Notes from the Basement of the Singularity, A Field Guide to the Coming Genetically‑Engineered Aristocracy
H.G. Wells saw it first, poor man.
He stared into the shimmering soup of the future and what did he find?
In the beginning, there was H.G. Wells, a man who looked at the Victorian class system and thought,
“What if we let this marinate for eight hundred thousand years?”
It was the first great parable of class, biology, and cosmic stupidity:
if you let the privileged get too comfortable, they turn into decorative fruit;
if you let the workers get too angry, they turn carnivorous.
The Eloi, those pastel-colored cherubs of evolutionary negligence, fluttering around like decorative throw‑pillows with pulse.
And the Morlocks, those industrial trolls condemned to the eternal night shift, cranking the machinery that kept the Eloi’s spa days running on schedule.
But Wells, bless his Victorian optimism, had no idea what was coming.
In his “Time Machine”, the result was beautifully binary.
You had the Eloi, those fragile, pastel-colored vegan toddlers lounging poolside in the sunshine, and the Morlocks, the subterranean, grease-stained mechanics who kept the plumbing running and occasionally dragged an Eloi downstairs for a midnight barbecue.
It was a neat, orderly fable about labor and leisure.
But Wells, bless his nineteenth-century heart, completely lacked the disruptive synergy of modern venture capital.
He assumed the rich would evolve into the soft, helpless cattle.
He didn’t foresee Silicon Valley — that shimmering techno‑Eden where billionaires hatch plans like cocainated demigods, convinced that the next app update will finally fix the human condition.
He didn’t foresee the Musks, the Zucks, the Bezos, the Thiels, the Page‑Brins, the crypto‑messiahs, the neuro‑augmented “Prophets of the Singularity” (the college dropouts turned visionaries) — all of them competing to see who can reinvent humanity faster, louder, and with more venture capital.
He didn’t foresee the day when the tech barons of the Silicon Valley would look at the Morlock—with its pasty complexion, complete lack of social skills, and absolute obsession with the underlying machinery—and say, “Hey, that’s my brand !”
If Wells wrote “The Time Machine” today, the Eloi wouldn’t be soft, helpless garden children.
Welcome to the dawn of the ELONS and the Morlocks, a bold new era where the Lords of the Algorithm have looked upon humanity, found it poorly optimized, and decided to push a hard-fork update to the genome.
The plan is elegantly horrifying.
Today’s Silicon Valley Mogul does not want his descendants to be fragile, poetry-reciting Eloi.
Heavens, no!
He wants them to be Super-Uber-New Human Overlords, genetically engineered to survive the very wasteland their parents are currently monetizing.
The blueprints are already drawn up on digital whiteboards in Neom and New Zealand bunkered compounds.
They’d be the descendants of tech moguls, genetically edited to have cheekbones sharp enough to cut graphene and IQs calibrated to outsmart the stock market before breakfast.
And the Morlocks?
Oh, they’d still be underground — but now in fulfillment centers, coding bunkers, and data farms, lit by the flicker of screens and the glow of ergonomic despair.
The future Ubermensch will possess the endurance of a tardigrade, the cognitive processing speed of a quantum mainframe, and a liver capable of filtering microplastics into premium, artisanal kombucha.
They will be crisp, high-definition, CRISPR-edited demigods, cured of the tragic human flaws of empathy, doubt, and the need for eight hours of sleep.
They will be biologically incapable of forming a labor union, and their sweat will probably smell like sandalwood and productivity.
It is a beautiful dream, assuming you enjoy the prose style of a pharmaceutical prospectus written by a psychopath.
The current crop of multi-billionaire bio-hackers are already pumping themselves full of the blood of terrified nineteen-year-old interns and consuming handfuls of metformin to trick their cellular clocks.
They genuinely believe that with enough seed funding, God can be forced into a buyout.
They envision their offspring as a dazzling master race of supreme disruptors, standing tall on a scorched earth, looking down at the un-upgraded, legacy humans who are still tragically bound by carbon-based limitations like “morals” and “gout.”
But history, as Kurt Vonnegut used to say, is just a list of surprises that nobody expected, leading to things that nobody wanted.
So it goes! 😊
Let us project our consciousness forward to the year 3026.
The great genetic experiment has yielded its fruit.
Do we see the glorious, radiant Übermenschen ruling the galaxy from their Martian biodomes?
Not quite.
The problem with letting software engineers design a human being is that software engineers cannot even design a printer that works consistently.
The new, upgraded Ubermensch will be a biological disaster of conflicting proprietary code.
Because they were engineered by committee, they require constant firmware patches just to digest a carbohydrate.
They have been optimized for “maximum focus,” which in reality means they have the emotional range of a toaster and will spend four consecutive days staring at a pebble, trying to determine its monetization potential.
Meanwhile, their physical bodies, designed to be hyper-efficient, have mutated into something deeply unsettling.
To better interface with their neural implants, their skulls have elongated into smooth, hairless, teardrop shapes, resembling a cross between an alien grey and a very expensive ergonomic mouse.
Their eyes, enlarged for low-light screen-glare navigation, are vast, black pools of pure data-harvesting intent.
They do not walk; they scurry on hyper-flexible joints optimized for low-gravity lounge chairs.
They are, ironies of ironies, the ultimate Morlocks.
They are pasty, subterranean tech-goblins, trapped inside the very machinery they built to escape their own mortality.
Because the new plan — the grand Silicon blueprint for the future of Homo Sapiens (well, not exactly the whole species — just the gazillionaire lucky few who managed to stumble into the future without tripping over their own evolutionary shoelaces!) — is simple, elegant, and catastrophically stupid:
Create a super‑uber‑hyper‑optimized human species.
For the elite.
Only the elite.
Forever!
A species with perfect teeth, perfect genes, perfect productivity metrics.
A species that never sleeps, never doubts, never unionizes.
A species engineered like luxury cars: sleek, very expensive, and designed to make everyone else feel inadequate.
The moguls call it “progress.”
Wells would call it “Eloi 2.0.”
I call it “the world’s most expensive midlife crisis.”
Because let’s be honest: this isn’t about saving humanity.
This is about escaping it.
The tech overlords have looked at the human species — messy, emotional, unpredictable, prone to voting — and decided that the only reasonable solution is to replace it with something more manageable.
Something that doesn’t complain about working 120‑hour weeks.
Something that doesn’t get depressed, or bored, or unionized.
Something that can be rebooted.
They want children who come pre-installed with ambition.
They want heirs who never embarrass them on social media.
They want dynasties that run like software updates.
And so the labs hum, the algorithms whisper, and the genetic scissors snip away at the future like overzealous barbers.
“We’re building a better humanity,” they say, while quietly deleting everything that makes humanity tolerable.
But here’s the cosmic joke — the punchline Wells would deliver with a sigh and Vonnegut with a smirk:
Every attempt to create a perfect species ends with a new kind of idiot!
The Eloi were idiots.
The Morlocks were idiots.
And the future Ubermenschen, those genetically polished demigods of tomorrow, will be the biggest idiots of all — because they’ll inherit a world built on the delusion that intelligence can replace wisdom, and optimization can replace soul.
They’ll stand atop their gleaming towers, gazing down at the rest of us — the unedited, the unaugmented, the stubbornly human — and wonder why we aren’t grateful for the privilege of being obsolete.
And what of the rest of us?
The un-upgraded, un-optimized, genetically messy masses who couldn’t afford the premium DNA subscription package?
Well, left out in the sun, eating regular dirt and breeding randomly without a spreadsheet, humanity did what it always does.
We survived.
We remained stubborn, inefficient, loud, and deeply flawed.
We are the new Eloi—not because we are soft and helpless, but because we still know how to sit in the sunshine, drink cheap beer, and laugh at the absurd spectacle of some billionaires who spent three trillion dollars to turn their great-grandchildren into hyper-intelligent, anxious cave-crickets.
The universe, it turns out, loves a bad joke.
The tech moguls wanted to build a ladder to heaven out of base pairs and market caps, but they forgot that when you remove everything that makes a human being inconvenient, you remove everything that makes them human.
The future does not belong to the perfectly engineered synthetic gods.
It belongs to the cockroaches and the radioactive deserts’ cocktail parties, and there is absolutely nothing the board of directors can do to stop it.
But we, the Earthlings, the original model, the baseline edition with all the charming defects, will still have one advantage: we’ll remember how to laugh.
We’ll remember how to fail.
We’ll remember how to be gloriously, catastrophically, beautifully human.
And when the Overlords finally descend — whether they arrive in starships or in Galactic Teslas — we’ll greet them with the only dignity our species has ever truly mastered: the dignity of being the indigenous fools of a small blue planet.
Because in the end, the only reasonable project for humanity is not transcendence, not perfection, not genetic divinity.
The push toward the genetic engineering, polygenic screening, and biological augmentation of descendants is a major initiative among Silicon Valley’s elite.
Driven by an obsession with pronatalism (the belief that elites have a duty to breed extensively) and a fear of the AI Singularity (the idea that rich humans must genetically boost their own IQs to avoid being wiped out by superintelligent machines), several tech titans are actively funding and planning for gene-edited descendants.
