Don’t Drink The Gene Juice

Another story all tied up with a bow! It's an awesome feeling.

While I'm a Mermaid, Not A Merman, was a very developed idea before I began writing, this one was just a little idea that developed eventually into this existing story.

I've thought a lot about genetic technology, and I've watched and read things about what we may be able to do with it someday. There's some really crazy stuff like "designer children" that might be possible someday, in which you can select traits like eye color or hair color before a baby is born.

I wanted to take it a step further - what if through an artificial virus, genetic information could be spread throughout the body, made to be invisible to the body's defenses, and alter the appearance of the body radically?

Obviously, this is a rather juvenile understanding of genetic technology and would almost certainly make your entire body one ugly cancer growth. But I wanted to put that aside just to see how it would effect our lives if a hundred years from now, we were able to completely change what we look like, and even our species.

Here I made a few predictions, namely that transgender individuals would readily pick this up so that they could easily avoid the difficulties of hormone therapy and surgery, becoming biologically no different than those of their desired gender.

I also briefly touched on those who identify as other kin, or not entirely human. As I do not know nearly as much about these individuals I did not focus on it in the story, but am confident in saying that Wyatt and Cathy identify with these individuals. I predict that with this technology available, many would choose similar lifestyles as they do.

I apologize for my lack of imagination in describing a world in the future, but I tried my best to include talk of things like self driving cars and such. In the end, I think that the people that come around long after us will live lives pretty similar to our own.

This was my first experiment into sci fi, so I hope that you enjoyed it! Let me know in the comments what kind of TG/TF story you'd like to see me do next!

Thanks for reading!