A villainous scheme

The chamber was quiet, save for the soft hum of machines. James Bond sat, wrists fastened to the arms of the chair, watching as his arch nemesis Ernst Stavro Blofeld stroked his white cat with studied indifference. Beyond the glass wall, a row of humming servers blinked in unison, their lights pulsing like watchful eyes.

Blofeld’s lips curved into a smile. “It is simple, Mr. Bond. We begin with a portfolio of embryos. Each tiny prospect is sequenced, its code rendered legible to us so we can calculate degrees of deviation from the perfect specimen. From there, parents will select only those children who would fit in our vision of a perfect society.

“Parents won't go for your crazy plan,” Bond replied. “It is eugenics.”

“What you call eugenics I call parental choice,” Blofeld laughed softly. “No one will feel that they are doing anything monstrous. They are merely invited to ‘reduce suffering.’ Who could object? The beauty of my plan is that coercion is quite unnecessary. The herd will migrate to the greenest pastures on its own.”

Bond’s eyes narrowed. “You are playing God, Blofeld!”

“No, Mr. Bond. We are beyond gods now,” said Blofeld, leaning forward. “Imagine a generation curated by algorithm: fewer liabilities, fewer defects, fewer complications, fewer costs. A cleaner human supply chain. When history asks who first made the culling respectable, who taught decent people to applaud outcomes they once shrank from, it will not remember God. It will remember me.”

This is an imaginary Bond movie, but at this point in a real Bond film, the scene would cut to explosions, daring escapes, and the villain’s comeuppance. But this script is not fiction. Swap out Blofeld’s sinister laugh for a Silicon Valley CEO speaking in TED Talk cadence, and you have Orchid.

Orchid is a real company whose pitch is chillingly straightforward: Fertilize multiple embryos, subject them to whole-genome sequencing, score them by predicted traits, and discard the “inferior.” Parents are told they are making wise, compassionate choices. In reality, they are offered sanitized eugenics sold as a luxury service under the banner of “reducing suffering.”

Make no mistake, this is not compassion. It is the commodification of children, the transformation of human life into a supply chain problem. When a society accepts the premise that some image-bearers of God are “defective,” and that their worthiness for life is determined by lab algorithms, then the groundwork for barbarism has already been laid.

The natural law testifies that human life possesses inherent dignity, not measured by utility or desirability. To kill or discard human beings because they are “defective” is to violate the most basic precept of justice: Do not harm the innocent.

Moreover, the common good demands recognition of the equal worth of every member of society. By reducing children to genetic probabilities, Orchid dissolves the bonds of solidarity. The weak are no longer protected but screened out. A community built on such terms ceases to be a polis ordered toward justice.

Genesis 1:27 declares that man is made in the image of God. To reject this is to embrace a false anthropology—one in which worth is measured by functionality, cost, or projected health outcomes. Orchid would have us believe that man may seize the prerogatives of the Creator and refashion humanity according to preference.

Ernst Blofeld, at least, admitted to being the villain. Orchid and its admirers dress their villainous scheme in the garments of compassion. But true compassion receives every life as a gift and confesses with the psalmist that we are “fearfully and wonderfully made” (Psalm 139:14).

Orchid’s promise of “better humans” is nothing more than a high-tech replay of an old heresy: man seeking to ascend the Creator’s throne. James Bond will not be crashing through the skylight to stop Orchid’s villainous scheme, and so the church must.