The BioTech Revolution

Most days, she didn’t even notice the display case filled with relics as she walked the open hall to her lab station. They were as interesting as a door handle or the tinting on the colossal sky lights above her head. But today, the sun’s beam, refracted on the golden edge of the heart-shaped piece of metal, caught her eye, and she slowed to a halt in front of the exhibit. She considered the piece of jewelry before her—the patinated locket hanging on a similarly oxidized golden chain was splayed open, each half stuffed with a tiny picture. On the right, a smiling woman glowed warmly out from the little frame; on the left, a child of indeterminate gender, grinned with self satisfaction.

Beneath the necklace, in bold font, the inscription read, “Prior to the BioTech Revolution, trinkets such as these were ritualistically exchanged between people as oaths or expressions of loyalty and companionship at a time when humanity’s survival relied on such archaic arrangements. Thanks to the revolution and the contributions of LifeTek Industries, every human is now entirely self-sustained and free from the constraints of inter-human dependency.”

A chime on her wrist pulled her attention from her reading. The monitor on her arm alerted her to the eminent dispensing of synthesized serotonin and GABA in response to a sudden chemical imbalance detected in the limbic and amygdaloid systems. A message, sent from the device to her home system, instructed the infusion of an oxytocin inhibitor to be added to her evening supplement as the solution was not readily available in the small, white, circular ChemPak attached to the back of her neck. She wondered a minute at this irregular dispersement, but shrugged it away, and continued the journey to her station at SynthLife Labs, a subsidiary of LifeTek Indistries. After all, she believed wholeheartedly in her work as a scientist and the infallibility of the systems put in place to curb the war, famine, and world-wide unrest in the years before the BioTech Revolution.

In this new world, in which every person’s central nervous system remained synthetically calmed, there was no fear. And without fear, there were no feelings of greed, no hoarding of resources. There were no feelings of loneliness—a reversal of the primitive call for companionship as a means of safety. Without loneliness, there was no desire for attachment. Without attachment, there was no risk of loss. Everything each individual needed was provided by the ChemPak through the constant, complex combatting of the primeval evolutionary forces that had held humanity, for so long, beholden to its basest inclinations.

The BioTech Revolution had solved all of humanity’s inherent blunders, had unlocked pain and suffering at the cellular level and reversed every effect before any undesired feelings reached the prefrontal cortex. Most people in the post revolutionary world had not had awareness of a negative feeling since age 4. And the technology was advancing—soon every last human would be imbued with the technology before they left the SynthLife womb. And that was exactly the work that she pondered on the rest of her walk to her lab. There were more tests to be run, more data to be collected. She wouldn’t think about the locket again; she wouldn’t ever again glance in the display case for any moment of time.

And never once would she experience the pangs of desire, of love, of passion, of belonging, of attachment that were inextricably connected to the emotions stifled by the ChemPak’s interventions. Though her most primal systems still functioned, still stirred when presented with the simple stimulus of happy smiles from ancient artifacts, their messages never reached her awareness. They never would. Not her awareness nor anyone else’s.

Not in the age of the BioTech Revolution.