The Hangman's Replacement: Sprout of Disruption (BOOK 1)

by Taona Dumisani Chiveneko

  But which side was this man on? Was he with the people who wanted Magistrate Changamire to continue sentencing people to death, or did he belong with those who were trying to shut down the gallows? Only one answer made sense: Neither. This creature was not a flocking bird. His wingspan was built for solitary flight. His genius had no peers. Collaboration with inferior minds would only dilute it. The man’s name was Professor Titus Clementine Guyo, also known as The Most Revenant Mr. Chidoma, Esquire.

  * * *

  MUTATION: THE DETERMINATION GENE

  “A prodigy is just a firework that gets laid by seducing the candles into believing it is a star.”

  The Harvester

  Dear Mr. Person,

  We have never met. We never will. I will only introduce myself as a man with colourful acquaintances. Though I only interact with them when necessary, my acquaintances sometimes share interesting information that is unrelated to my personal interests. Usually, I keep it to myself. For reasons I will not explain, a situation has arisen that has forced me to make an exception.

  Recently, I received news about a situation in which you are involved. This letter does not disclose the entire story. There is no need to provide information that will endanger more than it will enlighten. Therefore, I will only furnish you with the historical context of the matters you have been forced to address. I regret that I cannot advise you on how to overcome your difficulty. Nevertheless, there is value in knowing what you are up against.

  The greater story revolves around one man. He lived in a tiny village that the most zealous cartographer would be embarrassed to acknowledge. The man once had a young daughter. One day, in a moment of inattention, he allowed her to wander too close to their outdoor fire. The blaze was strong enough to deter anyone from coming within a metre of the flames. Unless, of course, one planned to throw oneself into it. That is what the little girl did. As dictated by the laws of obviousness, we can safely conclude that she died in discomfort. If the man had looked into his daughter's eyes just before her point of decision, he would have sensed her intentions.

  Note that the daughter did not die right away. It took her father several days to carry her to the nearest clinic. Along the way, he fought off a wild animal that attacked them as they slept beneath a tree one night. Both the encounter and the man’s victory over the beast had been designed to facilitate subsequent events.

  When they arrived at the clinic, the child was in a bad state. Was it a miracle that she lasted that long? Maybe.

  The nurses told the father that his daughter needed a blood transfusion. But these rural clinics do not have reliable cold storage facilities to keep fresh supplies of donated blood. So they improvise. If a patient arrives with a loved one, that person is usually asked to become the donor.

  But the father did not make an ideal candidate for such a procedure. He was exhausted and dehydrated. He had also sustained major injuries from fighting the wild animal. But like any loving parent, he insisted on donating whatever was necessary to save his daughter. And donate he did.

  The nursing staff drew his blood. Given his weakened state, he fell unconscious after they had drawn a single pint. However, the blood never made it into his daughter’s veins. Neither did any of the other organs and materials that were harvested from his body.

  The man nearly died at the operating table. He was saved by a blood transfusion from the same man who was responsible for extracting the materials from his body. Let’s call that man “The Harvester”.

  The Harvester had been hired by a group of clients who also had a stake in the harvest. The clients were powerful men who could have abducted the father and taken whatever they wanted from his body. However, this approach would have compromised their cause. It was crucial that the man never learn he had lost his organs. It was equally important that he part with them voluntarily. Without his consent, the whole effort would come to nothing. So how do you ask a man to unknowingly donate his organs? Solving this paradox required a mind of exceptional vintage. The Harvester had such a mind. He orchestrated a series of events that led the man to consent to donating “anything, if it could save my daughter.”

  The Harvester honoured the wording of that authorization. He dabbed a drop of the father’s blood on the daughter’s wounds. Of course, this did not save her. But it “could” have, right? Remember, the father did not specify an acceptable level of probability as a condition for his consent. Any likelihood below absolute certainty was sufficient. The phrasing of the consent had been planned to the last word. The delirious man uttered each one without being told to do so. If he had used the word “will”, everything would have been ruined.

  After the surgery, The Harvester did not tell the father the extent of his “donation”. Even if the patient had noticed that he was a few kilograms lighter, he would have been too overcome by grief to care.

  The Harvester had prepared for the operation many months before. He had set up the clinic, planned the daughter’s “accident”, and made sure that the wild animal would carve deep wounds at specific places on the man’s body. These jagged wounds were critical to the plan. They could be surgically extended for easier harvesting. Afterwards, they could be stitched up without the man ever suspecting that some of his organs had been removed. To the grieving father, the scars were solely reminders of the day he killed a lion, but failed to save his daughter.

  The Harvester developed a technique for grafting the organs into livestock. Using advanced genetic engineering techniques, he “convinced” both the implanted organs and the hosts’ bodies to “believe” that they had always been part of the same system. This procedure had two main advantages. First, it preserved the organs for much longer between their extraction and final transplantation into the human clients. Second, the interim transplants allowed the animals' circulatory systems to cleanse the organs of their human blood. It was important that the donor’s blood did not end up in the clients.

  So why did The Harvester’s clients invest so much in the effort? In a word: desperation. They believed that replacing some of their own organs with those of a righteous man would protect them from a terrifying disease. It was spreading fast. But before the organs could be transplanted, they had to be cleansed with animal blood. This process was meant to confuse the “spiritual germs” that were poisoning their blood.

  The Harvester was not the only person who his desperate clients hired to help slow their illness. The men offered unworldly rewards to unsavoury characters who would eat their own hands if someone paid them enough. However, the price of failure was severe. One such contractor was thrown naked from a plane into a lake full of crocodiles. Miraculously, he survived, but his disappointed masters did not let him escape that easily. Now please engrave the following into your memory: despite their brutality against the failed contractors, the men who hired The Harvester did not have the gall to exact vengeance on him, even after they discovered he was working against them. Some of the clients have fled the country for exotic locations where they believe the spiritual disease will not find them. Others have been forced into exile because the disease makes them allergic to Zimbabwean air. Those who remain are not ready to cut their losses. But all this activity happened long after they hired The Harvester, so let’s focus on the organ extraction.

  After the operation, The Harvester transported the organs to a secure facility in Mozambique where they were to be grafted into livestock. His clients guaranteed his protection and freedom of movement on both sides of the border. To their knowledge, The Harvester’s only motivation for accepting their assignment was financial. They thought he was just an intellectual mercenary with a passion for anatomical mining. Little did they know that they had hired the man who inspired the idea of the organ transplants in the first place. The Harvester had sown the seeds long before the clients even knew he existed. Long before their free will led them to task him with an assignment that would worsen the very fate they were fighting to avoid. How? The answer lies in the gr
ieving father from whom the organs were taken.

  The Harvester’s main objective was to mine the man’s blood and brain fluid. From these, he developed a genetic rocket fuel that he used to transform a beautiful plant into a carnivorous demon. When his mutant flame lily was ready, he unleashed it against his hapless clients. The Harvester dubbed his new fuel “The Determination Gene”.

  To add insult to injury, the clients never got their organs. “Someone” tipped off the Zimbabwean police about altered animals entering the country from Mozambique.

  Worse, the authorities have been vigilant in their fight. The costs and risks of ordering a new batch of organs have increased significantly. Suitable replacement organs are hard to find.

  Righteous men are even harder to find.

  Now you have a bunch of desperate men who are stuck between a spiritual disease that is threatening to consume them from the inside, and a plant that is doing so from the outside. Essentially, these clients were fooled into paying for an initiative that is now hastening their downfall. Such cunning makes The Harvester the king of predestination.

  To be frank, if the transplants had happened they would have only delayed – rather than altered – the likely outcome of this story. Nevertheless, time is the most important commodity in this macabre tale. If the clients use their time wisely, they may unravel the mystery that is frustrating their salvation. To survive, these men must think. Hard. They must navigate an intellectual minefield where every grain of sand is booby trapped. Where every blade of grass is a poisoned dart.

  This will be the most difficult experience of their lives. However, their pain will probably be wasted because all their accomplishments to date have been driven mostly by testosterone and adrenaline. In general, both can be very effective. However, the men need brains, not bravado, to solve their current problems. In fact, the more heated their tempers become, the lower the quality of their thoughts. Instead, they should try to emulate their tormentor. His mind works like a superconductor. The cooler it gets, the better it performs. There is no resistance to the flow of the man’s ingenuity, especially during a crisis.

  The Harvester is a spiritual man. The gospel of his faith is thought. In his world view, the only purpose of life is to increase the quality and velocity of one’s intellectual output. Because he is the smartest being he is aware of, The Harvester has anointed himself the deity of his religion. The Satan of his theology is faith. Why? Because faith subverts thought. In his opinion, faith is the serpent that tempts humanity with the nectar of unquestioning compliance. In his version of the Holy Book, Adam and Eve’s failure was to succumb to thoughtless hormonal urges. These impulses prevented them from realizing that the forbidden fruit they had devoured would lead to the painful and unnecessary creation of another being. Worse, the offspring was virtually certain to be burdensome, expensive, and of mediocre intellect. Of course, The Harvester wrote his holy book himself. I recently secured a copy. All I can say is that psychopaths can be intriguing storytellers.

  The Harvester may be a narcissist, but he is not insane. I do not believe he actually sees himself as an omnipotent being worthy of worship. This would contradict his central idea that worship itself is an unreasoned pursuit. Sure, he accepts veneration from his growing ranks of disciples, but this is just pragmatism. He needs a human resource base to carry out his plans. In the end, the religion itself is merely an amusing sideshow he dabbles in to cure his bouts of boredom. The disarray he foments invigorates his wicked heart. In some ways, maybe it would be better if he were actually insane.

  This is the man you are up against. A man who can cause widespread devastation and make it look like the unpredictable outcome of unrelated factors. A man who can tame improbability. The harvesting operation is among his lesser accomplishments. Circumstances forced his hand to sacrifice finesse for speed. Still, he succeeded. Worse, he embraced the lessons from that experience and modified his strategy.

  You will probably never meet this man, but he is aware of your existence. Fortunately, you are minor players in his ambitions. Take solace in his unflattering evaluation of your potential to impede his goals. Do not do anything to change this perception. This means you must abandon your plans to review certain capital convictions. Besides, many of the death-row inmates deserve their fate. Those who do not deserve the gallows would not benefit from your intervention.

  I recommend ‘defensive thanatosis’. As powerless prey, this strategy is your best chance to survive a threat that is already upon you. To protect yourself against The Harvester, you must behave like his namesake, the ‘harvestman spider’. Play dead. Continue your work as though you are indifferent to the strange events gripping this country.

  Tragically, I chose a different approach to the man. Our paths crossed in the course of a transaction I had with an individual who turned out to be his disciple. I chose a different survival strategy before I understood the capabilities of the predator I was up against. I fought. The Harvester has been trying to kill me ever since. I have lasted this long because survival was once my profession. I was good at it. Regrettably, the bastard pulled me out of retirement. I guess there are costs to having colourful acquaintances.

  My gloomy message has a glimmer of hope. You will not be defenceless against The Harvester forever. A time will come when his ability to strike at you will be reduced. Even then, he will remain more dangerous than any living person you have ever known. Your victory will be improbable, but at least you will have cleared the stormy waters of the impossible. Your opportunity will arise after the first execution by the new hangman. When that happens, you may proceed with your efforts to close the pipeline to the gallows. One of your fellow judges will soon announce his retirement. Between now and then, you must identify his replacement and convince him to pursue the job. I am sure you know where to look. Persuade him. The swelling waters are rising around him too. Therefore, he must decide whether he wants to be a creature of the land or the sea. This war has no amphibians. If you all play your parts, you may save many lives that deserve to continue, including that of the executioner himself.

  Godspeed.

  The Man with Colourful Acquaintances.

  * * *

  The Hanging Grudge

  The intruder chuckled as he replaced the letter in its hiding place. Justice Murambi’s office was pitch-black.

  “Ah, my Rhodesian friend. I wonder where you find the time to write letters spilling my secrets. No matter. Survival may have been your profession, but brilliance is mine. I have been honing my craft for much longer than you worked on yours. My occupation and I have been synonymous since birth. Unlike you, I cannot retire from what I am. Not even death will retrench me. With focus, I will not need to wait that long to kill you. All your colourful acquaintances are fast becoming my disciples. What will you do when they all report to me?”

  The man swivelled in Justice Murambi’s chair.

  “You are wrong about my former clients. I authorized the release of their organs, to them. That was always my intention. The Bakers simply needed a crisis to enhance the urgency of their transplants. Delayed gratification makes the prize sweeter ... until the sweetness reverses with a fury that matches the magnitude of the relief.”

  The man stood and walked towards the door. He stopped by the closet just beside it.

  “You are right about one thing though, my Rhodesian friend. My opinion of your judges is not very flattering. For now, I will leave your Mhitsa-loving jurist a friendly carnivore. My plant is an excellent playmate. It will entertain his corned-beef sandwich in the same way it has been handling the girl who inspired the obsession. Justice Murambi must realize that thanatosis will not save him. Only compliance will.”

  * * *

  Consolidated 7. File: BSE – xxx – Client / Chokwadi – Extract – Newspaper SED27850 – Zizi

  ZUVA REDU: Employee Caught Trying to Throw Human Arm into Mincer at Mhitsa Factory

  By Earnest Chokwadi

  An employee at Ma
baudo Foods Inc., the maker of Mhitsa Corned Beef, was caught trying to throw a human arm into a mincer. Phineas Chirondoko has worked at the cannery for more than eight years. During a night shift last Thursday, he asked a colleague to fetch him a drink of water. Phineas claimed he had a parched throat and was feeling dizzy. His worried colleague obliged.

  When he was alone, Phineas took out a human arm from an unknown hiding place. He was about to throw it into the giant mincer when he slipped on a pool of water near the machine. The fall broke his hip and immobilized him. When his colleague returned, he found Phineas flailing around on the floor. The wounded man was trying in vain to fling the arm into the mincer.

  The police were called. Phineas was arrested. He refused to divulge whose arm it was, where he had gotten it from, and why he was trying to add it to a vat of the country’s most beloved canned product. Phineas will be appearing in court next Friday.

  Mr. Xavier Mamhasu is the head of public relations for Mabaudo Foods. He was in full damage-control mode on Tuesday.

  “This behaviour is abominable! I can guarantee you and the public that no such incident has ever happened in any of our facilities. This employee was probably bitter about being passed over for a promotion. Luckily, this puddle of water thwarted his devious plans. However, I must emphasize that such hazards never happen in our facilities. This was the hand of providence!”