The silent regenerator
Henri was put into the isolation ward.Besides his past being an abuser of drugs,he had now come clean and worked for
a scientific organization as their official photographer.
They wanted to monitor his vital signs closelyalthough he had no recognition of himself or his surroundings.
His memory seemed to have been wiped out.His eyes looked blankly
at people and he made low guttural noises .
He had just been sent to do documentation in the remote jungles of the Amazon where a team of medical experts
and scientists were studying an intriguing case of a tribe
which had the amazing power of cell replication./regeneration.
While the scientists could grow stem cells into tissues and replacement spare parts for the body,they could not
replicate the complex functioning of the organs that worked in symbiosis with the other systems in balance with
each other without tremendous amount of immunosupppresive drugs on the patient.
But this tribe ,ahhh, had no idea of their chronological age as they had no visible effects of human aging in the internal organs
.Their faces didn't really sagged but just tightened
around the bone structures,their teeth were not rotten and their strength and agility were like youths in their prime of life although the medical researchers estimated their ages to
be in their 100s.
They hunted wild animals with their bows and arrows.There was a mysterious ritual they performed every month in
which mothers with their new born babies were led by the
shaman into a complex of caves.The shaman carried food and dried animal meat and they went deep into the damp
and dark chambers of caves.The tribe put in security to guard the cave from any outsider's aacidental or not intrusion into the caverns.At night,low guttaral chants emiteed from the caverns
.After four days,the mothers emerged from the cavern together with the shaman,looking like nothing extraordinary had happened.
The babies looked peaceful and "normal".
The witch doctor was worshipped as the giver of life and able to bring the near dead back to life.
Henri heard the translator explaining how their ancestor was a mighty monitor lizard and when enemies attacked it
,it swing its tail aganist the huge barbs of the palm tree and tear
off its tail.In a few weeks time,it would regrow the tail back to its originial size.
Months in the jungle and the rest fly back to civilization-Henri remained behind to take photographs of the amazing flora
and fauna for a natural botany society which had
commissioned him.
From one of the forays in the jungle,he caught the flesh eating bacteria.His lips were rotting and in the midst of a
delirium and high fever,the shaman forces open what's left of his lipless mouth which is now a gaping hole and feeds him with a dark concoction.
A few weeks later,his lips had grown back but as he was now in a state of shock,the tribal translator wired for help and
he was air lifted back to the the city and then to his present
location.
The concoction was made by the shaman by slicing off any part of his body and letting it ferment with a fungi in the cave.
The rotten potion was slowly dropped into the babies
mouth.With this ,they had found the power of regeneration of diseased organ and the fountain of immortality.
Now Henri had gained the power of regeneration when he drank the shaman's concoction.Laboratory analysis showed
the power of his undifferentiated stem cells had enormous potential.Organ failure would be a thing of the past-the super rich would pay any amount to gain it.
When an unscrupulous researcher at the lab realized that he could get a
handsome sum from Henri ,he sedated him and smuggled him out to a secret bunker. But they did not
have time to fully investigate the side effects which only came out under certain climatic conditions.
The old Henri was gone.What was left was "the living dead".To bring him out of the country,the researcher contacted
a few "organizations' and agreed to meet at a nearby country. He was put into a wheelchair ,sedated and put on a plane.The military would not need to develop robots in
warfare as their soldiers who were wounded could be revived.
When the researchers knew the secret of this tribe,they sent a team to bring some "specimen" back but it was too late-
the whole tribe was destroyed by a fiercer enemy and razed
to death.Henri was the only"surviving" specimen.
Temperature was very oppressive in the bunker where Henri was held.
An international biotechnology company had sent a team of expert researchers to do lab tests on Henri but
before they could complete it,a traitor in their midst contacted a global
terrorist organization which conducted an assault on the bunker.The guards were killed and whole team of
researchers was kidnapped together with the incoherent "sample specimen
X man".
In the van,they bundled up Henri and tied him down with plastic restraints.A few weeks later, an abandoned van was
reported next to a heavily forested area.There was no trace
of people until a search team found some bleached out skeletal remains scattered in the depths of the river bed.
The city was gripped by some mysterious virus that attacked the down and out homeless community.Some were
reportedlydue to the filthy condition they were living in,they
had wounds that couldn't heal and simply rotted to death.The doctors were racing round the clock to find a cure
but it seemed the latest arsenal of antibiotics was ineffective
against this antibiotic resistant virus.
Any memories of Henri had been wiped out by the toxins of the viral infection of the flesh eating bacteria mixed with
the the secret potion of immortality.He had regressed
to the primordial instincts of a wounded animal that hunted for food,possessed supernatural strength when cornered
by his enemies and suffered from excruciating pain in
his brain. And memory lapses.
