A Love Letter to Humanity

May this letter find you in a spirit of anger. 

My name is Dick Neilson — renowned geneticist, chairperson of the International Council of Freedom and Prosperity (ICFP), and soon-to-be mass murderer. I greet you in anguish. 

This letter will serve as my confession, my suicide note, and my billet-doux to humanity. Come what may. 

Shakespeare originally popularized that expression, “come what may,” in Macbeth, which is a story about what happens when you let fate meddle with everything. He’s dead and won’t mind my borrowing it. 

I would argue that trusting fate is the metaphysical equivalent of trusting a drunk chimpanzee behind the wheel of a speeding semi in rush hour traffic, which is what humanity has been doing for centuries. No more. We have taken the wheel. 

Part 1: Reality is a bastard, and we are its many fathers

In 2030, we overshot Earth’s population limit by several billion. This was our core concern at the International Council of Freedom and Prosperity, which was affectionately nicknamed “The Old White Man’s Club” by left-leaning journalist Jim Freznik. He’s not wrong; for we are old and white and men. Say what you will. Our intentions were pure; I digress. 

War, famine, genocide — most of it can be linked back to dwindling resources spread between too many people. Like many scientists before us, we dabbled. And like many scientists before us, we irrevocably reshaped humanity in our own image. Come what may. 

I’ll put it even more bluntly. I have stolen from billions of men, women, and children living in the western hemisphere. There, I said it. The object of my theft: the latter half of their natural lifespan. Very few of them will live past the age of 45. I am 70. Like so many before me, I have lived too long. 

Before you crucify me, know this: In terms of eugenics, I am Robinhood, stealing from an opulent, piggish era to give to an impoverished future. And the outlook was very poor, I assure you. 

I could forgive the desecration of life and nature as a result of necessity. But I could not and will not forgive its destruction in the glutinous pursuit of prosperity. 

I am not sorry and please let me explain. 

Part 2: The forlorn hope

Even when I was born in the year of 1960, the Earth was bursting at the seams with useless people. My father, Alex Neilson, was one of them. He worked as an advertising man. He never created anything or helped anyone in his life. His mission was to tickle an insatiable hunger for material things, mirages for people to chase with their money. God forgive him, because he was damn good at it. The American Dream of the 1960s had a white picket fence because my father put it there. 

Men like my father drove the consumerist feeding frenzy that decimated our planet, but he didn’t do it intentionally. He was a natural born storyteller. Like all good storytellers, he was a romantic and a true believer, which ironically made him more

susceptible to the hunger than most. His mirage was an abstract feeling success manifested in sparkling chrome, luxury, and speed: the Cadillac.

“When we’re finally rich, I’m going to take you on a ride to the coast in our brand new Cadillac,” he would say to my mother, laughing and then kissing her on the cheek. It was a wonderful dream, or so it seemed. 

And then finally on a warm summer day in 1969, he got his wish. We went to the dealership to see the Cadillacs. To my nine year old eyes, they looked the same, a blue one here, cream with green accent stripes, convertible topped — to me, it didn’t matter. I did not see the mythos that had enveloped my father. I saw only a car. 

Over tireless hours of talking to the salesman, we went over each feature in painstaking detail. The millimeter thickness of the leather upholstery, the pearl inlay on the dashboard knobs, trunk size, upgrade options, and on and on. He settled on a cream convertible with green accent fenders and leather upholstery to match. 

I expected him to be overjoyed on the ride home. Instead we drove in silence. When we arrived home, I watched him inspecting the machinery in the driveway, running his fingers across the fenders. 

“This one isn’t quite flush,” he said bending down to examine it closer. “Dick, come here. Do you see that?” 

I looked at the fender and then at my father and then back at the fender. It looked normal to me, and that is what I told him.

“No, no. It’s not quite flush. I’ll have to call the dealership in the morning and have them work it out.”

I’ll never forget the look on his face, the inability to reconcile the material object with the myth, the mass produced pile of metal with the fantasy. It was as if a Cadillac had died and left its Earthly pulp decaying in our driveway. 

I didn’t understand it then, but here is what I think my father realized in that moment: there is no such thing as a Cadillac, and there never was. The mirage had moved further down the road; only the the hunger remained. 

It may have been the hunger. Or it may have been my parents crumbling marriage. But life would get the better of him, as it has a way of doing. And when I was only 17, he went out to the garage, started his beloved Cadillac, and went to sleep. He was only 58.

PS. To my knowledge, my parents never did take that ride to the coast. 

Part 3: Corruption of my youth

After my father died, I took to emptiness and made it a part of me. I simplified my room to a single mattress and pillow. I got rid of decorations, posters, comics, children’s games. 

I was determined to change the world. It was my obligation. I stayed away from women and booze and drugs and worked diligently in my text books. 

To this day, I have not slept with a woman; although I had many opportunities. My reasons are no longer concerned with studiousness, however. It comes down to a more practical matter of resource conservation. Human couples consume three times the amount of resources than singles— with their pizza date nights, Caribbean cruise vacations, Costco shopping, etc. Humans get fat and happy when they’re together. It’s biology, the desire to mate, keep the species going, and prosper. It is our undoing.

The closest I’ve ever gotten to a woman was in college. Her name was Julie. I was not attracted to her, but she was attractive, like the way a finger painting or clay mug is attractive. Her zeal for genetics nearly equaled my own. We met as lab partners, where our ideas fed off each other. Soon we were frequent partners in study. That’s when I first told her about CRISPR, a dawning gene editing process of that time. Want bigger muscles? Just edit the gene. Want to change your predisposition to breast cancer? Just edit the gene. It all seemed so hopeful. 

Of course, we know now that editing one gene causes a snowball of faults in others. CRISPR was abandoned after UK scientists turned two embryos into cancer soup. But in those days, it looked promising, especially to an young and ambitious geneticists like me and Julie.

We dug deep and together innovated what I still believe was the first CRISPR delivery system. This would be our big break. Our ticket to think tanks and world changing projects. All we needed was live test subjects, and I knew exactly where to find them. 

The University of Ohio’s anthropology department had several chimps that were being taught sign language. Chimp

DNA is just a hairs difference from human DNA. These, I suggested to Julie, would be our subjects. Our Adams and our Eves.

I lied to the anthropology department about taking blood samples for genetic analysis to get close to the chimps. We’d actually be giving several of them CRISPR injections that would change fur color from brown to blonde. One injection, and in a few weeks, there would be blonde chimps walking around. What would they think of that?

Everything went to plan. The sedated chimps stretched before us. I handed Julie the syringe with the CRISPR. I watched her watching the chimps, gently stroking their fur; her gaze softening in an almost motherly way. It was then that I knew she wouldn’t be able to do it. She took my syringe of CRISPR and left without a word.

We didn’t speak much after that. Last I heard of her, she got married like everyone else. Had a family like everyone else. Doomed the world, like everyone else. 

Part 3: You can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs

There is an investigative journalist from Midland, Ohio that won’t be going home to his family. For that, I am sorry. And although I will eventually be a murderer many times over, this reporter was my first and most intentional. It couldn’t be helped.

Jim Freznek was a consumer watchdog reporter, which ironically put us on the same side. Although he didn’t see it that way. 

According to his Facebook, he had a beautiful wife, age 44, and a son, age 5–a happy family by all appearances. 

He was good at his job. His face frequented local news reports about storms, traffic jams, ribbon cuttings — small-time, salt-of-the-Earth stories. He caught his big break when a fracking company moved into Midland and turned the local drinking water into cancerous sludge. That was his rocket to an investigative reporting position for CBS. His big break, the event that set our paths on an inevitable collision course. Come what may. 

I imagine he literally jumped out of his seat when he got an email from a whistleblower at our virus research center in Wuhan. Of course, we knew who the whistleblower was. We hired a lackey to audit the movement of specimen inventory. He felt lucky to be there and was woefully under qualified. That was the whole point. We needed things to be loose. But we underestimated him. He caught on. And so he sent the email and sealed Jim’s fate. It’s regrettable. 

I didn’t plan to kill Jim when he came to my office. In fact, I planned to tell him everything. The damage had already been done. The wildly contagious virus had already escaped Wuhan and infected most of the world. And my suicide was already top of mind and in motion. No real damage could be done. Jim would be my chance to explain everything, my righteous vessel for sanctification.

When he walked into my office, he carried the air of a man who already knew all the answers. How wrong he was. I denied nothing, and then I expounded. His face grew pale and flat as I explained how we’d engineered a virus to compromise DNA. How we’d let it spread to billions of men, women, and children. How it caused a fatal mutation in heart tissue at the age of 45. 

But I also explained our situation, how the Earth’s soil was going barren from industrialized farming. That glaciers would be gone by 2100. That wars, violence, and super storms would only get worse as temperatures became unbearable.

He sat there for a long time, stoic. It was a lot to take in, I’m sure. And then he leaned forward and said, “My wife just got over the virus, and she turns 45 next week.”

I expected outrage. I expected self righteous judgement. I did not expect him to jump across the desk and place his hands around my neck, which is what he did. 

I tried to relax into the consequences of my sin; honestly, I did. Jim’s hands squeezed. My heart palpitated into my neck. Every vessel of my blood fought for oxygen. This was it, the valley of the shadow of death. I was ready, but my biology was not. I gripped deep into the carpet for resolve. Then I felt the handle of a stray letter opener, and in an instant, I had driven the blade deep into Jim’s neck. I hadn’t done it consciously, of course. A survival instinct had taken control, once again betrayed by biology. 

I watched in horror as Jim went still on my office rug. My chance for redemption bled out before my eyes. 

His death will forever be my deepest regret. We were on the same side, fighting the good fight to stop the pillage of the Earth and its people. We had very different ways of going about it. His was a long game, too long. We did not have the time. 

Part 4: An ode to harsh medicine

They say suicide is the coward’s way out. In my case, that couldn’t be further from the truth. I’m not a hypocrite, that’s all. I will be among the first to relieve the Earth of my burden, bravely walking into uncertain darkness to lighten the load for the hard road ahead. Come what may. 

Because of what is being done today, there is hope. Everyone knows that this is a time for action. We’ve run out of road, and everyone knows it. No one wants change to come at their expense, but there is no other way. That is why I’ve done what I’ve done. Despite what you might think, I do not hate humanity. On the contrary, I love it. I love it so much, that I’m willing to pay the check to preserve it. I wish that I could cover the bill on my own. 

After being sentenced to death for corrupting the youth of Athens, Socrates, one of the greatest thinkers and teachers of all time, leaned over to his friend Crito and said: Crito, we owe a cock to the god Asklepios (the greek god of healing) - Pay it and do not neglect it. Then he drank hemlock and died. I say to you that we also owe a sacrifice to the god of healing. Let us pay it and not neglect it. 

And so now as I drink my own hemlock, literally, I leave humanity feeling hopeful that our own healing has begun. 

• Dick Neilson