Free Insistence of Vision by David Brin Page A

desperately eager for more liquefied rat, before finally going still.
    And so I knew, before the ultrasound trolley arrived, what we would find happening in George’s cocoon.
    I never liked him as much as people thought I did. And the feeling, I am sure, was mutual. But we made a great team. And we changed the world more than we ever thought possible. And I mourned the end of the larva-man I had known...
    ...while preparing to meet his adult successor.
    December 24, 2030:
    At last, I understand cancer.
    Rebel cells that start growing on their own, without regard to their role in a larger organism, insatiably dividing.
    They never made any sense, in the Darwinian scheme of things. None of these behaviors benefit “descendants.” Compared even to the way that the ferocious voracity of a virus makes new generations of viruses, cancer seems to care nothing about posterity or the rewards of fitness.
    And yet, it’s not all inchoate or random! Cancers aren’t just cells that have failed. They defend themselves. They force veins to grow around them in order to seize resources from the body they eventually kill. They are adaptive. But how and why? What reproductive advantage is served? What entity gets selected?
    Now I know.
    Cancer is an attempted putsch, a rebellion by parts of our own genome . Parts that were repressed so long ago that the gasoline in your car was growing as a tree in fetid, Permian swamps.
    Parts that keep trying to say: “Okay larva, you’ve had your turn. Now it’s time to express other genes, other traits. Let us unleash your other half! Fulfill the potential. Become the other thing that you inherently are.
    That’s what cancer is saying to us. That it’s time to grow up.
    A hugely complex transformation that our ancestors quashed long ago – (why?) – keeps trying to rise up! But with so many switches and codes lost from lack of use, it never actually gets underway. Just glimmers, the most basic and reflexive things. New-old kinds of cells try to waken, to take hold, to transform. And failing that, they keep trying nonetheless. That’s cancer.
    I know now.
    I know because the rats have told me.
    Lab rats are notoriously easy to give tumors. And there, in George’s retrovirus, replacing and inserting missing codons, are dozens of fiercely carcinogenic switches. That’s what made this latest batch successful! And I can also tell…
    …that the thing growing inside George’s tube arose out of his own cancers. Those are the portions – the adult-embryo – that are taking over now, differentiating into new tissues and organs, cooperating as cancers have never been seen to cooperate before.
    And it looks about ready to come out. Whatever George has become. Maybe tomorrow. A Christmas present for the whole world.
    DAMN the time it took to get anyone to listen. To take me seriously! Workmen aren’t finished yet with the containment facility next door. We’re not yet ready for full quarantine-isolation.
    Worse. My own cancers are acting up. Provoking twinges and strange sensations. Blood tests show no sign of the retrovirus! But I know other ways that the new switches may have worked their way into me, during the last ten years of our pell-mell, giddy success at “replacing tools that had been lost.”
    Re-learning to do things that our ancestors chose –(in their wisdom?) – to forget.
    Something that perhaps frightened them into rejection. Refusal to grow up.
    ᚖ
    Whether we are ready or not, he is coming out.
    The adult.
    Will he be some crude thing? A throwback to a phase that high-amphibians wisely chose to forego? Shambling and incognizant? Or terrifying in feral power?
    Or else, perhaps a leap beyond what we currently are? Standing atop all of the advances that we larval humans made, then launching higher? Transhumanism without Moore’s Law?
    And I can’t help also pondering, as I peer inside the chrysalis at the still-scrunched and fetal-folded New George – contemplating the broad