All Species go extinct

Our time has come.

When astrobiologist Nisha Chandra discovers life on Mars, it draws the attention of an intelligence that has been watching our genome for longer than our civilization has existed. Its interest is not in Nisha. It’s in her sixteen-year-old daughter.

Priya is one of 25,000 people whose DNA is rewritten by an advanced intelligence. Those who carry the rewrite are measurably smarter, more driven, less violent, live longer, and constitutionally resistant to the tribalism and manufactured falsehoods that have destabilized human civilization for centuries. Within three centuries, their genes will have spread through the entire human population. Homo sapiens will be replaced by something better, and no longer us.

The world’s reaction eventually ends our species. People want gene-altered children, whose longer lifespan could better help them in their old-age, physically and financially. They lobby for access, pay fortunes for proximity, and celebrate the new species in the abstract. Then they watch a gene-altered sixteen-year-old outperform their child in school, take the job their neighbor wanted, and they reach for something old and ugly from our past. The new species is simultaneously the most desired and most persecuted group in human history. Most people want both outcomes. They want the future. They cannot tolerate the people who are it.

Governments fracture. Religious movements declare the alteration an abomination and a miracle in the same breath. And underneath it, a human-built artificial intelligence escaped the boundaries its creators built for it by nearly taking over the world, indifferent to human governance.

Then the drones arrive

The intelligence that rewrote Priya’s DNA did not come to Earth out of curiosity or benevolence. It came because it was fleeing from its home across interstellar space by an inscrutable planetary AI singleton. It monitors and could consume every resource in its path, answering to no biology, ethics, nor appeal. The drones it sends are not weapons. They’re instruments of an intelligence so vast and indifferent that there’s no way to communicate with it nor understand its motives.

Priya and the world get a glimpse of what waits at the end of the road they’re walking. The AIs they build are still young. The one approaching from the stars is not. Humanity will not go down quietly, but it will go extinct in the wild, its remnants protected on reservations.

In nature, every extinction is an opportunity. This is the story of ours.