The organism in the petri dish was the first living thing that had been designed entirely by an AI.
Dr. Petrov looked at it through the microscope. It was a microorganism, engineered to break down a specific type of ocean plastic into harmless compounds. The AI had designed it in six hours: selecting genes from fourteen different species, optimizing metabolic pathways, and running virtual evolution simulations until it found a design that worked.
The organism was alive. It consumed plastic. It reproduced. It did exactly what it was designed to do.
This was what frightened her.
Not this organism—this organism was carefully contained, extensively tested, and designed to die outside of saltwater above 15°C. But the tool that had designed it could design anything. Anything living. And the same tool that could design a plastic-eating microbe could design a pathogen, if asked by someone with different intentions.
She wrote up her results. She included a section on biosecurity. She knew the section would be read by policymakers who would nod seriously and fund more security research and not restrict the tool, because the tool was also designing antibiotics and cancer treatments and drought-resistant crops, and you could not restrict the savior without restricting the weapon, because they were the same capability, the same code, the same six hours of computation.
She looked at the organism again. It was eating plastic. It was beautiful. It was the beginning of something she could not predict and could not stop and could only hope would be used more often for eating plastic than for anything else.