The Thesesu Collection
by Andrew Akers
Andrew Akers is a forest ranger and fiction writer from Pennsylvania, USA. He is also a full SFWA member. His work has appeared in Book XI, The Daily Tomorrow, Metastellar, and many others. His debut novel, Tapestry, is expected in April, 2026. When he isn’t working or writing, Andrew runs marathons, plays Dungeons & Dragons, and raises his sons with his far more talented half, Kylie. More information about Andrew’s stories can be found at www.andrew-akers.com or facebook.com/AndrewAkersAuthor.
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Detective Walker Mastesson paced the sidewalk in front of The Kaleidoscope Collective, mentally organizing the details of his investigation as thick droplets of rain obliterated themselves in frenzied puddles at his feet. Twenty-one people were missing, their names and details mysteriously struck from public record. Each was also part of the same clinical trial at a prototype robotics clinic funded by an anonymous organization. Anonymous, until a recent hunch brought Walker here, to the opening of an art exhibit funded by, he suspected, the very same organization: Theseus Laboratories.
His walk here had felt a blur; faces, smells and colors of the city fused into an amorphous, drizzling blob. There was a headache too, dull and throbbing and centered somewhere nondescript behind the eyes. Just nerves, probably, but also a possible side-effect of his surgeries. Walker, through the cognitive noise of conjecture and evidence assembling itself, made a mental note to bring it up to his doctor.
A few stragglers entered before him, and he was careful to file each face away for future research, though it hardly seemed necessary. He, like anyone tuned into the zeitgeist, recognized many of them. A tick later, he was shaking his umbrella dry, stepping into the gallery. Walker added it to the collection of dripping fabric shields already hanging on a rack in the foyer. After giving the other umbrellas and jackets a cursory glance, he filed toward the metal detectors. Driven by muscle memory, he reached to index his service weapon and stopped short.
Left at home.
He felt naked without it, a necessary but painful price of entry. This event was private, with private security, and triggering Officer Rent-a-cop at the door probably wasn’t the best way to blend in. Instead, steeling himself, the detective entered with purpose, giving the security guy the same cold shoulder everyone else did.
He half-expected the detector to flag him anyway but it didn’t. Instead of pins and bolts and rods and screws, his broken parts were held together with a mineral fiber matrix and unpronounceable biotechnology. Had it been the police union who covered the costs? As was his state with much nowadays, Walker couldn’t remember. In any case, he now considered himself the three-way love child of the Million Dollar Man, Inspector Gadget, and Robocop. It felt nothing like Hollywood had promised.
Fuckin’ Drunk, he thought, cursing a man six-feet under and sixteen-months rotten. Buried or not, rotten or not, the idiot and his black Silverado were ghosts in Walker’s Rice Krispies, haunting his every snap, crackle and pop.
“If only I had taken a different route home,” he’d repeated countless times to the mirror in the hospital bathroom. “If only I hadn’t driven so late.”
But, as his granddad used to say in his thick Texas drawl: “Ya ain’t getting’ to heav’n on ‘maybe next times’ and ‘if onlys.’”
Tonight though, on this side of the party, he could be someone different. He had to be. His job, one that felt a lifetime away and impossibly foreign to him, relied on it. He’d been gone too long to mess up his first investigation back. Walker stepped forward, leaving his proverbial baggage at the door.
Professional athletes, movie stars, Fortune 500 CEOs, and strung-out musicians stuffed the foyer with pomp, pretension, and pseudo-intellectual bullshit. Walker kept an ear open, carefully straining pearls of value from the worthless drudge. He earned a curious glance here and there, the elite perhaps catching whiffs of his middle-class stink… or maybe spotting the scars beneath his coverup. Still, no one questioned him.
“Did you see their market earnings this quarter?” a suited man with a bluetooth headset was saying to his facsimiles. “They’re poised to become the leader in artificial limb manufacturing. We—”
“—a genius! And a saint,” a rotund woman belted to an indifferent man elsewhere. “They’ve donated millions to children’s hospitals nationwide. I’ve heard there’s even a display dedicated to it inside. It warms my heart just to—“
“—wellness guru said I should only eat foods from my ancestral home,” spoke the most LA-type Walker had ever seen. “Apparently that stuff is, like, tied to our DNA or someth—”
There were others.
“It’s so sad what happened to the founder! I cried for da—”
“—right. The new single drops…what’s today? Well, soon, I think. We really returned to our roots on this one. We got this, uh, didgeridoo player from—”
“The name is a play on words. Sigh. Haven’t you heard of the Theseus’s Ship thought experim—”
“—part of this exhibit. He said he signed an NDA and couldn’t talk about it, but told me to look for a snakebite tattoo. No, Martha, I don’t know what he meant by that. He just said ‘you’ll know when you see it.’”
The dogwhistle whine of un-oiled hinges brought the fractured conversations to a standstill. Walker followed the crowd’s reverent gaze to their newcomer, the man of the hour, their gracious host and reason for this grand assembly. He tracked the curator’s mannerisms with a careful eye, searching for something out of place. He didn’t need to watch for long.
“Hello,” the man said, voice eerily flat and monotone. It reminded Walker of Hal 9000 in that artsy space movie with the big dominoes.
“Thank you for your patronage and interest in tonight’s exhibit,” Hal said. “My name is Calvin Shultz. I am head of Public Outreach at Theseus Laboratories. We look forward to sharing some of our most exciting developments with you. Tonight’s collection is my brainchild, and held in the memory of the late Dr. Henry Shultz, my husband and founder of Theseus Laboratories. Please enjoy.”
There was a lull as Hal/Calvin turned to face the door to the first exhibit. The intro had been shorter than Walker was expecting, and far less climactic. Head of public relations? Couldn’t they have picked someone a little more exciting? Less creepy? If this company was the evil corporation he suspected it of being, they could have at least picked a spokesperson less serial killer-y.
Inside the first collection was a sight nearly as underwhelming as the speech. O for Two. A graze of animal sculptures stepped frozen in time, each seemingly moving toward an unseen attractor in the next room. These were pretty, Walker supposed, but nothing spectacular. He’d seen better at high school science fairs. Didn’t Theseus Laboratories have a quadrillion-dollar stock valuation? Couldn’t they have hired Banksy to do something? Walker wondered whether his gut, still recovering like the rest of him, was wrong about this place. It was the same as any other modern-art installation he had seen: pretty but pointless.
“We started no different than animals,” Hal/Calvin’s voice rang through the jostling crowd. “We thought it poetic to begin our collection the same way. Please, take your time to admire the sculptures. The next doors will open momentarily.”
Careful to avoid unnecessary collisions, Walker maneuvered himself to an emptier portion of the room. There, he inspected a miniature collection of caterpillars, sudden doubt over his hunch gnawing at his insides. Many of the faux representations had been coated in a resin of some kind, giving them the slimy appearance of the real deal. Others had been given craft-store hair implants, turning them from whatever their base material was into something fuzzier. Again, pretty but pointless. As he considered moving on before losing too much time here, he was stopped by a voice behind him. If only it hadn’t happened, he would think thirty minutes later. If only he had left earlier. If only he hadn’t come in the first place.
Ya ain’t getting’ to heav’n on ‘maybe next times’ and ‘if onlys.’
“Detective,” said a voice to his rear. There was no mistaking the monotone inflection of his host. Tucked inside his constant state of discomfort, the detective felt something else as he turned: fear. How did this man know who he was?
“You stick out like a sore thumb, so to speak,” Calvin said, reading the surprise on his face. “Don’t worry, I won’t tell.” He flashed a robotic wink. “Not that it would matter anyway; we are happy to have you.”
Walker’s unease only amplified. He took a deep breath, held it a moment, then let it go slowly, a trick he had learned at the academy to break vapor lock. It had proven helpful during his intensive therapy sessions and it proved helpful now.
“Thanks for having me. Though, and I might be betraying my station in saying this, I think I was expecting something more…”
“High profile?” Calvin finished, offering a toothy smile that put Walker’s own on edge. “Look closer, detective. I think you will find these exhibits are exactly what you have come here for.”
Walker turned, fighting the evolutionary urge not to present one’s back to a predator, and took a deeper look through the glass display. From a distance, the caterpillar collection looked like any other piece of “art.” Up close though, the medium presented itself.
Christ.
He recoiled at the revelation. Each resin or fuzz-covered insect was a finger — a human finger — twisted and bent to simulate life. A sore thumb, it seemed, didn’t stick out as much as the saying teased. At least, not when in the company of other severed digits.
“You…these are…” Walker sputtered like a machine that wouldn’t start. He had been prepared to see this, hadn’t he? Maybe not body parts, exactly, but his gut had warned him to prepare for something horrible. Could these belong to his missing people? Was this enough for—
“Why, these are tongues!” a woman across the room exclaimed from next to the exhibit of a shedding bighorn sheep. She sounded more like an excited child than someone sickened by the realization. The audience swelled to her, desperate to confirm the macabre discovery.
“She’s right!” an A-list action star yelled, thrill cracking his voice. He was hardly the cool, calm, larger-than-life character he portrayed on the big screen.
In all directions the crowd hurriedly pressed, desperate to unearth the awful truth of each display. Walker pressed himself against the wall to avoid the rush to the severed fingers. He cringed as several voices cried excitement at the discovery there.
“Greg, I found it!” another woman — Martha, by the sound of it — screamed from another side of the room. “Greg, look! Where the leg connects to the body of this tarantula: a tattoo of a snakebite!”
“Keep looking detective,” Calvin said over the growing buzz of the crowd. “Maybe you’ll find a piece you like.”
Before Walker could reply, the next set of doors opened and the crowd was moving again, pushing him deeper into the collective.
“Look at this!”
“Wow!”
Forced forward like a collapsed levee in a flood, Walker saw the next exhibit at the same time the crowd did. More sculptures filled this room, the medium increasingly apparent with each display. The animals were gone. In their place were intricately carved and molded models, each showcasing one of humanity’s great architectural feats. There was a Great Pyramid of kidneys, a Colosseum of eyes, an Eiffel tower of hearts, a Hagia Sophia of spines. With each horrible realization, Walker felt his own respective part groan in protest; a phantom, empathetic pain for an outcome they never knew they didn’t want.
“We created, and we were animals no longer,” Calvin pontificated from somewhere across the room. Walker couldn’t see him through the ocean of excited bodies. That voice though, that bland, creepy fucking voice. “We built. We reasoned. We created a legacy and a future.”
Walker pushed his way to it, unsure of what he would do when he got there. Even without his gun, cuffs or pre-accident spryness, he suspected his anger would be enough to take the man into custody. Screw the crowd. Screw their disgusting taste of the gruesome. He could see the curator’s slicked back grey hair and glint of his spectacles. Only a few more steps…
There was a scream from somewhere behind him, and a soft thump. Adrenaline already dumping into his bloodstream, Walker spun to face it. A woman had collapsed while looking over the Eiffel Tower.
“I’m fine, I’m fine,” she murmured, smiling and already righting herself. “I just got a little lightheaded.”
Relieved laughter waved through the crowd and someone helped her to her feet. By the time Walker returned his focus to the curator, the man had vanished. In his wake, a new set of doors had been opened.
If only he hadn’t pressed on. If only he had turned back.
The music came first, a song Walker remembered from his childhood. It rang out with the voices of those who had recited it so many times.
“Head, shoulders, knees and toes,
(Knees and toes)
Head, shoulders, knees and toes,
(Knees and toes)
Eyes and ears and mouth and nose;
Head, shoulders, knees and toes.
(Knees and toes!)”
Like in the other rooms, only amplified, the crowd ooh’ed and ahh’ed at what followed. Walker was silent, though he could feel the blood drain from his face. There was only a single display in here, the most haunting so far. It towered above the newcomers, head nearly scraping against the cathedral ceiling. Its arms and legs were frozen mid-play, as if bracing to catch a ball or tag someone out. It was a massive child, built to scale and missing its skin.
“This is what I was telling you about!” a woman hissed to her companion, “God bless them.”
“Jesus,” a man whispered in amazement.
Each leg, thick as an oak tree, was made with leg bones like toothpicks by comparison. Walker’s eyes travelled upward in growing horror. From bottom to top, the monstrosity was built from smaller versions of its parts. Femurs were made from femurs. Hips were made of hips. Its ribs were latticed from hundreds of smaller cages and entwined with muscles and tendons, shining eerily lifelike. Beneath it all, organ-constructed organs were left exposed for the world to see. Walker was going to be sick.
“Children are our future,” Calvin said, climbing to a small stage at the child’s feet. “Every limb, tissue and organ in this collection has been replaced with one from our factory, free of charge to the families of these brave kiddos.” Hearing the forced kiddos at the end was beyond grating. Walker needed to leave this place but needed something more to get this guy first. Merely taking him to the police station wasn’t enough. Everything here, although horrifying, may have been within the bounds of the law. The exhibit was perhaps in poor taste, but everything in it could have really been donated. Theseus Labs had, apparently, changed each donor’s life for the better. Still, there was something more going on here. His gut, the most important tool to a detective, was still telling him so. The curator was hiding something, and getting a search warrant this late in the game wasn’t an option.
To the right of the door they had entered through stood a second entrance, bearing a placard reading: “Curator’s Office: Authorized Personnel Only.” His gut, his joints, his head, his every once-broken body part screamed for him to enter. It would jeopardize the legitimacy of his investigation, but the truth needed to come out. As the sadistic crowd ogled at the mutilated body parts of children, Walker crept closer to the door.
From the stage, he heard the curator tell the crowd, “Onwards to the future, ladies and gentlemen. Upstairs is our final display.” The timing couldn’t have been more perfect.
With two soft clicks, the door opened and closed, returning him to a life away from the rich and famous. This new room, lacking the order and cleanliness of the gallery’s public side, betrayed the secret inner-self of the monotone man who recently sat behind its oaken desk. It was a mess. Open books laid sprawled and forgotten next to coffee-ring Venn diagrams. Invites, outstanding bills, and work orders rested on the table and nearby floor like a fallen house of cards. The shelves, bathed in knickknacks and colorful garbage, resembled more a gutted piñata than the property of an academic.
The shelves; something about the shelves.
Walker didn’t know how he knew, but what was he was looking for was on one of the shelves. His gut was telling him so.
It didn’t take long to find it. The large jar sat as the single object of rot in what was otherwise rainbow-colored brain vomit.
“Speaking of brain…” Walker whispered, tracing his eyes along the tightly squeezed wrinkles of the gelatinous organ inside. The thing had been badly mangled, exposing a sizable view of the paler inside. He lifted the jar, cupping it carefully in both hands. Inside was everything a person once was. All of their dreams and all their fears had once been contained here, in this impossibly complex biological supercomputer. Walker had seen and handled brains before. Crime scenes, autopsies, a visit to a strip club gone horribly wrong; each time he found himself amazed over how much of humanity could be reduced to three pounds of jelly.
“I see you found a piece you like,” the curator’s flat voice called from the doorway. Walker whipped around, again reaching his hand for a gun that wasn’t there. The other remained death-gripped on the jar.
“You’re up to something here,” Walker said, keeping his voice carefully measured. “You can trade out bones and organs but not minds. Not yet, thank God.” He raised the jar of brain paste. “I’m taking this with me to get tested. It’s evidence now. I don’t know of what, but I suspect I’ll find out. Don’t try to stop me.”
The curator looked taken back. “That’s not mine.”
Walker stepped forward, ready to leave. He had heard the ‘it’s not mine’ excuse his whole career. Drugs. Weapons. Now brains too, apparently. Unable to keep himself from responding the cold-cocked way he always had, he asked, “Oh yea, smart guy? Then who’s is it?”
If only he hadn’t asked. If only he hadn’t come. Whatever replacement Walker now operated with made the connection only after the words left a mouth that wasn’t his. The genie was out of the bottle; the cat was out of the bag; the brain was out of the skull. No act of nature or science was putting it back, though an adjacent attempt of the latter had certainly been made.
“It’s yours, detective.”
Around them, the room grew bright, illuminating what was once held in shadow. The ceiling, constructed of glass, gave the crowd above a birds-eye-view of the display inside. Giving them a view of him. Looking into the blaring lights overhead, Walker was again facing down a black Silverado.
Fuckin’ drunk! Fuckin’ drunk!
Clarity came next, like awaking from a nightmare and placing your feet on solid ground. Only, this grounding came with no relief. The real world had been reached but the nightmare hadn’t ended. There was a black Silverado, but it wasn’t what had hit him. There was a body rotting six feet under, but it didn’t belong to the drunk (Fuckin’ drunk! Fuckin’ drunk!). Headlights had been the last thing he had seen before the collision, but they had belonged to a minivan. The driver…the driver was…
“Do you remember him, detective?” Calvin said, real emotion leaking onto his face and into his voice for the first time. “Or were you too smashed to remember anything? Must have been a hard day at the office.”
“Wait…I…”
“It was ironic, really. All his hard work couldn’t save him, but it was enough to save his killer. Kind of.”
“T-This…isn’t legal,” Walker stuttered, still unsure what exactly this was.
“I’m afraid you’re wrong, detective. Every bit of you is proprietary, owned in full by Theseus Labs.” Calvin sighed. “The monster that used to be Detective Walker Mastesson is in that jar there…. and in the caterpillar display… and in the goat… and with the spiders… and in every display you’ve seen today. You’ve been scattered to the corners of the earth, detective. Your heart’s in Paris, your eyes are in Rome, your spine is in Turkey, and the kidneys still stained with your last drink are in Egypt. Not really, of course, but imagination is a powerful thing. You killed my husband, detective, the smartest man I’ve ever known, and I’ve made you pay for it.”
Head, shoulders, knees and toes.
Walker desperately clutched for his remaining lifeline. “But… twenty-one people were missing…” When the words left his mouth, they felt empty, meaningless, as if speaking them aloud made them less than real.
“Implanted delusion. Code. Consider it an Easter-egg.” Calvin shrugged. “It was your blood-alcohol content. Point-two-one.”
Fuckin’ drunk.
Walker fell back onto the desk, sending papers and pencils crashing. He wanted to be mad, but couldn’t. He wanted to run, but had nowhere to go. The jar shattered against the floor, spilling the mutilated remains of the man he used to be; the remains of an accidental killer. He remembered everything now, and a grief stole over him so complete that the pains and groans of his replaced parts were forgotten. There existed in their stead a pain no therapy could part him from.
“We open to the public tomorrow and run the exhibit until May,” Calvin was saying, gesturing at the gawking spectators unable to overhear their palaver. “After that you’ll be put in cold storage. Enjoy your stay, you fuckin’ drunk.”
The door shut, a lock slid into place, and Walker buried his head. If only he hadn’t driven that night. If only he made better choices…
He heard, in a head he didn’t belong to, the voice of his granddad again. “Ya don’t get to heav’n with ‘maybe next times’ and ‘if onlys.’”
“Don’t w-worry old man,” he choked between sobs, “I know th-this isn’t heaven.”
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