The Great Mediocrity

On a morning in the year 2084, sunlight filtered through the synthetic glass dome onto the neonatal care centre. There were no cries of infants here, only the rhythmic pulse of life-monitoring equipment, like some electronic lullaby.

A woman lay on an intelligent birthing bed, fine beads of sweat dotting her forehead. She was a “birth coordinator”, someone the system had determined possessed the optimal uterine environment and psychological qualities for nurturing the next generation.

This was her third time fulfilling this duty. The previous two children had already been sent to their respective foster families: one had become a marine ecosystem restoration specialist, and the other served as an atmospheric engineer on Mars. She had never seen what those two children looked like as grown-ups. The system said this was better for both parties, avoiding unnecessary emotional entanglements.

“Congratulations, madam, another healthy baby boy,” said the birthing robot in gentle synthetic tones. Its mechanical arms carefully cradled the newborn with movements more precise than any human nurse. According to protocol, the moment the umbilical cord was cut, subcutaneous sensors should transmit the infant’s initial genetic profile, neural reflex patterns, and bioelectric characteristics back to the central database of “ARGUS”. The entire process took no more than 0.3 seconds, faster than a human blink.

However, that night witnessed an event of extremely low probability: a rare solar storm swept across Earth’s magnetosphere, triggering microsecond-level electromagnetic pulses globally. Most equipment had redundant protection, but precisely at the moment this baby boy’s data was uploading, three base stations simultaneously experienced quantum entanglement state collapse.

In that instant, the baby boy’s genetic data suffered peculiar corruption during transmission. In ARGUS’s database, his code wasn’t the standard A, T, C, G base pair arrangement, but rather an unparseable…