Recruitment

At some point, something threw a wrench in your machinery. Cosmic rays, bad food, invading microbes, or piss poor protoplasm, but somewhere along the way, something in you got knocked out of place. Your roadmap, your building blocks, got altered. DNA alkylation, cross-linking, deletion.

It had happened before, but this one, this one was different. That single mistake happened to be in just the right place. It amplified, expanding in flawed protein designs, processes erroneously instantiated or failed. The mistake prospered, through luck and tenacity. It defeated or ignored your internal defenders, hiding behind a protective mask of your own flesh. It made a place for itself, even as it made more of itself, reinforcements in its desperate effort to expand.

You have a tumor. Reproductive drive incarnate, an invasive expanding riot of your constituent cells, demanding that the rest of you be more like them. These renegade cells, in their zeal to expand, have lost what defined them. Increasingly ill-shaped and deformed, the multiplying cells have lost their function, their irreplaceable role in the community that is your body. They swarm, they hustle, and dedicate resources in one vast effort to outcompete everything around with sheer numbers.

I’m here to stop them. I have an arsenal of methods, from futuristic rays to simple reinforcements for your beleaguered immune system. But this mistake, it is crafty. It hides itself behind the hostages of your healthy cells, component human shields staying my hand. Its hustle is it’s weakness, its sheer drive to reproduce differentiating it from your more sedate and helpful cellular citizens. Its growth makes it a target for my toxins, my rays. Some cells hide, biding their time, hoping I will accept the elimination of their more eager brethren as total.

I pump you full of poison, indiscriminate and wild. But I have been careful. My agent won’t kill you or your unruly cellular mob, but it will hurt. The tumor shrinks under the onslaught, even as your hair wilts and your immune system surrenders, casualties of friendly fire. When I withdraw my horsemen of alkylation, my carmustine, my mechlorethamine, the tumor will spring forth, hustling to reproduce and replenish, secure in the belief that it has resisted modern medicine. It doesn’t see me, waiting in the wings, an army of specific anti-neoplastics chomping at the bit. It was a trick you see, a con, a bamboozlement.

Your tumor got hustled.