A young scientist, sick with ambition, stitches a man together from the dead and shocks him alive — then flees the room in horror at what he has made. What he abandons is not a monster but a newborn: quick, eloquent, and learning by degrees that everyone who sees him will scream. Told as letters and confessions folded inside one another, it asks the question every technology since has had to answer — who owes what to the thing they build?