The President’s Choice

President Adrian Cross had been walking the same stretch of White House corridor for three hours, his footsteps marking time with the sort of metronomic precision that suggested a man trying to outpace his own thoughts - though thoughts, unlike Secret Service agents, had proven remarkably persistent in their pursuit.

The folder under his arm contained forty-seven pages of scientific miracle wrapped in bureaucratic language, complete with charts that made human genetic modification look as routine as adjusting a thermostat. Dr. Helena Voss and her team at Helix Dynamics had done something remarkable: they'd made playing God sound like sensible public policy.

"Germline modification technology has achieved clinical readiness," the executive summary cheerfully announced, as if announcing the completion of a highway project rather than humanity's potential evolutionary fork in the road. "Full deployment could eliminate 7,000 genetic diseases within a generation, saving an estimated $2.3 trillion in healthcare costs while preventing incalculable human suffering."

Cross paused before Lincoln's portrait - Honest Abe staring down with that peculiar mixture of melancholy and determination that came from making decisions during existential crises. Though Lincoln had only dealt with preserving the Union, not redesigning the species. Rather simpler times, really.

His daughter Emma's face flickered through his mind - pale from another cardiac episode, clutching her stuffed elephant while doctors explained why her heart insisted on beating irregularly. The technology folder promised such problems would become historical curiosities, like polio or smallpox. No more children born with time bombs in their chromosomes, no more families bankrupted by genetic lottery losses.

But the same technology that could fix Emma's heart could also enhance intelligence by thirty percent, add six inches of height, improve muscle fiber efficiency, sharpen memory retention to near-photographic levels. Dr. Voss had been refreshingly honest about the implications: "The distinction between therapy and enhancement, Mr. President, is largely philosophical. Both involve deliberate genetic modification."

Cross resumed his restless pacing, passing portraits of presidents who'd faced their own species-defining moments. Washington establishing precedents, Jefferson authorizing westward expansion, Roosevelt splitting atoms. Though none of them had been asked to literally redesign human nature with the stroke of a pen.

The economic projections were particularly sobering. Within two decades, "enhanced" children would dominate academic competitions, athletic records, professional examinations. The unmodified would become a permanent underclass - not through malice, but through simple biological obsolescence. Democracy assumed rough equality among citizens; what happened when some citizens were objectively, measurably superior to others?

"Every citizen will have the same shot at life," Cross had promised during his campaign, though he'd been thinking about education funding and healthcare access, not genetic engineering. The irony was almost artistic in its completeness: he could guarantee equal opportunity by making everyone unequal, or preserve equality by condemning the genetically unlucky to lives of preventable suffering.

His chief of staff had diplomatically suggested that perhaps such decisions were "above the presidential pay grade" - though Cross rather suspected that if presidents weren't meant to decide humanity's evolutionary trajectory, the job description needed significant revision.

Was genetic modification playing God, or was refusing to use such technology a form of divine neglect? If humans had been granted the ability to eliminate genetic diseases, wasn't using that ability a moral imperative? Or was Cross about to fracture the human species into castes that would make historical class systems look quaint by comparison?

He found himself in the Oval Office, though he couldn't remember walking there. The folder lay open on his desk, authorization forms arranged with bureaucratic efficiency. One signature would launch humanity's next evolutionary phase. No signature would preserve the current genetic status quo, complete with all its beautiful imperfections and tragic lottery losses.

Cross thought of playground memories - the universal childhood experience of being picked last, or first, or somewhere in between, based on natural talent and random chance. Soon, such experiences would be obsolete. Parents would simply purchase athletic prowess along with intelligence upgrades and disease immunity, the way previous generations had bought private school educations.

His pen felt unreasonably heavy as he lifted it, as if gravity itself were protesting this moment of species-defining choice. Somewhere in hospitals across the nation, children with genetic diseases were fighting battles they couldn't win against opponents coded into their DNA. Somewhere else, families were saving money to ensure their future children would never face such battles - creating a world where genetic advantage became just another luxury item.

The authorization line waited, empty and patient as time itself.

Cross stared at the space where his signature belonged and realized he wasn't just authorizing a medical program—he was deciding whether humanity's future would be written by evolution or engineering, chance or choice, natural selection or parental selection.

Cross stared at the space where his signature belonged and realized he wasn't just authorizing a medical program—he was deciding whether humanity's future would be written by evolution or engineering, chance or choice, natural selection or parental selection.

The silence in the Oval Office stretched like held breath. Outside, Washington slept, unaware that their president sat alone in the dark, holding the future of the species in his trembling hand.

The pen hovered over empty space, poised between worlds.