If I told you to jump

I read somewhere, a long time ago, that every cell in the human body is replaced over a seven year stretch. The stellar dust, from which we are formed at birth, recycles like a marital itch at the age of seven, again at fourteen, and then again at twenty-one, and so on.

I think they found this out by injecting rats with a radioactive isotope that allowed them to follow to the rat's cells on their biological journey to droppings and dust, I guess.

Do you know how many cells there are in the human body Pop-Pop?

Forty trillion and about half of them are gut bacteria, but they're really small and don't take up much space.

Pop-Pop looked like he was going to shit himself.

That was just one of the many side effects from nano-bot cell replacement therapy.

The theory behind the therapy was that the dwindling “will to live,” some of the elders came to submit to, was just a function of cellular unwillingness that, when multiplied to the scale of the human body, lent to a certain in-cohesiveness. Functional failing. By replacing those cells with tiny modular robots and thus maintaining a healthy corporeal identity, so the thinking went, the will to live would go on.

And on.

Alas, that was the theory. And, at first, it seemed to work. But not lately. Lately his new-found thirst had turned to thanatos and tossing himself off tall structures.

Tossing as in throwing, you understand.

However, the nano-technology meant he was – near to darn – indestructible and, as a consequence, his constant resurrections had given birth to a new Promethean Theology.

A breed of holy tossers.

Which made him only crosser.

It soon died away anyway.

And he still had his integrity.

Sort of.