Even by the end of that first night I'd achieved far more than I could ever have hoped to achieve in a lifetime. The problems of mind and body that great philosophers like Plato, Locke and Descartes had spent centuries wresting with were solved during the course of that one night. I had demonstrated that the behavior of the human mind and body was replicable by the precise application of electrical charges. I had dispensed with the need for a soul. I had shown that life wasn't the impossible miracle it once seemed. It was just bits of stuff being powered by electrical energy (and other energies). Nothing you couldn't replicate with a really good bath.

The work took years of development to get beyond the simple movements achieved in that first night. Just to get the body to sit up took months, mainly because of the amount of energy required. Eventually I had to entirely re-design the bath to make movement more natural. With the new bath in place, including the vertical tank, I could move the body in an upright position, even walk a few steps.

But even after that, developments were slow. I wasn't helped by the gradual decay of Eric's body. It became unusable after eight months, even with regular freezing between experiments and those corpse-sustaining Jacuzzi baths. Despite my best efforts I never achieved my goal of getting him to smoke a cigarette, the one thing he most wanted to do.

I got lucky though, Eric's decomposition wasn't the disaster it could have been. Katy died the next day, and Lucy the day after that. I had two new bodies to experiment with, the female mind this time. Okay, I might never get these corpses to reverse park a car, but they were fresh and I was able to fine tune my work. They must have been impressed, within a month they were applauding me.

Yes, I finally achieved clapping, which soon led to complex maneuvers like throwing and catching, and with two corpses to work with I was able to get them to throw and catch with each other.

By this time I had three assistants to help me; Igor, Tiffany and another Igor (the one who did the filing). The funding poured in, private health and insurance companies saw an opportunity to sell people life after death. This was a gross distortion of the groundbreaking work I was doing. I never claimed for an instant that my corpses would experience anything akin to life, but nevertheless their money proved useful in funding the expansion of my project.

My ultimate goal was to get the corpses to talk, to replicate language. After all, it is language that distinguishes human from animal life. I wanted to demonstrate that there were no limits to my new science. I achieved verbal grunts fairly early on; I got Katy to say 'Hello', or something like it, but no more. I couldn't even get Lucy to say 'Hello' back.

The problem was that most bodily activities were the result of hundreds of internal functions, but the bath-water was outside the body, so most of the internal parts were simply not functioning fully. This was okay for simple movements for very short periods of time, but not for anything vaguely complicated. To get the bodies to talk I needed a fully functioning voice-box, the ability to draw in and exhale air and the ability to cross-reference the spoken word with the brain's dictionary.

The answer took me years to perfect, but was actually quite simple; a sort of waterfall system of electric fluid, passing through the veins that already existed. Oh yes, a bit messy clearing out the blood, but worth it.

Kevin was my first serious attempt at language. Kevin was known to rabbit on when alive, so he perfect for the task; if ever a corpse was desperate to talk, it was Kevin. Within a week I'd got him ordering a pizza over the phone.

By then I'd developed the port-a-bath as well, so he was able to answer the door, pay the money and even eat the pizza. I hadn't realized this would work so well, I thought getting the corpses to eat would prove impossible in my lifetime.

It did give me a problem, as it took another year to get the excretion system working. Plus of course, I'd had nothing to eat myself, as is the nature of scientists on an all-nighter. The last thing you need is for your experiment to eat your pizza. Especially as the firm refused to deliver ever again.

I'm often asked if I ever went too far. In particular, I got a lot of bad press over the murder trial, even though I was found not guilty. It wasn't even me that did the killing, it was Kevin, and, in English law, a dead person cannot be liable for a crime.

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