I was in my last class when I got a message from Brad.
Meet after school. Science lab.
I counted down the minutes, glaring at the clock, then rushed to the science room. When I entered, the others were looking at a bunch of white mice in a cardboard box.
"Ten?" I counted.
"You said you wanted to move quickly," David said, adjusting his glasses.
"You did this?" I asked. I was surprised—I thought David wanted to be careful. Which meant he'd probably done it for me.
"Brad and I took last period off."
"What?" Amy asked. "David skipping school? No way."
"So walk us through it, Sherlock," I said. Amy and I had spent the last few days working on the app, while the boys ran simple programs on the bots to see how they would respond.
"Mice have short lifespans and a fast metabolism. We should be able to see changes sooner. I guess we only got about half of Megan's original dose, and the human to mice dose conversion is about 33."
"Megan's a lot bigger than 33 mice," I said. "Even half of her is."
"It's based on surface area, and body weight. You said she's 92 pounds, so half of her was 46 pounds, which would be about 33 mice. I'm pretty sure the calculations are right. An hour ago, I gave each of these mice a shot of peebots."
"Are we seriously going to call it that?" Amy asked.
"What should we call it, zee formula?" Brad said, faking a German accent.
"Let's just call them therabots," I said. "That's what people know. No use hiding it. And we'll need to use the hashtag that's already trending."
"Peebots is funny," Brad said.
"Maybe to you," Amy said. "But a lot of people won't see the humor in it."
"Whatever," David said, "I shot the mice with the bots. Then I figured out a patch to put them in a dormant state. After they do their thing, with no further instruction they'll attach to a bone cell and hibernate until the next command. You'll still lose some, even our skeleton renews every year. But they should last three months or so. Maybe six months, depending how much you're using them. You'll lose some after every mod, because not all of them will find their way back to a bone before they're flushed out."
"So, how are they doing?" Brad said, picking up the box and shaking it.
"Knock it off!" David yelled, grabbing the box. "Stressing them out could skew the results."
"Chill, dude," Brad said, as David placed the mice carefully back on the counter.
"So now what?" I asked. I couldn't believe we were actually doing this.
"Now we give each group of bots a command and see how it works."
"How do you keep them all separate? So they respond to only one command and not all of them?" Amy asked.
"That's where I come in," Brad said. "Right now they're all the same. But we take one mouse..." he put it into a separate container by itself, "and we give it a shock. The electricity goes through its whole system, but it will prime the bots and deliver the instructions: it's basically a tiny data transfer. The bots should get their marching orders and get started right away. They aren't delivering any medicines, they are just programmed to look for a specific genetic marker pattern, interrupt the genome at a certain spot, and then fill in the gaps."
"I thought we had to add in the DNA separately?" Greg asked.
"That's the way it's been tried before," David said, "but I found a better way."
"A better way than decades of scientists?" Amy asked, crossing her arms.
"Well, yes." David pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose.
I'd always thought of David as shy and quiet. But now his confidence was almost unnerving.
"The genetic material is already there, so we just used DNA replication—a biological process found in all living organisms. DNA polymerase synthesizes new DNA by adding complementary nucleotids to the template strand. So we force a PCR, a polymerase chain reaction, to amplify the target DNA fragment from a pool of DNA."
"In English?" Greg said.
"Basically, we snip the DNA and separate it into two pieces; then we have enough building blocks to restructure the DNA how we want it. The body fills in the gaps and uses the new code as a template. The bots go through and hack DNA; DNA replicates rapidly through trillions of cells; then there's a tipping point where the body starts recognizing the changes in the DNA and doing them automatically," Brad said, looking smug.
"It sounds messy when you say it that way," David said. "But it's like bioconcrete. They infuse it with bacteria, and food for them. When the concrete cracks, the bacteria eat the food and produce limestone that fills the cracks in a matter of weeks. The concrete lasts for 200 years and self-activates if damage occurs."
"You're full of useless trivia," Amy said. "Just show us how it works."
Brad took out a short cord and plugged it into his phone. The other end looked like the tip of a ballpoint pen. "We're only testing one very specific thing at a time for each subject. This is the list of what we're testing," he said, opening his computer again and showing us the chart. After each entry was a long string of code, including the specific genes to target and what combinations to edit in.
Mouse #1 – Control (no change)
Mouse #2 – Larger Ears
Mouse #3 – Smaller Ears
Mouse #4 – Larger Eyes
Mouse #5 – Smaller Eyes
Mouse #6 – Longer Whiskers
Mouse #7 – Shorter Whiskers
Mouse #8 – Increased Body Mass
Mouse #9 – Decreased Body Mass
Mouse #10 – Color change
"We did most of them in pairs," David said, "which will confirm that we're doing what we think we're doing, instead of it being accidental. And we chose things that would be really easy to see and measure."
"You did all of this today?" I asked. I knew David was smart, but this was seriously impressive.
"I figured out a lot of it earlier this week," David said.
"What about the tenth mouse?" Amy asked, "what color will you change him to?"
"We're not exactly sure what genes cause hair color, or how to change colors," David said. "Hair color is the pigmentation of hair follicles due to two types of melanin: eumelanin and pheomelanin. Generally, if more eumelanin is present, the color of the hair is darker; if less eumelanin is present, the hair is lighter. Since the mouse is white, the bots will edit the gene for eumelanin production, which should make the mouse darker."
"So are we doing this, or what?" Brad said.
David looked at me. I looked at Greg.
"I'm in," he said.
"Me too," Amy and I said at the same time.
David nodded.
"Okay," Brad said. "I've already added in the specific commands. All we have to do is shock each mouse with its unique setting, and the encoded commands should trigger the therabots." He picked up the first mouse and held it in one hand. With his other hand, he pressed the metal tip of the cord to the mouse's rump. Part of me was expecting the mouse to just explode or something. But when Brad hit the button on his phone, the mouse just wriggled a little. I wondered how much it hurt.
"How can we tell them apart?" Amy asked.
"I put in RFID's," David said, pulling up his phone. "They use electromagnetic fields to identify, track and store information. They'll tell me where each mouse is and the basic details, like what's been done and undone, and the latest procedure."
Brad picked up the second mouse, and scrolled to another programming option. He shocked the mouse and put it in with the first. After he'd finished shocking all of them, he put his phone away.
"What now?" Amy asked.
"Now," David said, "we wait."
***
I got a text from David the next morning.
Can you come to school early? Have to show you something.
I got there thirty minutes later and burst into the science lab. David stepped in front of me, blocking my view of the mice.
"Hold up," David said, "I need to warn you first."
"Warn me?" I said, "Shit, what happened? Are they all dead?"
"None of them are dead. They are changed. Not exactly as we planned."
"Great," I said. "We've created mutant, monster mice."
I pushed past him to look into the boxes, then I pulled back and covered my mouth with my hand to silence a scream.
"They aren't that bad," David said.
"No," I said, trying to keep my voice steady. "They just surprised me."
One mouse was the same. Another had ears that stuck up like a rabbit. One's ears were flappy like an elephant's. One had eyes as big as dimes and looked very surprised to see us. One looked like a tiny mop, his whole body covered in shaggy hair. One was as big as a hamster, and one was coal black. But the one that made me gasp was the most eye-catching. It looked like a lumpy little ball of skin and hair, with a fat body, almost like a fuzzy lizard with a hump on its back. It looked like something alien; a very tiny abominable snowman.
"That's why I wanted you to see them first," David said. "At lunch people are going to freak out. Some may think we should stop."
"We're not stopping," I said. "My sister—"
"I don't want to stop either," David said, leaning against the bench and looking down at the mice. "These results are actually surprisingly good. But I thought if you had time to think about things, you'd be better able to convince the others later, if anybody is having second thoughts."
He was talking about Amy. She'd be the weakest link. Then maybe Greg.
"You're the most level-headed," David said. "You think things through, and don't just blurt out things out. Also, they'll listen to you."
That was nice to hear. I wished it was true. David had just never witnessed my outbursts. I guess I only opened up to close friends. I wondered for a second if I was being manipulated. Maybe David thought I was the one likely to start arguing, and was trying to dissolve tensions by showing me the mice earlier in private. Calling me level-headed so I'd control myself later. If so, David was a lot smarter than I gave him credit for. But the other thing was probably true as well. I don't know why Greg would listen to me, but I could probably sway Amy on anything. And Brad was a wildcard, but he didn't seem like a quitter.
"We're not stopping," I said again. "I'll handle everybody at lunch."
David was looking at the mice, but it seemed as if he was looking through them. Like he was accessing some private universe that only he knew the way into. I took a closer look at the mice, marveling at what we'd created. I couldn't believe it had actually worked.
"Thank you," I said. I gave David an awkward hug and he stiffened. I didn't know what made me do it, I was just suddenly overwhelmed with gratitude. If not for David, this would all just be a crazy stupid idea. The bell rang and we broke apart. I reached for my bag and David put the mice in our group's private locker in the prep room next door.
I made a mental note to pick up some cheese for the mice when we did our cafeteria run. It was the least they deserved.