Challenge #01563-D102: The Birth of the Vardian Empire
Follow up to "Designer Babies". Other less reputable Medical facilities, pounce on the process, Dr Vardian is praised for actually trying to talk vanity parents out of bad choices instead of offering a range of "options", athletic ability, perfect pitch, genius I Q. Which leads to the sad question asked by the results. "Why don't I look like Mummy and Daddy?" -- Anon Guest
It only took two years for other gene therapy organisations to spring up in the void left by the Vardian Clinics. Each one had their own patented process, or means of making the desired child come to pass. Each one had a variance in the prices. Very few had as many scruples as Dr. Vardian.
More than a few only supplied blue-eyed, pale-skinned, pale-haired genes for prospective parents. And so very few noticed for such a long time that that, alone, should have been alarming. But the real alarm didn't happen until those infant geniuses were learning about family traits in their second year of schooling.
Many of those physically perfect, blond, blue-eyed, pale-skinned children went home to parents so very different from themselves and asked their parents, "Am I adopted?" And, to a parent, they all acted shocked that their beloved child could even suggest such a thing.
And, since a bulk of these perfect children were also very intelligent, they found means to do their own tests. Some sampled their parents' DNA. Others simply researched their own families. And what happened next... well... It's a devastating thing when intelligent children decide to rebel. By their fourth year of schooling, they had all figured out that they did not truly belong to their parents and, more or less, that they were all related.
Nobody in history had seen a gang of geniuses create chaos before. Nobody wanted to see it again.
Dr Vardian, now a very old man, had his reputation return to the good books. Vardian clinics came back from the dead as the copy-cats were shut down with accusations of diversity eradication and attempted genocide. The Vardian Clinic priced the blond, blue-eyed genetic model outside the reach of most but the most insistent of clients.
Thanks to the genius gangs and the trouble they made, there was a lot of hostility against the Vardian Children and any genius copycats. For the first time in modern history, favouritism turned away from the pale-skinned, pale-haired and physically advantaged. And it was those people, and Dr Vardian's family, who went with good intentions down a deep-time wormhole.
Humanity assumed that these geniuses would die out of their own hubris, or their own genetic bottleneck inside of two hundred years. They assumed that the Vardian colony would be another in the long list of Terran colonies that managed to kill themselves with their own ideals.
They were wrong. They were very, very wrong.
[AN: This story follows up from this one here. You threw me for a loop, Anon, I was looking for the title I thought you were supplying]
[Image (c) Can Stock Photo / HaywireMedia]
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