The Silent Horizon: a Love Story
A dystopian future where predictive AI targets autistic fetuses for elimination. Ella defies a surveillance state obsessed with “neural uniformity” to protect her unborn child — a reflection on eugenics hidden in progress.
In the not so distant future …
… the world had achieved what was once thought impossible: a society free of disorder, suffering, and, most of all, unpredictability. Genetic scans had become the norm for every fetus, detecting diseases, disorders, and neurodivergent conditions before birth. Chief among the targets for “removal” were those identified as autistic. The state had perfected a system using advanced generative machine learning techniques, built upon the once-theoretical 3D Transport-Based Morphometry (TBM), to predict not only the presence of autism but its potential manifestation across the lifespan. The algorithms fed on enormous datasets, correlating genomic markers, brain morphologies, and behaviour models into an ever-tightening web of certainty. The decision was swift: predicted autistic fetuses were terminated to maintain what they called “neural uniformity”—a world where every mind conformed to a singular vision of stability.
The capital’s towering skyline pulsed with controlled order, its glass structures humming with drone swarms and floating data displays. CCTV-like scanners, known as GeneCams, were as ubiquitous as streetlights, their red beams constantly sweeping over public spaces, detecting hidden pregnancies in a flash. Hovercraft patrols complemented the scanners, their searchlights slicing through alleyways and abandoned corridors. The moment a fetus was detected, the scans would commence. Parents would be informed of the results within hours. If the scans indicated even a whisper of potential autism, the verdict was immediate: removal.
It was under this grim shadow that Ella found herself running.
Ella had always been a quiet woman, navigating the margins of a city that no longer had places for the unpredictable. She lived on the fringes, in the forgotten industrial zones where the GeneCams swept less frequently. Her partner, Starr, had been taken years ago, during the first waves of purges when the government tightened its grip on those who didn’t fit. They were autistic—quiet, brilliant, and deeply misunderstood. Ella loved them for their mind, for the way they saw the world in patterns and beauty that others couldn’t.
She remembered Starr lying next to her beneath the old oak trees in the botanical reserve, their fingers tracing shapes in the drifting clouds, whispering about the intricate lattice of life’s patterns that wove beneath all things. “Everything breathes its own rhythm, Ella. Even the leaves. Even the clouds.” Their voice had always carried a musical cadence, words assembling not as rigid statements but as flowing gestures of thought. When the enforcers came for Starr, the reasoning was simple: “Their genes are a threat to the state.”
Ella had promised herself, and Starr’s memory, that she wouldn’t let them take another life.
The day Ella learned she was pregnant, she had been careful. She felt the soft flutter of life inside her and knew what it meant. In a world where bearing a child was the greatest act of defiance, Ella’s first instinct was to disappear. She knew the scan protocols intimately—the embedded sensors in public transit, the mandatory biometric checkpoints, the randomly sweeping microdrones that drifted through the city like silent parasites, endlessly hungry for deviation.
She had been running ever since.
The world outside was a vast lattice of surveillance. Public places were dangerous; even the corners of alleyways had hidden GeneCams lying in wait. For months, Ella kept to the fringes, moving from safe house to safe house, each one more crumbling and concealed than the last. The old world still clung on—abandoned metro tunnels, sealed-off sublevels of government complexes, forgotten stretches of farmland where nature had begun its slow reclamation—but it was a harsh, unforgiving place.
In these shadows operated the underground network—an interwoven web of caregivers, scientists, defectors, and kin of those once purged. At the heart of this network was Dr. Maren. Once a senior researcher for the Genetic Stability Directorate, Maren had defected after witnessing the state’s true intent: not prevention of suffering, but eradication of unpredictability itself. “They’ve convinced themselves that neurodivergence is instability,” Maren once told Ella, during a tense, whispered meeting in a sunken warehouse far beneath the city. “Instability is a variable they cannot model. What they cannot model, they fear. And what they fear, they destroy.”
Maren had saved others before—pregnant people who refused to submit, who clung to the dangerous belief that difference was not disorder. Through encrypted channels, she guided Ella to a remote cabin deep in the mountains where the GeneCams could not reach.
The journey was perilous. The city’s perimeters were encased in a mesh of layered security: biometric choke points, drone-guarded exits, and holographic identity verifiers that flickered with sterile blue glow. The checkpoints loomed ahead. Guards stood at attention, monitoring the GeneCams, their eyes trained on real-time holographic readouts, scrolling streams of genomic metadata hovering in the air before them.
Steeling herself, Ella stepped into the beam. The red light traced her form, lingering longer than it should have. She held her breath. The guard squinted at the scanner, muttering to his partner as algorithmic alerts flashed briefly—mild hormonal deviations, rising progesterone levels. A flag. Ella felt her throat tighten. But before they could react, a commotion erupted behind them. Another person, visibly pregnant and panicking, had been caught by another GeneCam. The guards turned, barking orders, rushing toward the disturbance. In the chaos, she slipped through the checkpoint unnoticed.
She didn’t stop running until she reached the outskirts—until the gleaming towers shrank behind her into the distance.
The mountains loomed ahead, jagged and indifferent, but they promised sanctuary. The trek was brutal. The forest closed around her, dense and ancient, its canopy muffling the distant mechanical whir of the drones above. The air was cold and biting, but Ella pressed on. With every step, she could feel the life inside her growing stronger, kicking against her ribs, as though urging her forward.
After days of walking, her body aching and hollow with exhaustion, Ella finally reached the cabin—a weather-beaten relic of a forgotten era, tucked beneath a canopy of pines. It was solid. Hidden. Safe. She collapsed inside, her breath ragged, heart pounding.
In the quiet of that sanctuary, the first contractions began.
The birth was long, a painful cascade of shudders and waves. But in the end, Ella held her baby in trembling arms—a tiny, perfect life. She gazed down at the child’s face, wondering if the state’s predictions had been right. Would this child be like Starr? Would the world see her baby as a threat, or as a wonder, as she did?
It didn’t matter.
In that hidden cabin, far from the scanners and the purges, Ella’s child would be free. The world outside remained cruel, but inside this sanctuary, love and freedom reigned. She whispered a promise to the child—to protect and nurture them, no matter what the world outside demanded.
For now, they were safe.
Years later, beneath the dense cover of old-growth trees, a quiet community thrived. Dozens of children, each once marked for elimination, played among the ferns, chasing patterns of light that danced through the canopy. Ella’s child—now named Liora—ran with them, laughing, tracing shapes in the sky as Starr once had. Their hands traced invisible geometries, inventing languages of movement only they understood.
Maren’s network had grown beyond what any of them once dared hope—hidden enclaves, scattered across the wilderness, shielded by geography and silence. Each was a fragile haven of unpredictability, of beautifully divergent minds who lived and thrived outside the state’s oppressive algorithms.
The state continued its hunt. GeneCams swept endlessly. The drones still circled. But in these forgotten wilds, they remained unseen.
As long as there were those willing to resist, to shelter, and to protect, hope endured. And in these children, that hope had not only survived.
It had flourished.
Epilogue
The research article “Discovering the Gene-Brain-Behavior Link in Autism via Generative Machine Learning” investigates the use of advanced machine learning techniques to identify potential markers for autism, correlating brain imaging data with genetic variations like 16p11.2 CNV. While framed as a scientific advance, the study’s capacity to predict autism from complex brain-genome patterns — even without precise certainty about ‘severity’ or ‘outcomes’ — unsettled me deeply. It’s not the science itself that alarms me, but the trajectory it so easily invites.
The more we normalise predictive models like these, the more we invite a future where probabilistic data becomes moral certainty — where statistical risk morphs into preemptive control. As I read the study, I couldn’t shake the chilling image of a near-future society where governments wield such predictive tools not to support autistic people, but to prevent our existence altogether. A world obsessed with eliminating unpredictability. A world of “neural uniformity.”
That vision became the seed for the story you’ve just read: one where predictive science mutates into state-sanctioned eugenics, and where a single pregnant person risks everything to protect her unborn child from the machinery of elimination.
I write this not as abstract fiction, but from the lived position of an autistic person who knows how often our existence is framed as undesirable, disordered, or defective. Research like this often gestures toward benevolent aims — early intervention, prevention of suffering — but the unspoken subtext is clear: many would prefer people like me had never been born.
I hope this story gives you pause. I hope a world like Ella’s never comes to pass. But if we do not ask hard questions about where predictive technology may lead — and who gets to decide which lives are ‘worth’ predicting — we inch ever closer to its shadow.
Dystopian? Yes. But dystopias often begin as proposals dressed in the language of progress.