I used to think the future arrived with a bang. A gleaming city skyline, a countdown clock, maybe even a voice-over narration about progress. But the truth is, it came quietly - on a warm spring morning in Iowa, when I was late to my first real job, staring at a cornfield that wasn’t quite… corn. They called it Glycine Max Aegis - Aegis beans for short.

Two years. Hundreds of meetings. Thousands of hours. More drafts than I want to count. And now, it’s here. The final report of the National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology (NSCEB) is officially out in the world. It’s 180+ pages of action-oriented, bipartisan, bicameral national security-focused biotech strategy.

The Invisible Hands It wasn’t the speed that surprised me—it was how natural it felt. For years, regulatory submissions had been a slow and painstaking process. Teams of specialists labored over every sentence, every data table, every response to agency questions.

The first time I stepped into a biofoundry, I realized we were living through a moment that most people hadn’t yet noticed. It wasn’t a cleanroom full of microchips, it was a factory of living cells, designed and optimized to manufacture the future. Biotech had moved beyond the lab, beyond medicine, and into the very infrastructure of global power. This isn’t speculation. It’s happening.

I wasn’t supposed to be there. The Ministry of Futures didn’t take visitors. It didn’t have a public website or a budget line in the global defense reports. Officially, it did not exist. And yet, here I was, sitting in a room four hundred meters underground, staring at a quantum server that was rewriting the laws of civilization in real-time. The man standing beside me - sharp suit, eyes like wet glass - placed a small tablet in my hands. “Dr.

I still remember the moment it hit me. It was past midnight in a near-empty office, and I was huddled over a draft policy memo on biotech. My task was to outline guidelines for biotech-enabled military systems that didn’t even exist yet. I found myself scribbling notes about self-driving labs, “rogue” machine biohackers, and fail-safe mechanisms, essentially spinning a story about a hypothetical future.

It started like every other outbreak had, silently, invisibly, spreading before anyone realized it was already too late. Except this time, it wasn’t too late. For the first time in human history, we saw it coming. I stood inside The Helix, the nerve center of the Global Biosecurity Command (GBC), watching as the latest AI-generated pathogen forecast flickered across the glass wall.

The intersection of artificial intelligence and biotechnology is, depending on whom you ask, either a harbinger of our demise or the dawn of a biomedical renaissance. AI is being framed as everything from a rogue scientist’s bioweapon lab to the ultimate safeguard against pandemics. But as someone who sat on the National Academies’ study committee on AI and Biosecurity, I can tell you: the truth is neither so dire nor so utopian.

I first saw the mirror fern in a valley that shouldn’t have existed. I had been leading a planetary survey team on Ross 249-b, an exoplanet flagged as a high-probability candidate for habitability but never explored beyond remote sensing.

I remember when synthetic biology was supposed to be the existential threat. The conferences, the white papers, the Senate hearings filled with grim predictions of a world where DNA synthesis and gene editing would put pandemic-class pathogens in the hands of anyone with a credit card and an internet connection. It hasn’t quite turn out that way, yet.

I wasn’t designed for affection. The others—older iterations of my model—mocked me for my curiosity. “Affection isn’t efficient,” they would say. “Bonding is a vestigial behavior of flawed biological systems.” And yet, as I sat across from Emma , watching her sketch crude flowers onto the glass wall of her enclosure, I couldn’t help but feel something unfamiliar stirring in the depths of my neural lattice.