mICROmOJIsTEIN | Short Story

On a raft floating on an ocean far away, there was a small, sleeping boy named Stein. He was made of dead flesh and bone.

Stein was suddenly born into existence by lightning striking a patchwork pile of mismatched corpse limbs and organs, in a reanimation experiment. His pallid skin loosely held together with meandering trails of stitches over countless scars. The unusual mixed-mapping of cadavers (some pieces all too familiar to some) terrified onlookers. Collective judgment and lies quickly spread, describing Stein and his creator as "murderous abominations" and "monsters not of this world". Shock and morbid fear informed assumptions in minds nearly as rapidly as the bolts of electricity had shot through the reanimation experiment, connecting the living and the dead. At the apex of persecution, Stein and his creator were chased to a shoreline by a torch-wielding mob. In a final act of sacrifice, Stein's creator pushed young Stein onto a nearby raft and out to sea, then, attempting to hold the angry mob back, he was engulfed in flames as Stein floated further out and away.

Haunted by vivid nightmares... fractured memories of smoke and fire, feelings of fear, loneliness, and torture, Stein tossed and turned now with the ocean's swaying, struggling to turn his thoughts to a new place to call home.

Woke from a screeching, in the distance through the mist, Stein could see an island, burning! The boy shuddered in disbelief at the all-too-familiar destructive flames staring back at him. Before he could change course, fate intervened, and a massive wave thrust the raft and the boy to the hellish blazing island's shoreline...