Lifers 4

Upon his arrival in Charleston Martins was offered the job immediately, the “Charleston Committee for Health and Wellbeing” having little choice after their current MD passed away that morning. For the first few weeks Martins worked very hard tending to his patients in and out of hours, and it wasn’t long before the people of Charleston started to like and trust him. Word soon spread as to how fine a doctor Martins actually was, his cures for the more serious ailments earning him high esteem and gaining him many friends, some wealthy, some not.

On one occasion a young girl of six was brought to him after spending forty-five minutes at the bottom of Kooks Lake. He eventually revived the girl who seemed to have suffered no ill-effects from her ordeal. It was this and similar actions of this nature that had him acclaimed by the most naïve of Charlestonians as, “A worker of the miraculous.”

He soon became very popular indeed, and even though he discouraged it strongly he’d acquired a following, a following that willingly donated substantial amounts of cash to him. Cash that within a few months had built him a newer and bigger surgery, and also afforded him a comfortable lifestyle. Martins liked his new found popularity and guiltlessly he took their money. And so long as it had no impact on his private laboratory life, he would reap the benefits.

After a few months he’d rented a large house on Ruth Street, just off Pennsylvania Avenue in Elk Hills North West Charleston. The only rooms in the house he would use on a regular basis howevere were his bathroom and kitchen. His bedroom he would use only occasionally due to him working late into the night; sometimes so late in fact, he would fall asleep at his desk.

The most important room to Martins however, and the reason he wanted to rent this particular house in the first place, was the basement; this room he would use for his more important work. The basement spanned almost the whole floor area of the building with a dividing wall across the centre. One side he furnished as a small living area should he require it, and the other side he used as his lab.

His followers naively looked upon Martins as their liberator, and because of that weakness he exploited them even more. Martins began to preach to them. He would rent a large hall only a stone’s throw from his house and talk to them, preach to them how he saw the human race and its numerous faults. Faults forced upon it by its so called creator. Faults he promised he would one day banish from each and every person that followed him.

He would preach of the shortcomings of God, and how he had made man not in his own image, but in the image of a weak and pitiful creature, a creature that would eventually succumb to the ravenous jaws of time. Because Martins spoke ill of the bible and its preaching’s it cost him many of his followers. The few that had remained loyal were baptised by him… literally. He had christened them, “Collective”, his “Collective”.

Martins still had his dream, and that dream was to become like the God he so often ridiculed… immortal. He now experimented on rats, and so far his experiments were not going as well as he’d expected them to. All the rats he’d injected with his modified stem-cell formula lasted no more than a few days before dying due to hypokalemia, a condition caused by a severe potassium deficiency.

This slowed Martins down considerably but would not stop him from trying, and whenever he needed a new batch of cells, he would simply take them from his unsuspecting patients, claiming he was taking their blood for tests.

One thing Martins had noticed of late was the younger the donor, the faster the cells would replicate. He’d recently injected two rats with modified stem cells from two different donors, one a woman in her thirties, and the other a child of seven. He cut half an ear from each of the rats and closely monitored the re-growth rate. The replication rate in the rat with the younger donor cells almost doubled that of the other, but again both rats suffered a lack of potassium causing irregular heart rhythms and leading to cardiac arrest.

Early one morning a young woman came into his surgery with an unwanted ten-week pregnancy; Martins realised that this opportunity could not go unexploited. He carried out the abortion and before discarding the foetus took a batch of stem-cells. During his modification of these cells he introduced another element to the formula in the hope he could weed out the problems. That element was a microscopic amount potassium.

Martins injected another rat and again removed half an ear; within twenty-four hours the ear had almost fully re-grown, and after running tests he found the rat to be healthy, but with slightly raised levels of potassium. A fact he wrote into his journal, but simply chose not to investigate further.

This was just what Martins hoped for; he knew the regeneration properties of his modified stem-cells were the cause of the rapid re-growth, and was in fact the reason the formula actually worked. Now old cells wouldn’t merely die off, they would be replaced by new cells, replicated cells. Any part of the body that would normally become old and tired would endlessly renew itself. And injuries as long as they were not fatal, would heal in a matter of days, if not hours.