There's something strange about living with death in your veins. You stop fearing it, you just… start negotiating.
I've spent most of my life on borrowed time. Pale, brittle, and half-alive, like a sketch of a man that never got filled in. My blood never caught up to my bones. My muscles? Thin, flawed and fragile. A cruel joke written in my DNA. A convulsion can hit anytime in a lab, in the middle of the street, or during something as mundane as brushing my teeth. I inject myself with a stabilizer every few hours to buy more time.
That's all I ever do: buy time.
My parents didn't stick around, can't really blame them. People don't like watching something they love slowly unravel. My father disappeared before I turned sixteen. My mother lasted a bit longer until the debt notices started arriving faster than my prescriptions.
After they left, I was raised by Uncle Elias, a reclusive biochemist who barely spoke, but who taught me the language of molecules, formulas, and unflinching logic.
He used to say, "The disease may be in your blood, but so is the cure."
When he died, I made that my religion.
I clawed my way through universities, papers, labs, and failures. My blood burned, my body trembled, but I endured.
And then, a mistake led to a miracle— synthetic blood. It saved lives... millions. The Nobel committee honored me.
I told them to go screw themselves.
Because it wasn't the cure I needed.
This disease is killing me slowly. My stabilizer's effectiveness is waning. The injections last hours now, not days. And so… I turned to nature's most elegant predator: the vampire bat.
They survive on blood, they thrive on it. I just needed to borrow their blueprint.
And now, with a prototype serum in my hands and a one-way ticket to the most infamous voyage in history, I'm ready to test it… on myself.
But first, there's one last experiment to finish.
_______
Lab 47B
The lab buzzed under flickering fluorescent lights, its sterile surfaces cluttered with scattered data pads, test tubes, and half-drained coffee cups. At the center, an eight-foot-wide, twenty-foot-tall transparent cylinder dominated the room filled with hundreds of frenzied vampire bats flapping in disoriented panic. Their high-pitched screeches echoed faintly, like whispers from something ancient.
Dr. Michael C. Morbius stood hunched over a workstation, face drawn in concentration. Dark circles hung beneath his eyes like bruises from sleepless nights. His white coat hung too loose on his wiry frame. Despite his gaunt appearance, there was a certain sharpness to his movements like a blade honed by desperation.
Across the lab, Kevin, his colleague, leaned casually against a support beam, arms crossed and eyebrow raised. His tone cut through the quiet like a scalpel.
"So… congratulations on winning the Noble Prize," he said, deliberately mispronouncing it with a smirk.
Michael didn't even glance up.
"It's Nobel," he muttered, adjusting a microscope. "And considering I told the Royal Swedish Academy to go f—" he paused, reconsidering, "—to take a long walk off a glacier, I doubt the feeling's mutual."
Kevin whistled low.
"Yep, still the most humble scientist I know. You invent synthetic blood, save millions, and still manage to insult a room full of international geniuses."
"It was an accident," Michael snapped, then softened slightly. "The blood formula, I mean. I wasn't trying to save the world. I was trying to save myself."
His hand trembled slightly as he reached for a syringe. Kevin's eyes narrowed as he glanced toward the massive bat chamber.
"I'm really not sure about your latest hobby, Mike. Y'know, the illegal vampire bat experiments you're not even trying to hide?"
Michael blinked and turned, finally noticing the obvious.
"Oh. Right."
"Giant glass tube full of flying bloodsuckers. Kind of hard to miss." Kevin motioned toward it like a magician unveiling a trick. "I mean, seriously. It's not subtle."
Michael chuckled dryly.
"Sue me. I figured—bats eat blood, I've got a disease in my blood. So maybe, with the right DNA splice…" he trailed off, then tapped the vial in his hand. "Science."
"That is a fuck up logic"
Michael moved toward a cage, lifted a trembling lab rat, and injected it with the serum. The rat convulsed violently, limbs jerking before it collapsed.
Kevin winced. "Well that's not great."
But before either could turn away, the rat twitched. Then jerked, then stood... alive, but unnatural. Its eyes gleamed red beneath the lab lights. It moved slower, stronger, wrong.
Michael's lips curled in a victorious grin.
"There. That's life coming back."
Kevin crossed his arms, unimpressed.
"Or unlife. And did that rat even have the same disease as you? How do you know it's cured and not just… some mutant blood-hungry freak?"
"Semantics," Michael muttered, already sealing the rat in a reinforced observation capsule.
"You're bringing that with you?"
"Obviously. I need to monitor its progress on the voyage."
Kevin's jaw dropped. "Wait—what voyage?"
Michael stepped over to a steel suitcase, snapped it open, and packed in both the capsule and a set of serum vials inside cold storage. He turned with a faint smirk, flashing a stamped boarding pass.
"The Titanic."
"S-Shit!!, how did you get that?"
"I got lucky"
Kevin stared. "You're one lucky motherfucker, but seriously doing this on that ship? You don't want to run more than one test before you jump straight to human trials? I mean… what if—"
"I don't have time," Michael cut in, voice low but sharp. "Every hour I wait, my stabilizers fail faster. My convulsions are increasing. If I don't inject soon, I might not make it to port. If this works, I'll live. If it doesn't—" he shrugged, "—then I die somewhere memorable."
He grabbed his coat, slung the satchel over one shoulder, and paused at the doorway.
"Besides," he added with a ghost of a smile, "if I do end up turning into a blood-drinking monster, I'd rather do it in international waters. Less paperwork."
Kevin shook his head.
"One day, your ego and your mad brain are going to kill us all."
"Maybe." Michael nodded. "But not before I make history."