He entered the door to his kingdom.
The abandoned hospital was ideal for his purposes. In the jars on each wall swam what was left of his patients. He had been working here since 1924 and had made sure of that. He had his way of staying young and he knew that people could pay him to do the same.
He walked through the next door. The giant tanks were in 4 lines down the hallway. He knew what was in them. What was left of his mistakes was there. He had a thing for fast spinning blades when it came to hiding evidence. He crossed the hallway, turned left towards the elevator and looked as out of place in the building as a solid gold tooth in a beggar's mouth.
The first floor. The cell floor. He had a variety of donors, some captured off the street from some race in captivity. He grew them like plants and they loved him as their gardener. Mainly because most of their brains were replaced by what were practically cell phones. Almost like telepathy, the only problem was that none of them had any motivation to use it other than for entertainment. It was difficult before automation in 1951. He had needed help running the facilities before, the insurgency had helped him during that time. They were all gone. Into the tanks.
The second floor. He stepped out of the elevator and into a room filled with tanks and tubes. The women swimming in the tanks were in a coma, some of them only alive because of his care. But having constant access to the incubators was necessary to keep his population always supplied.
He had experimented with hormones and chemical cocktails for some time and came out on top. From planting to harvest, only 6 months, one in the incubator, 5 in the isolation cells and 2 hours under the knife. The only problem was that the parts reached unusability in 3 years. But he had a solution for that.
He walked through the hall of incubators and into his office. The clean white room was a stark contrast to the hospital, but it fit the elevator. On the back wall was a single pipe filled with blue liquid. He pulled out his personal syringe, filled it with the liquid and injected it into his arm.
The insurgency had given him something great.
He feeds his failures and plants to make them kind and they gave him what he amassed to heal his spare parts. With their blood, his parts could last up to ten more years, with just one injection a day.
He returned to the elevator. Normally the entire facility ran automatically and there were no more patients skipping out for today, so he could go home now. In the elevator, he put his finger on the button on the ground floor. If it weren't for this, he wouldn't have come here. He would have just used some of the things at home. No, he was here for something else.
He pressed the button to the basement. He knew they were still there but he needed to see it.
When the door opened, he saw what he needed. The piles of old flesh that once was. Dozens of his old bodies hanging from bathtubs fed on the failures of his work. All of them blind from being kept in the dark for years.
He knew he would end up here. A blood donor to live on, his new self walking the earth. It was his body that could produce the blood he needed.
How many parts do they need to replace from the original to have the same thing twice? He knew the question was wrong.
They were all him, but old and broken. The only one that existed was the one that could walk.
"That's right old man. Your time is up."
He was knocked out.
As his vision faded, he saw the new body, man that thing looked good. He hadn't realized he had worked for 9 and a half years, looks like he was really getting older.
He accepted the hell he would wake up in, knowing that guy would one day share this fate too.
Original: Dr. Casimir Van Welter
Date: 27 Aug 2018
Author: Meta Wonderrat
Translator: Yorick1