Ex-Human
I was born on the 9th of November in 1972. My parents named me Jay, as in the bird, not the letter.
I spent most of my childhood picking up dead animals and dissecting them, teaching myself how they ticked and, eventually, how to bring them back to life. The only problem was they'd die again within the next few days.
I was obsessed with finding the answer, finding the key I was missing to create life from death.
I was 16 when Jack the Ripper flooded the papers and I stalked him through Whitechapel, learning everything I could from the bodies; It wasn’t often I got the opportunity to study humans.
Mary Jane Kelly died the morning of my birthday that year, so as a gift I'd allowed myself the time to dissect her body much the same way I had done a million times before with animals; it was messy work considering the state in which he'd left the body, but I did what I could. I came home later with her heart in a jar to find my parents about to bury my dog's body.
We weren't exactly well off and to my parents it had become a choice between him and me.
I saw another option.
I don't really remember doing it, I just remember sitting in a pool of blood surrounded by organs with a my knife dangling loosely from my fingers and a wicked grin plastered on my face after. I saw something then, as my parents bled out, a sort of... Life, in their eyes.
And I wanted it.
I won't go into detail about how I... extracted it, but I did, and I was sitting with my dog's body cradled in my lap as I injected the life into his heart.
He's not immortal now, I figured that out when he ran out of time and just stopped working one day. It wasn't hard to bring him back again though, considering I had done it to numerous smaller animals, swapping souls between them and taking meticulous notes while learning everything I could about this "life" substance and how it worked. I developed a theory that every being is slotted a certain number of heartbeats, a certain amount of time, and it could be stolen, but never extended, not really.
My own time was no different.
My body began to fail me for various reasons and the stolen time wasn't enough anymore, so I built organs from metal and gears, replacing what I had to to keep myself alive. I wasn't afraid to die, I simply felt I was still needed here.
It was decades before I finally found a true purpose for my makeshift immortality.