A Fifth Autopsy

Dr. Elara Morrow washed her hands slowly, as if scrubbing away the dread that had taken root under her skin. She’d done four autopsies in as many days, each more bizarre than the last. Each body arrived with the same signs: no external wounds, organs appearing pristine, but a blank expression frozen in wide-eyed terror.

Tonight was the fifth.

The morgue was quiet except for the low hum of fluorescent lights overhead. Cold. Sterile. Elara tugged on her gloves and approached the steel table in the center of the room. A pale sheet covered the latest arrival.

"Name?" she asked the recorder without looking up.

"Leonard Finch. Age 42. Found in his study. Same conditions as the others. No signs of forced entry. No trauma."

Elara nodded and lifted the sheet.

Leonard's face mirrored the others — eyes bulging, mouth agape, hands curled into fists at his sides. The coroner’s assistant, Jonah, hesitated.

"You sure you want to do this one tonight?" he asked, half-joking.

"We need answers," she replied. “If not tonight, then when?”

The Y-incision was clean, practiced. She had performed hundreds of autopsies, but nothing prepared her for this pattern. Heart: normal. Lungs: untouched. Brain: unremarkable.

Yet, each corpse whispered something silent — like their bodies had secrets etched in fear.

Halfway through the procedure, Elara paused. Something glinted beneath the skin near the sternum. She frowned and leaned in. "Scalpel."

Jonah passed it over.

She made a careful incision and gently peeled back the tissue. Embedded in the connective tissue of Leonard’s chest cavity was… a fragment. No — a shard. Black, glassy, and pulsing faintly. The pulse wasn’t biological. It was rhythmic. Mechanical.

“What is that?” Jonah whispered.

Elara didn’t answer. She reached for the forceps and grasped the shard. As soon as she touched it, her ears rang with a high-pitched tone — just for a second. Then silence.

“I need to send this to the lab,” she said, voice tight. “Now.”

Jonah hurried off with the sample, and Elara stood alone with Leonard’s body. She stared down at the cavity where the shard had rested, and a chill crept up her spine.

Then the power flickered.

The lights went out, plunging the room into darkness. A hum began to build — low and tremorous — like a distant engine stirring. The emergency lights sputtered to life, casting the room in red.

Leonard’s body twitched.

Elara stumbled back, nearly knocking over her tray. She watched, paralyzed, as Leonard’s hand lifted slightly, then dropped.

“No,” she whispered.

Suddenly, his eyes snapped open.

A scream tore from Elara’s throat as she crashed into the wall behind her. Leonard’s body convulsed once, then lay still again. His eyes were blank now — not terrified. Just… empty.

The lights returned.

Jonah burst through the doors, face pale. “The shard — it’s not a mineral. It’s synthetic. Micro-engineered, like a transmitter or receiver. The lab techs—” He stopped, seeing her pale face. “What happened?”

“He moved.”

“What?”

“He opened his eyes. He twitched.”

Jonah stared, then looked down at the corpse. Leonard was still. Motionless.

“You saw what you saw,” he said, trying to convince them both.

They didn’t speak for a while. Then Jonah cleared his throat. “The other four victims — the ones before Leonard — they all visited a tech expo downtown a week before their deaths. Leonard’s wife mentioned it in her statement. Some private demo by a startup no one had heard of.”

Elara’s mind raced. “You think they were implanted with… something?”

“Maybe. Something that records. Or transmits. Or worse.”

She stared at Leonard’s chest cavity, the absence of the shard like a hole in reality itself. Her hands trembled.

“What if it’s not just recording?” she whispered. “What if it's testing something? A neural response? A fear reflex?”

“You think they were… experiments?”

“Trials,” she corrected.

Jonah shivered. “So, what now?”

Elara pulled off her gloves. “Now we find out who’s running the trial. And we stop them before there's a sixth.”

But deep inside, Elara feared they were already too late.

Because that shard — the one Jonah had carried to the lab — had pulsed in her hand.

And now, beneath her skin, just over her heart, she felt the faintest… thrum.