[ WP ] The year is 2170 . The air is no longer safe to breathe , courtesy of hundreds of genetically engineered CRISPR viruses all capable of altering human DNA within seconds . A cult of clean air worshippers decides to venture out into the open and remove all their masks at once

That which oppresses us, makes us human. That's a difficult sentiment to get behind, right? You've probably heard it as `` what makes us different, makes us human'', or `` everybody has flaws, they're what make you, *you*''. They sound like they mean different things, but they are all precisely the same: 
 
 Those traits that limit you, define you. 
 
 The deaf have a unique culture, which has grown up in the shadowy valley of being unable to hear. So does every oppressed ethnic group. Are their lives richer for it? Of course it is, how could it not be? There's so much they need to compensate for, which invokes the mind and awakens imagination. Necessity, to invention, to tradition. We are complicated, we adapt, we thrive. 
 
 What happens when that wisdom is questioned, though? What happens when someone says `` Perhaps being flawed is not what makes us, us? Perhaps I need not live with a limp, or deafness, or the inability to see green and red? Perhaps I need not be limited?'' 
 
 There will of course be some well-meaning individuals who say: `` Technology has never cured humanity's societal ills! We have to fix ourselves, the *human condition*, first!'' 
 
 The visionary will put down his model of the prefrontal cortex, that place which controls judgement, compassion, and reason, the place shown, by fMRI, to be undersized and less active in the minds of sociopaths and racists, and say, `` My thoughts *exactly. *'' 
 
 `` What happens when we demand that all children be born intelligent, and beautiful? What happens to the underclass?!'' 
 
 The visionary, peering over the plans for the first truly autonomous factory, says `` Why would I have an underclass?'' 
 
 The well-meaning say: `` What happens to our cultures, to our heritage, when a standard of beauty is prescribed to all?!'' 
 
 The visionary will look up from his reverie of jewel-skinned beings, clear-eyed and straight in each limb, azure and vermilion and verdant green, and say: `` Why would I use the old standards?'' 
 
 `` What about the soverignety of our bodies?! What about *choice?! *'' The well-meaning will agitatedly yell. 
 
 The visionary holds up a photo of a state execution, the needle already in the arm of the struggling prisoner, and a pair of starving children in Africa, their stomachs distended, no more than three years old, and raise his eyebrow. `` What about it?'' he will parrot back, sadly. 
 
 The well-meaning, increasingly panicked, will nearly scream, `` What about those who *choose not* to be subjected to the changes you're suggesting!? What happens when religious extremists and radicals attack you for what you will do to them!?'' 
 
 The visionary, staring hard at the newspaper, reporting the account of the latest outbreak of a deadly preventable disease, spread due to the parent's denial of childhood vaccination, will reach over and press a red button. Outside, several rockets, will lance upwards into the sky bound for the swift, globespanning winds of the Gulf Stream, their hulls bubbled with glass vials... 
 
 `` *Why would I ever allow you to choose? *'' He will whisper, to the empty room. 
 
 Several hours later, the air raid sirens will start. It is much, much too late. 
 
... 
 
 This is not the moment that society ended. It ended later. Because the visionary was right. It worked. It worked. It *worked*. Removing all crude, animal deprivations worked. Doing away with the primeval fear responses that kept us alive in the Serengeti of the past, but availed us not in the realm of the present, *worked*. No lameness. No infirmity of age. No bleariness of eye. It worked. And it did n't stop. 
 
 The advances came dizzyingly fast. The fragmented, isolated pockets of'pure' humans, shivering, cowering in their tiny cement cavities underground, the paltry, paranoid few, could not understand what they were seeing through flickering satellite uplinks and grainy security footage. They ate their canned paste meals, and grew colorless and bland under anemic florescent bulbs, as Humanity changed. The first taste of that apple was free, but it was a buyer's market, now. 
 
 Humanity became asuryas and dragons, djinni and vapor, data and light, and our world fluxed, flowed and quaked about us: glowing with heat and steaming, it was poured into molds, each stranger and more organic than the last. Nearly all life felt the touch of our brush. We'd bungled it before, true, but that was just a matter of knowledge, was n't it? A matter of know-how, an engineering problem: not an ethical one... 
 
 The worldships were the last touch. We'd built them faster than you'd imagine possible, but we'd also made them beautiful. We'd be seeing them for a long time, after all. 
 
 And beneath the ground, the few remaining saw them, diatom cathedrals in steel and glass, and knew that they would be left, soon. The youngest wept bitterly, hatefully, for they had been born there, in the cement sarcophagi; trapped, like the humanity of the past, by their parents' choices. The older, though, had their carefully cultivated conservatism to protect them from regret. 
 
 We left. Our only legacy, the monuments of our ascendance, slowly overgrown by our world, and the mists of virions: our airborne evolution. 
 
 And even in the bunkers, the last holdouts, with their wheezing air purifiers and pallid skin, were unable to stop the young from choosing. For they grew old, and new ideas can not be denied. Groaning hatches were cranked open by muscles unused to such extreme exertion. Panting, sweating, they walked into the day of impossible phantasmagorical *life* 
 
 Sunlight dappled blinking faces. Some could not walk quickly. Some stumbled. 
 
 But they all took off their masks. They all breathed deeply. And in the days that followed, they were humanity, un-oppressed. 
 
 
 
 

