Mortis?” “It’s fine i guess, but what does it mean?” i asked him. “Exactly translated, it means one who doesn’t know death, it’s Latin” He told me to get some sleep and think about it, after all its something big, isn’t it? He also warned me not to tell anyone I had it, he told me that eventually I would have to due to my lack of aging over the next few decades, but I should continue to age over the next three years until I turn about 23, give or take a few months, this disease seems to prolong growth a little, but slow decay alot.
~2051~
Over the next 44 years I aged little, If at all. I still appeared just as I the day I was diagnosed with Ignarus Mortis, or at least not much different, I had gotten about 6 inches taller anyway, and ive grown a goatee, but that’s it. I can see how little i have aged when i see Dr. Sung, we have become friends since he diagnosed me with the disease, we occasionally go to the bar and have a beer, he gets older, but i don’t seem to, it’s a strange feeling.
It’s amazing how much people limit themselves because they know they will die someday, most never start things that they know will take years to complete, and why would they? there’s a very good chance it might never be finished in their lifetime, but not me, I don’t have that problem, if there’s one advantage to Ignarus Mortis, its this, I can finish things no matter how long they take, this is something ive thought alot about, and ive decided to become an inventor. I can learn anything, I have time, so if I can think of it if can invent it.
For awhile I thought of becoming a medical scientist, I wanted to find out exactly what Ignarus Mortis was, how I could have gotten it, and most of all, why I was capable of getting it and why no one else could or at least had gotten it. All I knew is that it’s a defect in my DNA, not a virus or anything like that, and something outside must have caused it to take effect, unless I had just never noticed it before because it doesn’t harm growth. That was something i decided to study, so over then next few years i worked hard dissecting my own DNA only to find that it seemed normal enough, though it was based less on carbon than most are and contained an element i couldn’t identify. perhaps if i ever figure out the human genome ill know exactly what caused this, maybe even find a new letter in my own DNA, a new chemical that makes part of it up.
~2059~
Last weekend Dr. Henry Sung died. he was 88 years old, I guess he had a long life, he had been retired for 28 years, he went into retirement on his 60th birthday. Died of organ failure because of old age. He had been rich, and liked to have fun, didn’t see many old Asian guys riding around on a Harley Davidson, especially not doctors, but he liked fun and did what he wanted. His wife had called to tell me he died, I was working on a project at the time, I was attempting to figure out a way to teleport. I always thought black holes were the key, I had even worked with Steven Hawking at some point, but no one took me seriously, sometimes I didn’t even take myself seriously, why don’t I just try to make magic? At his funeral i found out he had left me something in his will, not money, I didn’t need money; I could live comfortably off of the royalties from water based bio-fuel I invented. it was what appeared to be an eyeball in a jar, probably from a whale from the size of it, but it had tubes attached to it to keep it “alive”. It also contained an envelope with a letter in it that read: “This may seem weird, but I think you will find it entertaining. Do something with it, it’s not like you don’t have time. It’s from a blue whale, extremely receptive to electricity, you always wanted to make a monster, right? Go ahead and try, at the very least it will make a good pet, I know you are capable of it, so have fun. -Henry”. His wife told me that he had meant to give it to me months ago, but he knew he was getting old and might not get a chance.
It was true however, we had planned at one time to make a monster. Well, maybe in this situation “planned” is too strong a word, more like casually discussed in a completely theoretic manner just for the sake of entertainment. At the bar we would sometimes talk about how interesting it would be to make crazy monsters out of robotic parts and living tissue, and how it would be possible with the two of us, him being a medical doctor, and me being the inventor. It was only casually brought up in discussion of course, we never made plans, and we only thought of it in the first place after seeing a preview for the new remake of Frankenstein on the bar tv during a commercial break.
~2077~
I had finally managed to find some of the rare element called copper. I was lucky enough to come across an old roll of pennies someone had buried in my back yard. I live in a very old house, it was built in the 1980’s, nearly 100 years old now, must have been some kid that lived there when it was first built, I don’t know, but it works out well for me. I remember a time back when the stuff was everywhere, they even had water pipes made of the stuff. It’s hard to believe that even the penny, the least valuable form of currency, was made of the copper. Now it’s all gone, been sent into space by NASA, they took most of the world’s supply and made it into satellites, the rest is in bits of technology, its really expensive, most electronics companies have their own copper mine. Not that I couldn’t afford any, its just that no one’s selling. Man, I feel old saying something like “I remember a time” sounds like something someone’s grandparents would say, but I guess by anyone’s standards, 89 is old. I don’t feel old, I can still pass for being in my late 20s or early 30s.
The copper worked as I had hoped, I was able to make it into an alloy by mixing it into gold, it came out a nice rich orange color, bright orange. A beautiful metal, it would have been great for decorative purposes, but I needed it for it’s conductive properties. If I had done everything right, this stuff would be conductive enough to be used as a robotic equivalent of a nerve cell. Hopefully I could somehow tie it into the living nerve tissue of the whale’s eyeball, which was currently cryogenically frozen to preserve it until I could use it. I found that a taffy puller did a very good job on this metal in a semi-melted form, it pulled it into extremely thin wires, less than 40 gauge, in all I managed to make an approximately 6200ft long roll of it, all from only half of a pound. Limitlessly flexible, thinner than a hair, and pretty strong.
I need a brain for this creature still, what kind of brain? Obviously a computer chip, no doubt about that, but why wouldn’t I just use a camera and make a 100% robotic robot? Why did Henry leave me this thing? Unless he knew something I didn’t, or at least, something I hadn’t even thought about. Then I realized, camera technology isn’t what it could be, not to say there haven’t been any advances over the years, but an eyeball is still the best thing to see with, no denying that, and since whale’s eyes are located on the sides of their heads, each one has independent depth perception, no other creature’s eyes do, it’s because whales are smart enough to support such an ability, no other creature with eyes placed in such a way are. I would have to program the vision around that fact, not easy to do.
~2079~
Two years ago finished constructing the brain chip, I made it out of a substance known as “rubber diamond”, it was a scientists attempt to make an artificial diamond, but it came out rather rubbery, but still hard. it’s also clear, bullet-proof, and doesn’t break into sharp shards in the extremely rare event that it’s ever broken. A perfect substitute for bullet-proof windows, but for me it replaced silicon for the base of the chip. After fabricating it, I needed to program it. I wanted to give it life, so over the next 2 years I programmed every thought I had into it, everything, left nothing out, even things such as “im hungry” and “I have to use the bathroom” went into it, though those would later be translated to feeling files. I programmed it to have various types of thought separated into categories, including: personality, action, reaction, foreground, background, instinct, physical awareness (feeling), emotion, active, and inactive. With the addition of the free radical system AKA the unpredictability program that should never ever be used on any robot, and 22.7 terabytes of memory space, I would guess that that would be close to that of a human. I also gave it a memory decay program, the smaller memories will decay over time, still keeping the basic concept of them, but compressing the file size by deleting the smaller details, and eventually completely forgetting the smaller things in files that aren’t accessed for a certain amount of time, with the open-ended file system I made, it could access any memory seamlessly from it’s last thought, therefore it only forgets the useless thoughts.
The “brain” would go directly behind the eyeball, it would be encased in a type of lava rock that is highly resistant to magnetism and around that there would be a silver and aluminum heat sink, finally fitted with an outer “skull” made of lead and tempered steel. The body would contain a hollow, rubber diamond lined cavity containing hydrochloric acid and enzymes, essentially it would be a stomach, but it wouldn’t work as most do. The robot would eat, but as the food enters the stomach, it goes through a pressure chamber. The stomach must remain air tight, and as the pressure from the enzyme’s digestion builds, it’s slowly released into a chamber that uses the force to drive a gold and copper piston against a magnet to generate electricity. Though the downside is it must also excrete waste, so in the lower body there is a removable waste container, when it’s filled, the robot will empty and clean it.
The outer design will be simple, it will have one eyeball in the middle of it’s head, a mouth made of actual living cells grown in a lab, giving it the ability to taste, move more accurately, and talk once it learns how, and of course vocal cords made of a type of carbon-fiber rubber. It’s body will be a pipe that is thickest at the top and thins into a flexible tail at the bottom, and it will have hands that are controlled by microhydraulics which means it will have as much if not more control over it’s hands as a human. The copper and gold wire will go over the “skeleton” in a net-like matrix, all will be connected to the brain chip, it will be able to sense the difference in current running through them when the wire is touched, therefore giving it a sense of feeling. The robot will have no legs, it won’t walk, it will hover. Making things hover is simple; all it requires is an even number of gyroscopes with half positioned vertically, and half horizontally. Spreading them evenly is key to making this creature hover straight, so there is a horizontal gyroscope in each shoulder and 2 vertical ones in the central body. They are mounted on sliding motors with a limited range of movement, so the robot will be able to alter it’s angle and height at will, but only to a certain extent. After all internal parts are installed, it will be covered with a thin layer of micro-fiber Kevlar that can be shrunk under heat, and after the initial shrinkage, it becomes heat and flame resistant. Now that the blueprints are done, time to build it.
~2080~
The body was finally done, just under a year after I started it. Everything looked just as I had hoped, and worked fine too. All that was left to do was finish the head. I already had the skull made, and I had gotten the eyeball out of cryogenic storage, luckily it had remained intact and “alive”. Connecting the eyeball to the brain chip was actually easier than I had expected, the living nerve cells were able to bond to the copper and gold wire, and they were able to pass electricity to each other. I had to use some of my blood to replace that of the whale’s however, the freezing had shredded the blood cells, and giving it my DNA may help to preserve it. After mounting the eyeball into the self-moistening socket, I installed the head onto the body. Time to activate it. I couldn’t exactly feed it, it needed to chew its food or it couldn’t be digested. I ended up having to start it manually by moving the pistons until it had generated and stored enough electricity to get it started and hopefully last long enough to eat and digest some food. And then, I removed the piece of plastic I had used to keep the contacts from connecting.
Nothing happened, as far as I could tell I had either not charged it enough, or I had simply messed something up, time seemed to be way too slow, maybe if I just waited a little more. And it seems that I was just being impatient, the eyeball had started to move, it knew how to move off of instinct, it was looking around, seeing it’s surroundings for the first time, but was it just a robot, or something more? I approached it cautiously, it made a loud, but indistinguishable sound, I assumed it was a sound of fear. It was afraid of me. That could only mean one thing, it was aware. If only Henry was here to see this, I made an almost living creature. It made a slight humming sound for a second, at first I thought this may be a first attempt at speech, but then I realized it was activating it’s gyroscopes, it got up off the floor and rose up to it’s full height, hovering about six inches off of the ground, it’s head was about 5 and a half feet high. But seeing it hovering there made me nervous, I didn’t know how it would act, it might be friendly, it might be violent, with the unpredictability factor and the free radicals, it could do anything, it thought on it’s own.
For a few minutes I just watched it, it was moving every part of itself, picking up things in the room and touching them, feeling them, and examining them. It seemed to have forgotten I was even there. It was making indistinct noises; just testing it’s vocal abilities I thought. I picked up a candy bar from the box of them I had on the table and offered one to the creature. It took it, and examined it, then stared at me obviously puzzled as to what I had given it. Then I picked up another, and slowly took off the wrapper, the creature copied. Then I took a bite, so did the creature. “Snickers Bar” I said. The creature just stared. I expected it to try to repeat it, but it didn’t, it just continued to eat the candy bar.
Over the next few weeks I talked to the creature regularly and let it watch documentaries on TV, it had started to say words, and even seemed to know the meaning of a few. It seemed to like gassier foods, such as beans, fatty meats, and cabbage, but those are the ones that suited it’s needs the most, but by far it’s favorite food was candy. If it discovered a new food it liked it would say that the food “flavors nice of candy” even if it isn’t remotely sweet. In it’s mind “candy” simply meant something that tastes good, but over the next month it’s grammar continued to improve, and soon enough it could talk well enough to have a conversation with it.
It’s brain chip was locked. Quite literally locked, no one, not even me could access it to make any changes. The creature itself is the only one capable of controlling it’s mind, a perfect system. And then it was time to introduce the creature to the world, but first it needed a name, and a gender. Since I wasn’t going to built it any extra parts, I would simply choose a gender for it and tweak it’s voice box to suit it. I decided to make it male, the eyeball was from a male whale, and the brain was programmed with my own thoughts, so it’s only suiting, I tweaked the vocal cord and slightly deepened the voice, not too much, but just enough to take the neutrality from it and make it sound human. As for a name, I gave it a long list and let it choose. He chose Grizzly, it means gray. Suiting, I suppose, he is covered in charcoal gray Kevlar.
Grizzly loved to learn things, and ever since he heard of school he became obsessed with the idea, though he had the wrong idea. He seemed to think it was a wonderful place where he could go any time he wanted to and learn something, though I did my best to convince him that school is NOT a good thing, he still wanted to go, just for a day, just to find out. But the thing is, schools do their best to take over everyone’s life, maybe it’s fun for a while, but after years and years of it the learning stops once the interest is gone. In the end, I convinced him to go to college instead of going to a public school. And though he is only little more than a year old, he has the maturity and intelligence of a human adult. College is filled with adults, who hopefully wont freak out at his odd appearance. Not like they had never seen an android before, most physical work has been done by them since the late 70’s, but never before has there been a robotic creature that looks anything like Grizzly, or one that is capable of learning, most just do as they are programmed to do and are only built to resemble humans for artistic purposes. Grizzly only looks human in the slightest way, the basic upper body shape was similar, had two arms, two hands, and a head on top, but he had no legs, he hovers, he had one large eyeball instead of two small ones, and he had a tail.
Though he had never attended school before, I did manage to get him into a collage off of pure intelligence. He had an IQ of over 277 on the Lipton’s system, that’s about 25% higher than the national average I Q of 207. About the same as mine. They say that one cannot raise their IQ, its something they are born with, and I suppose it’s true, but the more time you have to think, the more of your IQ you can use. Also, with the replacement of the WAIS method of IQ testing with Lipton’s method, the results are usually more accurate, therefore its really possible to tell how smart someone is. Grizzly also had the mathematical abilities of a calculator, literary capabilities of a computer spell check, and over 21 terabytes of memory space still left empty.
~2088~
Grizzly finished college a few days ago. He took every course the college offered and finished all with a perfect grade. He became known as “The Eyeball Monster” but not as an insulting name, as a title given to him by the media that he accepted and became famous for. Few knew I made him, and at first people were just plain scared of him, but by the time he finished college, he was famous. Everyone had heard of The Eyeball Monster, someone had even made the mistake of trying to kill him. That’s the problem with society, there are people out there who would kill a famous person just so they can say that they did something noteworthy in history, or that they have a really good reason to kill someone they don’t even know.
It was some weirdo that was convinced that Grizzly and all other technology would one day kill everyone and take over the world. And in his mind, Grizzly was the worst of the threat. He shot Grizzly 6 times. Of course a bullet wouldn’t kill grizzly, he was made of thick steel and covered in Kevlar, but he could feel pain, and it hurt a hell of a lot. But more than the physical pain, it hurt his feelings. That was the first time Grizzly had ever experienced real hatred, at first he was rejected by most, and it didn’t bother him, but this was different. The police wouldn’t do anything, they said it was nothing more than attempted destruction of property. They didn’t care what Grizzly was, or that he was just as alive as they were, he was metal, therefore replicable.
I would have to do this my way then, I knew who had attempted to kill grizzly, and the only reason he had failed is because he shot him in the chest rather than the eye, luckily for me, the law was on my side, I was over 100 and therefore not to be put in prison. One of the few fair laws that had ever been passed, if someone over 100 commits a crime, its most likely because they are senile and don’t know any better, they or their caregiver is fined to pay the damage, but other than that, nothing. Guess I get to go beat him up, I still felt about 30, I thought I could take him. As I approached where Patrick, the guy that tried to kill Grizzly, lived, I noticed that the lights were on. Lucky for me, he was home. I knocked on the door. No answer. “Are you the guy that tried to kill Grizzly?” I asked. I could sense him standing on the other side. “Get the hell off my porch” he yelled. I kicked the door, it fell down surprisingly easily.
Luckily for him he got out of the way before the door fell on him. He hit me with a phone. “What the hell? A phone?!” I said. He was mad. “Who the hell are you?” he demanded, “That thing’s mommy?” “Sort of” I said. “I built him.” And it seemed that was the wrong thing to say, he hated robots and I made the one, that in his opinion, was the worst. He drew a revolver from inside of his pocket, but before he could even raise it to shoot, I cut his hand off with my mini-plasma cutter. No blood came out, the wound had been instantly sealed by the extreme heat of the cutter, it melts than cuts. The severed hand lay twitching on the floor still holding the gun. The same gun that almost killed Grizzly. He seemed momentarily shocked, he didn’t move, not that he was dead, he was still breathing, and still standing, but his brain needed time to process exactly what had happened. I used that second to stab him with a toxic sedative syringe. A painless death, just goes to sleep and doesn’t wake up. More than he deserved in my opinion, but he had now attempted to kill both my creation and then me. Shows how useful a scientist’s pocket junk can be.
~2101~
Ignarus Mortis was certainly an interesting disease. At 113 I didn’t look or feel old. Probably looked about mid-30s by normal standards. Grizzly has been experimenting with biotechnology for a few years. I showed him his blueprints the day after I killed Patrick, since then he’s been obsessed with the science of creating life out of metal. The free radicals in his brain chip had been more than I planned. He seemed to have freer will than most people did. No limiting factors for him, he did what he wanted. Including building himself a pet. He’s always liked animals, but the thing is, he hated the idea of knowing that he would outlive a pet if he ever got one. So, by using his own blueprints he made a pet. It was a cat, he used real cat’s eyes even, and gave it a digestive system similar to his own. He made it smarter than an average cat, but not intelligent enough to be a human, but the main difference between his design and the cat’s design was that the cat had legs. It walked, jumped, and balanced. A lot like a real cat, except it wouldn’t die.

~2132~
Recently we have finished three new “Eyeball Monsters”. They each have an IQ of approximately 207, exactly average. They will be released into the world to live like humans. Each is started off with basic knowledge and instinct, and come equipped with plenty of space for memory. This was only an experiment to see what would happen, hopefully the world would know what to expect from them after all the publicity Grizzly got. Their life spans were limited however to about the same as a human, the whale’s eyes used contained only the whale’s DNA, so they wouldn’t have the advantage of Ignarus Mortis.
~2138~
“Eyeball Monsters” are now commonly known as The Metal Genome. The ones released into society have worked out quite well, two of the three have chosen artistic careers. One is a musician, one is a sculptor, and the other is a chef. My 150th birthday was last week, and from how I look and feel now, I think ill last to 600, though it’s hard to make an accurate estimate, only the future will tell for sure.
~2139~
Today I was thinking about it and I realized something. Living for 600 years is a lonely existence, maybe Henry knew more than he let on. By giving me that eyeball, not only had he made it possible for me to create what might one day become a new species, but he also gave me the one thing that someone in my position is least likely to find in their life. A friend that wont go and die.