The Makings of a Good Bioweapon - by Abhishaike Mahajan
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Fiction<br>The Makings of a Good Bioweapon<br>3.2k words, 14 minutes reading time
Abhishaike Mahajan<br>Jun 18, 2026
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Note: I’ve been traveling through Europe for the past week or so, and have not had time to finish my larger ongoing essays. So, this is a piece I wrote back in December 2025 about bioweapons programs. Also, a few friends and I are hosting an NYC meetup on July 16th, you should come by!
An ogre of a creature, something that had been born just weeks back, chewed on a padded rectangle. This rectangle was wirelessly connected to the tablet I was holding, and chirped that the bite force of whatever was gnawing at it hovered at roughly 4,700 PSI. That was the last thing I needed before I could finally hit the switch. The creature’s head vanished, replaced momentarily by a red aerosol and the sound of wet pennies hitting glass. Generally good practice to pack these things’ skulls with a plastic explosive when they first slide out of their birthing tank, because six-inch glass really isn’t tough enough to prevent one of these newer breeds from getting through to me, and replacing it with something seven-inch thick, or even a foot, just felt like kicking the can down the road.<br>I extracted the few biopsies I needed from the corpse, its body still gushing various gases from its various organs, and called in a cleaning crew. This one was Generation 47. I went through the checklist, compiling together a list of metrics to place into a slide-deck later. The cleaning crew arrived in their hazmat suits, spraying dissolving enzymes before the next iteration arrived. I handed one of them the vials containing my biopsies. “Could you hand this to the evolution team?” He laughed, a hearty, full guffaw, and told me to find some other idiot to be a messenger boy. I breathed in deeply and delivered it myself.<br>After arriving back at my observation chamber, I received a call from the external womb team, who told me that Generation 48 was on their way. I thanked them for the notification and hung up. I hated the external womb team. They had been given a budget of nearly $50B to keep the production line of this project moving as quickly as possible and it increasingly felt like the developmental biologists who ran the whole thing had long since abandoned the hope of doing anything useful, in pursuit of increasingly bizarre aesthetic modifications.<br>And, speak of the devil, Generation 48 was a perfect example. Their team wheeled in their atrocity on a sterile chrome gurney, plopping its drugged, swollen body into the walled-off room in front of me. They had really outdone themselves this time, creating something that looked like it had been designed by a group of giggling twelve-year-old boys. It had iridescent scales that shifted from oil-slick purple to something resembling a sunset over a chemical spill as it shifted nervously back and forth, and, as it yawned, revealed rows of needle teeth that had rims of gold leaf on them. And it was somehow even bigger than the last one, because bigger is always better.<br>My manager was a man named Alexander Smirnov, who walked in as I was mentally weighing whether it’d be easy to get away with ending the creature’s life immediately, eventually concluding that it’d raise too many questions.<br>Smirnov exclaimed, “Wow! Look at this thing! Isn’t it gorgeous?”<br>Smirnov resembled a knuckle, a thick one, a swollen creature with suspiciously thin limbs, as if he swallowed a prize hog and was hiding it in his belly, refusing to digest it and nourish himself. Between his ears lay a single puff of air, roaming around, excitedly colliding with the walls of his skull like a housefly trying to escape a windowpane. He had risen to his position through a kind of stochastic motion, bouncing from role to role until he’d accumulated enough momentum to become unmovable.<br>“Yes,” I said, “It’s certainly something.”<br>“Though I was looking at the statistics, this one’s bigger, sure, but it seems like the absolute size of its genome is smaller, no?”<br>I wanted to cradle his thick skull between my hands and push, push until they went straight through, just so I could feel and interact with the exact cluster of consciousness that produced such an inane comment.<br>“Yes.” I decided to say.<br>He nodded sagely. “Well, it’s a trade-off, isn’t it? Can’t have everything.”<br>“I did want to ask,” I murmured, “if you’d reconsidered my proposal yet to start a pathogen team? That I could lead?”<br>Smirnov looked crestfallen.<br>“Well,” he said, his voice dropping a register, losing the high-pitched, jovial charm it had just seconds ago. “It seems unlikely. I realize you have your own set of arguments for why we should be working on engineering viruses and bacteria, but it really is a tough argument to make upstairs. You have to understand, these people really like spectacles, things that go, pop! You know? Something they can really put alongside some...