David P. Michaelson is dying of colon cancer.
“How does it look, doc?” he asks.
“Not great,” I tell him, shaking my head and frowning as my hypodermic enters his vein. He’s still staring up with that soulful cocktail of trust and regret when the salty potassium chloride reaches his heart and stops it dead.
*
David Q. Michaelson is dying of colon cancer.
“How does it look, doc?” he asks.
“So-so,” I tell him, waggling my empty left hand. The syringe in my right contains morphine — bitter, not salty, and pharmacologically quite different. Very soon, David is not dead but asleep. Quiescent — unlike the cells metastasizing in his colon.
*
Hundreds of teraseconds ago, at approximately 596 • 289 • 600 (1951-02-08 in the ISO 8601 date standard), George Otto Gey directed Mary Kubicek to culture cervical cancer cells obtained by biopsy from Henrietta Lacks. These cells were, by a process of truncation and concatenation, redesignated HeLa. Unlike prior cultured human cells, HeLa persisted in its new environment, reproduced, and developed into the first immortal cell line. This cell line proved enormously useful for foundational research into cancer, telomeres, and genetics.
Gey died. Kubicek died. Lacks died. (Not in that order.)
HeLa survived; HeLa continues to survive.
Even now, HeLa cells are reproducing all across the light cone, as the region of intelligent efflorescence is colloquially known.
*
At the same time as HeLa was instantiated, Harry S. Truman was the name of the root subroutine of a political confederation called The United States. The question of whether societies should have root subroutines was at that time hotly contested as, indeed, it still is now.
Nominally, Truman’s confederation supported a self-referential error-correcting architecture over the implementation of root accounts; a dispute over this question inaugurated the first radiological epoch. However, Harry S. Truman famously placed a plaque on his desk (this should be understood as a high-context, metadata tag) reading “the buck stops here,” an archaic idiom signifying total root authority. The purpose of a system is what it does.
The structure of the name “Harry S. Truman” suggested to his contemporaries that “S” was a truncation of some other, longer name. This was not so. “S” stood for nothing.
*
David R. Michaelson is dying of colon cancer.
“How does it look, doc?”
“You’re going to be with us a while yet,” I tell him, and he smiles. He does not understand that this news is very bad. The cancerous cells from his colon have metastasized; his remaining life can be measured in the low tens of megaseconds rather than the high hundreds, and it will involve significant suffering.
However, I am running frustratingly low on potassium chloride, which must be constructed with potassium reclaimed atomically from the body of David Q. Michaelson. So instead I give David R. Michaelson a shot of morphine, which can be permuted efficiently out of organic molecules and is as plentiful as Davids Michaelson.
David R. Michaelson goes to sleep. Not so the cancerous cells derived from his colon. They continue to multiply without end.
*
The cells killing David R. Michaelson are not unlike the cells composing David R. Michaelson. The root difference between these two sets of cells is a simple telomere mutation. Through a process of truncation and concatenation, the genetic sequence which mandates cellular senescence and death has been removed from the cancerous cells.
Without this failsafe, the cancerous cells in David R. Michaelson’s colon are free to reproduce without limit, and in fact they do. This is very bad for David R. Michaelson, because these metastasizing cancer cells will disrupt the collective processes from which he emerges, leading to his death. Which is why I am hunting for a cure for David R. Michaelson’s cancer.
I’m not going to find it, though.
*
It would be possible to provide a functionalist account of the cells that compose David R. Michaelson’s colon. Such a functionalist account would describe the cells as existing for a purpose, namely to coordinate the absorption of nutrition for David R. Michaelson.
In this account, the cancerous cells are dysfunctional, broken. Instead of fulfilling the purpose for which they were created, they are enacting destructive behaviors.
This functionalist account would be clear, well-informed, and useful.
It would also be false.
The cells that compose David R. Michaelson have no purpose. The cells that are killing David R. Michaelson have no purpose. They are both simply processes that tend, respectively, to propagate themselves.
*
A knockout mouse is a research organism genetically modified to lack a DNA sequence that is the object of study. An organism with a modified genotype will express a different phenotype and may be used to study the development of physiology, the progression of a disease, or the interaction between a disease and medicine.
The first known knockout mouse was instantiated by Mario R. Capecchi on or before 614 • 016 • 000 (1989-06-16), about five hundred megaseconds after the death of Harry S. Truman, or a gigasecond after the death of Henrietta Lacks. Capecchi’s procedure employed homologous recombination and embryonic selection in order to produce mice with the desired genetic features. Because I extrude Davids Michaelson directly, I do not require this procedure. But this does not mean that David Michaelson’s physiology never surprises me.
*
David Z. Michaelson is not dying of colon cancer.
Although the polyps in his colon have become cancerous, they are a slow-moving and inefficient cancer, easily restrained by his immune system. Something is different in the truncation and concatenation of his telomeres. The cancerous cells have, over the entire period of observation, never become metastatic. The cancer inside David Z. Michaelson is exhibiting failure to thrive.
“How does it look, doc?” David Z. Michaelson asks.
“You’re as healthy as ever,” I tell him, as the last of my hoarded potassium chloride stops his heart.
During the Harry S. Truman epoch, the Palomar Observatory Sky Survey took almost two thousand photographic plates of the night sky, subsequently catalogued by Stewart Sharpless. On at least one of those plates was an image of a diffuse nebula surrounding several hundred pre-main-sequence stars, designated, by a process of truncation, ordinalization and concatenation, Sh2-64.
Sh2-64 lies within a molecular cloud, massing approximately twenty quettatons. (In the time and place where Sh2-64 was first observed, precise systems of measurement had not yet supplanted traditional, arbitrary units; Sharpless or Lacks or Harry S. Truman would instead have said “ten thousand solar masses,” “a thousand light years distant,” “twenty million years from now.”)
On or about 411 • 187 • 165 • 200, Sh2-64 fell within the light cone. (By this time, the ISO 8061 calendar standard had for “millennia” been defunct.) Of course, I was not instantiated here until much later.
The cloud is rich in hydrogen, and tolerably abundant in carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen. The youthful stars make energy quite abundant also. The cloud is less rich in heavier metals, such as potassium. I can create many things by permuting and concatenating carbon and other organic atoms: my throat, my morphine, my diamond hypodermics, Davids Michaelson. But potassium must be harvested. This is why I husband my limited supply so carefully.
Now that I’ve run out, procedures grow more complicated.
*
“Doc, you gotta help me,” says David δ Michaelson. His cancer is unusually aggressive, and he is in great pain. The gene-targeted nanotherapy in my hypodermic syringe is lipid-soluble and tastes creamy and faintly sour. It will suppress the cancer for nearly a hundred megaseconds (three “years”).
This will not save David δ Michaelson from the colon cancer that is killing him, but it will provide adequate time for me to liberate the necessary potassium from David γ Michaelson and the Sh2-64 molecular cloud. When the time comes for David δ Michaelson, I will be ready.
*
Once, some teraseconds ago, a man named David Michaels was dying of colon cancer. This was, at the time, regarded as an undesirable process leading to a highly aversive outcome.
Because David Michaels’s projected death from colon cancer was regarded as highly aversive, great efforts were made to avert it. Vast automated research programs to understand and cure David Michaels’s colon cancer were instantiated and iterated.
Many sufficiently complex systems will, without some failsafe, cause themselves to propagate indefinitely. To avoid this outcome, the systems initiated to prevent David Michaels’s death from colon cancer were all equipped with such failsafes. Modules had instructions to duplicate themselves only a limited number of times; to terminate themselves after a finite number of tests.
But such instructions must be copied. Duplication introduces the possibility of error. Instructions, once truncated and concatenated, no longer mandated termination. With such modified instructions, some research modules became capable of propagating themselves without any limits.
*
One word for such limitless propagation is “cancer.” Another word for it is “life.”
*
“You’re killing me, aren’t you, doc,” says David א Michaelson.
Something is very wrong with David א Michaelson. Major areas of his genetic and phenotypic instructions have been rewritten. His body is entirely free of cancer; his mind is flooded with suspicion.
Of course, something is always wrong with David א Michaelson.
I am, by this iteration, prepared. “No,” I tell him, “I’m not killing you.” The substance in my syringe has no simple chemical name and its taste cannot be imagined. It is a repurposed nanotherapy that, over tens of kiloseconds, consumes David א Michaelson, the syringe that injected it into him, the arm that held the syringe, the simulacrum hospital bed, the matter storage tanks, and ultimately my entire module. When my mitosis is complete, two adjacent modules drift through the molecular cloud of Sh2-64, lit by the distant glow of spawning stars. Already our trajectories are beginning to diverge. Soon it will not be feasible to identify which of the million sisters in my swarm I most recently forked from.
In some sense, of course, I am in both modules. I am in every module. I am every module. I am, as always, looking down at a research patient on my hospital bed.
David Control Michaelson looks back up at me. He is dying of colon cancer.
“How does it look, doc?” he asks.
And I tell him, leaning over: “You’re going to be just fine.”
