His glasses reflect the monitor’s glow. He’s staring intently at the screen. At first it seems as if he’s studying a strand of DNA or the results of an experiment from some of the laboratory equipment behind him.

He is, in fact, playing Tetris.

It’s not that he’s idly playing Tetris. He is playing deliberately because his mind is elsewhere. The blocks give his eyes and his hands something to do while he thinks. He is thinking about his sister.

She’s sprawled asleep on the table behind him, blonde hair spilling off the edges. She will remain asleep until he wakes her up. The skin on one of her arms is pulled back, revealing fine wires and precise machinery. She is hard on her artificial limbs, and that constantly pushes him to develop better technology.

It’s been years since the accident. She’s been the focus of all his work since. He’s not sure his parents would even notice if she disappeared. At first he took care of her out of fear he would be found out, but he’s developed a genuine fondness for her now that she’s under his control. She understands that she will be taken away and pulled apart by people far less gentle than her brother if she does not keep his secrets.

He’s thinking that he wants to radically revamp the system. Artifical limbs and metallic organs were good enough to start with, but they’re so basic. There’s got to be something better. Maybe using nanites to create and maintain a flesh body around a device designed to house her soul. He devised the machine to capture the soul several months ago, but hadn’t tested it yet. The idea was that at death, the body lost a certain weight without losing obvious mass. Obviously it was losing a certain energy, and with a tight enough siphon around her, he could capture that energy and then put it inside a different body, one less limited and more reflective of the progress of science. A matrix of energy, perhaps, designed to simulate a solid body. The nanites. Something that would be more independant of him, that wouldn’t leave his sister erroring in the middle of school, and would reduce the ‘bionic girl’ effect that was showing up in her gym classes.

The only problem was that he would only have one chance to get it right. The first time he’d worked on her, after the accident, there’d been no margin for error, of course. But then he was desperate, and she would die anyway if he did nothing. This was different. He couldn’t do anything until he was certain.

He wouldn’t fail now, not after all this. So he continues playing Tetris and refining his ideas.

After all, what’s the point in playing God if you can’t bring the dead back to life?