text: Gene-splicing and editing technology had virtually eliminated all human disease by 2089. Death was now a treatable disease. Misery was a memory. The vast majority of inhabitants of Earth enjoyed perfect health and lifespans well into the hundreds. Death was now voluntary and many, rather than dying, chose to venture out into the stars and seed the universe with Man. So plentiful had the food supply become that the food grown, cultivated, and harvested by *Farminators* could feed the entire globe, and was also being exported to offworld colonies to feed the legions who dwelled among the cosmos. Like the industrial revolution before it, the “Genetic revolution” transformed life. Birth rates and conception were carefully regulated to ensure that supply met demand. Infections were largely unknown. War was eradicated. Life was, in a word, perfect. Finally. Gone was the era of diabetes, cancer, and organ failure, replaced by long days of art and leisure and long nights of partying and debauchery. Addiction, illness, and trauma could be easily treated with the technology that had begun it all: **CRISPR**. CRISPR was short for *clusters of regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats* - a type of genetic material that made it possible to snip out erroneous and lethal bits of DNA and replace it with healthy, superior code. Animals, plants, even bacteria could now be revised and improved, all with the ease of editing a page of text. Everyone’s DNA bore the fingerprints of CRISPR’s touch - tucked among the base pairs of purines and pyrimidines was proprietary material with instructions, copyrights, and legal warnings. A utopian, eukaryotic EULA that everyone had signed and yet no one could read. It rapidly became the one thing that nations and governments could agree upon. A worldwide project for the betterment of humanity, the survival of the species and the spread of humans to the vast, cold reaches of the universe. There had always been opposition, although minuscule. Those known as “DNAturals” formed an aggressive movement to return humanity to what they considered the normal way of life and the natural order. Their numbers dwindled after the *Genetic Revolution Act* was voted into law in 2074 and mandatory CRISPR therapy became the rule of the land. Still, pockets were rumored to exist: Norwalk, Svalbard, Reykjavik - deeply embedded believers that operated clandestinely. There was talk of DNAturals hacking CRISPR wetware and implanting malicious code that would stop - some even said reverse - the headlong rush toward *homo superior*. As I say - rumor. Unvalidated. Until now. I’m a DNAtural, one of the few. I’m also a genetic engineer. I’ve worked secretly within the CRISPR project for years and edited millions - perhaps billions - of people. I am not alone in this effort; DNAturals are a small group, but we are composed of the last of the free-thinkers, perhaps the last bastion of people who see the truth in this supposed utopia. My meetings with the DNAtural leadership were handled entirely through messages written in DNA and RNA and left at dead drops. A cup of coffee at a café in Brussels contained the code to outline our next meeting. A used napkin tossed in a wastebin in Shanghai held the manifesto to be released to the world when the world was released from genetic tyranny. Coded and then decoded, plans within plans. We alone knew the truth: these superior beings were no longer humans. The utopia was a sham. I was able to bury my *own* proprietary code deep within the trademarks and NDAs that CRISPR wove into nearly everyone on the planet. So common was acceptance of CRISPR that my work was never questioned, my allegiance assumed. And so, I wrote. I wrote a living symphony of guanine, adenosine, cytosine, and thymine. With those four words, I could compose instructions to bring about the change that DNAturals sought; a return to evolution. Today will be judgment day. A reestablishment of sanity - after a brief period of insanity, of course. Unfortunate, but unavoidable. Today will be the day the DNA encoded to nearly everyone on Earth by CRISPR begins the revolution. I stand in the middle of Times Square and watch as the fruits of my years of labor blossom and ripen. I watch as an iridescent, milky liquid - pure DNA - begins to ooze from the skin of everyone I see. They look like melting candles, dripping with pearlescent lines of code. And I know it is happening simultaneously all over the globe; Tiananmen Square running with pools of shimmering liquid, the canals of Venice streaming, teeming with coded lines of life. And in the cold depths of space. The evolution revolution has begun.