Everyone agreed the problem was very small. That itself was how it got so big.
It was called Baseline Drift, which sounded like something that happened to boats when you forget to moor them. It did not sound like something that would reorganize biomedical science, but it did — specifically, the part that depended on knowing what counted as ordinary.
Baseline drift meant that nobody could reliably say what a “normal” human outcome looked like anymore.
This was awkward because, until the mid-twenty-first century, biology had relied on a shared set of normative assumptions: how much people should sleep, how fast wounds should heal, how cognition declined with age, how bodies responded to stress, infection, calories, boredom. These weren’t “universal” control groups, of course, because every experiment still had its own controls — but they were population reference frames, the invisible scaffolding beneath public health guidance, drug approvals, actuarial tables, and phrases like “clinically meaningful improvement.”
It began (depending on whom you asked) around 2025 with the publication of a global guideline on using GLP-1 medicines to help manage obesity. Or 2028, when prenatal methylation screens quietly became the standard of care. Or 2031, when adaptive lighting systems tuned to circadian biology spread from hospitals to schools to office parks. Or maybe it was 2034, when insurance stopped covering “general wellness” supplements because everyone was already getting them through food fortification, water treatment, and special perks from their employers.
In truth, there was no one moment where someone stood up and said, “We are now enhancing the species.”
There was only the slow tide of policies, memos, and social proof.
By 2040, most children in wealthy countries had received personalized micronutrient profiles before age three. By 2045, gut microbiome calibration was as routine as dental cleaning. By 2050, short-course somatic gene therapies corrected rare metabolic inefficiencies the way eyeglasses once corrected vision. While no single person was wholly optimized on all fronts, such interventions nudged distributions. Means crept upward. Variance narrowed in some places and exploded in others.
People slept eight-point-two hours instead of the six-point-nine that they had in the 2020s. They recovered from illness faster. They aged more slowly, but unevenly, and in unpredictable ways. Cognitive decline no longer followed a singular curve, as it had before the introduction of anti-amyloid therapies. Neither did pain tolerance, emotional regulation, immune response, or stress recovery.
Humans were healthier than ever. They were also less similar to one another than they had ever been.
Differences between rich and poor countries, between drug availability and production standards, between quickly diversifying treatment frameworks, or simply between the marketing prowess of certain doctors over others, made it so that human lifestyle, behavior, and ultimately, human bodies diverged ever more.
The Institute for Human Reference, whose name sounded more confident than it deserved, was founded in 2053 in a renovated strip mall in Florida. The mall had once housed a Chick-fil-A, a nail salon, and a store selling nothing but phone cases. Now it housed ethicists, statisticians, molecular biologists, policy analysts, and one historian hired to “provide context,” which is what someone does when you want them around for optics but don’t plan to listen to them.
The Institute’s mission statement was short and confident: Define the reference human.
This used to be straightforward. In 2000, it meant “average diet, average activity, average lifestyle, no diagnosed disease, and no ongoing treatment.” In 2030, it meant “no experimental therapies, no known genetic edits.” By 2053, it meant nothing at all.
The trouble started with a spreadsheet, as it always does. A junior analyst noticed that participants labeled “unmodified” in a longitudinal cognition study were improving faster than those receiving standard nootropic protocols. Not significantly. Just enough to ruin everyone’s weekend.
The untreated cohort slept better, learned faster, and healed quicker than expected. They showed lower systemic inflammation, smoother glucose curves, and fewer regrettable opinions online. This was not because the treatments for the positive control group were harmful. It was because both groups were already heavily modified — often in aberrant, untracked ways. The “untreated” participants had benefited from cleaner air, adaptive lighting, fortified diets, stress-moderating urban design, and gut microbiomes optimized by public utilities providers for the bulk of their lives. Their baselines had been lifted, quietly and incrementally, without ever being logged as an intervention.
It was as if doing nothing had become a performance-enhancing drug.
The Institute convened a panel. The panel produced a report. And the report produced concern.
Without stable reference populations, public health science began to fray. Drug trials struggled to generalize. Public health guidelines contradicted one another. Regulators could no longer say whether an effect was meaningful or contextual. And insurance actuaries complained loudly.
The Institute tried to recruit even more unmodified humans. They advertised discreetly. “Participants sought,” the flyers said, “for a study on human baseline biology.” This attracted three types of people: conspiracy theorists, survivalists, and men who believed their masculinity was harmed by seat belts.
None qualified. Every candidate, regardless of how they avoided vaccines or grew their own food, was touched by various environmental enhancements. Their water was cleaner, the nutrients in their seeds higher, and even the air they breathed in the Institute’s lobby had been treated by germicidal ultraviolet light.
Meanwhile, the world continued improving.
Children learned faster, but differently. Each person became a unique bundle of interventions, exposures, and optimizations. Scientists began publishing papers with titles like Toward a Functional Approximation of the Human Baseline and Defining Control Conditions in a Post-Control World. These papers cited one another heavily and meant very little.
At last, someone proposed manufacturing a baseline.
Embryos. Archived ones. From before CRISPR, before microbiome engineering, before the Great Vitamin Correction of 2029. They would raise these children in sealed environments, feeding them pre-industrial diets. They would experience no screens, no optimization, and no enhancements except love, which everyone agreed did not count, despite all evidence to the contrary.
The ethicists balked.
The regulators bristled.
The grant proposal was rejected, revised, rejected again, and then leaked.
GOVERNMENT CONSIDERS PRODUCING “NATURAL” CHILDREN FOR SCIENCE.
Public reaction was swift and confused. Some people thought such children would be holy. Others thought they would be monsters or savages. Most people thought the whole thing sounded complicated. A Texas senator said the proposal sounded “expensive and European.”
The project was shuttered.
The Institute pivoted to simulation. If scientists couldn’t find a baseline, perhaps they could model one. Perhaps they could reconstruct the unmodified human the way paleontologists reconstructed dinosaurs through fragments and educated guesses. They rented an old data center and built several models of unmodified humans from historical data, archaeological inference, and optimistic assumptions.
The model was elegant and insightful, but also depressing.
The simulated baseline humans were less healthy, more impulsive, more violent, and much more likely to believe things that were untrue. When the model was presented at a conference, someone asked whether this meant enhancement was a superior way of life.
“No,” said a statistician, “it means our assumptions about our ancestors were flattering.”
The room laughed politely.
The Institute issued its final report in 2061. It stated, in careful language, that the concept of an unmodified, “natural” human baseline was no longer scientifically meaningful. Humanity had become irreducibly specific, fragmented into trajectories too individualized to be averaged without distortion. Science could no longer pretend that population means governed individual outcomes the way it did before. The failure was not ethical. It was statistical. Averages had stopped converging. The problem was no longer contamination of the baseline, but the disappearance of the conditions under which a baseline would be sufficiently explanatory.
It didn’t take long for biomedicine to adapt. N=1 studies proliferated. Rolling baselines replaced fixed controls. Therapies were evaluated against a person’s own prior state, not some mythical norm. Progress became local, contextual, and personal. The 2060s saw the proliferation of some seven billion digital baselines, with each person becoming the proud representative of their own unique reference group.
The Institute closed in 2062, its offices converted into a yoga studio. The historian wrote a book that sold poorly but aged well.
Science continued, because science always does. It simply changed its metrics.
People went on living longer, thinking more clearly, suffering less, and wondering why they felt so uneasy. Aging people reminisced about the people of yesterday. Ad agencies bemoaned the death of a world where they could appeal to a large target audience. Children asked their parents what humans used to be like.
“Worse,” the parents said.
“Why didn’t you change things quicker?” the children asked.
“Humanity was afraid of changes,” they said. “But we kept accepting small improvements and got better over time.”
The children — enhanced in a thousand invisible ways — went to sleep under lights tuned to their biology, breathing optimized air, dreaming dreams shaped by a history of improvements they did not choose.
They slept well. That, at least, could be measured.
Eliomer H. Kaas is an Eastern European social scientist with a taste for the simultaneously hopeful and depressing stories that make up the world of STEM in the 21st Century. Through his fiction, Elio tries to come to terms with the ever-changing nature of social advancement spurred by technology and the chaos caused by this advancement to human society, culture, and life.
Cite: Kaas E.H. “Baseline Drift.” Asimov Press (2026). DOI: 10.62211/29wj-12qw
Short, speculative fiction is a great way to throw ideas out there. Loved this one! It certainly lives up to the substack's title, Asimov's science writing was profoundly influential to my teenage self, half a century ago, and so was his fiction.
This is brilliant. I’d push one idea further, though. Maybe the baseline didn’t drift. Maybe it was always unstable, and we just didn’t have the resolution to see it. Enhancement didn’t break the average. It exposed how artificial it was to begin with.