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...........Um.
sweatdrop
Anyway, I'll post it here:
reading is optional, though it's pretty short.
What’s that?
He glanced at the program again before adding a few more notes, his fingers blurring on the keyboard, making no mistakes I could see. It’s a cancer cell model.
And?
And, I found the cause of it.
Duh, I told him, admittedly a little proud to show off my ninth grade education. It’s when the cell division goes out of control, that’s what causes it.
No, what causes that. You have to get down to the subatomic level before you can really cure it….
What causes it? I should have been surprised that he’d found something like this, but I wasn’t. I knew him too well.
Look. He pointed to the enlarged cell, clicking on PLAY on a little video feed. The cell started moving; little spherical molecules came in and out of the cell via enzymes, or some just soaking right in, and the jellylike cytoplasm moved and swirled. It was really cool.
Then a couple of red molecules entered the screen—well, not red, exactly, but with tiny speckles of red covering most of them. They came into the cell via passive transport, heading straight for the nucleus. The first ten or so made it, but then the red molecules grew thicker and thicker, and the cytoplasm hardened and refused to let them in. I watched as the cell closed off all its exist and entries…and then it died, just wilted and shriveled away, and that was the end of the video feed. Everan closed it and opened another one.
This one started out with a cell exactly like the one I had just seen, but it was still alive, still resisting the red stuff…but then differently shaped molecules started gathering, and to my surprise, the cell let them in. A lot of the red ones were still kept out, but I saw, with a dismay I couldn’t explain, that now every molecule entering the cell was stained bright red.
A red molecule, the ones that were clearly a virus, zoomed straight in and sank into the nucleus. Several more came in without any resistance at all, and then it was as steady a flow as anything else. Each of them zoomed straight for the nucleus, crowding in a circle around the nucleolus—finally, one managed to break in, and then the cell started going crazy, splitting itself in half and in half again, over and over and over, each one with red molecules in them, until all I could see were blurs of red and blue cytoplasm. Then the video stopped.
I stood there, staring at the screen, and realized what I had just seen.
Did you make that? I asked him. He nodded.
I got this cell model from that cancer research place before I shut it down. This is a program they were using. I got all of their experiments too, saved onto here, but they were bogus. Such idiots…
I looked at the bottom of the screen—there was a timeline there I hadn’t noticed before. It started around 1960, and ended in 2007. I opened the other video—this one started in 1850.
Around when the car was invented, Everan explained. Gas engine. That’s when pollution started getting bad.
I frowned, playing the video again. I wanted to understand this…I wanted to know how to fix it….
Do you understand all of this? he asked me suddenly.
I nodded. Yeah…this is a human somatic cell, and these red molecules, the pointed ones, they’re the cancer virus. The cell tried to keep them out, but it kept everything else out too, and it died. And in the second one, it let these tainted water molecules in before it could die, but then its defenses against it weakened and it started to ignore the red stuff, and then it let more in, but it was too much to handle and it went straight for the nucleolus…I’m guessing it tainted the DNA and made it divide faster.
Everan nodded, impressed, but I could tell I hadn’t gotten everything. Do you know what the red molecules are, though? he asked me. I was surprised at his tone—it was a rhetorical question, but devoid of his usual sarcasm or superiority…he was talking to me like I was an equal, like I was Kamilé.
She didn’t look too happy about it, but Everan didn’t pay attention.
Not really, I admitted. Some kind of virus that causes cancer, maybe?
He nodded, turning back to the screen. Something like that…actually, the red parts of the molecule are tainted by pollutants.
What sort of pollutants? I was eager to know.
He arched his eyebrows at me. All sorts of pollutants. In the air, in the water, in the food. It’s everywhere.
I thought about this for a moment, and then it hit me hard. POLLUTION is what causes cancer?
Exactly. And global warming, and all the disgusting food you people eat. He pulled up another model of a cell, this one completely unrecognizable and covered with red. I recognize this one from Tyrranen’s lab…it’s the cell from the muscle of a deer. The part that humans eat.
Ohh…I looked closer at it. Meat is a pollutant?
No. The animals are more vulnerable to the pollution, and they’re tainted all over with it, but it doesn’t cause the same effect as with humans. When you eat them, they give you all of that…that’s why elves don’t eat meat. We discovered this ages ago.
His people, I knew, chose to expand on biology and physics rather than technology. Thank the gods.
And it doesn’t help when you fry it all in pig fat, he added, scowling. That’s just disgusting. The buildup in your arteries makes it harder for the pollutants to leave, too.
Hey, I don’t eat it, I muttered.
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