by Jeff Pepper
I wake up from my nap to the sound of “clip clop, clip clop.” It’s my neighbor Bill’s horse, slowly pulling their wooden cart along the crumbling asphalt road in front of my house. Taking vegetables to market, probably.
I don’t really want to get up from my rocking chair on the porch. I’m seventy-two, and some days it seems like everything hurts. What I wouldn’t give to just drive to the drug store and buy a bottle of Advil. But no, those days are long gone. Like my car, which is now just a rusting skeleton half hidden in tall weeds in what used to be my driveway.
My god, the world has gone to hell in a bucket.
And yeah, it’s my fault. Not that I did anything, it’s that I didn’t do what I should have when I had the chance.
Here’s how it happened.
It all started fifty-three years ago, just at the tail end of the Obama administration. I was a senior at Carnegie Prep, an exclusive boarding school a few miles north of Pittsburgh. It was for kids who were extremely bright, or whose parents were extremely wealthy, or, in a few rare cases, both.
I was definitely in the second category. I was reasonably intelligent but certainly no Einstein. Fortunately, my dad had made a fortune during the dot-com boom of the late 1990’s. He told my sisters and me that for our own good he was not going to leave us any of that fortune, but he was going to make sure we received the best education money could buy.
Carnegie Prep was just what you’d expect, a cluster of lovely old ivy-covered stone buildings set in the rolling hills of northern Allegheny County. There were manicured gardens, tennis and pickleball courts, a dining hall serving gourmet food, and an indoor pool. Surrounding the school were a couple of hundred acres of woodland, and streams for fishing and skinny dipping.
But the best part, for me, was the science building. It wasn’t much to look at from the outside, but in the last six months it had been transformed from an ordinary academic lab into a cutting edge facility, loaded from basement to rooftop with the latest and most expensive tools. The biology lab was particularly impressive, with electron microscopes, DNA sequencers, mass spectrometers, bioreactors, and equipment for culturing and modifying cells. I had no idea how the school could afford all that stuff, even with the ridiculously high tuition our parents paid.
Like I said, I was definitely not the sharpest knife in the drawer. But I liked science, especially biology. This was back in the days of the genetic engineering revolution. CRISPR, the gene editing toolkit, had recently been developed, and it was turning biology and manufacturing upside down. All of a sudden you didn’t need to build a billion-dollar megafactory to produce exotic drugs or chemicals. You just needed the right computer software and a reasonably well equipped bio lab. All of which had recently been installed in this building.
It was the first day of class, on a beautiful September morning. I walked into the biology classroom and saw a dozen of my classmates already there, playing with their smartphones or talking quietly. A few of them sat, eyes closed, not quite recovered from whatever they’d been doing the night before.
I sat down next to Gloria, who was, well, glorious. Bright eyes, wicked smile, spiky hair dyed green, athletic build, and way smarter than me. Yeah, I definitely had a crush on Gloria. She tolerated me, and once in a while she gave me a sly smile that seemed to say, “Don’t give up, Charlie, anything could happen.” Today her smile was subdued, more polite than enticing, but I gratefully accepted whatever attention she was willing to give me.
The door opened and a man walked in. He wore an expensive-looking dark blue sport jacket and open-collar white shirt over gray slacks, several steps above the tweedy clothes we were used to seeing on other male faculty members. Medium height, powerful build, handsome, an Asian face with wide nose, crinkly eyes, and dense grayish hair in a military style buzz cut. He could have been a colonel in the People’s Liberation Army, or a former Olympic gymnast. He looked us over briefly, nodded, and barked, “Good morning, class. I am Mr. Xing.” He pronounced it Chinese style, shing, pitched just a couple of notes higher than you’d expect.
He continued, “This semester you will learn how to play God. You will learn how to write, and rewrite, the genetic code underlying all life on Earth. I assume you already understand the basics of DNA, organic chemistry, and software development. Am I correct?” We all nodded. “Good. By the time this semester is finished, you will know more about modifying the genetic code than ninety-nine percent of the biologists in the world. You will work very hard, and you will accomplish great things.”
I was not overly impressed. I’d been at Carnegie Prep for three years and was accustomed to instructors who had been leaders in highly competitive fields before retiring here to spend their final working years teaching small classes of affluent and well-behaved teenagers. They were often given to exaggerating how wonderful their classes would be, and how much we would benefit from their wisdom.
But still, something about this guy seemed different. He radiated intelligence, drive, and boundless energy. In spite of myself, I was curious to hear what he had to say.
He promptly ruined this with his next words. “You will be divided into two competing teams. This will let you use the strength you get from being part of a small group. Tribalism is a universal human trait, and it will serve us well in this class.” Not at all what I was expecting.
“How will I divide you into two tribes? My first thought was to do it based on skin color, but clearly, looking at all of you, that will not work.”
We were shocked. I wondered how long it would be until someone reported him to HR and he became an ex-teacher at Carnegie Prep. Days? Hours? Minutes?
He continued, unfazed by the expressions on our pale faces. “So, we will use a different approach. I understand that the students here are more or less evenly split between those who are native in this region, and those from wealthy families living elsewhere.”
I looked at Gloria and whispered, “Natives? This guy is unbelievable.” She slowly shook her head.
“Let’s begin,” he said. “Natives to this side of the room,” and he waved his hand towards the side with the hand-carved mahogany wood paneling, “and outsiders over here,” indicating the side of the room with windows overlooking the rolling hills.
We obeyed, not knowing what else to do. And I think we were all a little curious to see how weird this was going to become. I walked over and stood with the natives. Gloria joined the country club set on the other side of the room.
“You are now two teams,” he said. “Two tribes, if you will. You will compete to solve a difficult genetic engineering task. Every week, the team that has made the most progress not only will have the satisfaction of crushing your competitors, but they will get to wear these baseball caps.” He produced a box of white hats from a desk drawer. Plucking one out and waving it, he showed us that written in large black letters was the word, ‘WINNER.’
“And the losers must wear these.” Another box of hats, black this time, with ‘LOSER’ emblazoned in white letters on the front.
He stood in front of us, hands on hips. “Any questions?”
To my shame, I said nothing. But Gloria stepped forward from the ranks of the wealthy out-of-towners. She said, “Mr. Xing, you are new here. I must tell you, this is incredibly offensive. We are all friends here. Well, most of us anyway. We’ve worked hard for the last three years to understand each other, bridge our differences, and find common ground. Now it looks to me like you are trying to destroy everything we’ve worked so hard to achieve.”
“Yes, yes,” said Xing excitedly. “That’s exactly my point. You all,” and he waved his muscular arm to encompass all of us, “have been working so very hard. For what? To overcome what you are. Deep down, you are not one big family. You are a temporary gathering of competing tribes. Cast off this veneer of recent human civilization and you will quickly revert to your true nature. Believe me, your tribalism is what has allowed your civilization to progress so quickly. Do you think you would have developed the atomic bomb were it not for the desperate pressures of your second world war? This unceasing competition and warfare has taken you from horse-drawn carts to spaceships, from telegraphs to TikTok, in just a hundred years. It’s incredible. Do not look at me and think I am forcing you to do something unnatural. I am simply leveraging your own human nature.”
Gloria shook her head. “No, this is wrong. I won’t be a part of it. I’m outta here.” She picked up her laptop and her backpack and walked out of the room.
At this point I mustered what little courage I had. Or maybe I just wanted to impress Gloria. I stood up and said, “Mr. Xing, whatever you are teaching here, it’s not biology. I don’t know what it is. Nazism, maybe. Whatever, this is not what I signed up for.” I followed Gloria out the door. The rest of the class, having located their own spines, did the same. When I looked back, Mr. Xing was standing alone in the classroom, holding the two baseball caps. I wish I could say he looked sad or forlorn. But no. He just stood there, impassive.
The next day we all returned to the biology classroom, curious to see who the replacement teacher would be. To our amazement, Mr. Xing was there. So was Dr. Lopez, the head of school. I won’t bore you with the details, but Dr. Lopez gave a short speech about the school’s commitment to equity, diversity, and mutual respect. Then Mr. Xing apologized to the class for his insensitive and wrong-headed remarks. I half-expected him to put on a ‘LOSER’ hat and wear one of those self-criticism placards that were all the rage in China back in the days of the Cultural Revolution. I think he would have done it if that’s what was required for him to keep his job. But Dr. Lopez didn’t fire him, and that, apparently, was that.
It was odd, looking back on it, that Dr. Lopez let him off with a reprimand, or whatever minor punishment she came up with. The kind of stuff Xing had said would normally have resulted in, at the very least, serious disciplinary action, and more likely a quick one-way ticket out of the school and the end of his teaching career. Why was she so lenient? Was there something going on between these two? Or was there something else at work here? I wondered again about this new teacher, with his expensive tailored clothing and his strange ideas.
With the initial drama out of the way, we got down to biology. The semester’s task was easy to describe but incredibly difficult to achieve. The two teams – now composed, thanks to Dr. Lopez, of randomly selected students – were given similar challenges. Both were to start with a simple bacterium, a little rod-shaped critter named Vibrio natriegens. It’s common in all oceans of the world. It loves salt water and, given optimal conditions, can double its population in only ten minutes. It can also survive in fresh water and even as an aerosol, at least for a while. V. natriegens is also well understood, its entire genome already mapped and studied. Mr. Xing told us that this particular variant was especially hardy and multiplied quickly.
Our challenge was to modify the bacteria’s genome to enable it to metabolize nutrients other than what it had already evolved to eat. Our team, consisting of myself, Gloria, and four other students, was assigned to create a new version that could metabolize iron. The other team’s goal was to enable it to eat plastics.
“The organisms you are about to create are potentially very dangerous,” said Mr. Xing. “If you succeed in your work and somehow these get loose in the world, they could destroy much of human civilization. So, you will all do your wet work in a strictly monitored facility, which we just happen to have here in this building. The lab will be sealed, the air will be filtered, and all entry and exits will be through airlocks. You will go through a rigorous decontamination procedure whenever you leave the lab.”
We set to work. The first month was spent studying the bacterium’s genome, figuring out which genes were responsible for metabolizing its preferred nutrients. We learned it could survive on a varied diet, including glucose, glycerol, amino acids, ammonium salts, phosphates, and lots of other things usually found in ordinary seawater. This was one very adaptable bacterium, which was probably why it was so successful.
Next, we researched naturally occurring bacteria that already knew how to metabolize iron and plastics. I won’t go into the technical details here, but trust me when I say there are lots of both, so we had plenty of candidate genes to work with. The hard part, of course, was getting those new genes to work in harmony with the rest of V. natriegens’ genome. Large portions of the bacteria’s single, circular chromosome had to be hacked to prevent its primitive immune system from turning on itself. And we had to deal with a million other things that could go wrong once we started tinkering with its DNA.
After a month or so of research and software modeling, we moved on to lab work. The DNA molecule is large, but the individual building blocks, the base pairs, are far too small to be modified mechanically by needles, tweezers and so on. So we used CRISPR to read the bacteria’s genetic code and remove unwanted stretches of DNA or add new ones. We tried hundreds of different ways to insert the new genes into the bacterium’s genome. They were all failures, or, as Mr. Xing was fond of telling us, “successes that showed us what not to do.”
The work was exhilarating. What made it more enjoyable, for me anyway, was that Gloria was my lab partner. Working side by side with her, we became close friends. I was getting little sleep, but when I did, I often dreamed of doing some genetic mixing with her. Unfortunately for me, those fantasies did not extend to my waking life. We were lab partners and friends, nothing more.
As the semester wore on, the work became more and more intense. Many of us practically lived in the lab, sleeping on couches and neglecting our other coursework. Instead of going to the dining hall, we ate pizza and drank soft drinks at our lab tables. Mr. Xing, who ate nothing and apparently never slept, encouraged us to remain focused, giving us occasional bits of advice but generally leaving the problem solving to us.
It paid off. A week before Christmas break, both teams were finished. Our little critters were happily munching on iron filings and multiplying in glass beakers. The other team’s bacteria were turning plastics into god-knows-what, and breeding like, well, like bacteria. We’d done it.
“Excellent work,” said Mr. Xing, after both teams had submitted their final reports. “I knew you could do it. And I must admit, I thought you would need to utilize your built-in tribal allegiances to gain sufficient motivation, but it turned out you formed new tribes which served the same purpose.” There were a few grumbles, but we were all feeling pretty good and no one was in a mood to re-litigate the past.
“You have all worked hard and achieved great things. Tomorrow night I will take all of you out for drinks and dinner at Moondog’s.” This was a local bar popular with the older students, known for its strong drinks and greasy but plentiful bar food. “It’s on me. See you at 8. Class dismissed.”
Carnegie Prep was a traditional school, and after-hours socializing between faculty and students was rare, though not officially prohibited. It seemed strange, but none of us wanted to turn down a free meal and a chance to see Mr. Xing let down his buzz-cut hair.
Moondog’s was crowded and noisy as usual, but Mr. Xing had arranged for a private table in the back, where the decibel level was moderate enough to permit real conversation. He ordered large quantities of food for the table, and pitchers of soft drinks. As usual, Mr. Xing didn’t eat anything, but he surprised us by knocking back one Jack Daniels after another, lining up the empty glasses on the table in front of him like little transparent soldiers. The drinks seemed to have no effect on him whatsoever. He was talkative and cheerful, as you’d expect from someone in a bar, but he didn’t seem even a little tipsy.
“My young friends, you have achieved greatness!” he said, after fifteen empty glasses had been lined up on the table and another was in his hand. “Whatever life throws at you in the future, you can always be proud of what you have accomplished in this class.” Not exactly the assurance of future success we might have expected from him, but still nice to hear.
“Tell me,” he said, changing the subject abruptly, “can anyone tell me why we are alone?”
Alone? We all looked around at the crowded, noisy bar, not quite grasping his point.
He continued, “There are billions of stars, millions of habitable worlds in the galaxy. Yet human scientists have found no evidence of intelligent life anywhere other than what is on this planet. No radio signals, no lasers, no space ships, nothing. Why is that, do you suppose?”
A few hands went up. Xing gestured to Michael, a somewhat nerdy but affable kid. He said, “A science fiction writer named Cixin Liu wrote about this. He calls it the Dark Forest hypothesis, though the general idea appeared earlier in other science fiction novels. Liu says that the universe is a highly competitive and deadly place, a vicious jungle full of hungry predators. Any civilization foolish enough to advertise its presence through radio or other signals is swiftly attacked and destroyed by other, more powerful civilizations that don’t want to see additional competition for limited resources. Stay quiet and live, speak up and die.”
“Excellent!” smiled Xing. “You know, Cixin Liu is a friend of mine. We spent quite a bit of time together years ago. He went on to become a famous writer of speculative fiction, whereas I am just an unknown science teacher.”
This was interesting. “What do you think of Liu’s books?” I asked.
“Entertaining, but hard to take seriously,” he replied. “All that talk about the Trisolarans hatching elaborate schemes to kill off Earth’s scientists, organizing secret societies, and all the rest. Fun to read, maybe, but silly. That’s not how an advanced civilization would take out a competitor.”
“Blow it up?” asked Michael.
“No. Expensive and unnecessary, and a waste of a perfectly good planet. All they need to do is destroy the young civilization’s industrial base that would allow them to reach out into the greater universe and become a player competing for resources. And that’s easy. In most cases, they can even get the civilization to destroy themselves.”
I was starting to get a sick feeling in my stomach, and it wasn’t from the greasy pizza. Looking at Mr. Xing knocking back yet another whiskey, he seemed less and less like an ordinary science teacher, and more like a really bad dream.
As if sensing it was time to wrap things up, he rose to his feet, not wobbling a bit. “Well, kids, I’ve got to be going. Got a long trip ahead of me. It’s been a real pleasure. Before I leave, would you all please come outside with me for a minute?”
Dumbly, we all trooped outside behind him. It was a chilly December night and it was raining hard. Water was running along the gutter and rushing down into a storm drain. Xing reached into his jacket pocket, producing two glass vials. We all knew what they were. He stepped up to the storm drain, one expensive black shoe partly covering the “DRAINS TO RIVER” sign stenciled on the pavement. He threw the two vials onto the street, smashing them into the rushing stream of water. We watched as bits of broken glass washed down the drain.
“Take care, kids!” he said, waving his hand cheerfully. Then he turned and walked away, oblivious to the rain soaking his head and clothing. His hands were tucked into his pockets, and as he headed down the street, we could hear him whistling. He turned a corner and was gone.
That was fifty-three years ago. Nobody ever saw him again. But I think of him whenever I sit by the window with Gloria and watch the rain falling on our crumbled world.
© Copyright 2025 Jeff Pepper
About the Author
Jeff Pepper is the founder/CEO of Imagin8 Press. He's written and co-written over 100 titles, most in the shenmo (gods and demons) genre and based on classic Chinese novels. The company has sold over 45,000 copies. He’s founded and led several tech companies, including one that went from startup to IPO in 7 years. Jeff co-holds several US patents. In his free time he enjoys eating vegetarian food, playing competitive pickleball, and sea kayaking. More info: www.linkedin.com/in/jeffpepper/.