MOLLI BEGAN TEXTING LATE in the evening after she finished her usual prep for the next day’s activities at the bakery.
Molli: “Peter did you see the text from Ears?”
Peter: “Yeah, scanned it. Didn’t read thru.”
Molli: “Read again. Geedee underground is buzzing. He wants to meet at studio tomorrow.”
Peter: “Fine. Urgent?”
Molli: “He thinks so.”
The next morning, Peter prepared to ride his bike to his favorite coffee hangout at Harvard Square. Despite the increasing numbers of augmented transhumans on the streets, or “varints” as they were commonly known, the Square was heavily policed and experienced few problems. This was no longer the case in the downtowns of many cities across the globe where varint factions were increasingly enmeshed in social disruption.
Despite the rising dangers on the streets, Peter carried no weapons. If he was ever was confronted by an angry varint, he planned to use his podcast as his defense of their kind. In his mind, the podcast proved he was a proponent of the expanding, amorphous definition of humanity that varints represented.
The emerging panorama of varints were generally characterized in three major groups. ‘Clippers’ used gene editing and gene drive technologies to augment their bodies. Most augmentations were simple and relatively cosmetic, including changes to skin and hair color.
Other augmentations were far more complex and impactful. Clipper tech quickly advanced to enable major nervous system and musculoskeletal changes, such as added brain capacity or improved strength or height. And at the extremes were the rarer but more controversial modifications like the integration of mammalian, animal, and even plant DNA into a person’s genetic code.
‘Chippers’ were often lightly augmented, at best, but extensively integrated with Internet-centric and AI-controlled systems. Transdermal microchips, first used extensively in pets, gradually advanced into complex systems of components embedded directly within the human body. Touted initially as an upgrade from handheld cellphones, these systems quickly came into widespread use despite fears that such use provided unfair, unequal, rapid access to data and information.
Opponents of such chipper tech feared it might enslave the user to cloud-based systems or the human masters who controlled the systems. Proponents argued that people with any type of interface to unfettered, coercive social media and search AI algorithms were equally as susceptible, irrespective of the access technology used.
The third broad group of augmenters were the grippers. Grippers used metallic and mechanical component augmentations, typically fused into their bones, sinews, and flesh.
Grippers were aptly named, given the first implementations of this tech to enhance hand strength for labor-intensive jobs. Once grippers saw how easy it was to augment their musculoskeletal systems with metallics and machines, many began hybridizing even further. These hybridized ‘mechs’ as they were commonly called, also might implement other augmentations such as clipper muscular embellishments to complement their metallic infrastructures.
With few exceptions, varint modifications were almost always visible ones. This made them easy targets and social pariahs among non-varint, unaugmented humans. And with a burgeoning array of augmentations available at declining prices, non-varints understood they were on a fast path to becoming the minority in cities across the globe. For many, augmentation for any reason was an insult to their religious or moral belief systems.
By the mid-2030’s, anger between non-varints and varints had reached a fever pitch. Fueled by the profit rhetoric of numerous, divisive media organizations, their animosities continued to be amplified.
As an augmentation agnostic, Peter held no strong opinions. Though he loved the exciting new tech being implemented, he always tried to straddle the growing social divide in his podcast, never taking sides. For him, it was mostly the non-human varints, particularly the newly created dog-raccoon breeds, that were often a problem for bicyclists like himself. To avoid any damaging confrontations with that growing and often unpredictable species, he always carried pepper spray on his rides.
He was happy to find that Harvard, MIT, and other universities in Boston had begun accepting human varints as both students and teachers. Indeed, this was one of the many reasons why non-hybrids were so repulsed at transhumans.
Higher education was being accused of surreptitiously stacking their institutions with varints who possessed advanced capabilities that non-hybrids lacked. Hybrid professors and teachers were often recognized as excellent additions to the schools’ rosters, with the potential to accelerate productive new discoveries that might improve university endowments and industrial-academic opportunities.
Peter pedaled along the bike path from his house to Harvard Square, a few miles west on Massachusetts Avenue. He loved the Square, its history, the diverse community of people he met there, and the original charm it retained. Passing Wadsworth House, he often imagined General Washington staring out the window from his wartime headquarters and envisioned other great figures in American history walking the same streets he traversed.
It was a sparkling, warm Thursday morning in late August. As he approached the Square, he expected to see families in tow with their matriculating children, along with the usual array of diverse faces and cultures of the returning students and faculty. However, except for a few vehicles transiting along Brattle, JFK, and Massachusetts Avenue, the area was eerily quiet.
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As he locked his bike, he noticed an old friend from his high school passing by in a car.
“Jorge!” he shouted, waving to flag him down.
The young man stopped at a nearby parking place, a virtual impossibility on a typical Cambridge weekday. He rolled the window down, the car’s engine still humming.
“Dude, long time!” Peter exclaimed. “I see you’re still running this old girl, and she looks pretty good despite the winters. What you been up to?”
Jorge’s dark face had a quizzical frown.
“Pete-boy,” he began. “Why aren’t you watching? I’m just coming home from work, and we had it on there. Everyone’s glued to the feeds. Didn’t you see it? The photo?”
Peter removed his sunglasses and crouched down further, with his head perched sideways, halfway inside Jorge’s car.
“What are you talking about?”
“You’ve haven’t seen the news?”
“Not really. You remember Molli, don’t you? She challenged me to be less media and device-addicted, so I turned everything off last night and kept it off, and my phone’s not with me right now. How’s that for crazy?”
“Well then, Captain Genius, you’ve missed the biggest scientific news in the history of mankind. Here, see.” Jorge handed Peter his phone.
He squinted at the small onscreen image. “What the hell’s that?”
“It’s the obelisk that streaked across the sky and crashed in Canada yesterday. An alien obelisk.”
“What? Seriously? I saw early feeds last night, but it seemed like just another UFO sighting thing or even a satellite that fumbled through the atmosphere. You can’t believe any news these days, with so much of it being doctored-up. Damn deep-fakes.”
Jorge scanned the horizon to ensure sure no traffic cops were nearby.
“So much is happening, I can’t tell you in five minutes. In Canada, the Prime Minister is getting pressure to fess-up. Some kids found the thing and took a picture before the Feds could haul it away and lie about it being a meteorite. I’d love to be those kids. Solid gold, they say, or platinum and gold, and a cylinder made of carbon-something that you’d probably recognize. Like eighty tons of precious metal there. Not small change, dude. Ah, would I like to have that in my bank account! Anyway, got to run. Forget your little diet from the video feeds today and go paste your eyes on the screens. Wickedly cool!”
The car started rolling away.
“Okay. Thanks. See you later.”
Peter threw his hands back to avoid getting hit by the window’s edge as Jorge sped away. He then turned around to make a quick dash into the coffee shop. Outside was his street friend, disheveled as usual, and handing out newspapers.
“Dirksen! Hey big guy, how’s business going?”
“Nobody’s buying papers today, my man. They’re all focused on live feeds.”
Peter stared at Dirksen’s bare feet, a less uncomfortable place to direct his gaze than anywhere else. A few years earlier, Dirksen copped an option for free vision repair in a drug deal bet. Without considering the implications, he went off-net to one of the many non-licensed clinics, deep in Boston’s underground gene drive, or “geedee”, community.
The earliest applications of CRISPR gene drives enabled very targeted genetic changes in the reproductive germ cells of rapidly reproducing populations. Initial impacts of this new technology were clearly evidenced when, in the year 2025, the malaria-carrying anopheles mosquito was decimated in an accidental release of a few test mosquitoes genetically manipulated to stop the disease.
This one example of gene drive tech saved a half million lives a year, and its release was hailed as a miracle. It was also derided as a harbinger of future risks to humanity.
That one so visible and beneficial instance drove immediate public support for expanding CRISPR geedee tech more broadly for human use. Many pre-established medical and drug release safeguards were set aside so that the fruits of the new technology could be implemented faster.
Because genetic changes could only largely propagate through reproductive germ cells, initial geedee implementations were restricted by an animal’s physical size since larger mammals typically bred slowly. This challenge set in motion intense additional investment in research to implement genetic changes faster and more comprehensively within existing populations, not just the offspring.
The geedee lid blew off once gene drive accelerator capability, or ‘scroll,’ was discovered in 2024. This advancement cascaded genetic changes immediately and broadly throughout an organism’s target tissues, rather than only in its germ cells.
Upon this discovery, species augmentation became a global focus of attention, particularly as related to humans. Patents and intellectual property rights were cast aside as garage-entrepreneurs created mail-order geedee kits with scroll, as dangerous as they were.
These kits found a willing home in underground markets, tattoo parlors, and dark web stores. Unable to adequately police these new miracle enhancements so strongly desired by so many people, states like Massachusetts and California became the first to decriminalize and tax the burgeoning new industry.
CRISPR hybridization technologies, which had previously been regulated by and limited to the government and scientific communities, became widely available at the going street price. Related industries sprouted rapidly, such as augmentation parlors that could easily and cheaply create code to modify a person’s more obvious physical characteristics like skin color, luminescence, and mammalian appendages.
Dirksen’s unfortunate experience was one of the countless unintended, ‘off-target’ consequences of these rapid technology geedee advances. Severely farsighted at birth, Dirksen could not stomach the thought of laser surgery or anyone cutting into his eyes to cure his problem. Instead, he wanted a third eye to improve his vision.
Though an innocent desire, it was borne from ignorance of the potential after-effects. As happened too often in the geedee underground, his genetic modifications didn’t go so well. The third eye grew on his forehead as planned, above and between the other two, but it never attained a proper size, nor did its optic nerve integrate into his visual cortex.
The flaccid, undersized addition rolled around blindly and aimlessly, bulging from his skull like a precarious rock outcropping. It would occasionally come alive with a blink of its eyelid, which otherwise hung tired and sagging over half the eye. To top off the ignominy of it all, the underground geedee creators couldn’t even get the iris color right. It was a smoky gray, unlike his natural dark brown eyes.
Peter pulled out his wallet and handed him the cash. “Dirksen, take this. It’s a fiver. I’ll grab a paper. Hey, when it gets colder, remind me and I’ll bring you the new boots my parents sent me. My closet is full because they’re always sending me stuff, and I don’t need them.”
“You are a brother to us.” Dirksen handed him a copy of The Varint, a street newspaper of the geedee underground. “Yeah, I’ll be glad to have those boots in a few weeks. Remember when it snowed last week? Boston, middle of August? Weather is moreso nutso.”
Peter smiled then shot into the coffee shop. While standing in line, he stared with everyone else in amazement at the vidscreen. CNN was covering the latest news on the obelisk.
“Geez,” he realized, “it’s no wonder nobody’s out on the street. Molli and I may need to modify the pod’s format even more than I imagined."