Dog Boy

50

Jackie sat beside Matt, scratching the back of his neck as Lucas looked at the screen. Gosh how she wished she could understand what was going on here. Sadly she didn't have an eye for this scientific stuff. When she and her mom had dinner with the Hewitts on occasion, her mom would talk with Lucas about all those years ago when they worked together - and gosh Jackie could barely understand any of it. She did her best though to breathe, and find a topic of conversation she could understand with Meagan.

On the other side of Lucas, Ashley sat on a stool, sitting carefully after nearly toppling over when she'd hopped onto it. Ashley, like Matt, was not responding to things like yes or no questions. She just didn't seem to understand. She was less energetic than Matt, showing signs of frustration when chewing on a piece of rope, and Matt wanted to play with it.

Matt was easily amused. He would chase a stick, a ball, and funnily, Jackie's tail. There were times running around in the Hewitt's backyard that she could just forget what she longed for him to be - and could just enjoy Matt the golden retriever. At least he still liked giving kisses.

Ashley though, did sometimes like playing. Though she preferred to spend hours napping in spots of warm sunlight, one thing did get her attention - when they'd throw her a frisbee. Oddly she wouldn't chase anything else, but a frisbee made her positively giddy. She'd bark loudly, wagging her tail like mad, and do crazy high jumps, almost always catching it.

Meagan had remarked that ultimate frisbee had been one of Ashley's favorite games - and likewise, when they'd brought out a soccer ball, Ashley had become ecstatic about that as well - she didn't really understand that she needed to get it into a goal, being more interested in sniffing it and pushing it around randomly with her nose - but it was a game she would play with Matt.

It was the odd phenomenon they had noticed - Matt and Ashley, obviously, were no longer human. They could be watched all day long, and you'd never guess they were once anything other than dogs. But certain things got their attention. Sports for Ashley. Meagan playing the guitar for Matt. Somehow, it seemed that a part of them was still there.

This had brought them all much excitement, because they hoped that maybe they could excite their minds into thinking, and slowly bring them back to intelligence. They tried getting Matt and Ashley to do little tricks, asking them to point their paw to someone, for example. This brought mixed results - and they shied away from harder tasks, seeming to find frustrating to an overwhelming degree, even if they were offered treats. Sadly, it seemed to be a dead end.

But they were smarter than Jackie gave them credit for. They wanted more than their basic needs. Right now, Ashley wanted to see Lucas's computer screen. Whether she understood any of it, Jackie doubted it. It was hard for her, a human - well, a canid - to understand it. Sometimes though Ashley seemed remarkably in control - perhaps Ashley wasn't trying to communicate out of spite, after Jackie and Douglas had been playing a game of frisbee keep away.

Lucas yawned, and scratched behind one of his ears. He navigated away from his massive spreadsheet of data in some very technical piece of software she didn't recognize, and looked back to the files on Seth's flash drive.

Seth wasn't stupid - or at least, as stupid as they had hoped. He had encryption on the drive, but they'd finally broken it a few days ago. It had led to a shocking discovery.

Seth had activated the canis virus.

He'd left breadcrumbs through his flash drive, note files describing in great detail what he had done. He said in this that it was his way of pushing it all forward, of unlocking the "true potential of humanity's genetic technology" - and that it would be selfish of him to hoard the "scientific knowledge" gained in this endeavor, even if it incriminated him greatly.