Krugenborte’s bots

In the late 1800s, a mysterious and secretive scientist known as Doctor Krugenborte pioneered the first robot/human hybrids. Little was known of the man himself — some said he had once been a surgeon, others a clockmaker, others still a disgraced professor of anatomy driven from his university under circumstances nobody would speak of. What all accounts agreed on was this: Krugenborte worked alone, he worked at night, and he worked with a devotion that bordered on the religious.

He foresaw a time when the bonds between man and machine would blur — when flesh would no longer be a boundary but a beginning. While his contemporaries tinkered with steam and gears for the sake of industry, Krugenborte asked a stranger question: not what can a machine do for a man, but what might a man become, once he was no longer only a man?