"Potentially?"
"Potentialli, with an i. You're an excellent candidate."
The thin paper crinkled under my legs as my PCP went over my test results. My company required an annual physical for all employees, though they didn't care about the results. They just wanted to check off a box for the shareholders.
"So, it's like a weight loss drug? I'm not interested."
"Dan." The doctor pulled over a stool to sit closer to me. "You're five-eight and nearly 300 pounds. This isn't a weight loss drug, per se, but even if that's all it was, I'd recommend it strongly."
I self-consciously rubbed my belly and considered his words. I'd always been "husky," and rugby through high school and college had packed on muscle. He was right, though. "I don't understand, doc. I barely have time to eat breakfast or lunch. I grab a protein shake or two. Where's the weight coming from?"
"How many protein shakes? How many snacks? Hectic schedules make for unhealthy habits. Do you exercise? How's your sex life? I bet those are suffering too."
He was right. One or two protein shakes were more like three or four, plus a straight-up milkshake after work. And any exercise or even sex left me exhausted. "Ok, what's so special about this new medicine?"
The doctor handed me a printout from a medical website. "Potentialli is not a weight-less drug like Ozempic or Wegovy, though it has been very successful for weight loss. You're a good candidate. Yes, because of your weight, but your family history of heart disease is also critical. Potentialli is an engineered virus that unlocks your full genetic potential."
"Say again?"
He pointed at a simple gene chart on the printout. "All of us are a random combination of our parents' genes, like a series of hundreds of dice rolls. Sometimes we're lucky - we get our dad's height, our mom's brains - sometimes we're unlucky - bad skin, male pattern baldness." I touched my receding hairline. "Potentialli rerolls the dice, so that we land a nat 20 every single time."
"So it rewrites my DNA? What's that do?"
"It all depends on your genetic potential and how far you are from your maximum. Let's say you originally rolled a 15 for height and wound up at five-eight. Potentialli rolls a 20 for you, and now you're six foot."
"Wait--I could get **taller**? What is else could change?"
"Everything. Metabolism, eyesight, muscle tone, heart and lung condition, intelligence, creativity. Everything will simply be...better."
----
I arrived at home with the small Potentialli package in my hands. It was a single-use injector, which made me nervous as hell. I walked into Sarah's home office and kissed her on the forehead.
"How was the doctor?" Sarah didn't look up from her screen. We had met at work in a leadership program a few years after college, but she had left the company a few years ago to start her own consulting business. She was a few inches shorter than me, and even though she had never been an athlete, she'd kept in better shape than me through healthy eating, regular yoga, and a few 5Ks each year. I had first been attracted to her raven black hair, now salted with gray.
I moved some papers to the floor and sat in the office guest chair. "Fine. I need to lose weight, obviously, and he was worried about my family history. This is a little weird. I thought he was going to suggest a GLP-1, but he prescribed me this experimental drug called Potentialli."