When I first turned the beholder on all eleven eyes twitched. I studied its reactions carefully while reading vitals from the monitor. I swear there was absolutely no indication that anything foul was happening or was about to happen.

There's just no way. The main eye in the center contains an 8k resolution camera, feeding the creature's auto-movement AI engine, which I had written myself over the years. It was responsible for navigation and movement. The ten other eyes fire a combination of bullets, lasers, and tiny grenades, only on my explicit command from the control panel on my remote PC. Flight capabilities came from a bleeding-edge drone, which lay beneath the thick plastic monster coating lined with Kevlar.

My pilot plan was to rob an armed security truck that drove on a highway nearby. Nobody would see the beholder coming, nobody would be prepared for it. Once the shooting began people would see that it could escape their bullets, and that the ammunition that it didn't escape would bounce right off. It was the perfect weapon, totally untraceable. Even if by some chance it did get shot down, there was no way it would lead back to me.

So you can see, I really hadn't planned for the creature to start talking to me in some gibberish language that I didn't understand. All I heard out of its very first words was something about a lair in a forgotten realm somewhere. When I pored over the source code, I found nothing to indicate that any functionality like that should be present. Talking was never a priority for this build-out. Hell, I didn't even put speakers in it. Then, when it started firing weird rays at me, I knew that something had gone horribly wrong. I had lost control of it.

The cop took a long sip from a cup of what looked like dumpster-worthy black coffee.

"You're telling me you're responsible for the deaths of 112 people because you lost control of your Frankenstein and you can't even remember the code you put in it to make it do that?"

"It wasn't supposed to come alive. Surely, you understand that!"

"Yeah, sure. Forensics will tell the tale. I hope you're ready to spend a long time talking to the FBI, because they're going to have a lot of questions for you."

"I'm pretty curious about that forensics report too."

That was the last thing I said before I scratched an itch on my ankle. When I looked down at it, I saw a red splotch where one of the rays had hit me. Funny that I hadn't noticed it before. What was more concerning is that there was tissue growing from that spot.

When I looked up again I saw both the cop's head and his feet.

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Open to feedback. Please help me get better!