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

by Taona Dumisani Chiveneko

  The stiff man was literally shaking in his overstuffed suit. At one point, his face was so puffed up from anger that I thought he was going to have a stroke. When the obligatory display of outrage was over, he calmed down and relaxed his hulking frame. I am told he was once a bodybuilder.

  “This is an isolated incident. At Mabaudo, we pride ourselves on the high quality of our product. In fact, we are releasing a new bacon flavour this month. Our heart goes out to the rest of the hand’s family. Continue to buy Mhitsa Corned Beef! Naturally flavoured cow. Your taste buds will love you for it.”

  The police refused to provide further details about the incident. However, they did confirm that the arm appears to belong to a woman.

  * * *

  The Determination Gene

  Dear Percival,

  I have an exciting story to tell. I would love to boast that my pending narrative relates the most diabolical scheme I have ever concocted. But I cannot. Too many of my achievements could lay claim to such a superlative pedigree. Therefore, like any doting father, I will not play favourites among my intellectual offspring. This would only foment a storm of jealousy and unrest. As you will agree, a man who provokes conflict among his children is really at war with himself. And when you have a mind like mine, any familial conflict would have thermonuclear repercussions. So let us abandon the irresolvable. I invite you to frolic in the intrigue of my improbable account.

  Every good story starts with a simple premise. This one begins with the notion of survival. The determination to live is both instinctive and ferocious. It often encourages compromise with evil. Only the Devil ever benefits from such a bargain.

  The desire to live is not a conscious intelligence that is capable of thought or calculation. The impulse that drives a man to beg for his life when his head is about to be severed by a hacksaw is the same one that encourages a worm to thrash about when dangled above a flame. Though the worm is not capable of reflecting on the notion of mortality, it continues to fight until its will to survive is incinerated in a cloud of fatty effusions.

  The primitive craving for survival is universal in all things capable of dying. Now imagine if you could isolate the basic element that drives all animals to fight for survival? What would you do with it? I already had my own ideas when I started my search for an entity I eventually dubbed “The Determination Gene”.

  This adventure was driven by my effort to develop a carnivorous flame lily. Though I succeeded in giving my plant a taste for meat, she was easily distracted by the natural nutrition in the soil. She made no effort to focus on hunting animal protein. Worse, earlier versions of the plant could not distinguish between rat and human flesh. I eventually made her more discriminating in her preference for the latter. However, I still had to grapple with the mystery of deficient motivation.

  How could I inspire the lily to seek out a corpse that was buried far from where the vine was planted? There was only one solution. I needed to find the genetic basis for extraordinary motivation. If I could integrate that into the plant’s genetic makeup, I would create a beast of great ambition and focus. These traits would propel the plant’s growth towards its preferred diet: dead bodies. In short, I wanted to develop a carnivorous heat-seeking missile that equated its very survival with devouring human remains.

  But where would I get the best raw materials? Though the world is full of organisms that will fight for survival like the worm above a flame, some creatures exhibit levels of determination that surpass the extraordinary. Many will even exhibit this trait in situations that fall short of impending death. This is the class of outliers I was looking for. From these, I would pick the one that set itself apart from its exceptional peers.

  I travelled the world in search of the most determined and resilient creatures. I visited war zones where women sang songs of thanks and praise even after being attacked with savage bayonets, and even more savage penises.

  I found monks who had slept on cold concrete for decades while awaiting divine revelations. I came across men who had grown up in humiliating poverty, but who rose to build global enterprises, lord over entire countries, and even lead criminal organizations of comparable distinction.

  I even met a girl who had walked across the Sahara in search of her father when she was only eight years old. By the time she found him, she was eighteen. He was dead. She then walked all the way back to her mother, who had also died by the time she returned. So what did she do? She walked back across the desert once more to look for a boy she had met on her initial journey. Unfortunately, the boy was already married by the time she found him. Now a grown woman, she noticed the high number of AIDS orphans in the town. So she started an orphanage.

  When I asked how she felt about her chronic adversity, she told me that she was the luckiest person in the world. Her personal tragedies had blessed her with more children than she could have carried in her own womb. Then she looked at me in a strange way. My blood ran cold. She reached under the table and took out a Bible. I should have stood my ground and countered her delusion with the wisdom of my own religion. Sadly, my phobia for conventional faiths overcame my desire to win a convert for my more enlightened one. I sped out of that orphanage like a headache fleeing a painkiller. In retrospect, I am glad I did not harvest anything from that woman. Though she was a hardy little louse, her “determination” was powered by religious zealotry. I am not convinced that she had an innate disposition for perseverance.

  Further north, I met a Siberian hermit who lived in the foothills of the Ural Mountains. His life’s passion was wrestling black bears ... in the nude (him not the bears). He did not know why he did it. All the hermit knew was that if he stopped wrestling bears, he would die. The other locals wanted nothing to do with him. Some of them told me that they often heard growls and screams echoing through the mountains at night. Many of them prayed that one lucky bear would maul him to death. They were constantly disappointed when they later saw him bathing his wounds in a nearby river the next morning. His courage and prowess for wrestling were admirable. Still, I concluded that he was just a crazy man with frozen gonads. I saw no point of harvesting anything from him either. I kicked him in the testicles and fled.

  The plant and animal kingdoms (excluding humans) offered some pleasant surprises. Organisms from these realms are much simpler to figure out. Their behaviours are not muddied by personality factors or flawed belief systems. If an insect smells like a fart, you can be sure that the stench has a genetic basis. It is neither trying to make a lofty point, nor is it suffering from an inferiority complex. Thus, my curiosity led me to focus on harvesting samples from plants and animals, even though none provided the ultimate source of determination. I knew I could harness their peculiar traits to produce interesting varieties of my plant.

  In Panama, I found a spider that eats its own limbs during lean times. I am told they grow back. But though the distinction is razor-thin, desperation is not the same thing as determination. Nevertheless, auto-cannibalism is one the most intriguing phenomenon I have ever heard of. I collected a few live specimens to starve when I got home. I placed them together in the same container for the journey to Zimbabwe. My calculations were accurate. By the time the spiders arrived in Zimbabwe, their numbers had fallen by half. The container was littered with the debris of shattered exoskeletons. I placed the survivors in a glass tank and watched their numbers decline to just one. The Apex Predator. The ugly bugger was constantly glaring me through the glass. His honeycomb of eyes was filled with culinary intentions. Too bad he was much smaller than me. After further starvation, his cannibalistic instincts turned against the very body in which it resided. How did it end? Interestingly. Sometimes you must eat yourself to survive, I guess.

  In Borneo, I discovered an edible plant that can survive the most vicious forest fires. The natives saw no irony in telling me that it tastes better cooked, even as they munched it raw. Elsewhere on the island, I found other plants that inverted the natural hierarchy of the food ch
ain. In the Kinabalu National Park, I came upon an orchid of asphyxiating splendour. Its petals ignited tender feelings that ran counter to my misanthropic nature. This flower also ate meat.

  Though it was not the source of my determination gene, I was intrigued by its sophistication. Instead of “hunting” in a manner that induces panic in the prey (as other meat-eating plants do), this one produces a chemical that lulls its prey into a euphoric stupor. The experience is equivalent to dying from an overdose of pleasant dreams. This pleasurable death makes the dish more palatable to the orchid. The reason is simple. When an animal dies in a traumatic manner, it produces stress-related hormones. These secretions would ‘soil’ the meal for a flower of such refined taste.

  You have to respect a flower with etiquette. I harvested the orchid and shipped it back to Zimbabwe.

  In the Canadian Arctic, I collected tardigrades that can survive in temperatures well below –200°C. The genes responsible for this endurance conditioned a version of my flower to thrive in frigid conditions. Now, even a northern Canadian winter could not prevent my flower from feeding on a frozen carcass. Imagine if you had that ability, Percival? You would be able to reach into your freezer on Christmas and start munching on your frozen turkey. If your children did not inherit the gene, you would have to defrost the leftovers for them.

  In the Canadian province of Saskatchewan, I went to investigate rumours of a city under siege by a green army. At that point, I had lost interest in human sources of determination but I was told that this place was special. I decided to make an exception.

  When I got to the city of Regina, I was convinced that I had walked into the rowdiest leprechaun conference in the world. I could not smell the shamrock, but I did not accept this as definitive counter-evidence. It was so cold that I am sure no odour could have wafted far from its source before it froze.

  I followed the marching crowd to a nearby stadium. When I entered, I began to doubt my theory about the mythical nature of these beings. The rebuttal to my theory confronted me when I looked down at the men who had amassed in the field below. Leprechauns will never grow to that size. Finally, it dawned on me that the crowd I had followed was a hoard of frenzied sports fans. They had come to support their local “football” team: a beefy brigade of men who rammed their helmet-clad heads into each other more than they applied their feet to the ball. Oddly, the “ball” itself looked like an egg.

  I know you are wondering why this spectacle made for a worthy stop along my epic quest. What sort of determination could anyone express by simply playing or watching a professional sport? Well, the temperature that day was –18.5°C. The chilly wind made it feel 10 degrees colder.

  I saw an African immigrant whose nose and ears had frozen and broken off. And still, he kept on cheering for his new hometown team. This made me think: If a man decides to leave a warm continent for a place where he knows he will lose body parts to frost bite in the name of sport, then he must be truly determined. The same can be said for the locals. I would have tried to harvest something from one of them but I underestimated the cold. My own hands were frozen. Holding a scalpel was impossible, so I stayed to watch everyone else freezing.

  Fortunately, the team won. If the home crowd let out a joint sigh of relief, it probably before I noticed it. A smiling lady with a blue nose turned to me said: “You should come back in the summer. It is lovely here.” Maybe so. But I am not interested in lovely summers. Temperate weather is not known to breed determination. Creatures of tremendous resolve can only be forged in the furnace of severe hardship.

  Of course, it is possible that my leprechaun theory was correct. Those beings can be crafty. Maybe they staged the sporting event to hide the magical nature of their symposium from an outsider? Maybe they wanted to take me for a ride? Well, at –18.5 °C, it was a rough way to make a point.

  Farther east in Canada, I visited a plantation in Rougemont, Quebec. To be honest, this part of my trip was inspired by a distraction. Quebec produces the best maple syrup in the world. My insatiable sweet tooth would not allow me to leave Canada without paying tribute to its craving. Thus, the only determination I can associate with that part of my trip was my determination to eat as much maple syrup as I could before approaching diarrhea territory. In the end, my visit may have gone beyond indulging in the sweet sap to orchestrating a fantastic heist. The operation cleared ten percent of Quebec’s annual production of maple syrup. More about that another time.

  My travels were long and fascinating. But guess what the comedic twist was in this whole saga? After travelling the globe and discovering all these peculiar life forms, I eventually found the most determined of them here in Zimbabwe. It was hiding in plain sight.

  That is the problem with being a genius. Your obsession with empirical rigour can make you sceptical of self-evident solutions. I made up for my error by initiating a series of events that would forever change the lives of many. It all began with a single pint of the man’s blood.

  Blood is a reservoir of delights. It is a treasure trove for those who know what to look for, and how to isolate it from the rest of the junk. I know how to do both. After tapping the man's veins (and his skull for an acceptable amount of cerebral fluid), I took the material back to the laboratory. What a euphoric experience. Test tubes and Petri dishes have never tested my patience for social interaction. I cannot say the same for the naked bear wrestler, or that bible-wielding do-gooder.

  After several gruelling years, I finally made the decisive breakthrough. I isolated The Determination Gene. To be accurate, “determination” in living organisms is built on a complex multi-factorial matrix. It is not immune to the influences of environmental factors. For simplicity, let's just say I combined all the goodies into a single “gene serum” that can enhance almost any propensity in living creatures.

  Think of it like gasoline. You can use it to power your vehicle or to set a house on fire. For better or worse, The Determination Gene merely fuels whatever trait is inherent to a certain organism. Naturally, my preferred tendencies lean towards mischief. I combined The Determination Gene with my flame lily’s newfound taste for meat. There it was. The warhead was now loaded.

  When I tested my creation, the results were disappointing. The flame lily remained just as distractible. Its roots grew in all directions where it thought it could find food and water. Just like any other plant, it was hedging its bets. It had no discipline. No focus. Alas, it had no determination. Just a mild openness to animal protein. Mine was a vexatious ordeal. I had not invested so much time and resources to create a nutritionally ambidextrous weed.

  I made many modifications, but nothing worked. I found myself facing an intellectual brick wall. This was unfamiliar territory. I began to experience another recurring nightmare. The giant brain cells of dead idiots were pointing and laughing at me. “You are not so smart, are you, now?” The taunting was unbearable.

  However, the connections between my brain cells live in a constant state of collaborative combustion. Unrelated ideas and inputs converge in unpredictable ways. Eventually, this cortical orgy reveals insights that would enlighten all the monks in Asia. My breakthrough was born of such a process.

  One night, as a part of my brain sulked over my problem, a cluster of brain cells in another part were engrossed in an interesting historical document. I had just acquired it for my collection of prized artefacts.

  As you are aware, there is a thriving global market for historical, artistic, and cultural artefacts that have been acquired without the consent of their owners. With enough money, one can order many prized objects from this unregulated marketplace. You can find anything from famous paintings to dinosaur bones, rare books, medieval torture instruments, the wooden prosthetics of notorious pirates, and even the pickled heads of defeated kings. I have placed many orders for interesting items over the years. For the record, I own none of the aforementioned treasures. Admittedly, I do venture into the aberrant from time to time.

  The docu
ment in my collection sparked my breakthrough. The letter was written in 1942. Its author was a British communist. He was writing to a newly minted priest who was preparing for his first deployment to continue the good work of “civilizing” the natives of Rhodesia. Much of the letter is “blah, blah, blah,” but a reference to one of your fellow countrymen set my brain alight.

  As I read a particular line in the letter, my brain cells shook violently. They ruptured and sprayed their scalding magma in all directions. I felt as though an aerosol canister of genius had exploded in my head. The mist of illumination ignited several battalions of my other brain cells. Together, they consummated an intoxicating orgy of brilliance. I will never know what force triggered this explosive reaction, but, in that moment, I knew exactly what would motivate my plant. The idea was so simple.

  That night, I drove to Bulawayo. I reached the city limits at about five in the morning. Shortly after that, I was at Matopos. The answer to my problems was buried there.

  By now, you have probably figured out the purpose of my trip. I went to pay homage to a man who shares your ancestral origins, but who differs from you in that he is dead. I knew that Cecil Rhodes had taken a sinister secret to his grave. I had to find it. It was the only way The Determination Gene could arouse an erection in my flame lily.

  I know what you are thinking, Percival. Grave robbery does not fall into the class of mischief that I prefer to indulge. It is not my style. I prefer to leave such tasks to people without a more exalted calling. Besides, Rhodes had himself buried in a boulder. (Who does that?) Unearthing him would be too much effort for a man who prefers to labour with his mind. Fortunately, there was no need to dig up the scoundrel in order to resolve my “determination dilemma”.

  I tell you, Percival, that Rhodes was a wily old fox. For a man who did not have the aberrant cortical structures that correspond with stupendous intelligence, he was commendably crafty. His true legacy has been misunderstood. Rhodes did not care about colonization any more than I cared about Zimbabwe’s independence. The man was a plotter of the highest order. Scheming was his oxygen. If he were alive today, I would grant him a senior position in my congregation. (I started my own religion, remember?) He would immediately feel at home. Brilliance was also his only spiritual belief. That is why history remembers the likes of Cecil John Rhodes but has forgotten the John Randal Bradburnes of this world. After all, what glory is there in hugging lepers?