The Product

The optimization rate was 97.3 percent.

Darius Cole read that number seven times before he understood what it meant. Not the percentage - he understood percentages. He had been an athlete his whole life. He understood metrics, statistics, body fat and sprint times and vertical leap. He understood the language of numbers because it was the only language that had ever been spoken to him with complete sincerity.

What he did not understand was the word optimization. It implied design. It implied intention. It implied that someone, somewhere, had looked at a human being and decided how that human being should be improved.

Subject D-07 demonstrates 97.3 percent optimization rate. Projected peak performance window: ages 22 to 29. Post-peak decline expected to be gradual rather than abrupt, allowing for extended utility in coaching, mentoring, and ambassadorial roles.

D-07. Not Darius. D-07.

He sat on the edge of his hotel bed in the Indianapolis airport Hyatt, the document spread across his knees, and tried to process what Dr. Voss wife - her name was Carol, she had called herself Carol, she had worn a black dress and carried a manila envelope and sat across from him at a diner off Interstate 65, ordering coffee and telling him the story of his own creation - had told him over the course of three hours.

Aegis Biotech had run a program called Project Titan. The goal: create the theoretically perfect athlete through controlled genetic editing. Not one athlete. Seven. D-01 through D-07. Six failures. One success.

D-01: terminated in utero. D-02: terminated in utero. D-03: died at eight months from cardiac arrest. D-04: died at two years from respiratory failure. D-05: survived to age ten. Diagnosed with severe cognitive impairment. Placement: unknown. D-06: survived to age fifteen. Committed suicide at age fifteen. D-07: survived. Thrived.

Darius. Born Darius Cole. Adopted by the Coles of Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Grew up thinking he was special because he was fast and strong and never got sick. Not special because he was special. Special because he was engineered.

I never agreed to this, Darius said.

Carol nodded. She had said this six times in three hours. He knew she was tired. He knew she had driven eight hours from Nashville to deliver this news to a man she had never met. She knew it too.

I know, she said. None of us did.

The hearing was scheduled for Thursday. The league had convened an ethics panel - not a court, not a tribunal, a panel, which meant it had no authority to punish anyone but immense authority to confuse everyone. Aegis lawyers would argue that the editing had been consensual (it had not been - consent requires knowledge, and knowledge requires truth, and neither existed). The league lawyers would argue that the editing had not affected performance (it had - by an estimated 34 percent, according to Dr. Voss internal reports, which Carol had also included in the envelope).

Darius did not care about the hearing. He cared about the question that kept him awake at night, in hotel rooms and rented houses and friends couches, the question that had no answer: if my body is designed, who designed it? If my talent is manufactured, is it mine? If my achievements are the result of someone else blueprint, what am I?

The answer, he suspected, was: product.

The panel convened on Thursday morning. Darius wore a suit that cost more than his father car. He sat in a chair that was slightly too small for his frame. He listened to lawyers use words like bioethical and precedent and gray area and felt himself shrinking, not physically - he was six feet three inches, two hundred and twenty-five pounds, and no word in any language could make him smaller - but internally. Spiritually. Ontologically.

At 2:47 PM, the panel issued its ruling. Darius would not be stripped of his titles. The league would not investigate Aegis. The editing would not be banned, because banning it would require admitting it existed, and admitting it existed would require admitting it had been happening for twelve years, and admitting that would collapse the entire professional sports ecosystem, which was built on a foundation of tiny cheats and bigger lies and a collective agreement to look the other way.

Darius stood up. He walked out of the hearing room. Reporters swarmed him.

How do you feel about the ruling?

Does this change how you view your career?

Do you feel cheated? Do you feel privileged?

He stopped on the steps of the building. The sun was bright. The air was cold. He looked at the cameras - twenty of them, maybe thirty - and he thought about the seven embryos, the six failures, the one success, the 97.3 percent optimization rate, the projected peak performance window of ages twenty-two to twenty-nine.

I never agreed to it, he said.

Then he got in the car and drove away, and his hands shook on the steering wheel, and he did not know if it was because he was angry or because he was relieved or because he was neither.

His heart beat. Fast. Faster than it should have been. Eighty beats per minute. Ninety. A normal man resting heart beat. But Darius was not a normal man. He was D-07. He was the product. And products do not get to choose their specifications.

© 2026 - Authored by Z R ZHANG ( EL9507135 -- パスポート番号[ちゅうごく] 중국 여권 번호 Номер паспорта หมายเลขหนังสือเดินทาง Passnummer رقم جواز السفر CHN Passport)

The aforementioned Author hereby grants to OXFORD INDUSTRIAL HOLDING GROUP (ASIA PACIFIC) CO., LIMITED （BRN74685111） all economic property rights, including but not limited to the rights of: reproduction, distribution, rental, exhibition, performance, communication to the public via information network, adaptation, compilation, commercial operation, authorization for third-party use, and rights enforcement.

Such grant is exclusive and irrevocable. The term of such rights shall be 49 years from the date of publication.

To contact author, please email to datatorent@yeah.net