io9 is proud to present fiction from LIGHTSPEED MAGAZINE . Once a month, we feature a story from Lightspeed’s current issue. This month’s selection is “The CRISPR Cookbook: A Guide to Biohacking Your Own Abortion in a Post-Roe World” by MKRNYILGLD. You can read the story below or listen to the podcast on Lightspeed’s website. Enjoy!

If you’re reading this—on some godforsaken imageboard, or dog-eared book page, or in encrypted base pairs sequenced off 3D-printed oligos—you’re probably grappling with a pretty tough decision right now.

I’m not judging you. I know how it goes. You tried your best but nothing’s infallible, or you slipped up one night, or he just straight-up went, your biological clock’s ticking, and hacked your birth control, knowing once it happens you won’t have a choice. The second his sperm enters your egg, he’s done, back to his star-studded career cranking out Science and Cell papers, and you’re stuck at home—with everything from your calories to your screen time dictated to you by Big Brother—hoping your research project will still be waiting for you after the baby pops out.

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Listen: in the twenty-five years since the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe, we might’ve had our rights chipped away, little by little—but we’ve gained so much more. There’s a law of equivalent exchange that absolutely cannot be fucked with. The more protests get crushed on the streets, the more bubbles up underneath. And what’s under America is a bioreactor. A rising in every single one of the trillions of cells that make up our bodies, our chromosomes, in every single one of our tens of thousands of genes. They said you don’t have a choice, but, by reading this, you’re making one.

You’re taking back your DNA.

It’s actually very simple. What you’re going to do is hack your immune system. Think about it. What’s the immune system’s job? It detects foreign, or non-self, cells and destroys them. But it doesn’t always succeed. One of immunology’s biggest mysteries was how an embryo can develop without triggering the mother’s immune system. I say was, because in 2037, scientists finally figured it out. Like many biologists who solved something big, they were working in another field entirely, without even realizing the significance of their findings.

Cancer is another blind spot of the immune system. In part because tumor cells share so much DNA with their host—they are their host, plus a scattering of cancerous mutations. Scientists had reasoned for decades that they could tweak the immune system to go after those little variations. They tried combinations on combinations of gene deletions, tweaks, duplications, charged patients millions for the hope of personalized medicines. But they could never get it to work. Even their souped-up immune cells weren’t sensitive enough. Models predicted that 40% of a tumor’s genome would have to differ from the host’s as much as another person’s does in order for the treatment to work.

Do you see where I’m going with this? What contains even more non-self DNA than a tumor? What gets 50% of its DNA from another individual entirely? An individual who’s taken to coming home and wrapping his arms around you, hands on your stomach, after a hard day’s work—whispering in your ear about how he knows how hard it’s been for you, but he just has to get this faculty position, then he’ll be there for you and the baby 100%, he’ll make it up to you, he’s asking for a small lab for you to run, attached to his own. And have you started thinking of names for your son?

I’m not going to tell you the procedure leaves no traces at all. Like any surgery, it leaves scars. Not on your body, but your genome. Not on an individual, but the entire human race. Your body will no longer be able to host any cells with non-self DNA. That means no tumors, but also no grafts, no organ transplants, and YOU WILL NEVER BE ABLE TO GET PREGNANT AGAIN.

Still reading? I thought so. There’s a reason our country’s birth rate has been plummeting worse than the stock market, year after year.

What does it say when we would rather choose sterility than abide by our country’s laws? That we would rather give up on having children than be forced to birth one? What does it say when our country’s best scientists are trying to develop artificial wombs, trying to develop tools to tear apart genomes and undo what we’ve done rather than address the reason we did it to ourselves in the first place?

The Department of Homeland Biosecurity thinks they know the reason: We’re crazy bitches. They laughed when this protocol first started circulating online, reasoning the only ones who’d do it were the kind of psychos that shouldn’t be reproducing anyway. Undesirables sterilizing themselves, what a win! Then the tides started turning. More and more of us looked at the world burning, more and more of us looked at their sons, the next-gen of DHB men—and instead of reproducing, we picked up pipettes.

Now we’re bioterrorists radicalizing the birthing population, enemies of the State who want to eliminate the proud, American race. How could we be so treasonous? How could we be so unnatural?

What a word, unnatural. You only have to look at Nature herself to understand. When an organism becomes sick, sometimes it can’t get better on its own. Sometimes the very systems that are supposed to patrol the body, eliminating that sickness, ignore it and let it perpetuate instead. In that case, it’s up to the individual cells making up that organism to act on their own. Sometimes when a cell becomes infected, so full of pathogens it can no longer function, it chooses to commit a process called apoptosis. It destroys itself so the rest of the body can become healthy. But that’s an overly simplistic view. Apoptosis has evolved over millions of years into a process integral to development itself. It’s how the webbed paws of our embryos develop into fingers, how our blood vessels are guided, how extraneous neurons shape the mature circuitry of the human brain. It’s the exact opposite of suicide.

This protocol? It’s old news. Like I said, the reversal of Roe was just the beginning. We figured out how to manipulate our genomes out of necessity—and now we’re doing it for all kinds of reasons. You want to keep this pregnancy after reading this? Cool. But maybe you’re interested in something else now. You want to alter your baby’s genome so it’s not biologically related to your sperm donor? You want face mods to fool the cams? You want claws? It’s possible. It’s all possible. DNA is our blueprint, and now it’s fully customizable. In every. Single. Way.

We’re the apoptosis shaping the development of our species. Before us, humanity’s genetic diversity came from reproduction. But what happens when we don’t need that step anymore? What will we become? What are we becoming? You want to see? You want to teach someone? You don’t believe me? Keep reading.

This is only chapter one.

MKRNYILGLD is a biologist who can give birth. Twitter: @MKRNYILGLD .

Please visit LIGHTSPEED MAGAZINE to read more great science fiction and fantasy. This story first appeared in the September 2022 issue, which also features work by Jenny Rae Rappaport, Kristina Ten, Dominque Dickey, Cody Goodfellow, R J Theodore, Martin Cahill, Karl Schroeder, and more. You can wait for this month’s contents to be serialized online, or you can buy the whole issue right now in convenient ebook format for just $3.99, or subscribe to the ebook edition via this link .

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