With the twist of his right wrist, Nick snapped-closed his flip phone. He was as cool as a cowboy snapping open an old Zippo lighter. Nick was old but still fashion-forward. His vast income allowed him to collect antiques, more specifically, old electronic equipment.
Tonight would be exciting. The smell of torture was in the air. A boon, he reminded himself. The damn Takeda finally held his revenge. He was proud of the old bugger. He could only imagine how Takeda would get even with the Visconti with that boon, but this was neither the time or the place to ponder it. Besides, some very rare fun as at hand.
Nick looked at the doctor ready to earn his exorbitant salary. The patient's pulse was a murmur; blood pressure was nonexistent, and what came next was unlikely to work. The dangerous procedure had never successfully worked on a healthy patient. This corpse would probably collapse long before the procedure was over. The doctor had warned the Chairman of this time and again. Nick did not share his pessimism. If anything, Takeda was a world-class bastard. He'd survive just for spite, if nothing else.
The doctor shook his head in disbelief as to what he would do next. He could not believe he'd agreed. If one medical practitioner had any chance of making this work, it was this man. The doctor had been working for the old ghost for decades for a good reason: he was the rare person not shy to surf beyond ethical or moral lines. Crazy and reckless was precisely what he loved to do, but he was stepping out of his own comfort zone. Making the impossible happen at the cutting edge of illegal medical advancement was his own thing; this was lab torture of an animal too weak to react.
"Go ahead, inoculate him. Make sure he suffers," added the Chairman with a small smile. No answer was necessary. Pain was the central component of this process. The doctor was as ready as he ever would be. During the mind meld, he had prepared his patient. Takeda's frail husk was already hooked up to several small devices. The wires and probes were taped to different parts of his body. His vital signs were weak, but the body was alive. The doctor was kneeling, and was holding a long empty syringe in his mouth. He needed both arms to do what came next. He had laid several suitcases around the bed, and on the bedside table were several screens lit with activity. The procedure required extensive monitoring.
With his left hand, the doctor grabbed a little box. He held it up in Nick's direction. There was a black area on the box, one of those fingerprint scanners. Nick licked his thumb and placed it on the reader; it hissed open as air entered the box. Inside was a deep red glass capsule filled with some synthetic fluid. This was not blood; it looked like it belonged in a robot, not a human.
"We have seconds until it goes cold," said the doctor. He was moving with the speed of a junky needing to shoot himself. He clicked open the syringe, and clipped in it the red vial. The doctor clearly needed help, and looked like a field medic trying to stop bleeding of a patient riddled with holes. Nick refused to help. The doctor placed the needle on the neck of the patient and paused.
"Do it!" rasped the ghost. The doctor needed no more encouragement. With a gentle push, he injected Tadeka with the contents of the vial. "How much time?" said the ghost resting in the corner chair.
"We should see changes around the entry point almost immediately. This virus replicates extremely quickly even in a body this weak. It moves through cell walls, not blood. Don't touch him." There was a smell of alcohol in the air.
The patient was on an intravenous drip. The doctor reached up, pushed the plastic clip down and increased the flow of plasma to the maximum. There was little time. The man was preparing for medical Armageddon.
"Put these gloves on. Hold him!" said the doctor to Nick. As the doctor gave the order, he realized the Meta would never lift a finger to help. A mere two feet from the bed, Nick was savoring every instant and grinning ear to ear.
The doctor snapped open the lid of a large case. It was filled with plasma bags. He reached into the case and unfolded two bag supports. He set them up where he could, often bumping into Nick. He hooked up the two bags on the arms of his patient. This body was not going to enjoy these next minutes, and it would need all the nutrients it could get. The pulse remained, for the moment, very faint.
The doctor placed sunglasses on the patient's face and ripped open his robe. Inside the case were two ultraviolet lamps. He clipped both of them to the stands and turned them toward the old white skin of his patient. Takeda somehow needed the rays. On his neck, at the point of the injection, the skin was slowly crackling. On a cellular level, his DNA was being twisted back in shape.
Nick smiled. He loved virology.
The doctor opened a third suitcase. It was filled with little sugar sports packets used by athletes to fuel up during a race. There were in it also candy bars and plastic bottles of energy drinks. The doctor started laying these down on the floor.
"Sir, you should go, the next minutes will not be easy for him," the doctor warned. "He may get violent. One of these guards outside the door would be helpful."
"Grab them if you want. But on one but us walks out alive and having witnessed this and having seen this. As for the pain, that is precisely why I should stay."
The doctor knew Nick was not joking. There would be no assistant. "This is not for the faint of heart. This will get very bloody and smelly."
"You have any popcorn?" The ghost was smiling from ear to ear.
Takeda's body was being infected by small foreign agents. At first, the changes were invisible. The doctor seemed very nervous as he monitored Takeda's vitals. The doctor kept replenishing the plastic bags tubes into his veins.
"Doctor, as this delicious abhorrent spectacle unfolds, can you narrate what is going for our friends of the Council." This would be an added annoyance, but not unexpected the doctor told himself.
The doctor unzipped pouches, unfolded tissues and began the narration, "Well, from a scientific perspective, this is highly fascinating. We infected him with four foreign agents, three of which I know about and a fourth you gave me less than an hour ago. No animal, or insect has ever survived a general cellular regeneration process this complete. Aside from very small multi-cell living creatures, animals and humans alike die each time we try. I hope your mysterious agent cures these defects."
"Trust me, I did not get to where I am by failing at what I do. For the record, my own mixture was made of three agents, so we are really giving him six different components. But who is counting at this point? Surely not him." Nick issued a ghastly chuckle.
"Fine." The old body on the bed began slowly to convulse. "The first agent to act is normally what we call P-Pee-Sc21. It is a prion in the Scarpie form. We added a twist to it."
"A protein," finished Nick. "The beauty of life is fascinating." There was nothing beautiful about what was going on. This was no place to correct the doctor.
The medical expert continued, "By using a prion, we can migrate the agent directly between the cell walls without risk of exo-contamination. As you may know, prions will first attack the nervous system. In this phase, the patient's nerves and brain have been jolted by a folded protein we attached with dominant RNA in an amyloid form." He looked back to see if the Chairman was keeping up with the explanations. He was.
The doctor knew he was getting a bit technical, but Nick loved every moment of it. The body jerked several times, and Takeda yelled as if he were being tortured. The poor treating physician received no help in trying to hold his patient down and prevent him from knocking down one of the bags of plasma.
"At this point, this should feel like a mixture of very bad case of meningitis and being dropped alive in boiling water.” He hesitated. “Much worse, actually, full body burns is closer to it."
"I have always found biology to be much more interesting than technology." Nick said, looking at the room's security camera to confirm it was closed. "Continue."
"A portion of RNA was injected to force cells to generate proteins of our design before it will move and alter the DNA segments. As you know, to modify DNA, we need to promote cell regeneration. During cell splitting, the DNA opens. If the cells cannot find sufficient nutrients, they will literally digest themselves. Am I being too technical?"
Takeda's muscles were now convulsing. He shook like a zombie.
"Doctor, you may not know this, but I hold several doctorates including one in molecular chemistry. I also have a genetic biology Nobel. Your explanations cannot get too technical for me. Stop dumbing this down." Nick, intrigued by the phenomenon, was staring intently at Takeda's convulsing body. "Are we clear?"
“Yes sir.” The physician was taken aback by this. He knew every Nobel and this monster wasn’t on the list. The doctor glanced at the monster. "After the initial flare-up, the body will collapse into shock, despite the nutrients I have been pumping into it." As if on cue, the convulsions subsided. "At this second stage, the prion we injected in the cocktail includes a protein that will stimulate the production of undirected stem cells. These exist in faint numbers on the outside surface of each bone, on the heart valves, and between the spine and the nervous system. This old body has, at best, a dozen cells left so we injected some cells. The new cells also need nutrients, and their formation will digest parts of muscles and bones, releasing lactic acid as a by-product. Each time we reach far into lactic acidosis..." He looked back at his boss. The man understood what lactic acidosis was.
This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
"Don't you have a wonderful analogy for me, doctor?" said the old ghost. "Acidosis has to hurt."
"Well, normal to high levels of lactic acid in the blood are 0.5 milimol per liter. A great cyclist can reach numbers as high as 3.0 as he finishes a category 1 climb in the Alps." The doctor looked at one of the instruments. "We have measured ultra-marathoners at the finish of a race at 5.0, but in each cases, they have spent years training their metabolisms to resist this acid buildup. The patient is now at a level of 9.3. The acid is collecting in every tissue, between every cell. For him, moving a pinky will feel like needles are being inserted between each finger. Moving is torture, yet he moves."
Nick grabbed his cane, pushed himself up, and moved closer to the bed, avoiding the patient. He reached over and pushed the tip of his cane into Takeda's chest. The patient yelled and the mere reaction to the pain doubled the pain. "What a wonderful procedure," Nick was enjoying himself. "So technically, the body is destroying itself as it regenerates."
"Correct. At his age, cells rarely split and we can only regenerate this code as it splits. Normally the process would take years."
"Yet, somehow our boy’s remains alive and is not dying." He poked the body again with the expected result. “What would happen if those stem cells were from a different person?” Before the doctor could think about the answer, Nick just told him, “Please continue the narration.”
"The body is an amazing piece of machinery. In addition to the prion, we have injected him with a virus that snaps open the DNA loop and reconnects it at the beginning, that's where it was located a century ago when he was born." Nick knew the body had a cell aging system. He was too well familiar with the notion that with each reproduction of the DNA, the code loop closed upon itself one link at a time, until one day cells were unable to reproduce. The largest part of age manipulation was linked with this suit. "For the change to take place and the link to attach itself, each cell must go through a splitting cycle. We kick-start the regeneration by boosting the immune system forcing it into splitting. The bags are filled with plasma and white neutral cells. The body will use those, at first." The doctor looked at the heart rate monitor. "We do need the flow of blood to be stronger. I have never attempted this on a body this old."
"Increase the rate manually," suggested Nick.
The doctor was taken aback by the suggestion, but the old ghost was right. The doctor immediately got on top of the body and started a cardiac massage. "He will not like this."
"One of life's little pleasures." Nick sat back down and lit up a cigarette from a pack. The comment was distasteful at best to anyone but him.
The man was crushing the thoracic cage with his heavy hands. "The syringe also included a virus; that one I am unaware of its effects on the human body. It looked rather dangerous."
"Well doctor, to our friends watching this man," he pointed at Takeda, "is the father of an early variation strain of virus. He alone is to blame or thank for its existence but it’s power over death has no equal."
"We need a miracle about now." The doctor was giving his patient a milder version of CPR. He did not hit hard enough for the heart to stop. He kept at it for several minutes until Takeda's heart rate improved to 50 beats per minute. Then the doctor got up. The nano-infection at Takeda's neck was spreading. The body began to shiver, the dark lines were spreading. His fingers and lips were quickly drying up.
"This next part will not be pretty. Are you really sure you want to stick around?" The question was rhetorical. "Every cell will have to split in the next minutes. The body will now try to reject about forty pounds of dead cells any way it can. The new cells will need nutrients. Normal evacuation systems will kick in, but will not suffice. There will be puss and smell. The dead cells will collect in pockets. He will shit and piss himself out; in theory that is. This is where we lose all our patients because of internal pressure. They literally implode and explode from puss buildup. This looks a like a yellow Ebola."
Nick made a sign of him eating from an invisible tub of popcorn. The doctor was in a room with pure madness. He pulled out several large syringes from his bag. They were veterinary equipment. He also pulled out a hand scanner. The doctor grabbed two large scalpels and handed one to Nick. "I assumed you will want to help with this gory portion, it involves cutting him open. You need to cut the skin open to let pockets of puss empty as I cannot drain them with the syringes. I will point them out with this scanner. Bumps will appear. I will try to remove the puss building under the muscles."
Nick stood up and grabbed the knife. The doctor was right, cutting Takeda open would be a pleasure. "Do I cut the muscles?"
"Yes but not connective tissues."
What happened next with sickening. The doctor kept passing the scanner over the body, looking for large pockets of puss to appear within the body. "We don't want the puss to block organs or blood flow. Let's hope the brain regeneration is not too fast, that would kill him under the pressure. I have no drill."
"These cells should not really regenerate," said Nick mostly to himself. The doctor smiled. Nick was again right. The ghost was a wonderful bedside attendant as long as you disrespected a patient.
"The connecting tissue within the cranial box should regenerate, there is almost half a pound of that. Those will have to go if they can't flow out naturally through the nose and eye sockets," he offered. Nick was excited. The doctor continued the work for ten minutes. The sight was not for anyone with a weak stomach. Takeda's body looked like it was literally decomposing. Every organ, his nose, his eyes were bleeding black and yellow blood. His skin was peeling in large patches. The doctor shoved long needles into the body and sucked out smelly yellow fluid. Nick really did not need to help; the dry skin cracked by itself allowing the fluids to ooze out along with blood. He just watched the show with a smile.
Soon the bed sheets were stained by red and yellow liquid, the smell in the room was putrid. The doctor was trying desperately to avoid getting in contact with the blood, he quickly gave up that effort. At some point, the stench became overwhelming, despite the open window.
Outside, the weather was getting worse. In the distance, lightening was flashing furiously, as if nature itself was objecting to what was going on in this room. The doctor quickly ran out of bags of fresh blood. For a moment, he hesitated about drawing his own, but Nick made a small nod telling him to wait. On cue, the patient's heartbeat slowly began to improve. Blood pressure was also rapidly improving. Below a layer of dead skin, new reddish skin was growing. Red hues returned on the man's face. This was a miracle.
The next stage was one of healing. The zombie-like creature in the bed opened its eyes. The pain must have been incredible, but the body was animated by a stronger force: hunger. The doctor was ready. He held to Takeda several sport bottle; luckily they had a spout. Takeda drank from decomposed lips, and as his putrid hands squeezed a bottle, the pain made him drop it. The hunger was too strong. Then he grabbed it again, ignoring the pain, and drank another bottle, then a third. Rapidly, the wounds were healing. By the time solid food was presented to him, the skin on his hands had reformed. Dead patches of skin were falling from his body. The creature ate the entire content of the suitcase.
"Very funny..." said Nick. "He keeps calling me a vampire; now I get to use the word zombie." The ghost spoke loudly to his former employee. "Takeda, do you crave brains?" Nick alone chuckled. The man's ears were filled with blood, it was clear he could not hear. The doctor was now covered in blood, sweat, and puss.
The doctor was under a lot of stress and snapped at his insensitive employer. "Shut up a moment, he can hear you." Nick decided to ignore the comment. Under the circumstances, his medical expert was holding quite well. Nick had no respect for the academics distant from their fields. The doctor was, literally knee deep in it.
"Sir," he began as way of an apology, "the patient's higher brain functions should return at any time." The doctor had easily removed forty large syringes of dead cells. Tadeka slipped back into reality, and opened his eyes. As a diver surfacing after minutes without air, the century-old body grasped for a deep breath. The patient made multiple sounds as he quickly awakened from long slumber. He was coughing out his old lungs.
"Need... food," These were the first waking words of Takeda.
"Don't eat me," joked Nick. Both men in the room smiled back at Takeda, each for a different reason. Takeda's mind began to strategize. His memory began to connect the dots as to what had just happened. His facial expression stiffened.
Finally it spoke, "I forgot to ask what you needed me for. I just signed away my soul, didn't I?"
Nick's smile, if that was possible, widened. No answer was necessary. The metaphor was perfectly chosen.
Takeda looked at his hands. They were hurting and covered with dead cells. He was also a renowned virologist; he knew cellular-level regeneration when he saw it. The skin on the back of his hands was gaining tint and tensing up. His hunger could wait.
"This is incredible! I did not know in-body cell regeneration was possible," said the patient to the two men looking at his discussing hands.
"It is not, " confirmed Nick. “We got better while you slept.”
"You are the first," confirmed the doctor. “The Chairman does not realize how improbable all this is. Sir, you should be dead, not be able to talk minutes after such a massive shock to your system.” Takeda felt only pain and hunger. He slowly bent upwards in the bed. Nick could hear the cracking sounds of the joints. Takeda placed a foot on the floor, then a second. He looked at himself in a mirror. Every inch of his body was a raw nerve, the pain was beyond human understanding. He drove himself to function.
"I just got up, yet I have been in that bed for almost a decade. That is impossible. My muscles also are regenerated."
"I did not remember you to be such a ballerina," said Nick. "You need a shower," he said as he pointed at the bathroom. Nick got up, walked to the shower faucet and turned the water on. "Cold water seems more appropriate." Takeda's shower was sure to clog any drain. From the room, Nick said loudly, "You have five minutes to clean yourself up before I blow this place up."
Takeda looked at the doctor. "I even kept the follicles. Where is the morphine?"
The two men were packing up some of the equipment. "The pain should not be blocked yet. It directs the formation of new white blood cells in your body, and helps with the rest of the regeneration."
"I don't care," Takeda said.
"Sir, you do. Trust me. You will now start regenerating some bone cells. Drink this." The doctor slid his hand past the curtain. He gave Takeda two large white plastic pouches. "You need calcium and fat. There is nothing better than good old fashioned milk for you right now."
In his mouth, teeth were also regenerating, and some fillings were being forced out by the pressure of growing calcium. The pain, when compared with the other areas of his body was tolerable. He spat several fillings. Then there was the headaches. Nick did not recall having had this much fun in recent memory. Takeda collapsed several times to the ground, but each time managed to get up.
"What a fucking drama queen!" said the old man looking at the time on his watch. The convulsions lasted some time. Takeda's fantastic brain needed a diversion. Nick held a mirror in Takeda's sweaty face.
"Look!"
Takeda wiped his face, took a deep breath and looked at himself. What he saw would have been impossible to believe without going through this entire experience. This was someone else's face.
"Who is this?" His Asian features were gone, instead were the features of a Latino.
"A gift. Wash yourself. We have to go."
Takeda was frail. He needed food, water, and a month of sleep.
Nick threw a pair of pants and a shirt on the floor.
"What are the side effects?" mumbled Takeda from the shower.
"A boon. You fucker. And you want collaboration from us? Five minutes. For the moment you are mine. You forgot who I am."