Recycling!

Do you remember, back in 2013 - January I think it was - the fuss made about the remains of a Roman woman who died in her 30s?

As I recall, the find was made in a necropolis near Lleida in the Catalonia region of Spain. The woman, who had died some 1,600 years before, had a calcified tumour in her pelvis…and it had a bone and four deformed teeth embedded within it, two of which were still attached to the wall of the tumour.

There will always be theories about what causes foetus in foetu. The self-styled experts sometimes call it an ovarian teratoma, and explain it away as a ‘bizarre but benign tumour’. If only they knew…

But I know. It’s just another manifestation of parasitic twins, albeit a rare one.

My research indicates that there are two possible theories; it could be that one twin - always an identical twin, and never a fraternal one - is sopped up, as it were, by the other one, during early pregnancy. Thereinafter, the tissue of the parasitic twin is dependent upon the body systems of the host, to survive.

On the other hand - and here I speak as the only real expert in the world on the matter - it could be one type of teratoma; containing, as it does, all three of the major cell types that are found in an early-stage human embryo. I don’t expect you to comprehend this, but, just for the record, they are: the trophoblast, the epiblast (also called the embryonic ectoderm or primitive ectoderm at this stage), and the primitive endoderm.

Forget stem cell manipulation – it is so yesterday. Oh, I know that people who call themselves geneticists still use it – and they use it to make ridiculous experiments like growing ears on rats’ backs, or fingers on pigs’ bellies, or spare skin on horses’ thighs.

My system was cheaper, and simpler – and infinitely more successful. But I’m not telling. This paper will only be found after I am dead. And then you will know why I had to be the reclusive “typical crazy scientist” that the Press and everyone else (except my patients) expected me to be. Oh, and why I sometimes wrote Letters-to-the-Editors and signed them Ciarán Blake.

The theory was simple, as all perfect theories usually are. But of course, I say this with the foresight of hindsight.

But when the zombies came to me to be re-fixed (I prefer the term re-humaned), it was because they’d heard of me by word of mouth from others who had been treated by me, after they became zombies.

I’d known about Chang and Eng, and the Biddenden Maids, but this was something new. The idea occurred to me way back in 2009, when I was still a kid and I’d read that story about the foetus-in-foetu case of Kang Mengru, the Chinese girl who was ‘pregnant’ with her own twin.

I remember reading up all I could about parasitic twins.

But I digress. What had really got me thinking was Kang Mengru’s story. Of course, the tabloids had regaled us with photos in Glorious Technicolor. The poor kid looked fit to burst, and the CT scan had shown what the matter with her was.

Not many people know - or care – who Little Gav was. His story was the same as that of Kang Mengru, and it happened in the same year; only Gavin Hyatt’s twin was bursting out of his belly button, as the Xenomorph did in Alien.

Having been diagnosed as suffering from a severe case of folliculitis, or a cyst, or hernia, Gavin was incredulous when the doctor ‘birthed’ his undeveloped twin – and asked for permission to take him home in a specimen jar.

I devoured any literature I found – I made a list of many known cases of people with extra limbs, of those with irises of a different colour...you know, heterochromia. While my friends were struggling with their French verbs, I was swatting up on craniopagus, thoracopagus, xiphopagus achipagus and pygopagus conjoined twins. Chew on that, Einstein.

I made up my mind to study genetics. It fascinated me how the DNA held, encoded within it, the entirety of an organism’s hereditary information, and how the genome includes both the genes and the non-coding sequences of the DNA.

Inevitably, after a time, the idea struck me... If a person can have two brains, and be able to think with either of them, and three legs, and be able to manipulate them all... there must be some way to make this happen naturally - and use the extraneous tissue thus created.

Oh, yes. But just imagine me going to the Medical Council and telling them that I would like to make women carry what are usually referred to as “encapsulated tumour-like formations inside the body”, so that I could then extract them and use them to conduct experiments and culture and clone new body parts. Oh, yeah, right. I should be so lucky that they would accept my project, no questions asked...

X-philes will surely remember Humbug, that episode in The X-Files (Season 2, Episode 20), which took place in the town of Gibsonton, Florida, where many of the residents were circus marvels and talented sideshow performers.

“The Alligator Man” was killed in his own swimming pool; the culprit was the Fiji Mermaid, who turned out the be Leonard, the parasitic twin that could leave the body of his alcoholic brother Lanny – and was trying to find a new match, perhaps because he knew that by the morrow, Lanny would be dead of cirrhosis of the liver. It is probable that he was eaten by “The Conundrum”, the heavily-tattooed man who would never talk and who would ‘eat anything’. As Dr. Blockhead succinctly explains, ‘nature abhors normality’.

And then came the Apocalypse… which was really only a new virus, much, much, worse than Covid-19, in that people did not die when stricken down with it… they became zombies.

I had a captive audience, a sitting duck market… not quite, but you get the gist of it.

I kept well by bathing in fennel-infused water, and drinking gallons upon gallons of it. Old wives’ tales work, you know. 

I trapped two zombies and re-humaned them. Before I freed them, I asked them to spread the word around. Actual zombies would not harm them, because they recognised - erm – kindred spirits, so they stayed around long enough to talk and get my details.

In a short while, I became rich beyond dreams of avarice… but it was the high I got out of it, and not the money, which gave me the impetus to continue my service to ‘humanity’(sic).

But I digress.

It is pertinent to note that the medical condition babies of being born with ‘extra heads’ is often referred to as encephalocele. There was that baby girl in Uttar Pradesh in India, who was born with what appeared to be three heads. These were actually two large protrusions formed on the back of her skull. There had been no complications during the pregnancy.

On its website, Great Ormond Street Hospital had referred to this condition as ‘a rare congenital neural tube defect where part of the skull has not formed properly so a portion of brain tissue and associated structures are outside the skull, and the protruding sac may be covered with skin or it may be covered with a thin membrane’.

Another baby who made the news was Itzamara Vega, born in Colombia, with her twin growing inside her belly. The 45-millimetre twin, growing inside its own amniotic sac and weighing 14 grammes, was removed from within her via keyhole surgery, and ‘somehow’ found its way to me. It had neither a heart nor a brain, but it had an umbilical cord, and arms and legs.

Monica, the mother, said that doctors actually realised that something was amiss seven months into her pregnancy and it was actually the very first case of foetus in foetu being diagnosed during a pregnancy. Itzamara was delivered pre-term, as the growing twin would have caused her permanent damage.

As I was saying... now, where was I? Oh, yes. The pedants would probably tell me that I was using the human body as a “thing” upon which to experiment. I would probably be crossed out of the List and not allowed to practice.

Therefore, there had to be something “easier”, that would not bring own the law on my head like the proverbial tonne of bricks.

Ah! Teratomas. That had to be the solution. Like the parasitic twin, it was often encapsulated in tissue, but unlike the foetus-in-foetu, or extra limbs, stomachs, or organs, this could in no way be constituted as a legitimate body part.

Just so you’ll know - the word teratoma comes from the Greek words teras and onkoma which translate to monster-swelling. In the interests of research, of course I wrote a paper about the condition, and, after being recognized as the world expert on teratomas, I was getting referrals as if there were no tomorrow, almost as many as the zombies that later beat a path to my door…

You know – nobody asked for the “products of surgery” to take home with them – although I know that this is all the rage when extra limbs are cremated, or when teeth are extracted.

In any case, I found I could build up a bank of tissue and organ components, and take it from there.... sometimes, I was lucky enough to get brain tissue, teeth, hair, bone... and the occasional eye or complete limb. Strangely, I never had any rejection problems, as happened to my peers with some transplants from living donors.

Any doctor worth his salt would know that most teratomas are benign; nonetheless, I have developed a method to ascertain this, because I never, but never, used lines made from cells of malignant teratomas.

So now, you all know why my patients’ treatments were so expensive – but were a hundred per cent successful. You now know why the new skin of burns victims was so smooth and perfect on my patients, and how receding hairlines became a thing of the past without ever having the “doormat” look that some aesthetic surgeons could not avoid; just as later, you would not know whether the person to whom you are talking, used to be a zombie, or not.

Therefore, if you were thinking that this is my Last Will and Testament, I am sorry to disappoint you.

I have destroyed all documents pertaining to research and treatment. My secrets have died with me.