This is very good.

I seem some parallels but our stories are quite different, certainly different enough for both of them to exist side by side.

While the subject of the story is interesting and well written, what I find interesting is what isn’t being said. How does the murder of a six-year old doom millions? What kind of monster is created this way? At first I thought the protagonist was creating the first zombie but then I notices that whatever awakens, does so in the next room. So there is a separation, a division. Is this science? Pulp? Occult? Like a good horror movie, this story does a good job of telling a story while raising questions about the world it exists in. Everything appears to exist in a true state. As opposed to bad horror movies that raise questions about the story itself or the decisions made by people. I guess what I’m saying is that this has just enough believability to splinter off into a fringe universe and I’d be curious to see that explored more.

I agree with Quick. This is a intriguing piece. Well done.

“Separating the soul from the body is a long and painful process.”

Putting it back, in a different body, is even harder.

The narrator is forced to “transplant” the soul of the little girl into the body of the beast, taking her life to give life to the abomination.

Breathtaking. Scary concept, great execution. One wonders what the soul of a little girl will do once it gets into the monster. Will she do the bidding of her new overlords or will she turn on them?

Most people in the scientific community believe that consciousness is a product of the mind, similar to how light is the product of a burning candle.

There is a different idea, however, that consciousness exists outside of the physical body, and that the body and brain act as a sort of transceiver, like a TV set. The signal manifests itself through sights and sounds on the TV, but if you destroy the TV, the signal continues. (Of course, in our case, the TV would be a two-way transceiver, where the signal was able to learn and change based on the things happening in the physical world around the TV.)

Anyway, the idea continues to say that mentally handicapped people or animals may not function on the same level as the rest of us, but this is a result of either damage to the physical form or less complexity in the physical form — much like an old or damaged TV set compared to a brand new, Hi-Def set.

(Comment continued below…)

If the girl’s consciousness was separated from her optimally-functioning body and transplanted into a man-made (and likely less functional) monster body, chances are she would have difficulty functioning within that space.

Also, we know that the brain stores information which it uses to “frame” sensory input (to help us understand the input). Obviously her brain’s stored information would be unavailable from the monster’s brain, and the monster’s brain might have a preexisting framework of information.

So the question becomes this: Would the little girl’s bodyless consciousness retain enough of her personal identity that she could overcome the restrictions and inherent perceptual differences of the monster’s body, in order to exact her own personal will?

When we’re born, do we remember what came before? Do we remember being the disembodied consciousness? Or does it fade like a dream as we learn to cope with our new reality?

Food for thought. :-)