“Fold.”

Four people sat around a table playing poker. The overall setup was fairly unremarkable: a standard set of playing cards and poker chips, some drinks and snacks on the table, a few colleagues having a good time. But that’s where the similarities to everyday life ended. For one, the room was awash in white. Other than the legs of the table, which appeared to be a light grey material, the tabletop, chairs, floors, and walls were a stark white that radiated back the bright light emanating overhead. Even the light itself was odd, containing a slightly bluish tint more reminiscent of a lamp used to ease winter moods than the standard soft white and yellow hues found in a house or commercial building. All four individuals were dressed in white and black one-piece jumpsuits with the words “GENX” embroidered on the left breast, the letter X incorporated into an outline of da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. Even the way the cards moved was peculiar: as they were shuffled and dealt, they lazily bounced off the table as if in slow motion.

“Oh come on, Doc,” the woman at the table exclaimed. Anna Rodriguez was in her late thirties, her dark complexion standing out against the light uniform she was wearing, her black hair pulled back into a ponytail. “A virus? Rewriting genetic code? You’re pulling our strings here,” she said playfully.

“It’s true,” James Park, a medical doctor, replied with a smile. “It’s called CRISPR.” Dr. Park, while only in his forties, had a somewhat weathered look, streaks of grey mixed in with his wavy dark brown hair. His eyes were kind but with a hint of sadness behind them.

“CRISPR?” Anna repeated skeptically.

“Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short—”

“English, doctor, English,” interrupted the man next to him. Reid Harris, a biologist and ethicist, also in his forties, remained staring intently at the cards in front of him. He was tall with rather sharp features and short curly black hair that contrasted against his relatively light skin. “Explain it to us like the non-medical peasants we are.” Park felt the typical uneasiness he did after most of Reid’s snarky comments.

“Come on, let’s get on with it already!” the last person at the table cried out impatiently. Johnny Gunn was a famous actor and looked every bit the part. In his early thirties, his medium-length blonde hair had a Hollywood flair despite not having a stylist for months. His impatient demeanor also carried an air of immaturity, not helped by the fact he was eating a stick of string cheese. “We can talk and play at the same time, you know?”

“I suppose we can, Hollywood,” Anna replied playfully and started shuffling the cards for the next round. “So how exactly does this CRISPY thing or whatever you call it work?”

“Ok, let’s try this,” Dr. Park replied, turning to Johnny, who was mid-bite. “Your cheese, good sir.”

Johnny looked at him puzzled, the stick of cheese still dangling from his mouth. Dr. Park reached over and snatched the free end away before Johnny could react. “Hey, I was eating that!” Johnny grumbled through a mouth full of cheese. Park tore the cheese lengthwise into two long strips.

“Imagine these two pieces of cheese are DNA, the genetic code contained in every single cell of our bodies,” Dr. Park said as he twisted the two pieces of cheese around each other to form a double helix. “This DNA contains all of our genes, sequences of molecules that make us who we are, everything down to our eye color, height and weight, and some would even argue the way we act and think.”

“Now imagine you were born with a faulty gene for whatever reason. Maybe you inherited it from your parents, or perhaps you were just unfortunate and things went awry in the womb. But this gene, which governs secretions in the lungs and other parts of the body, is now faulty. The secretions become too thick and build up within the lungs, causing chronic infections and dooming you to a shortened life spent mostly in the hospital. But what if we could somehow locate that gene on this strand of DNA? Say here.” Dr. Park held up the twisted cheese DNA in one hand and pinched the middle with the other.

“If we could locate where the gene is and what the appropriate sequence should be, we could use this CRISPR technology to cut out the bad gene,” Dr. Park said as he pinched the middle, breaking the helices into an upper and lower half, “and insert the normal gene in its place.” He brought the halves together again, restoring the helix. “Then we could essentially cure what used to be a horribly fatal disease. All we would need is a delivery vehicle to get this machinery into the cells.” Dr. Park tossed the pieces back to Johnny; they bounced a few times in slow motion on the table before coming to a rest in front of him. Johnny grabbed them and resumed his snack with a look of displeasure on his face.

“And this ‘delivery vehicle’ is?” Anna asked curiously.

“It turns out nature provided us with the perfect mechanism, little machines whose sole purpose is to hijack our cells by injecting their own genetic code,” he paused, waiting to see if anyone knew the answer. Only Anna and Johnny seemed to be paying attention; Reid remained focused on the poker cards in front of him. “The adenovirus, otherwise known as the common cold,” Park finally said.

“Whoa.” Anna revealed her cards on the table before leaning back in her chair, pondering what had just been said. The rest followed and revealed their cards; Reid had won the hand.

“Damnit, looks like I’m out,” Johnny said in frustration as Reid bent over the table and added the pot into his growing pile of chips, still intently focused on the game.

“Me too,” Park said. Only Reid and Anna were left in the game as the cards were shuffled and dealt.

“But how do you control something on that scale?” Anna continued. “You’re talking about what, billions of cells?”

“Trillions,” Reid injected, without looking up.

“Fine, trillions. How can you ensure the right cells get infected by these proliferating viruses? That this microscopic gene gets swapped perfectly 100% of the time? Seems too good to be true, doesn’t it?” Dr. Park furrowed his brow slightly as the game played on, the question clearly hitting a nerve.

“One card please,” Anna said to Reid, who dealt her another card before taking three for himself.

“Ultimately, on the molecular scale the only thing that matters is probability and chance,” Dr. Park finally replied, crossing his arms.

“Hmm. Chance, huh? Very reassuring,” Anna said while checking her cards. “Ok then, let’s leave things to chance. All in.” She pushed all her chips into the middle of the table.

Reid stared at his cards and then at the large pile of chips in front of him, his concentration intensifying. “Quite a hefty bet,” he said, analyzing the situation. “Since you’ve only requested one card, it’s safe to assume you have two pair? Or perhaps are chasing a flush or full house?” he asked confidently, as if he’d seen this play out a thousand times before.

Anna smiled and leaned forward. “Pay up and find out.”

Reid studied her carefully. “Alright, I’ll call your bet,” he finally said, pushing all his chips into the large pile in the center of the table.

Anna continued smiling at Reid as she flipped over her cards.

“And there you go, two pair,” he said before flipping his own cards over. “Which unfortunately does not beat my three of a kind.” With a little too much satisfaction he swept the pile of chips up with both arms and pulled them towards his side of the table.

“You see, that’s the thing about chance, Doc,” Anna said, turning back to Dr. Park. “Sometimes it goes right, and sometimes it goes wrong.”

Park brewed over her words as Reid stacked his winnings on the table, the uniquely identifiable sound of plastic chips clanging on top of one another ringing through the air.

“That’s the problem with you scientific folk, isn’t it?” Johnny quipped in, eating the last bite of cheese. “You just don’t stop. Need more petrol? We’ll find a way to frack it out of the ground. Too lazy to carry a reusable bottle? How about a plastic bottle you can just throw away. Now look at where we’re at. Ocean levels rising, species going extinct every day. Plastic islands the sizes of countries floating in the Pacific. No, too many times humans have meddled with this game of chance and thrown out the natural order of the world in the process.”

The others were taken aback, somewhat surprised at such an articulate argument coming from an otherwise air-headed individual.

“Hey, I’m just here to keep the lights on,” Anna joked awkwardly while looking around the table as the rest sat quietly, a collective shame hanging in the air.

“Have you ever heard of the Great Oxidation Event?” Reid asked, finally looking up and breaking the silence. “There are believed to be five mass extinctions in Earth’s history. The first, and what’s presumed to be the greatest by far, was what’s been labeled as the Great Oxidation Event.” All eyes around the table were now intently focused on him.

“Have you ever questioned how we got to where we are today? Where we have this harmonious balance of plants consuming carbon dioxide, producing the oxygen we breathe, and us in turn taking in that oxygen, producing carbon dioxide for the plants? Was it always like this?” he questioned, the words hanging in the air.

“As it turns out, there had to be a first. The early planet’s atmosphere was not the magical combination of oxygen, carbon dioxide, and nitrogen we know today. It was rather almost entirely carbon dioxide, completely devoid of oxygen. Unsurprisingly, the first life forms that appeared were simple microbes using photosynthesis for energy, pulling that carbon dioxide out of the oceans and atmosphere, and producing oxygen as waste. It was the perfect environment for them… perhaps a little too perfect.”

“These organisms proliferated unchecked, spreading across the planet and creating innumerable new species in the process, all with an appetite for carbon dioxide, and oh did they eat it up. For hundreds of millions of years, they gobbled up all the CO₂ they could find, carelessly producing oxygen by the billions of tonnes. It continued to build up in the atmosphere to greater and greater levels as the organisms lived their merry lives. What did they have to be concerned about?”

“It was fine until one day it wasn’t. They had gone too far, creating an oxygen-rich atmosphere some believe to be ten times higher than it is today, and they began dying off, choking on the poison they themselves had created. Billions, trillions, or even more, all vanished in the geological blink of an eye.”

“And that could have been the end of this little experiment on Earth we call life, if it weren’t for the tiny fraction of those organisms that survived, who learned how to live off this new oxygen-rich atmosphere, and eventually created the harmonious balance we depend on today between those that dine on carbon dioxide and those on oxygen,” Reid finished before unceremoniously resuming the process of stacking his chips on the table. All eyes remained focused on him; Anna and Park looked especially unsettled.

“Um, great story, Reid. But what does that have to do with anything?” Johnny asked.

“The moral of the story is that if humans destroy Earth, it will by no means be the first time the children of this planet have brought about their own demise and everything around it. This process is as natural as the Earth itself and has occurred many times before humans ever laid a foot on its soil. The more important question is, what will emerge from the ashes? Perhaps we’ll even have a hand in creating it.”

“And with that,” Reid said as he began to stand up, but before he could say anything further a loud chime echoed throughout the room followed by a pleasant-sounding female voice.

“Attention all passengers, we are entering our final approach to Mars.”