Chromosome 47

In 2076, humans have tamed climate, energy, and AI, but have written "birth qualifications" into their bodies. Every legal embryo must carry a synthetic small chromosome, C47. It is a population watermark, a fertility threshold, and a person's passport for future medical treatment, schooling, and reproduction. Without C47, there is no compliance. Xu Qingmai, a female worker in the old city, did not have a childbirth permit, but she was pregnant with a child without a C47 watermark. In the clinic, the fetal heart beats steadily, but the system pops up a countdown: "Recommendation for termination of unaudited pregnancies." Doctor Shen Nian only had twelve hours to decide whether to report the matter. At the same time, the first generation of recombinant children began to show pubertal abnormalities, there was a large-scale mismatch of pollinators in Nantang, and the maintenance worker of the offshore platform zero issued a warning before disappearing: "Don't add watermarks to your children, as the watermarks will find similar ones." An embryo without a watermark, a group of children who were dismantled into "cases", and an ecological disaster disguised as an algorithm accident all ultimately point to the Beiqiao clinical trial that was sealed twenty years ago. If C47 is really the key to protecting the future of mankind, why do children without it develop stably? If the body becomes a license, then who has the right to say that he is truly alive?