Galatea 2 - Epilogue

EPILOGUE

Kevin Giles paused from his work, as he had been doing frequently within the last few hours, to gaze lovingly upon the security footage that displayed his beloved Galatea in her prime as she mowed down guard after guard. No longer a doctor or a professor—these were not titles he could simply return to at this point—all he had left was her, an experience which was now limited to mere playbacks on a grainy security camera with a backup generator that could give out at any moment now.

With any remaining human presence on the island fortress reduced to corpses and fish food in that order, Giles was free to claim this place as his own now. He had little to work with, his powerful body staving off starvation with whatever canned rations he could find in the barracks.

“Credit where credit is due, these military guys were on the right track with replicating my tech,” Giles mused, crossing two wires to create a necessary harmony between two otherwise unrelated devices. “But they were missing one crucial step of the virus-making process—me, of course.”

His fists forwent the need of complex tools as they bashed through steel to bask in the juicy innards of inferior tech. Kevin threw chunks of million-dollar machinery across the room like bits of dirt from a dog digging a hole in a backyard. Piece by piece, he assembled a device better than ever before. With the virus improving both his memory to picture perfect and his hands to swiss army knife levels of multipurpose usefulness, he didn’t need months of preparation and an entire team of construction workers to craft his masterpiece.

While his body was nowhere near the capabilities of his Galatea or even the fascinating evolutionary patterns that had developed due to Audrey possessing the virus for far longer, those downsides weren’t about to matter now.

He scooped up a smatter of dried blood, one that was most certainly his given its discernable, darker color. Even after being separate from the host for quite some time, the virus continued to live on. “I ought to thank you, my Galatea,” he mused aloud. “Were it not for your merciless assault on my being, I wouldn’t have such a large sample size of my blood to extract.”

Giles’ monologue had conveniently left out Audrey’s initial wounds and the man in black’s subsequent unloading of an entire pistol magazine into his torso, but that wasn’t by intention. His mind had become so poisoned with the idea of Galatea—his Galatea—that it simply overwhelmed any other thought process he could muster.

He didn’t need Gillian. He didn’t need the bottle. He didn’t need the pursuit of science for the betterment of mankind. Kevin’s entire existence was now devoted to a solitary purpose—reuniting with his Galatea. For a brief moment, during the governmental invasion of the campus, he had a taste of greatness. But like the Greek tragedies which had inspired his desires, their love hadn’t lasted. This did not deter him in the slightest.

“If only the Greeks had technology such as mine, then the Gods would fear Pygmalion and his creation, as they rightfully should.”

With his newly constructed machine, he began to tweak and enhance his current virus into a monstrosity of modern science. It would be a long and arduous process with the limited resources at his disposal, he would probably have to resort to using the bodies around him as bait to hunt the oceanic creatures that were once thought to be unhuntable.

Soon, it would be the gods who would need his blessing for creation.

Soon, he and his Galatea would rule the universe together as husband and wife, whether his Galatea wanted it or not.

And with that, Galatea 2 is complete! Eventually, I will get to work on the third installment, whenever that may be!