An excerpt from Nephilim.

“Those eggs really hit the spot, right?”

“I’d love some more,” he answered.

“Sure,” Zdenek responded. “One or two?”

“How many do we have?”

Before long, James had wolfed down nine eggs.

“I wonder if it’s the choline,” Zdenek mused as James shoveled. “Eggs have a boatload of choline. Maybe she’s craving it. Orange that is.” James hadn’t touched his toast. “Choline, you know? It might help my baby merge with your nerves.”

James’ face bore the same strange expression as when he’d gazed around his bedroom. “You remember that existentialism class I took last year?”

“Remember it?” Zdenek scoffed. “How could I forget? If it weren’t for me writing your final paper you would’ve walked away with a big fat ‘F’.”

“I think I understand what Sartre was saying now. Take this fork.” He licked Tabasco from the tines. “Like, it’s only the essence of a fork, to meet a purpose. This,” he regarded the fork as if he’d never seen one, “this thing popped into existence just so I could deliver this scrumptious pile of eggs into my mouth.”

James looked down at his legs in the same way, from one to the other. “And your machine—”

“Component. She’s just one component.”

“The machine is bonded to my leg. But a leg is just a leg. Yeah, just a leg. And I’ll still be James, regardless of how much the component changes my leg.” He stood up and walked across the room. “Hell, you could saw my leg right off and I’d still be James.”

Zdenek gulped hard and his left eye twitched. By now, the micro-tendrils of the component had infiltrated James’ nerves. They were inexorably advancing, inching millimeter by millimeter towards his brain, like leaves seeking sunlight. The component’s chief ambition (though not its sole desire) was to merge with James’ brain on a cellular level. The rest of it was just a side effect.

“But what about when this thing of yours finds its way into my skull?” James said. He filled the sink with hot, sudsy water and scrubbed the dishes. “What then?”

“Um,” Zdenek said.

“Will I still be James?”

“Um.”

Marc Arginteanu is a neurosurgeon and author of Nephilim and Azazel’s Public House.