Though Vic gets her name from "The Premature Burial," the similarities end there. Her ultimate ending aligns with the 1843 story "The Tell-Tale Heart" instead. After Vic fails to persuade her partner and heart surgeon Alessandra to join hands with her in performing a rushed trial on a human candidate (surprise, it's Verna again!), she angrily smashes a heavy paperweight into Alessandra's head. Though she claims it was an accident, she doesn't hesitate to use her dead girlfriend's body to implant her revolutionary cardiac equipment, whose incessant chirping drives her to the brink of madness. In the original story written by Poe, the narrator kills and mutilates the body of an old man into pieces and stores them under the floorboards. But, racked with guilt and the loud thumping noises he believes to be the old man's heartbeat, he confesses to the police as the secret and the paranoia that come with it eat away at his mental well-being.
