Replaceable

      by Mark P. Suszko

“Anybody can be replaced,” goes the saying.

It’s truer than you may know. What Doctor Horvath would say is: “Every body can be replaced”. Because that happens to you every day, cell by cell, and there’s no magic about that. The individual tiny bits of you wither and die off, and new cells are taking their place, every minute you’re alive. Oh, not all at once, of course. For example, liver cells might take a couple of months of hard work, filtering the toxins and poisons you send their way, before checking out. Skin cells, about a month. Blood cells, around 120 days. Teeth and bone are close to permanent in a body as it gets, decades, but entropy still comes for those as well; gravity grinding away at cartilage until knees and femurs become mortars and pestles, spinal disks crack and fracture. But brain cells... well, jokes about drinking aside, unless you go out of your way to kill them, brain cells last your whole life, more or less. But you are dying every minute of every day, in tiny, unseen pieces. And that was the underlying principle of the scheme. 

The so-called “Horvath Process” was a way to hold the brain cells in a static condition, alive but quiescent, while artificially accelerating the decrepitude and replacement of every other body cell. When complete, your brain ended up still connected to a freshly-grown version of itself, free of damage, at the approximate same apparent age you were when you first underwent the Process. Horvath characterized it as just an accelerated healing system, only applied body-wide, all at once. For those who could afford it, it was a fountain of youth dream come true. For the government, it was a nightmare. Which is why my office got the call, and why I... well, I’m getting ahead of my story.

My shop was small; a collection of  “trouble-shooters” or “effectuators”. Among ourselves we called it the “Bureau of Ambivalent Euphemistics.”  We are the guys who do the things that nobody says were done,  or can be done, and yet, need doing. Clear? No? That’s how we like it. 

Anyway, we caught the case of the Horvath Scam, with orders to figure it out and put a stop to it. The why, you can guess any number of times and be right each time: It could destabilize population growth. It might lead to new fatal illnesses.  It short-circuited the order of successions. It might be straight-up murder in some way. Though nobody who’d underwent the process would file any complaints, and they walked around in public all the time, afterwards, certainly not looking the worse for wear. Which was kind of the point. 

The biggest worry for us was, those people who got the Process in secret; people whose loyalties might be bought with the promise of eternal non-aging, for themselves, and/or a loved one. People who make decisions, laws, that sort of thing. So we planned an infiltration operation. It wasn’t easy; Horvath did his work outside the territorial limit, in International Waters. Prospective patients, well-vetted, paid obscene sums to get on Horvath’s waiting list, then were whisked to his private floating  complex on robotically-controlled speedboats or quad-car  copters. Previous attempts to bug these or smuggle weapons on them all were foiled somehow, and Horvath must expect people like us coming, so his technical means to shield his facility were substantial. Government-level substantial. To date, no customs or naval vessel had been allowed to visit the place. Which in itself spoke to how many important people might already be friends of the Good Doctor.

I and the other Effectors sat around the BAE’s secure meeting room, discussing how we might go about our own visit. I was the second-most-senior Effector - only my boss, Lemuel, was older. Barret was middle-aged but spry; she was proud of her daily workouts and combat drill scores. Rej was the baby of our group, still in his twenties, not so muscular he’d stand out, but whipcord strong, with lightning reflexes. The planning session had been stalled for hours. We had some secret funds put aside from some oligarchs who wouldn’t be needing them anymore, to use for our buy-money. That went into some Swiss and Cayman accounts with just a whiff of a data trail, for easier verification by the target. We were stalled at creating a cover identity and back-story that could survive the vetting process Horvath’s security screening used to accept patients. 

Rej reiterated he would be the best person to play the infiltrator: “I have combat skills, I can think on my feet, I’m good with tech.” 

Barret made her play. “You have to be really rich to afford the Process, Rej. To get that kind of rich, takes years of quiet, steady investing and social climbing, without becoming well-known. You might play some flash-in-the pan new-money kid, or a celebrity no-name, but that means your social profile would have to be highly visible, with too many ways to break, too much time to lay the basics out.  I can play an old-money type, the reclusive, quiet kind, with a circle of important and rich friends. Horvath-bait for sure.”

Lemuel looked at my raised hand with surprise. “Darius, you’re just a month or two short of retirement. Frankly, friend, you’re old, fat, and slow. You’d have no chance if anything went badly on the Island.”

“But I have the best cover story, though.” I retorted. ‘And nobody would look at me and think I was a super-spy...”

“...Eff-ec-tor!” they all shouted, tiredly but in unison; correcting the nomenclature around our roles was a daily struggle at the office.

“... regardless. I’m the one it’s going to be most easy to build a cover for: no social presence, no family, no real history. Some boring fat guy that squirreled money away since the glaciers. Plus one other trait the rest of you don’t have.”

“Such as?” Asked Lemuel, skeptically.

“A fatal disease to get cured of.”

The office went very silent. Barret moved first: “How are you going to fake THAT?”

“Nothing to fake.” I said, palms held out in front of me in supplication. “It’s why I took the early retirement. I just didn’t want to bring you all down. I have some time left before I plotz, I was going to do the old bucket list tour, but this... seems more interesting somehow.”

“But you could get killed.” Rej said. 

“That was going to happen anyway. Maybe Horvath’s got a cure for me. What’s the worst that could happen?

They built my cover while I did some crash courses in general electronics, medicine, and hand-to-hand. Both confirmed that I was the worst choice of Effector to send. But I was it. 

Nobody that went to the island took any baggage, and we knew from previous tries that the robot transport would not move if it detected anything like a weapon or bug coming aboard. I would need to be creative if I had to somehow signal my team later. The cover story was well-done and would hold up to scrutiny for a time, but would get more likely to be broken by the day, after two weeks, when certain people would get released from jail and become available to Horvath’s snoopers for questioning. 

I sent in my blood work to Horvath’s clinic, and my fatal illness happily got me a priority booking.  No use dying while waiting in line. The quad-car flight out was creepy and lonely, but at least I got to compare my memory of the satellite images with the real place. 

Horvath’s security man interviewed me, and I passed his initial screening without much fuss. Either my cover was solid, or they knew, and were just playing along to find out more about me first.  

I got to see a couple of patients in the Recovery Center: a converted auditorium fitted-out like a Victorian greenhouse full of varied plants and trees. Very humid, heavy air in there. The patients were older than me, but somehow, they looked like they had a lot of energy. They praised Horvath noon and night while I was there, their gossip detailing various intrigues and scandals... but gave away little useful or relevant information.

I got my first peek at the lab when Horvath gave me my initial physical exam and blood tests. I mentally catalogued as much of the gear as possible, though a third of it was something I hadn’t seen in any familiarization database. Horvath was willing to explain a bit, telling me the same as I have already given you; he “pauses” your brain while the body gets sped-up with chemicals and weird magnetic fields or something of that nature. You come out the same age version of  you, but re-built of new cells, cast into the old shapes, coming out invigorated. My turn was to come the next day, so I did my raid as soon as lights-out. I skulked around the complex and lab with a cat-like stealth that Rej would have to envy. I was able to find and observe several unconscious patients in various stages of the Process. I snooped through the doctor’s devices and got the gist of what he was doing; he’d gotten it down to a repeatable routine process that anyone could learn with some effort, but they wouldn’t know how to build the stuff he operated.  I borrowed some of the doctor’s tools for a short time.  And  in my “research”, I found the part Horvath had left out of the story. 

My star witness was some kind of game show host, back on the mainland. Wresting him from the pod full of wires and goo was a challenge, but my quickie electronics and medical training let me bypass the monitor alarms, so we had a little time for a chat. I asked him his name. He was groggy, but I watched his lips form the sequence of letters.

They didn’t add up to his name.  And about that time, the tasers hit me, and I woke after a time in my own pod full of goo and wires, well-secured.

“I have the feeling, Mister Darius, that your wealth and history are both illusory. “ said Horvath. “Which three-letter Acronym do you work for, I wonder?” he shrugged. “No matter.” I’m in all of them already.”

“You are?” I asked. “Is that a euphemism, Doctor?” Or metaphorically”?

“Physically.” he replied, as he adjusted controls and rotated dials. You saw the Master Cylinder with a copy of my own body inside? I’m overlaying my brain onto theirs, so to speak. Multiplying myself. Much faster and more reliable than having children. More obedient, too, by far.” he squatted down to my eye level for a bit, as he went on: “Certain Vodun cultists speak of the entities called ‘loa’, spirits who ride the bodies of chosen worshippers, possessing them.  It’s a little something like that, in a poetic sense, maybe.”

“So you don’t really cure anybody?” I stated.

“Oh, of course I do, sir: that accelerated re-growth part really works. It has to; otherwise, my consciousnesses would run out of rides to command. And customers would complain. Well, I guess I wouldn’t, personally. You take my meaning.”

He fiddled with more controls. I started to feel cold.  “I promised a kind of immortality; just not the kind they expected. My own. But I’ll be around a long time in these, Darius. I have a lot of plans for the world. Good plans. I’m... no,  we! We’re going to make it all better. You’ll see!”

I guess he - we- did, after all. Make it better?  It was a weird experience, being ridden by the loa that was Horvath’s consciousness. And there were so very many of us. We almost succeeded in fulfilling his takeover plans.  I was still in my body, but he controlled it, and how much of myself I could express. He could call up memories from my mind on command. But luckily for us all, he never thought to ask the right questions of me,  call up the specific right memories, until it was too late. Questions like, what kind of crash course medical and electronics training I had received, and how had I employed it. What my first career had been, before I got tired of hospitals and became an Effector.  How I had smuggled a weapon in when no guns or blades or other devices could pass his detectors. How I had applied his acceleration process on a particular sample of tissue, and added those cells to his magical mixture. 

He had cured me, but the remains of the world-wide army of secret Horvaths we didn’t root out, after me, should be well into stage four or better by now. 

Except for me. 

He’s trapped in me, maybe for life. But my buddies at the Bureau are taking care of us, and who knows, maybe they can separate us at some point. 

My retirement buddy Darius Horvath, and me.