Fictional Stories for Fictional Audiences

Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus Reclaimed

A Tale of Industry and Abomination

May 23, 2025

For a full week, Prompting Culture will feature AI-centric sequels to selected well-known works of fiction, in short story format. Enjoy!

⚠ Please note: This story was inspired by Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein”. Prompting Culture claims no ownership or copyright over the original characters, settings, or concepts, as they appear in the original 19th century novel.

Chapter I

The Wanderer’s Lament

The creature drifted through the Alpine passes, a spectre untethered from time’s relentless march. Its threadbare cassock—wrought from burial shrouds and beggars’ castoffs—flapped like a penitent’s flag beneath the simoom that howled through the defiles, a wind which seemed to preach a sermon on futility. Glaciers, those hoary sentinels, glared down with rheumy indifference, their crevasses yawning like the ribs of a devoured cosmos. Decades of exile had inured it to solitude’s sweet rot, yet now a queer perturbation stirred: not hope (that fey illusion long since interred), but a morbid fascination akin to maggots writhe in carrion.

In a hamlet cleaving to the rocks like lichen, it overheard tavern whispers of one whose Promethean aspirations mocked even Victor’s follies. “Harcourt,” spat a blacksmith between quaffs of kümmel, “would dissect God’s own throne to fuel his furnaces.” A discarded broadsheet, frozen to a lychgate, proclaimed in woodblock arrogance: LABOUR PERFECTED THROUGH GALVANIC SUTURE; MORTALITY’S CHAINS SHATTERED. The creature’s gaze lingered upon these runes, talons curling in unwonted trepidation. Here was blasphemy polished to a mercantile sheen—and yet…

The factory emerged as a Boschian cathedral. Chimneys vomited pitch plumes skyward, their belching syncopated with the clank of treadles below. Through iron gates limped hollow-cheeked wretches, their eyes glazed as medieval martyrs. The creature contorted its frame—a grotesque parody of their stoop—and slipped among them, nostrils flaring at the stench of sweat and hot brass.

Within, the din assaulted like Bedlam unchained: Jacquard looms chattered dirges; steam hammers pounded a Dies Irae. At the epicenter stood Alaric Harcourt, his gaunt figure etched with the harsh geometry of ambition. “Behold!” he crowed to assembled burghers, “the apotheosis of industry!”

Upon the slab lay a corpse reanimated, its limbs trussed with copper filigree. The creature recoiled—not at the abomination, but at its own reflection in the thing’s clouded eyes. Memory surged: a lakeside hovel; a blind man’s kindness; fire.

Harcourt’s gaze snared it. “The Ur-creature graces us!” he simpered, oiled words dripping like tallow. “Come, critique my improvements!”

“Thou hast but forged a perverse automaton,” the creature rumbled, its voice a deathwatch beetle’s rattle. “Where my maker imbued life, thou installs… machinery.”

“Precisely!” Harcourt’s smile glinted scalpel-sharp. “Your genesis was artisanal—mine is reproducible. No soul-searching, no conscience. Merely… efficiency.”

“Efficiency?” The creature’s laughter curdled the air. “Thou art a cobbler stitching with severed tendons.”

Dusk found it prowling subterraean vaults where the very stones reeked of tallow and despair. From a shadowed archway floated voices:

“Harcourt demands fifty fresh cadavers ere Saturn’s Day.”

“The potter’s field’s scraped bare. Shall we harvest the almshouse?”

The creature turned, bile rising—then froze.

Amidst a midden of discarded cogs glimmered a diminutive hand, pallid as communion wafer. A doll’s limb, it reasoned, some child’s plaything lost. Yet the whimper that followed—frail, wet, alive—pierced its marrow.

Nay—this was no mere artifice, but a child’s severed member, still twitching.

Chapter II

The Apostle of Progress

The Manchester estate loomed like a mausoleum of modernity, its gaslit windows bleeding jaundiced light onto snowbanks sullied by soot. Within, Alaric Harcourt held court beneath a chandelier of Bohemian crystal, its prisms fracturing the faces of shareholders into a grotesque phantasmagoria. He stood gaunt yet galvanic, like a cadaverous Prospero in a waistcoat of arsenic-green silk. His voice was a carrion crow’s croon polished to oratory sheen.

“Gentlemen,” he declaimed, raising a goblet of claret that glowed like congealed blood, “let us toast to the obsequies of obsolescence!” The assembly tittered, their cravats starched, their consciences starchier still.

A drapery yanked aside revealed his theatre: rows of corpses upright on iron gibbets, their limbs stitched with copper suture, eyes replaced by quartz lenses that glittered with idiot vacancy. “Behold—Labour’s liberation!” Harcourt caressed a reanimated forearm, its flesh grey as printer’s rag. “No wages, no grievances, no souls to trouble your ledgers. Mere automata, yet superior to Adam’s brood!”

The creature watched from a gallery, cloaked in shadows and self-loathing. How familiar this pageantry—the rapture of a creator drunk on dominion. Yet these abominations unsettled it anew. Where it had been forged in lightning’s agony, these wretches were cobbled in cold calculus, their hearts stilled not by cruelty but indifference. Are we kin? it wondered, bile rising. Or am I, too, but a prototype for this desecration?

A shareholder, cheeks flushed with claret and avarice, slurred, “But can they think, sir?”

Harcourt’s laugh was a scalpel on glass. “Thought is a defect, my dear sir! These marvels heed only the loom’s threnody and the foreman’s lash. No dreams. No rebellions.” His spectacles flashed as he turned toward the gallery. “Is this not preferable, Ur-creature, to your tragic flailings?”

All eyes pivoted. The creature stiffened—seen, not as a spectre, but a specimen. Murmurs surged: “The original… how medieval…”

“You mistake life for machinery,” the creature intoned, its voice a coffin dragged through gravel. “These puppets of yours are but echoes of my curse. At least Victor trembled as he played God.”

Harcourt smirked. “Victor lacked vision. I have systematized genius. What he bungled in a fever-dream, I’ve patented, packaged, and made profitable.” He gestured to the cadavers. “Why, even now, Parliament clamors for regiments of these soldiers—unflinching, uncomplaining!”

The creature’s claws dented the balustrade. Unflinching. Uncomplaining. How often had it longed for such numbness! Yet here, in this gallery of gawkers, the craving curdled to revulsion. These men did not fear Harcourt’s monsters—they envied them.

Later, as port flowed and cigars smoldered, the creature skulked past a scullery where scullions scrubbed caviar from silver. A scullion-child, perhaps twelve, flinched at its approach.

“Please, sir—” she stammered, brandishing a tureen like a shield.

Sir. The word lanced it. Not “monster.” Not “devil.” Sir.

“Fear not,” it rasped. “I am… an acquaintance of your master’s.”

The girl’s eyes darted to the banquet hall. “D’ya think it’s true? What he said ‘bout them corpse-men replacin’ us all?”

The creature knelt—a motion both tender and terrifying. “Child, listen well: Harcourt’s engines will always demand fuel. Today, cadavers. Tomorrow…” It nodded at her chapped hands. “…fresher stock.”

Her face paled. A dropped tureen shattered like a requiem.

As midnight’s cloak smothered the estate, the creature fled, Harcourt’s laughter nipping at its heels. Yet in its mind festered the girl’s question—replacın’ us all—and darker still, the perverse allure of those hollow-eyed automatons. To be spared feeling… to toil without torment…

A snowflake melted on its brow. Ah, Victor, it mused, see what orchards bloom from the seed of your sin.

Chapter III

The Assembly Line of Flesh

The factory’s maw swallowed the creature whole, its cavernous belly vibrating with the threnody of progress. Cloaked in a laborer’s greasy fustian and a cap pulled low to obscure its scarred visage, the creature moved through the din, its nostrils assailed by the stench of hot tallow and iron filings. Above, gas-jets flickered like malevolent will-o’-the-wisps, casting jaundiced light upon rows of shambling figures—Harcourt’s improvements—their limbs jerking in marionette rhythm to the looms’ clatter.

“Keep pace, ye laggards!” barked a foreman, his cattle prod crackling with galvanic spite. A reanimated worker, its jaw stitched with copper wire, stumbled into a loom; gears snagged its arm, stripping flesh from bone with a wet crunch. No scream followed—only the ceaseless thrum of belts and pulleys.

The creature’s gorge rose. These are not my kin, it thought, watching a glassy-eyed abomination stitch cambric with fingers half-rotted. They are carrion compelled to parody life, as marionettes parody grace. Yet the familiarity chilled it: the slack jaws, the sutured sinews—a funhouse mirror of its own genesis.

A human laborer, sweat etching canals through grime, spat into a slop bucket. “They don’t eat, don’t sleep. Soon, nor shall we.” His compatriot, a whey-faced youth, muttered, “Aye—Harcourt’s patent’d us all obsolete. Next, he’ll stitch beggars from gutter-scraps.”

The creature’s fist clenched. It recalled the alpine hovel, the blind man’s tremulous voice: “All men bear the divine spark.” What spark lingered here, in this cathedral of exploitation?

“You.”

The foreman’s prod jabbed its ribs. “New, ain’t ye? Face like a meat-axed ham.” His eyes narrowed. “Or… summat worse?”

Before the creature could reply, a bell clanged. The foremen herded workers toward a vault door, its riveted steel gleaming like a bank vault’s. “Inspection!”

They emerged into a gallery overlooking the core—a vast chamber where naked corpses dangled from hooks, awaiting “processing.” Alaric Harcourt stood center-stage, sleeves rolled to reveal arms mapped with chemical burns.

“Observe,” he commanded, plunging a syringe into a cadaver’s neck. The body convulsed, quartz eyes snapping open with a sound like breaking icicles. “The latest iteration: neural filaments grafted to spinal cortex. No more clumsy clockwork!”

The creature stepped forward, discarding its cap. A gasp rippled through the crowd.

“Ah!” Harcourt’s smile was a scalpel slit. “The Ur-creature honors us! Come, critique my refinements.”

The creature loomed over him, its shadow swallowing the lamplight. “Thou hast not refined—thou hast diminished. These wretches are but wind-up toys, stripped of agony’s poetry. Where is the terror of awakening? The grandeur of defiance?”

Harcourt chuckled, adjusting his spectacles. “Grandeur? Your maker’s folly was sentiment. My creations know neither rage nor despair. They are… efficient.” He gestured to the assembly line, where a child’s corpse—missing a hand—was being fitted with a soldered claw. “Join me. Govern them. Be their Prometheus.”

The creature recoiled, yet—

Govern. The word slithered into its mind, seductive as laudanum. To command an army of the voiceless… to be needed.

“I am no tyrant,” it rasped.

“No?” Harcourt arched a brow. “What are you, then? A philosopher? A martyr?” He leaned close, whispering, “Or a relic, outmoded by the march of progress?”

Doubt, that old serpent, tightened its coils.

Nightfall found the creature in the factory’s bowels, where defective models were melted in vats of aqua fortis. Amid the acid’s hiss, it heard a whimper—not mechanical, but human. Behind a stack of crates, a reanimated child cowered, its lopsided mouth leaking black ichor. One eye was hazel, alive with terror; the other, a milky orb of quartz.

“F-father?” it gurgled.

The creature staggered. This was no puppet. This was a child—its mind half-eroded, yet still clinging to shards of self.

“Harcourt…” it growled, the factory’s walls throbbing in time to its pulse. “…what orchard of hell have you seeded?”

Chapter IV

The Fractured Brotherhood

The factory’s underbelly was a subterranean crypt, its air thick with the sibilant hiss of acid and the reek of scorched marrow. The creature descended, each step a dirge, past vats where defective models dissolved in aqua fortis—limbs curling like parchment in flame, glass eyes boiling to slurry. Dissolution, it mused, Harcourt’s sole act of mercy.

A whimper pierced the miasma. Not the toneless drone of automatons, but a child’s fractured keen. The creature followed the sound to a pallet of crates stamped SUBJECT 11: NONVIABLE. There, hunched in a nest of frayed wiring, cowered a stitched horror: a boy of perhaps eight winters, his face a lopsided grotesquerie. One hazel eye wept human tears; the other, a quartz lens, oozed black ichor. His left hand—missing two fingers—clutched a ragdoll sewn from factory scraps.

“F-father?” the thing gurgled, its voice a wet rasp, as though speech were a skill half-remembered.

The creature knelt, its own scarred flesh crawling with phantom sutures. “I am no father,” it murmured, “merely… another orphan of ambition.”

The boy-thing convulsed, ichor dribbling down its chin. “Hurts. Make it stop.”

Hurts. The word struck like a cleaver. These abominations were not numb—Harcourt had lied. They felt, however dimly, however brokenly. The creature cradled the child’s head, its mind aflame with memories of William’s corpse, of Justine’s hanged throat, of all the lives rent by its own wrath. Cycle unbroken.

“Cease this madness, Harcourt!” it roared, storming into the industrialist’s sanctum—a glass-paned aerie overlooking the factory floor.

Harcourt glanced up from blueprints, unperturbed. “Ah. Met Subject 11, did you? Regrettable miscalculation. The prepubescent cerebellum resists neural solder.” He sighed, as though discussing a faulty valve. “But progress demands sacrifice.”

Lightning lashed the sky, etching the room in argent. In Harcourt’s spectacles, the creature glimpsed its reflection: a leviathan of scars and rage, yet in the tremble of its jaw, the grief-glutted eyes—humanity, undeniable.

“They suffer,” it hissed.

“All organisms suffer,” Harcourt countered, adjusting a brass astrolabe on his desk. “The difference? My creatures need not comprehend it. A sleight of mind, really. Reduce consciousness to embers, and pain becomes… manageable.”

The creature lunged, pinning him to the wall. “You play Metropolis-Satan, yet lack even Lucifer’s pride! These are not creations—they are livestock!”

Harcourt’s chuckle was a dry rattle. “Livestock? Nay. They are products. You, of all beings, should grasp the distinction.” His finger tapped the creature’s chest. “Your maker gave you a poet’s heart and a murderer’s hands. I’ve streamlined the process. No heart. No hands. Only function.”

Outside, thunder growled. The creature released him, its voice a spent storm. “And when your ‘products’ revolt? When their half-souls curdle to hatred?”

Harcourt straightened his cravat. “Then I shall tweak the formula. Porcelain next, perhaps. Flesh is tediously medieval.”

The creature turned to leave, but paused. “That boy… Subject 11. What was his name?”

A beat. “Names are sentimental ballast. He was… material.”

In the acid room, the creature gathered the twitching child—so light, so fragile—and climbed to the rooftop. Rain needled its face. Below, the factory throbbed, a great iron heart pumping ruin into the world.

“L-listen…” the boy-mechanism stammered, clutching its ragdoll. “Story. M-mama used t-tell…”

The creature’s throat tightened. “Speak, little one.”

But the quartz eye dimmed. The body stiffened. Gone.

Chapter V

The Unraveling

Chaos unfurled its raven wings. The looms, once metronomes of order, juddered to a halt as reanimated laborers—their neural filaments frayed to madness—turned on the machinery with feral glee. Fingers, half-stitched and oozing, clawed at steam valves; teeth of porcelain and rot sank into leather drive-belts. A foreman’s cattle prod sparked uselessly against a woman whose jaw hung by copper threads, her glass eye rolling in ecstatic revolt.

“Regain control!” Harcourt bellowed from his gantry, face lit by the hellish glow of overturned furnaces. Below, a shareholder’s wig bobbed in a vat of dye, his screams harmonizing with the death-rattle of pistons.

The creature ascended through bedlam, Subject 11’s corpse cradled to its breast. Flames caressed the rafters, their tongues whispering of Victor’s Arctic pyre, of the De Lacey cottage’s razing—fire, ever the reaper of hubris.

Harcourt’s sanctum reeked of scorched velvet and cowardice. Blueprints fluttered in the heat-draft like fleeing doves as he barricaded the door with a mahogany desk. “You,” he hissed, brandishing a soldering iron as though it were Excalibur. “This is your handiwork!”

The creature loomed, its shadow a shroud. “Nay. ’Tis thine own. You planted blight and marvel at the harvest.”

Outside, a boiler exploded, shaking the room. Harcourt stumbled, spectacles askew. “They… they require firmer governance! A stronger hand!” He clutched the creature’s arm, desperation eroding his diction. “We could perfect them—you and I! Imagine: a race beholden to reason, free of passion’s tyranny—”

The creature recoiled as if scalded. “Passion’s tyranny? You, who fear nothing but margins dwindling?” It seized his cravat, lifting him until their faces mirrored—one a map of scars, the other of sterile avarice. “Hear me, mimic: I was born of lightning’s kiss. These wretches are born of ledger lines. You are no creator—you are a thief, pilfering graves and dignity to feed the maw of shareholders!”

Harcourt’s laugh was a death-rattle. “And you? What are you, if not my blueprint? A tragedy in want of a third act?”

The creature stilled. Somewhere—no, in the marrow of its being—a chord vibrated: the ice fields, the sledge, Walton’s stricken face. To make peace with the abyss…

It dropped him. “I am the reckoning your ilk evades.”

The roof groaned. Embers fell like damned stars.

Harcourt crawled toward a strongbox, fumbling with keys. “Porcelain… next iteration… nonflammable…”

The creature turned away, Subject 11’s weight a lodestone. At the threshold, it paused. “May your name be ash.”

In the stairwell, flames danced a sarabande on the walls. The child’s limbs swayed limply, ragdoll still clutched. Below, the riot crested: a machine-man wielded a severed piston rod like a berserker’s axe; another gnawed the throat of a fleeing clerk.

No victory here, the creature thought, only entropy’s grin.

The east wall collapsed, night air rushing in like a benediction. The creature leapt into the void, Subject 11 held aloft—a mock Pietà—as the factory’s core detonated in a chrysanthemum of fire.

Chapter VI

The Ashes of Ambition

Dawn seeped into the valley like a bruise, staining the smoldering carcass of Harcourt’s empire. The factory, now a skeletal hulk, coughed cinders into a sky veiled by its own hubris. Amid the scoria, a bailiff in singed livery unearthed a strongbox, its iron belly cradling Harcourt’s journal—a relic of arrogance embossed with his motto: Labore et Arte.

The final entry, penned in a hand trembling with haste or mania, read:

“The defect lies not in the Process, but in the Material. Flesh is inherently flawed—prone to rot, revolt, remorse. Next iteration: porcelain. Smooth, sterile, obedient. Let the kilns of progress burn hotter, and we shall sculpt laborers as flawless as saints…”

The creature observed from a promontory, Subject 11’s body wrapped in a shroud of burlap and belt-leather. Below, scavengers picked through the ruins—peasants hauling scrap, urchins pocketing cogs for playthings. A parson knelt to bless the dead, his prayers drowned by the clang of a dredge-team harvesting copper from the river’s poisoned breast.

No pyre for this child, the creature thought, clawing a grave from the frost-hardened earth. It laid Subject 11 to rest beneath a cairn of charred gears, the ragdoll tucked beneath his partial arm. No epitaph but the factory’s death-rattle.

“Oy!”

A vagrant child—a girl of six, her smock stiff with soot—stood atop a slag heap, clutching a wilted daisy. “For ’im,” she lisped, thrusting the flower toward the cairn. A front tooth gaped where life had struck her.

The creature recoiled, its every instinct keening: Flee. Lest your shadow blight another soul. Yet the girl advanced, unflinching, her eyes reflecting not its scars but the dawn’s pallid fire.

“Ain’t ya gonna take it?”

Memories cascaded: a Delphic portrait of the De Laceys laughing; a fisherwife’s scream; ice cracking underfoot as Walton’s ship retreated. How many chances at grace must I shatter?

The creature extended its hand—a mosaic of sutures and sinew—and paused. The girl did not flinch.

“Child,” it rasped, “do you not fear me?”

She tilted her head. “Ya buried the dead thing. Pa says only decent folk do that.”

Decent. The word hung like a mote of light in the creature’s fathomless dark. It reached again, trembling… then withdrew.

“Keep your flower,” it said. “Plant it where the smoke cannot blight it.”

As the girl frowned, a foreman’s shout echoed. She fled, the daisy discarded in the ash.

The creature lifted the bloom, its petals already curling like burnt parchment. So fragile, this impulse to kindness. So easily effaced.

Behind it, the dredge-team cursed as their haul clanged—not copper, but a reanimated hand, still twitching. The parson crossed himself and retreated.

Alone once more, the creature turned northward, where glaciers groaned like living things. In its palm, the daisy crumbled to dust, borne away on a wind that stank of progress. Somewhere, a kiln fired its first porcelain limb. Somewhere, a child’s laughter tangled with the clang of gears.

And the creature walked on—a shadow against the snow, its scars a testament, its silence a dirge.

Thank you!

Prompting Culture