Will Our Kids Biologically Enhance?
This won’t look like cyborgs from a movie; it will look like “high-tech braces.” As the job market becomes hyper-competitive, parents will feel like they are neglecting their children if they don’t give them a “neural boost” for focus or a genetic tweak for health. Kids may even feel intense pressure to “upgrade” their memory, their wit, or physical strength, just so they can continue to relate to their peers.
Some Early Evidence: The biohacking market is projected to hit $22.5 billion by late 2026. Following the FDA’s approval of Casgevy (the first CRISPR therapy), the “stigma” of editing human biology has largely evaporated, transforming genetic and cognitive “optimization” into a standard consumer product.
The Optimized
What follows is a work of fiction — an imaginative look at one possible future, offered not to alarm but to help us think, pray, and prepare.
I found the consent packet in the recycling bin. Not the whole thing — just the parts he thought I wouldn’t recognize: glossy trifold pages, a pre-op checklist, a return envelope with a logo that looked like a clean, white cathedral — CEREBRAL INTEGRATION SERVICES — and, folded one too many times, a brochure titled Competitive Again.
I stood there with my hands in dishwater, watching paper soak and warp, as if the words might dissolve into something less real. Behind me, the house hummed with ordinary life: the dryer thumping, the dog sighing, the kettle beginning to complain. Ordinary sounds, and my heart suddenly refusing to keep time with them.
“Mom?” he called from the living room. “You okay?”
I dried my hands and walked in. Adam sat on the couch in his socks, too calm for a man who’d just done something irreversible. His eyes were bright — not manic, not glazed. Focused. Like someone who had finally stepped into his own body after years of bumping into doorways.
I held up the brochure. “What is this?”
He smiled, almost relieved. “You found it. Good. I didn’t want to hide it forever.”
“Did you — ” My throat tightened. “Did you do this?”
“Last week,” he said, and leaned forward as if sharing good news. “It’s not a transplant like… swapping brains. It’s a neural graft. Interface tissue. They seed it along the frontal pathways. It integrates. It’s me, but — ” he searched for the word, then snapped his fingers once. “Faster.”
I heard the phrase last week the way you hear a car skid: too late to stop, only bracing for impact.
“Why?” I asked, and hated how thin my voice sounded.
He didn’t flinch. “Because I’m tired, Mom.” He spread his hands. “I’m tired of being the guy who’s ‘solid’ but not ‘exceptional.’ Tired of watching people with augmentations get hired and pretend it’s just ‘grit.’ And it’s not just the work. It’s the guys. We go out, and they’re talking in shorthand, processing half the conversation before I’ve even processed the first sentence. I’m the only one left sitting in the lag, the slow friend everyone has to wait for. I wanted to belong again.”
I sat down across from him, the brochure still in my hand. “What can you do now?” I asked, because I needed to know what had been bought.
Adam’s eyes flicked up and to the side — an old tell from childhood when he was counting in his head. Except now it looked like he wasn’t counting. He was accessing.
“Okay,” he said, eager. “Watch. Give me any paragraph you remember. Anything. Or — no — ask me something. Anything. Ask me something hard.”
“Adam — ”
“Please,” he said, and there was a boyish hope in it that made my chest ache. “Just test it.”
So I tried to protect myself with the trivial. “What’s the capital of — ” and then I stopped, disgusted at the thought of turning my son into a party trick.
He filled the silence anyway. “Mom, I can map out a whole conversation in advance,” he said softly. “I can hear where your worry is going to land before you say it. I can draft emails that get replies. I can read a contract and spot the hidden clause. I can do mental math like it’s breathing. I… I can hold more.”
It sounded like a miracle until you listened closely and heard the hunger underneath it: please let this be enough. I looked at him — my son with his familiar hands, his familiar mouth, the little scar by his eyebrow from falling off a bike at ten. And yet something in his presence had sharpened, as if he’d been filed down to efficiency.
“You’re excited,” I said.
“I’m relieved,” he corrected, and then grinned. “Also excited. I — Mom, I got an offer. They fast-tracked me. They said my ‘cognitive throughput’ is…rare. I start in two weeks.”
Two weeks. A job. A future. All the things I’d prayed for. And still my stomach turned, because I knew what he’d traded: not memory or personality, maybe, but limits. The humble boundaries God had built into us like guardrails.
“Did you tell Dad?” I asked.
His smile faltered. “I didn’t do anything wrong.”
He leaned back, impatience flickering. “It’s medicine, Mom. Like a pacemaker.”
“A pacemaker keeps a heart beating,” I said. “This… changes how you think. How you decide. How you resist temptation. How you love. Don’t pretend those are the same.”
He opened his mouth, then closed it. His eyes — so quick now — softened. “You’re scared of it.”
“I’m scared for you,” I said. “For the part of you that was allowed to be slow. The part that had to pray when you didn’t know. The part that had to wait and suffer and grow.”
He looked away, jaw working. “Slow doesn’t cut it anymore.”
There it was — the whole argument in a single sentence. Not philosophical. Financial. Not prideful. Desperate. I wanted to pull him into my arms and rewind time. Instead I did the only thing a mother can do when she can’t undo: I stayed.
“Come with me,” I said. “Right now.”
“To where?”
“To the chapel,” I said. “We’re going to sit with Jesus for fifteen minutes. No talking. No proving.” My voice shook, but I kept it steady. “Just presence.”
He almost laughed — almost. Then he looked at my face and something in him, underneath the new speed, recognized the old bond. “Fine,” he said, standing. “Fifteen minutes.”
On the drive, he spoke excitedly about the new opportunities that were now open to him and how he would finally feel like he belonged. I listened, but it was hard to keep up. It was an odd sensation, trying to keep up with his new multi-threaded stream of consciousness, as if I was the dial-up connection to his 5G signal. Even when I tried to edge in a thought or two, he was finishing my sentences before I could even draw the breath to speak them.
The chapel was a mercy. Stepping inside, the silence didn’t just meet us; it seemed to demand that the world outside — and the world inside Adam’s head — stop its frantic racing. Here, his new abilities found nothing to optimize, nothing to process. The red sanctuary lamp burned with the same low, steady flame it had since I was a girl. We knelt.
After a while, he whispered, not triumphant now, not defensive — just young again. “Mom…do you think God is mad?”
I didn’t have a clean answer. I had only the truth I’ve learned the hard way: God does not love us because we’re impressive.
“I think God wants you whole,” I said. “And I think we’re going to have to learn what ‘whole’ means now.”
He nodded, eyes fixed forward, as if for the first time since the procedure he’d met something that couldn’t be sped up. We stayed until the fifteen minutes ran out — and then, because neither of us moved, longer.