Dog Boy

10

Lucas Hewitt awoke to his tablet buzzing, and light shining through the window. He blinked slowly, feeling extremely tired. He looked to the tablet, and realized that it was making his "important call" vibration pattern.

"Hello?" he picked it up quickly.

"Finally, there you are Lucas," Tessa responded. "I've been trying to get a hold of you for an hour now."

"What's going on?" Lucas asked, feeling anxious, but maintaining a steady voice. He jumped out of bed and dashed over to the closet as he spoke.

"Nothing is wrong - well nothing is more wrong than it is already, so you don't need to be in too much of a rush to get over here -"

"The kids are fine?"

"Yes, they're alright. Lexy's kid Jackie is pretty moody though from what I hear. Matt seems to be fine."

"Okay, then what's the news?"

"News? Oh there's no news, I just wanted you to get up and get back to work."

"Tessa, I -"

"Jeez," she laughed, "you are so easy to -"

"I don't have time for this Tessa," Lucas said while clasping his belt. "We are in a very dire situation. I appreciate a bit of levity to improve morale, but please don't act like it's an emergency. I had been planning on sleeping for at least another hour."

"Oh I'm just kidding around. I do have some news. News that you might find important."

".... what kind of important?"

"Since we had to start dividing processing power on the computer to run only a few modules per problem, things have been going slower for everyone. Our specific problem has borne some fruit. The computer has eliminated a bunch of areas of the canine genome as the center for the cancer cure."

"That is -" Lucas finished pulling a shirt over his head - "fantastic. What kind of elimination are we looking at?"

"87%."

"That... is not what I was hoping for when you said there was a big reduction in candidates."

"I know."

"Seriously, even if if our potential area of search was 2%, that's still an incredible number of combinations of genes that are responsible for fighting the cancer."

"I know.... Lucas... you think that maybe we should just give up on this?"

Lucas froze.

"Let me rephrase that. Give up on this line of attack. We're acting like the only potential cure for this cancer is found in the canine genome. We could try other avenues, like nano-treatments."

"Do you know a whole lot about this cancer Tessa?"

"No."

"When it first arose, it was like nothing we'd ever seen before. It was this bizarre pulsing - tons of mutations would appear all over the body, then appear to go into remission. Then it would surface again later, and  come back stronger. It would continue in this ratcheting up fashion until the tumors took the patient's life."

"That is... horrific."

"It was... very. Nanotech has become invaluable for treating a lot of cancers - but those are more traditional cancers, ones that arise in only a single part of the body. Ones that when defeated do not usually come back. To treat someone with this new cancer using nanotech, you'd require a much, much larger amount of bots. It is already a dicey business getting small groups of nano machines into more delicate parts of the body, but a whole massive swarm flooding all of it? It would be as bad, if not worse than old fashioned chemotherapy - something we tried back in the day on the cancer."

"Did it work?"

Lucas began putting on his shoes. "Yes and no. For once, the buckshot approach to treating cancer that chemotherapy used actually worked, as the cancer was spread throughout a patient's body. However, that's where that awful behavior of the cancer came in - it would be intermittent, sometimes appearing and then fading quickly, other times staying for months in its first phase. Chemotherapy would slow the progression of the phases - but they would still come, and in greater force. Quite often the cancer would come back soon after chemotherapy ended."

"And this was all being done... on small children?"

"Yes."

"I'm sorry Lucas."

"It is alright. Hopefully this is in the past."

"But there could be something much, much worse coming our way. Are you certain that you want to keep pursuing the dog DNA as the cancer treatment?"

"I'm sure. It is the only thing that has suppressed the cancer."

"Some here have been theorizing that the treatment virus went rogue and hijacked the cancer or something, and that's what started the changes."

Lucas sighed. "I don't know. We'll have to keep on studying it all we can. At very least, even back in the day, Clive, Seth, and myself did a risk analysis - albeit a very not-thorough one - and determined that any side effects wouldn't get too serious - but I'll confess that we were wrong. We thought that at worst it would be some fur growth, the nose getting slightly wet... not this."

"Well this is some other good news then I suppose," Tessa said. "One of the other projects running on the computer determined that while the virus has been able to protect the brain from the cancer, every simulation run, the canine changes were not ever able to affect the brain."

Lucas bent down, resting his head on his knees, and let out a long sigh of relief. His son, at very least, would hopefully be able to maintain his mind.