by D. S. Murphy
Brad was kidding, but I could see Amy’s panic setting in. I looked over to David and glared. He could have been less paranoid, and more comforting.
“That’s not going to happen,” David said quickly, reeling the conversation back in. “We’ll start very small. One tiny tweak at a time. Everything carefully controlled, with safeguards and backups built in. But…” he paused, “this isn’t a game. If we get something wrong, things could get very ugly.”
“Literally,” Brad said, smirking.
Amy looked like she was going to be sick. I kept an eye on her until class was over. It was a fun idea in theory, but I knew it went against her better judgment. She’d always been skeptical of body hacking, and didn’t talk to me for days after I got my thumb implant. Now that it was getting real, I didn’t want her sabotaging the project.
I was halfway to my next class when I felt a tug on my arm. I turned around, expecting David or Amy. Instead I was face to face with Melissa. And she was smiling. At me.
“Hey Brianna,” she said, linking one arm in mine. “That’s a nice bag. Where’d you get it?” Her friends were taking selfies behind her, pouting their lips. It reminded me of a Chinese study that said people who made the duck face were more likely to be neurotic, anxious and moody. It was the kind of thing Amy and I joked about, from a safe distance. But now I was close. Too close. Melissa smiled, baring her teeth, and I realized she was waiting for me to speak.
“I can’t remember,” I said quickly. My backpack was a few years old, and covered with obscure rock band patches. I was pretty sure Melissa wouldn’t touch it with a ten foot pole.
“Greg tells me you’re working with him on a science fair project,” she said, changing the subject. “I think that’s great. I know how handy and techy you are. Maybe you’ll even be able to bump his grand point average a bit?”
Melissa gave me the closest thing she could to a genuine smile.
“I mean, he’ll get a sports scholarship for college for sure, but I want to make sure we can go to the same school. Also, just between us girls, he’s insecure about his low grades.”
“Um, sure,” I said, looking around for an escape.
“The way I see it, Greg is going to be spending quite a lot of time with you over the next few months. He told me you’ll even be working during lunch breaks and stuff.”
She paused, clearly wanting a response.
“And?” I asked, raising an eyebrow.
“Well, I just wanted to make sure that your little crush on him won’t make things uncomfortable for you.”
The blood rushed to my ears.
“What crush?” I asked, folding my arms.
“Everyone knows you’ve got the hots for Greg. I mean, who wouldn’t?”
She said this part loudly, and my cheeks burned as several heads swiveled in our direction.
“I don’t—” I started, but she cut me off with a raised palm.
“Don’t worry. I told him to be extra nice to you. Because you probably don’t get a lot of attention from guys and that isn’t good for a girl your age.”
“Was there something else you needed?” I asked, clenching my fists. I wanted to say something clever, but I always froze up around conflict.
“Just don’t let Greg being nice go to your head, or think he actually likes you. M’kay sweetie?” Melissa pinched my cheek, then joined her coven of cackling bitches against the lockers. I turned down the first corner and sank against the wall, trying to steady myself.
5
Megan had her first treatment that afternoon. When we got to the doctor’s office, which was in the private wing of the local hospital, I grew increasingly anxious. The waiting room was comfortable enough, with leather chairs and green ferns, but I knew behind the double doors were white walls, harsh fluorescent lights and a chorus of humming machines. It was a sterile, lifeless space, paradoxically meant to preserve human life.
For me, the pleasant background music was a blatant lie. More than a lie: a taunt. I came here with my mother, dozens of times, always promising her that things would be okay, that she would be fine. When she died, I hated Dr. Jenkins’ office. I stopped just shy of hating the man himself; or at least I tried to. I knew rationally he’d only been trying to help, and my mother’s death wasn’t his fault, but I could still barely stand the look or smell of him. The sound of his voice. His gray mustache. Everything about this place made me physically ill. But I wasn’t here for the décor. This was a reconnaissance mission.
Megan squeezed my hand when we were invited into the examination room. She’d always had a good sense of how I was feeling. When had she gotten so brave? Probably in all the secret doctor visits I’d been excluded from.
“The nanobots themselves,” Dr. Jenkins was saying, “are cylindrical clamshells on flexible DNA hinges. Locked with twin DNA double helixes at the front, they carry a molecular payload, like a cancer drug, inside.”
“Once they’re in the body, how do they know what to do?” I asked. My phone was in my pocket, recording everything, but I wanted to make sure to get as much information as possible.
“The DNA locks are engineered to react only with specific molecules or proteins on the surfaces of cancer cells. If present, the locks bind to these molecules, the clam shell opens, and the nanobot’s payload is delivered.” He demonstrated by putting his hands together, then opening them. “This allows the nanobots to release drugs only near cancer cells, sparing the body’s population of otherwise healthy cells.”
“Why can’t other proteins unlock them?” Megan asked. She smiled slyly up at me and I squeezed her shoulder.
“Well,” Dr. Jenkins said, waving his hand towards the white wall behind him and bringing up a large wall panel. He sketched something on his tablet and it displayed on the larger screen behind him. “It’s kind of like this. Imagine that this semicircle here is the lock. On either side of the semicircle, there are binding points.”
“Uh huh,” Megan said as she watched the diagram taking shape.
“As the therabot is travelling through your body, it will come into contact with different kinds of molecules and proteins. Let’s imagine that the type you need is this square here, and make the binding points square-shaped at the bottom to show where they should go.”
“Alright,” said Megan.”
“If you have any other proteins entering the semicircle, represented by these little triangles, circles, and stars, they don’t have the right surface to slot into the binding point. This means that they can’t activate the opening sequence.”
“That’s pretty cool,” Megan said, turning to me with a big grin.
“But when a square comes along, it slots in nicely and waits for another square to join it on the other side.”
“Then it’s open sesame,” Megan said.
“That’s exactly right,” Dr. Jenkins smiled warmly.
“Are there different kinds of nanobots?” I asked. “I mean, how do you make sure you have the right kind, that are going to work with the type of cancer my sister has? Is that done during manufacturing?”
“That’s actually really neat—the bots come with certain prewritten setups, and respond to certain frequencies, so you can use the same bots but change their shape depending on what they will be doing.”
“And what about the payload? How do you get the medicine inside them?” Megan asked. I knew she’d asked that one for my benefit.
“You can just soak them in a solution: the same drugs we’d normally give in a syringe. The clam shells will open up when they get wet, and close again when they dry out. After that they’ll only open after they’ve connected to the specific targets they’re after.”
“So that means that the medicine is getting to where it needs to be in a much more direct way?” I asked.
“Yes. That’s what’s so exciting about all of this. The opportunity to treat patients without the effects on the body that people have had to experience in the past. Well, you girls know all about
that…” Dr. Jenkins said, his voice trailing off. A crack of discomfort marred his friendly bedside manner.
“But that’s just to fix the cancerous cells, right?” I interrupted. I did not want to talk about Mom right now. “If you were dealing with a genetic issue, could the bots be used to change the DNA and fix the issue before it starts?”
“Luckily we don’t have to think about that in this case,” Dr. Jenkins said.
“But could it?” I pressed.
Dr. Jenkins raised an eyebrow. I didn’t want to push too hard, but I needed this information.
“I’m just wondering if we could have caught this sooner, and fixed it.”
Dr. Jenkins softened his expression but held up his hands. “Theoretically, sure. But the implications of something like that are very complex. There was a big fuss in 2015 about the CRISPR-Cas9 system. It got a lot of media. Some people referred to the process as “DNA scissoring” because it let anybody with knowledge of molecular biology modify genomes. Hackers were selling CRISPR kits out of their garage. But what happens if CRISPR snips out the wrong DNA, or adds in a sequence in the wrong place?”
“Most medical science was built on learning through mistakes,” I said.
“That may have been true centuries ago,” Dr. Jenkins said, “when surgeons were stealing cadavers for late night experiments. But thankfully, medical procedures now have strict laws to safeguard the public from snake oil salesmen. Even if these techniques are ever deemed safe and effective, who would qualify for treatment, and when?”
“Why would anyone have to qualify for treatment?” I asked. “I mean, if people are sick, and we have the technology, why not heal them?”
“Firstly, there will be associated costs with any treatment, and somebody will have to pay for all of it. Secondly, let’s say you’re 93 and dying of natural causes. Old age basically. But we could stabilize your DNA to stop deteriorating,” Dr. Jenkins said. “Now this is science fiction, mind you, but these are the kind of scenarios researchers have to think about. Do we save everybody? The world population is already unsustainable. If nobody ever dies, where will they live? What will they eat? But more than that, what if we mess something up and cause irrevocable changes to the human genome? What if we destroy ourselves, trying to improve ourselves?”
I nodded, pretending I understood, but these big theoretical questions bored me. I liked mechanics. If something was broken, you fixed it. If something could be made better, you upgraded it to do what you wanted. I didn’t see why the human body should be any different. If our bodies were hardware, and DNA was like the programming language or code, hacking biological limitations or defects seemed like the next obvious move.
I watched Dr. Jenkins set up a tray with a large syringe on it. The therabot solution was light blue, and almost seemed to sparkle under the bright lights like glitter. He wiped Megan’s arm with a sterilized alcohol swipe, and then leaned in close. I looked away when the needle went into Megan’s arm.
***
Three days later, I was standing in my school’s science lab holding up a thermos full of Megan’s pee.
“That’s disgusting,” said Amy, holding her nose.
“Shut up, you can’t smell anything,” I said, waving the sealed container in front of her face.
“Actually, urine is mostly sterile,” David said, scratching the back of his neck. “The urea in urine breaks down into ammonia, which has cleaning properties. The ancient Romans used it for whitening teeth.”
“Gross,” Amy said, making a face. “Where’d you even hear that?”
David shrugged and unlocked the door to the science room. We’d gotten the key from Mr. Leister; the lab was usually closed during lunch but we wanted to work on our project without direct supervision. He’d been reluctant but Amy sweet talked him and promised we wouldn’t make a mess. Large open windows faced the trees at the edge of the school grounds, past the baseball diamond.
“So what’s first?” Greg asked.
“First, we isolate the nanobots,” David said. He took the thermos and unscrewed the lid, pouring the liquid into a glass beaker. Then he turned on a small kerosene flame, and put the beaker onto a burner plate.
“You look like a mad scientist,” Brad said. “Wait a second—” Brad reached forward with both hands and messed up David’s hair until it was sticking out in every direction.
Amy laughed and pulled out her cell phone. “Don’t move,” she said. “As serious scientists, I think we should be documenting our progress. Hashtag science, hashtag badhairday.” David looked up at me and raised an eyebrow.
“Don’t worry,” I smiled. “It kind of suits you.”
“Hey Amy,” Brad said, going to a storage closet and pulling out lab gear. “If we’re doing this for posterity, we should all look the part.” Brad handed out white lab coats and goggles.
“Everybody squeeze in,” Amy said. She pulled a selfiedrone out of her backpack and tossed it into the air. I’d made fun of her when she’d gotten one, but it had turned out to be far more useful than I’d imagined. It was also kind of endearing, the way it bobbed around to make sure that everybody was in frame before its little light blinked on the side telling us to get ready.
“Say cheese!” Amy said. We posed behind the glass beakers and the brewing concoction, which was starting to steam. While David finished up whatever he was doing, Amy printed out three-inch stickers of the photo for us to put on our binders.
I didn’t expect the boys to actually use theirs, and I was surprised when Greg and Brad both put the stickers in visible places. Places people would actually see them—like they weren’t embarrassed to be friends with us. I had a picture of Greg in my notebook last year, surrounded by hearts and love notes, until I realized how dangerous it was and trashed it. And now he had a picture of me in his notebook. I blushed, flattered. Of course it wasn’t just me, it was the group, but I was going to count it. This forced project wasn’t turning out so bad after all. I didn’t realize I was staring until he met my eyes and smiled, winking the dimple on the left side of his chin. I practically melted, until I remembered what Melissa had told me. Was he being nice to me because she asked him to?
“That’s it?” Brad said, a few minutes later. David reduced all the liquid into about a tablespoon of cloudy looking, viscous material that looked a little like melted toothpaste. “Yup. The bots are too small to see, but they’re there. Here, check this out.” He tapped a tiny bit of the substance on a glass slide and then slid it under a microscope.
“One individual robot is about one nanometer,” David said as we took turns looking into the microscope. “One nanometer is a billionth of a meter. There are 25,400,000 nanometers in an inch.”
Even with the microscope I could barely make out the individual bots.
“Now comes the fun part, right?” Brad asked, opening up his laptop. It was black and had an alien sticker on it. It was an expensive model; I’d assumed Brad was hard up for cash but maybe bot fighting was lucrative. He certainly couldn’t have gotten money from his family. A few years ago there had been a drive to help out his family, after Brad’s father took off. We brought toys and stationery for his younger siblings, but Brad refused to take anything.
“So what is the fun part exactly?” Amy asked, still looking at the pee concentration in disgust.
“Making contact,” David said. “There should be a very faint, simple signal we can lock onto, which will let us customize the programming.”
“If we can’t do that,” I added, “we can’t really do anything.”
“Lucky for you guys,” Brad said, his fingers flying over his keyboard. “I’m kind of awesome at this stuff. And…. I’m done,” he said, smirking. He flipped the laptop around to show us a black screen with computer code scrolling down it, followed by a blipping cursor.
“We’re connected?” David said, raising his eyebrows.
“You doubted my powers?” Brad said.
“Not for a second,” Amy said,
giving him a high-five.
“So we’re good?” Greg asked.
“It’s a first step,” I said. “Now we have to tell them what to do.”
6
The next day, I couldn’t wait until lunch. I would have been thrilled to hang out in private with Greg under any circumstance, but doing a top-secret, potentially world-changing science experiment certainly made things more exciting. I’d also started paying more attention to my appearance. Normally I went to school and tried to disappear into my hoodie, but now that Greg actually knew who I was, I was inclined to make a good impression. Obviously, with Megan’s treatment we didn’t have money for a shopping spree, but I let Amy dress me up and loan me a few cute outfits. And I started wearing eyeliner. Nothing drastic, but a slight improvement. Or so I told myself every fifteen minutes when I checked myself out in the reflection of my aPhone.
“So whose blood do we use?” Amy asked when we met for lunch the next day.
Now that we had the nanobots, we needed to put them in a petri dish with some blood to see what we could do with them.
“We’re going to be doing a lot of testing,” David said. “I think it’s fair that we rotate it. I’ll go first, and we can each take a turn.”
“Plus it would get suspicious if one of us started having bandaids all over,” Greg said.
David took a needle and poked it into the tip of his index finger, letting three red drops fall into the petri dish. “So we’re basically trying to get the bots to find and edit genetic sequences, right?” I asked. “DNA hacking.”
“Pretty much,” Brad answered. “They figured this stuff out years ago.”
“DNA scissors,” I said, remembering what Dr. Jenkins had told me.
“Right, also known as TALENs,” David said. “A DNA sequence is just made up of four building blocks: As, Cs, Gs, and Ts. We know the sequences for various hard-coded genetic manifestations, including advantages and disadvantages, like diseases. In 2015 scientists were using TAL proteins to identify certain “broken” parts of DNA chains they wanted to fix, and adding an endonuclease that would cut the chain in that spot. Those are the scissors. Then, they just added the new DNA sequence they wanted to fix it with. The individual cell would accept their hijacked version of the DNA and fix the mistake to the DNA in a process called homologous recombination.”