Sorry about the missed post on Friday, I was taking a little Thanksgiving blogcation.

My parents live in The Woodlands, a master-planned community 28 miles north of downtown Houston. Although the suburb was bought out by real estate developers in 1997, George Mitchell’s original vision for the community was focused on aesthetics. Relics of some of the original ideas can be seen. On Research Forest Drive, office buildings made entirely out of mirrored windows crouch among the pine trees and swampland. It’s as if Superstudio’s utopian Continuous Monument was begun in the Great Piney Woods of East Texas.

These buildings house genetics firms with nondescript names like GenSys, GenTech, and BioSynth. Inside these corporations, sinister DNA-bending scientists are working to create a new subspecies of humans who can thrive in the petrochemical smog that blankets Houston. One day, they will break free from the labs and take everything within 50 miles of the refineries in Pasadena away from their oxygen-breathing brethren.