"Korglis ... ... Sgt. Korglis, what's that book?" Lt. Darlesh wanted to know before Sgt. Korglis left work.
"It's not work related, sir, but I only read it on my meal break. It's about a real Frankenstein."
"A what Frankenstein?"
"It's about how modern medical science, especially improvements in transplant technology, make the fictional Frankenstein actually possible. Of course it wasn't possible when Mary Shelley wrote the original story in 1818. It wasn't till the 1950s that the first organs were transplanted, just kidneys. After the advancement of immunosuppressive drugs in the middle 1960s other organs were transplanted. The first heart transplant was in 1967. Hand transplants involve much more tedious and fine work and those didn't happen till three decades later."
"I've heard some reports, none of those people became a virtuoso at piano though." Darlesh liked to add a hint of skepticism to almost everything he said.
"Perhaps not yet, but from there it's just a bit more study and one day almost anything is possible. In this book the first assembled person was made using a brain and spinal cord intact from a race car accident and attaching everything else, but from there it's just a bit more study to transplanting a brain to another spinal cord."
"That must be fiction then." Darlesh liked to draw lines where it seemed they need to be drawn.
"Yes sir, this particular book is fiction about what it presents as an impending future. How really impending it is, the readers can muse."
"I worry about you and O'Leary." Indeed Lt. Darlesh did worry. "Have you seen that 'Superfetus' character he thinks he needs to track?"
"Do you mean the man whose head is so huge in comparison to the rest of his body that he looks like a fetus, but he's a giant?"
"No, I mean the Superfetus draped in garlands of wisteria."
"I haven't even heard of that one, sir, ... oh, sarcasm, right. I have talked to people who claim to have seen him, but I haven't seen him myself."