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. She wished she had 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. 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 harder tasks they shied away from, 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 had 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 endeavour, even if it incriminated him greatly.

As with canis itself, it started with a virus. It acted just like canis, but on a smaller scale, still causing changes, but in his words, "flipping on the necessary switches to get the machine started." The virus had spread throughout the world, acting very very slowly - he had in fact, released it an entire year in advance. He'd lamented that it seemed to have failed - but then of course, then everything had gone south in a hurry.

Jackie still was trying to process this. Her whole life had been upended by this insane man, and the lives of millions more around the world. Part of her nearly gave into the impulse to feel ashamed of her appearance again - this time feeling like the monster to a Dr. Frankenstein.

But reading his entries after canis exploded quickly turned her away from that. She imagined him maniacally laughing as he wrote his thoughts, talking about how fun it was seeing the world descend into chaos, being forced to watch loved ones become "so appalling to the senses." She hated this man. Matt probably would've said something more gentle like "he thoroughly despised him" - but Jackie hated this man. It seemed the ultimate spite would be for her to love her life, and be happy with who she was.

Despite Seth's copious notes, and the gruesome insights into his disturbing personality, the files on the catalyst virus, as Lucas and Clive were now calling it, were bearing little fruit. The virus that had further transformed Matt and Ashley had little clear information. Seth had said in one of his notes that he made detailed notes on everything that was "finished" - and so they were all quite afraid that the secret to turning Matt and Ashley back... was locked inside that psychopath's mind - and who knew where he was now.

"How did that crook do it?" Lucas asked to himself, breaking the quiet humming of the ventilation. "He somehow hijacked the original canis virus, and no matter where I search in these viral samples, or in his files, I'm not finding any sign of the virus he used to change Matt and Ashley."

"Is it possible that it wasn't something he did to the virus," Jackie asked, "but something... I mean... like that it wasn't an invasive procedure, but an external one?"

"What do you mean?" Lucas asked.

"I dunno," Jackie shrugged. "Some kind of radiation maybe?"

Lucas leaned back in his chair, resting his head against his hands. "Sorry to say, but that's something you only see in superhero movies. In real life, radiation - usually - gives you cancer, not super powers."

"Sorry," Jackie said, her tail curling against her.

"Sorry for what?" Lucas asked. He scratched Jackie behind the ears. To an outsider, a weird thing for a grown man to do to a teenage girl. But he wasn't a stranger off the street. He was a good man. The Hewitt's really felt like family to her. Perhaps canis people doing things like that made some people uncomfortable, but she didn't care. Lucas was not her father - but she liked to imagine that it was something her dad would do - as well as then give her a noogie as she squealed in laughter trying to get away.

"Seriously though Jackie," Lucas said, "I appreciate any help thinking through this, even if it's just moral support."

"I just wish that I could provide some real help," Jackie said. "I feel like I need to study college level biology and genetic engineering before I can actually give any advice."

"Honestly," Lucas said, "college won't help you here - and my career at Generation barely helps either. I'd say this is the cutting edge, but I can't even find where the edge is."

"But you're sure it's with the virus?" Jackie asked.

"Well," Lucas said, "I have a hard time understanding where else these changes were coming from."

"It's just that you said that the virus has been documented a ton around the world now," Jackie said. "And that you've compared the sequenced information of the virus in Matt and Ashley."

"Yes," Lucas said. "It's strange. The virus still pretty much matches up with the early gen versions of it we created all those years ago - and along with that, you match up with it, and so do Meagan and I. But despite the information being the same, the observations are not. Matt and Ashley - as well as you, all have levels of viral activity consistent with someone who just barely finished changing. I just know he used that somehow - he saw it from the samples he stole from our lab, but how he did it..."

The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

"And you don't think he put a different virus in them?"

"We would've detected it... at least I hope so. Can't imagine what awful things you could do with a completely undetectable virus. Augh. It's just, the thing is..."

He paused.

"What?" Jackie asked.

Lucas pulled up the folder of Seth's flash drive. He sorted through the long complex file directories, clicking on filenames that were just long strings of seemingly arbitrary numbers. Five, then ten minutes passed.

Jackie was leaning on her arm, nearly asleep, when Lucas leapt from his chair.

"Found it!"

She jolted upright, Matt leapt up from his nap against one of the walls, and Ashley fell off the stool, thankfully landing on her paws.

"Oh," Lucas laughed, scratching Ashley, "sorry girl."

Ashley barked, and wagged her tail. Matt seemed confused.

Lucas returned to the computer. "There," he said, pointing at the screen.

It wasn't a note document, but a file in some sort of coding language, with really long, dense, endlessly nested statements. Jackie only knew what those were from Matt talking about how it was a characteristic of the terrible code in his computer science classes. Jackie squinted at the multicolored text, and Lucas helpfully highlighted a specific few lines, where a note was tucked away after many lines of code.

"Our initial trials have proved to show potential," Lucas read. "The subjects do not show any rejection of the particles. However, activity after 6 weeks has shown little to no change, as was desired. Human trials are recommended to be conducted as soon as capable."

"I don't get it," Jackie asked, "was this testing another virus?"

"No," Lucas said. He highlighted more text below it. "The particles it seems, are unable to fully propagate. They cause changes in the subject, but are quickly eliminated. Another agent might be necessary for more rapid changes to occur."

"Another agent...," Jackie said. "Like the virus?"

"Yes," Lucas said. "I should've thought of this before. How do you change someone past what the virus is able to? How do you change them so fast when the virus has normally propagated slowly? Surely something biological cannot go so fast."

"So... so this thing they were testing?" Jackie asked, "it wasn't biological? It was artificial?"

"Yes," Lucas said, beginning to search through the document, "You need something artificial - and then biology that is able to allow that kind of change, namely, you're virus anomaly."

"And this artificial component?"

"Nanoparticles," Lucas said while scrolling down further in the code. "Generation was trying to crack the technology a decade or two ago, where it just hadn't worked before. Nanotechnology has some really big ramifications for biomedical applications, like targeting cancer, and"

He stopped searching through the document.

"I apologize," he said, "I'm rambling. Point is, I'm sure that's what is going on inside Matt and Ashley - and while it's certainly detectable, it was under the radar for us, as we were looking for something completely different."

"So what do we do?" Jackie asked.

"We need to gain control of the nanoparticles," Lucas said. "I need you to call Clive. Get him to search everything in Seth's old lab that could pertain to this. Once we get control, we need to dig into the code, find out how all this works. It's obvious that Seth took some souvenirs of his own from Generation all those years ago to engineer this... we just need to decipher them."

****

It was already late afternoon when Jackie had checked in on Lucas's work at the lab. Clive arrived with pizza a few hours later. He'd been working to decrypt the rest of Seth's data for a while now, and he tackled the problem with renewed vigor.

But ultimately, it was when he was taking a break, and looking through other items that had been recovered from Seth's lab, when he discovered another flash drive, a Star Wars one shaped like R2D2. In it was all the data they needed.

"Ugh," Clive said. "His code is a mess. I can tell this was written by someone much better, with their own way of organizing things, and he just patched over the places he needed."

"Doesn't matter how organized it is," Lucas urged him, "just do it."

"Lucky for you," Clive cracked his knuckles, "Ever since I was a computer science TA in college, I am very proficient at untangling knots. If I can fix my professor's code, I can fix the code of the second worst programmer on the planet."

****

It was midnight when Clive stood up from his computer.

"I've got it ready Lucas. All we have to do is run the program."

Lucas nodded, and called Matt and Ashley over to Clive's desktop. Clive then took off Matt and Ashley's normal collars - which respectively bore their cover names of "Dusty" and "Peaches" - and then put new ones on - the collars they had worn in Seth's lab. Upon further analysis, they'd realized that the collars weren't just administering shocks - after getting the nanoparticles into them through their food or something like that, the collars had been broadcasting the signals to the particles, thus inciting their further transformation - and would now hopefully do the reverse.

As Clive typed on his keyboard, Lucas grabbed his wrist.

"Clive," he said, "I want you to promise me - I want you to promise me that the collars aren't going to shock my kids."

"I promise," Clive said. "The system that shocks them is in a completely different file. Being clear though, the real worry is the nanoparticles. We're doing something that hasn't been done before - like really, really never been done. Nanotech is used so little in humans. I'll be honest here... this could be dangerous."

Lucas breathed slowly and deeply. "Do it."

Clive moused over a button in his program, and then selected "run" from a drop down menu. A window came up that began spitting out status messages.

Jackie gripped onto the hem of her t-shirt with one hand, and on the tufts of Matt's neck with the other. She steadied herself the best she could.

"I've acquired the particles' signal," Clive said with slow breaths, eyes scanning the incoming data. "From what I've seen, we need to start by unlocking the particles so they're allowed to do their work. He locked it down as soon as they had fully changed - so we unlock it... and then find our way from there."

All of them were very, very nervous. Jackie scratched Matt behind the ear, and he licked her hand.

"I unlocked it," Clive said with a slight sigh of relief. "Now... wait. Huh?"

"What?" Lucas asked. "What?"

"I just lost the signal," Clive said, quickly scrolling up the window that was giving the status on what was going on. He opened the secondary program that was doing the actual communication to the nanoparticles.

"Dang it!" Clive said. "The program is still broadcasting fine? Why did we lose connection then?"

Jackie looked to Matt and Ashley. They barely seemed to respond. They didn't seem to be thinking... but they didn't seem to be in pain either. If anything, they seemed confused about what was going on.

Despite so much progress in one day, Clive worked at it for a half an hour, then another half hour... but it just wasn't working.

"Jackie," Lucas said, "I think you better be getting home now."

"But what if -"

"Matt and Ashley are going to be fine until tomorrow," he said. "But you need to go home. If we make a breakthrough... well, it'll be a surprise."

Jackie reluctantly left. She felt in a twist of emotions, like someone showing you a really heartwarming video on their tablet, but you're distracted by the discovery that they use the light mode version of the app. Maybe something would happen. Maybe they would have to go back to the drawing board. Different opinions on how to feel fought in gladiatorial combat in her head. "Don't get your hopes up" on one side, and "have the courage to be a bit hopeful on the other."

As her car drove her home, she chose to just continue feeling the way she had thus far, and pretended that none of their leads today had been discovered. She suppressed the feeling that Lucas was just trying to get her to leave in case something went wrong... but she knew him better than that. If he was afraid of her being unable to handle stressful situations, they wouldn't have let her come to join the rescue, or watch them attempt to control the nanoparticles.

But still, as Jackie finally got to bed late that night, she was wracked with anxiety. Questions that had plagued her a thousand times resurfaced. Finally, her sheer exhaustion brought her to sleep.