Stalks

Melbourne’s eyes grew on stalks. This caused a great many problems for him. It made it impossible to get glasses, difficult to make friends, and instead of using hairbands to keep his hair out of his eyes he had to use eyebands to keep his eyes out of his hair.

Fortunately, there was an accident at one of Monsanto’s secret laboratories. A stalk of corn grew to impossible proportion. Melbourne managed to sneak onto the premises. The one thing that his eyes were good for was seeing around corners. He climbed the cornstalk all the way up to the moon where he met several other individuals whose eyes grew on stalks. They were happy for a time until Melbourne realized that they shouldn’t have to live on the moon just because they were different. Unfortunately, by the time he realized this the great giant cornstalk had been cut down.

They had no choice but to build a spaceship. When they made it back to earth everyone thought that they were aliens. They tried to explain but nobody would listen. In any case, they finally received the respect and positive attention that they deserved.

Orifice

In the year 3000 as people evolved into stronger and more efficient multitaskers, they grew increasingly annoyed with the limits of the oral orifice, or mouth to use the vernacular. The people elected to create a new hole in their heads for breathing. The conventional mouth would be reserved for speech and assorted gestures of physical affection.

Oddly, the vote to add the new mouth was nearly unanimous, but the discourse concerning its location was robust and unrelenting. It was eventually decided that the mastication orifice would be located at the naval as the stomach would then be adjacent to it. This would require that all restaurants redesign their tables and that a new system of dining etiquette be implemented. All this could be easily done, of course. After all, humanity had made sudden changes before (like the last time it called itself humanity) and had even become somewhat accustomed to them.

Suggestions to locate the new mouth on hands were courageously defended, but were in the end such arguments found themselves deceased and desisted.

After two decades, humanity decided to go back to its old arrangement. People found that they missed the sensation of food travelling aaaaaaalll the way down the esophagus down into the deep pits of their bellies. People then decided that longer necks were in order. Arrangements for modification of the species were made shortly after.

A Happy Society

An exorbitantly wealthy scientist once wished to create a perfectly happy society. Genetic engineering would be its key. The first batch of people all died during infancy. The tolerance levels for the poisons that their brains had been programmed to release with negative emotions were simply too low. As soon as an infant began to cry, it would die. After the sixth batch or so, the strategy was perfected. Sadness, anger, and other “negative” emotions would cause severe pain or even death. The scientist created a perfectly happy society.

Every year there are inevitably a few dozen deaths, mostly children and adolescents. If a person can make it twenty years or so without slipping into a fetal depression, they tend to keep the healthy habit of happiness up for life. Those who are not so brave, or so cowardly, die a slow and painful death. Poison secreted from their brains creeps down the veins in their arms and back, chilling the tips of their fingers and toes. They die a lonely death, clenching groin and buttocks. A tear-stained corpse will be found shortly after on a hard street or a soft bed.

Only one murder has been committed since emotional conformity was actualized. The science was killed in cold blood. Nobody stopped the murderer, there were no police because there was no crime. Some expected the assassin to die there next to its maker, but the assassin simply walked away. Apparently the perpetrator not of a crime of passion, but one of simple necessity.

Two generations after the assassination the trait still persists, a cursed cancer of the heart. One can only hope that their descendants will be truly happy.

iPropogate

Humanity is more fluid and adaptable than ever. Of course, in the beginning things were not so well organized. There was a point in the 21st century when not everyone had the ability to customize the next generation. Some who did have this privilege abused it.

What I am talking about of course is customizing new born children. It is not hard to pick and choose traits, it is not even that hard to cross species. Then, anything that isn’t done genetically can almost always be accomplished cybernetically or physically.

This is the privilege that initially was only available to some and which was abused by several. Classism became biological as well as economic. The rich grew children with special abilities. They built savants and synaesthetic. They built mental and physical prodigies of ever type. Even rich adults found ways to improve their bodies either with machines or with surgical additions of new body parts. The poor reproduced the old fashioned way. They fell further and further behind.

It was not until war broke out against a group of people who wished to wipe out inferior humanity that the problem of classism was truly dealt with. It is sad that clone and chimera armies of mean superhumans had to come into being before we decided to take the initiative to fully and fairly regulate the gene trade, the cyber-augmentation trade, and the physical splicing trade.

Now anyone has the right to change one’s body or the body of one’s progeny. However, for those augmentations which are considered dangerous or wrong, special licenses must be maintained and the subject must agree to the procedure. Newborn chimera humans are illegal.

The regulations have functioned with a large margin of success over the last few decades, but with so many new colonies being formed off planet, it may no longer be possible to regulate what humanity becomes.

vacation

I stayed at this hotel in Canada last week. They don’t have very tight regulation on genetic modification apparently. The hotel was decorated by genetically modified organisms.

All of the plants on the premises were bio-luminescent. It was awesome and beautiful. There is nothing quite like swimming in a pool that is lit entirely by glowing bushes.

The plants in the rooms were electrically charged. Have you ever plugged your laptop or shaver into a shrubbery before? I promise you, it is a memorable experience.

There were also a number of cats on the premises with glowing stripes and eyes. They added an alien jungle aesthetic to the environment. I believe one cat may even have been spliced with squid genes so that it could change the color of its skin and essentially cloak itself, a Cheshire cat if you will.

Perhaps hotels with creatures like these will be legalized in the states soon. One can only hope, right?