The World Of Ideal Humans

Chapter One: Innovation and Creation

The sky was black, the clouds were grey, and so was I. Smoke filled the air, factory lights in the distance pierced my eyes. The world was shattered and broken, everything changed in the blink of an eye. But still, here I was, walking down this desolate street, becoming more pitiful with every step. Loathing what this world has become. At this point, I was naive, I was gullible, and I was weak. My name originated from both of my parents' names, beginning with my mom and ending with my dad, with some letters in between. My mother was Fawn, and she acted as such. Sweet, innocent, and caring; the best mother I could ask for. My dad, however, was named Opollo, meaning "he who has reached heaven". Some might say the irony of the meaning is amusing, but I am not keen to agree. My parents put some of the letters of their names together to come up with Noro. My last name is Dougenis, which means "genes" or "being born". That is my name, Noro Dougenis. and I am called as such. My parents would refer to me as "God's gift" because that's apparently what my name meant. I was skeptical, and what I found was that it meant "curse" or "cursed". As I walked down this road, I looked up at the sky and pictured how it had looked only around a decade ago. The sky was bright, the sun shone through mist and transparent clouds. Rainbows would appear as soon as the rain ceased, almost every time. It sounds like a fairy tale, but it was just the beginning of a nightmare. The decades leading up to the present day were most of my childhood. I am now 15, and it is the year 2040. A lot of mess happened over the past couple of decades, but the worst being the scientific discoveries. I have always thrived in school, and my favorite subject is science. Unfortunately, many of the recent scientific breakthroughs have been the most controversial and detrimental of their kind. These breakthroughs began in the field of genetics and altering DNA. In 1996, the first animal to ever be cloned from an adult was a sheep. Her name was Dolly, and this was one of the most interesting scientific breakthroughs of its kind, with cloning now being natural and commercial. That is not the focus, however. What I am focusing on now is CRISPR, which stands for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeat. On the surface, it doesn't seem that harmful, but what it has done to the human race can't be undone. CRISPR was first discovered way back in 1987 but wasn't properly used until 2007. The concept of CRISPR is just editing genes within bacteria and cells. As an example, if there was a cow that was pregnant, CRISPR could alter the genes within the embryo to create a "perfect" calf. In 2018, CRISPR had already begun to evolve and be used on humans. A pair of twins in China were subjected to this genetic alteration, which was conducted as a test to see if the two girls would be immune to the virus HIV. This was widely recognized in the scientific community, and debate struck out about whether it was humane or not. From 2018 until 2019, CRISPR had begun to fizzle out of discussions. That was until 2020 when it had begun to take its toll. That year was full of trauma that lasted way into 2021, with CRISPR only being a minor topic at the time, even though more and more human embryos began to be genetically modified. At the start of 2020, Australian wildfires wiped out 47 million acres of land, killed 34 people, and thousands of people had to relocate and lost their homes. That was only the beginning. On January 9th, the WHO (World Health Organization) discovered a new deadly virus that started a global pandemic. This was the pandemic of coronavirus, which had originated in Wuhan, China. This virus continued well into 2021, reaching over 116 million cases and 2.5 million deaths in March of 2021. Former President Trump was impeached for the first time in the beginning of February. He was acquitted thereafter on February 5th. On March 9th there was a global stock market crash, which was the worst of its kind that had been seen since the Great Depression. Black Lives Matter protests continued throughout the year, with racial equality starting to become more of an issue than it was before. A new breed of hornet, called the "murder hornet" had begun to arrive in the US, with its size getting close and even over 2 inches in length. Afterward, on November 7th, Joe Biden became the president-elect of the U.S., with Kamala Harris being the first woman vice president. I wasn't even born at the time, so I don't remember any of this, but I have heard that it was the worst year my family had experienced up to that point. With all of these events, including other minor ones, CRISPR was not talked about until 2021. On December 14th of 2020, the coronavirus vaccine was introduced, and in April of 2021, almost everyone globally had received the vaccine. Now, CRISPR was talked about. It was all over the news, with the amount of genetically modified babies rising to over 10,000 in June. Throughout 2021, this was almost the only thing that was talked about, with around 240,000 babies being subjects of CRISPR at the end of the year. This number began to increase drastically throughout the next 5 years, with the number of genetically modified children in the world being over 1 billion. That was close to 1/8th of the population. Almost 13% of the human population at this time was genetically modified. But as everything has one, this was only the start. Over the next two years, genetic modifications had begun to not only be used for disease immunity, but also to code for appearance and general traits such as eye color, hair color, body type, sex, and even intelligence. It had gotten to a point where over a fourth of the population was now genetically modified. It had gotten worse after that, with around half of the population being the subject of CRISPR by 2039. It was out of control, and it wasn't going to stop anytime soon.