Part 1
He stood over the now motionless body of his son, stunned to disbelief. The sheets that covered him were stained with blood, and the once assertive body of a boy in his prime lay in front of him, broken. He could barely hear the doctor’s medical ramblings, or rather he thought of them as the screeches of a banshee forewarning of a death. He could only see them coming off his only son’s passing. He himself was a doctor held in high esteem in all circles he traveled in, whether academic, professional, or social. He, like always, stood with an almost regal air about him, he was in control of any situation. He saw himself as a demigod amongst men, yet, he was able to fool them into thinking of him as a humble and common man because of his insistence that you not call him Dr. Ebrahimi but by his first name Darius.

He saw a crack in his facade at that moment. He envisioned a man who stood with dropped shoulders, who could not bare to hold the weight of the world, he met the gaze of his wife as he recoiled away from the bloodied face of his son. He saw her in her crisis and thought that he could not shrug the weight of the world now. He would have to bear the grief and responsibility for her suffering as well. In his life he was taught to believe a hierarchy of responsibility. He should take care of his wife. In the end it was his decision to make. Whether to forestall his sole heir’s passing or to be objective. And so, he put physician before father and took his son off life support.

Soon after he buried his son, his exemplary marriage ended. His abstaining from substances that would alter his perception of reality waned. He needed release. He had lost everything. Darius simply shrugged, letting go. Months passed, then years. His son’s face became blurred, every dream of him becoming more and more abstract. The memories became corrupted to a point where he would revisit family tapes to make sure his mind was not making up a detail.

Part 2
         The idea came to him in a dream that unlike the others was not restless. He saw himself looking upon the earth with eyes holding tragedy and loss. He saw himself with the same determined demeanor as before. His eyes were as once before. Eyes which had once been drawn in fine lines, which stared intently at the future in front of him as opposed to the eyes he had now.  Now they drooped and were looking back. He saw himself with a visage that was well meaning and not mired in self-doubt and sadness. He was, in the dream, beholden to a beautiful yet frightening scene. Darius, in his dream saw the unmistakable personage of his son as a newborn covered in ashes stepping out from a fire that was still in embers. Like most fathers protecting their young, he swooped into action, taking his son out of the flames. As he reached for his son, lifting him from the ashes, he felt joy and clarity. His son had been reborn. He saw possibilities, he saw life anew.
         Like a man beset by hope he went on with life as it was before. He felt the same weight on his shoulders as before. That weight however, was not being held just barely. [1] The weight he carried had changed from that of grief to one of hope. Make no mistake reader, hope and a future with possibilities are a greater weight than grief. In his quest for raising his son out of the ashes and dirt; he gave up everything. He would spend days in his lab tinkering with ideas, finding a way to bring his son back to life. He had found hope in a project that he had worked on in his days as a scientist. Human cloning had been outlawed, rightfully so, for its lack of ethics and what could be achieved with it. He, however, had worked with a group to weaponize human cloning.

Part 3
         Darius had been approached with an ungodly amount of grant money one day decades earlier. Their only request, which would have been seen as reasonable by any man of science’s standard, was to create synthetic DNA. This was no small feat. In order to do this Darius created base pairs out of  components that he made in the lab. Those components would later conform and replicate using the subject being cloned sequence of DNA as a template. The amalgamation of these components would be extremely malleable and have the same qualities as unprogrammed cells.[2]  These cells would serve as unspecialised units that could be programed to take the shape of whatever you wanted them to be. Darius, awestruck by his own achievement wanted to share this finding with the world. He had created something that could save countless lives. It could be used to grow missing limbs and organs. It could be used to grow entirely synthetic lifeforms.

He was however stopped by those who granted him the money. They owned the idea and the proprietary knowledge that came with that idea. Darius was left without the fame and glory that would have made him into a name talked about in not just the [3] medical community but in every household in the world.
        
He was however not bound by any law. Having seen everything slip away from his once iron grip hand etched at the moralist that he once was[4] . This seems contradictory to some. A man who pioneered one of the most frowned upon and regrettable practices such as[5]  human cloning being said to be a moralist. In actuality, he was. Darius withheld the secrets that would enable the organization to achieve its ultimate goals: weaponizing human beings. Empty shells filled with a relay for rudimentary instructions. No conscience and no frewill. The perfect soldier capable of doing whatever was necessary to complete the objective. He withheld this knowledge. He was willing to use this method to become a sort of alchemist now. He was going to make a living philosopher’s stone in the form of his son.

Part 4
         It took months to scrounge[6]  up the necessary equipment for his project. The hardest part was the advanced technology needed to successfully transplant a human consciousness into the empty vessel. Darius in his experiments had unlocked the code to inherited memory. He could extract the the neurocognitive makeup of a person just from their DNA. This was reliant on a previously considered pseudoscience called Epigenetics. Epigenetic hypothesis assumed that all of life’s experience would be automatically encoded into your DNA. Darius was able to encode[7]  these genetic memories into the the mass of stem cells that would make up his son by cross referencing the DNA of his son[8]  at the time of birth with that of him at the time of death. Once having figured out what these aberrations were he could encode the experience into his son’s brain. [9]
        
        
Part 5
         He took a scalpel to the amniotic sac that covered the newly formed body that[10]  lay in front of him. A humanoid blob of undifferentiated almost transparent cells covered the silhouette of the body of a man. Cutting[11]  through this membrane of flesh with surgical procession he cut through to the emaciated body of a boy without any pigmentation and or hair. The boy l[12] ay there and finally gasped for air. Covered in thick sludge from the amniotic sack that covered him minutes earlier [13] he sprung off of the bed in the middle of the room.[14]