Welcome to the Age of Robot Animals

Why build robots when you can just tweak animals?

- David Wallace-Wells

Something tells me you’ve heard of the Zika virus—in fact, something tells me you are presently freaking out about it. That panic, I’m here to tell you, is not exactly rational (though I totally share it), since the virus poses quite a limited threat to anyone older than one trimester and since doctors are still unwilling to actually blame it for the rash of birth defects in Brazil. (Zika has shown up in a lot of places unaccompanied by microcephaly, and the doctors don’t have any clear picture of what is going on in Brazil.)

But our reflexive terror is also no great surprise, considering how neatly the virus collects the trip wires of contemporary endtime anxiety into a single bundled fuse. There’s the prospect of a pandemic, beaming out from the tropics. There are the birth defects, in particular those tiny heads—and the worry that you may give birth to a child with one. There is also no “cure” for Zika, and a vaccine, the doctors say, is at least a few years away. And then there is the fact that the disease is transmitted by mosquitoes, in places where the bugs are so pervasive the virus might as well be traveling by air, which mocks any defense as human as a quarantine. Given all that, what should the movie director in charge of this scenario command his screenwriter to have his hero do?