![Xixi745B [Contest Entry] [Detailed, Chillingly Realistic Backstory] Minecraft Skin](https://static.planetminecraft.com/files/resource_media/preview/cyborg_minecraft_skin-2322078.jpg "Xixi745B [Contest Entry] [Detailed, Chillingly Realistic Backstory] Minecraft Skin")
Published May 21st, 2012, 5/21/12 10:55 am
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It started innocuously enough; so innocuously, in fact, that any of the survivors in the last days of humanity were unable to pinpoint the beginning of their downfall. All that we could definitively remember was that, at some point, the technology that was integrated into humans who needed a mechanical transplant of one form another o a pacemaker, a bionic arm, an artificial leg o began to surpass their flesh-and-bone counterparts not only in performance and durability, but also in comfort and control.
The first prototypes of the new generation of prosthetics went, naturally, to those who needed them most. A ten-year-old girl named Amy Rapello who had lost both her legs to osteosarcoma was one such recipient who, in the early days, became the poster-child for the prosthetic company o NeGePro.o Not to be outdone, competitor Axiomatic Prosthetics Ltd. sought out and provided enhanced eyes for Kevin Yu, an aging policeman who had lost his vision as result of shrapnel from USAo s infamous o 9/11.o These recipients and others were overjoyed with their new, enhanced body parts. For instance, though Amy was technically disqualified from running any races with her new bionic legs, she was allowed to run alongside competitors on the track of the 2020 Olympics in Istanbul as a NeGePro promotion. To her great joy, she destroyed the all-time meno s record for the 5K set by Kenenisa Bekele sixteen years ago with a new (albeit unofficial) time of nine minutes, eleven seconds. Mr. Yu meanwhile completed his final years of service in a blaze of glory as he quickly became renowned for his ability to pinpoint and identify trace forensic evidence.
It did not take long for feelings of jealousy from unenhanced humans to ooze to the surface like worms after a rainfall. The next-generation prosthetics were supposed to be withheld from all but those who lost body parts or functionality due to disease or legitimate accident, but an influx of patients who had deliberately severed limbs in order to unlock access to the products forced the medical community to release them to the public. The prosthetics themselves, the surgery to integrate them into oneo s body, and the regimen of anti-rejection drugs were all extremely expensive (in addition to automatically disqualifying you from competing in every major league sport in the world). So, unless you were fortunate enough to be chosen to become a walking advertisement for the next up-and-coming prosthetics company, non-vital prosthetic implantation was a procedure normally reserved for the very eccentric and very wealthy. The proportion of criminals who sought out black market prosthetics was a growing concern, but was more than matched by the number of law enforcement officials who obtained government-subsidized implants. The balance of the world was appearing to hold steady.
The turning point, if I had to guess, was the Brain Chip by Axiomatic Prosthetics. Marketed as a foolproof way to boost your IQ by ten to twenty points (o results may vary, but 90% of our patients report improvement of upwards of 10% on all aptitude tests!o ), the Brain Chip was the first of the o non-messyo prosthetics; that is to say, the average person did not feel squeamish in the slightest at any point during the one-hour procedure involving the implantation of a chip smaller than a garbanzo bean into the front lobe of the brain. The price was still very steep, as each chip required a great deal of time and specialized equipment to custom-make and implant. Thus almost overnight being born into wealth (or not) became the single most important factor in deciding oneo s aptitude for any skilled career o lawyers, engineers, architects, mathematicians, professors, doctors, and mechanics soon all became expected to have obtained a chip. The changes in education were equally swift; as the guaranteed improvements of the chip became greater, it became simply impractical to teach o mixedo classes in which half of the students had intelligence near to or even surpassing that of geniuses Einstein, Leonardo Da Vinci, and Sir Isaac Newton and half the students were the usual blend of dim to ordinarily bright. The schools became segregated; the parents became outraged and, as the quality and quantity of next-generation prosthetics increased, this outrage spread. Owners of the prosthetics were ostracized, insulted, or beaten; graffiti appeared denouncing them as non-human; factories and hospitals supporting implantations were torched; Amy was attacked so often at school that she had to retreat to home-schooling; Mr. Yu, now happily retired, has his house broken into one night, was knocked unconscious as he slept, and had his eyes gouged out and sold. If o enhancedo individuals attempted to use their abilities to fight back, they were condemned by public media.
When people began to realize that the prosthetics were here to stay, the focus of such activity shifted from the destruction to the obtaining of implants. This was the next phase of the apocalypse. There was an enormous upsurge of low-to-middle-income families selling everything they had, defaulting on every loan, in order to purchase a Brain Chip for their wretched children; debt soared; riots began in earnest; the offices of prosthetic manufacturers were stormed and looted; the police, low-to-middle income themselves, were as often part of the riots as part of the defence; black market prices plummeted and contraband surgery gained ground; risky procedures were conducted in damp basements and secluded motel rooms. o Luckyo Luciano IV, leader of the Sicilian Mafia, gained a reputation as the most modified human in history and put this reputation to use, breaking into banks, casinos, and jails with his stainless-steel fists and mechanical muscles. A group of radicals calling themselves the o Purists,o comprised of people from all walks of life who for whatever reason rejected the modification of the human body, attempted to pass laws banning prosthetics once and for all. It was, of course, much too late o at this point, nobody was willing or able to stop the production of prosthetics or reduce the abilities of the prosthetics already in place. Those who had experienced life-changing augmentations would never have submitted to o downgradingo surgery.
Around the time Amy Rapello celebrated her twenty-fifth birthday, NeGePro and Axiomatic Prosthetics both went bankrupt along with virtually every other technology company o those having obtained the Brain Chip now had the intelligence to design and build their own prosthetics. Employment plummeted as an entire generation found themselves jobless and aimless. The same year another extremist group was formed, presumably as much out of boredom as due to ideology. They were comprised exclusively of modified individuals and with membership well into the millions, named themselves the Superior. The majority of their membership were those who had been children or adolescents at the time of the inception of augmented prosthetics o those who could not quite remember what life had been like before they had been able to climb walls, outrun motorcycles, or outwit their parents; those who truly did think of themselves as superior by virtue of someone elseo s research into the technology they now claimed as their own. They had members all around the world. They were able to communicate through custom-built internet-screens integrated into their eyes and quickly developed into a dangerous force to be reckoned with. At first, they had motivation to do something but no direction in which to pour their efforts. Then they decided that the Purists and their senseless denunciations of the Superior lifestyle had to go. As they had no schools to go to and no obligation to work to pay for items they could easily steal, the main activity of the Superiors became the hunt. It started with those entirely unmodified but soon spread to the cowards who had only obtained one measly Brain Chip or a solitary replacement limb and eventually progressed to those who had roughly half their human flesh still vilely un-augmented. There was no attempt at all the persecute those who were exterminating the humans; the issue was far, far beyond legal control. The thin veneer of stability shattered in civilizations the world over. Humanity had entered total anarchy. Superior members competed in their race to become as completely unified to technology as possible, and all around the world efforts were made to attempt to conceal any and all conspicuously human traits.
The last of the major developments had to be the rapid discovery that the new, modified humans were quite simply unable to procreate. It was of no surprise to anyone o after all, what did people expect if they exchanged their ovaries for a small electric generator that freed them from the need to eat? At any rate, death by natural cause had effectively ground to a halt. Anyone already augmented could simply continue to replace their human parts as they failed, the recent development of the ability to upload oneo s brain onto a Brain Chip helping things along. And it was just a matter of time before any remaining Purists could be destroyed. New pseudo-humans could be constructed, if needed.
So these remaining Purists retreated. Each isolated pocket comprised of those who had worked together or lived together and were now preparing to die together. There was no way for the pockets to communicate without interception by a Superior or a Superior sympathist. A group of us who had been stranded in Hong Kong since we had happened to be at a convention there when the airlines had simultaneously collapsed (personal wings were a bargain ten thousand U.S. dollars, if you knew who to talk to) made our collective way out to a small unnamed island in the Pacific. We were largely ex-scientists, laughed out of our jobs by modified individuals with two or three times our IQ, so we were able to quite easily take up abandoned geological research sites and call them our home. Where the other Purists went, I do not know o I assume they scattered, attempting to hide in extreme environments where sand or ice would gum up the joints of the modified. Each pocket of Purists was totally isolated from each other. But there was a certainty, I believe, that extinction was a matter of time. We would live out the last of our days and die peacefully in our secluded micro-towns.
We were wrong, of course. Remaining hidden from a population of geniuses is no easy feat. At this point about four billion former-humans remained, and though only a fraction of these actively wished us ill, hunting isolated pockets of humanity was probably the hunterso only form of entertainment. And they knew better than we did how large the world was, and how unlikely it was that they would actually be able to hunt down the remaining humans. So I assume o I can only assume, since we had no news in our last miserable days o they devised some kind of final solution. The non-Purists were, after all, largely invulnerable to anything that would endanger a human: they fed off of electricity, heat, or sunlight rather than food; plague and illness could not touch them. So what they did was induce a global crisis like that which had been so painstakingly avoided in the late 1900s o they destroyed the ozone layer with a well-chosen blend of nitrates and chlorofluorocarbons, vaporizing the mantle that protected the Earth from deadly UV light. What did they care if Earth became a desolate rock? They had no need for vegetation and animals and scenic coral reefs. So came the day we were awoken by the UV alarms going off all over the station marking a UV index of 16. I have no idea how they managed to cause such a drastic change overnight, but it doesno t matter anymore. That first alarm was about a month ago and we are all at deatho s door. Nobody has been able to go outside for more than five minutes without their skin beginning to crisp; vegetation has withered; animals are either dead or far underground. We have collectively lost the will to live, and I think most of us have starved to death. The horror of the situation, as we discussed last week while splitting our last two boxes of raisins thirteen ways, was that none of us could envision any other outcome of the world. The specifics may have changed in a slightly different situation, but this had all been a quite natural progression of technology. So had we been doomed as a race as soon as the first stone was sharpened by an ancestral caveman? Or has hunger and imminent death been making us overly pessimistic? I could not tell you even if my life depended on it. I can feel darkness circling in, and I think that I just heard someone collapse in the next room. For some reason, I have Axiomatic Prosthetico s jingle stuck in my head. Hook line and sinker o o 10% improvement!o o we were all taken in. Even those who rejected it all o look how we ended up. Lose humanity or lose life, that had been our choice. Ito s a catch-22. And is quite possible we are o or had been? o the last humans alive, because we had a fair amount of food at the beginning of the crisis and we were all able to retreat to the underground portion of the station when the UV hit. Now, as I struggle to look around, I see some of my fellow Puristso lifeless bodies o I might even be the very last human in existence, there is no way to know for sure. That last thought is making tears come to my eyes. There were many hypothetical ways for humanity to come to an end o media had tended to hark to the zombie or natural disaster or plague, but no matter what, the survivors always went down fighting. Sometimes a ragtag group of them had to cannibalise each other to make it through, but end of the world be damned they made it. Instead, here I am writing these words on scrap paper by dimming candlelight. I think Io m going to lay my head down now o just for a second. Out, out brief candle o lifeo s but a walking shadow. Goodbye, homo sapiens.
The first prototypes of the new generation of prosthetics went, naturally, to those who needed them most. A ten-year-old girl named Amy Rapello who had lost both her legs to osteosarcoma was one such recipient who, in the early days, became the poster-child for the prosthetic company o NeGePro.o Not to be outdone, competitor Axiomatic Prosthetics Ltd. sought out and provided enhanced eyes for Kevin Yu, an aging policeman who had lost his vision as result of shrapnel from USAo s infamous o 9/11.o These recipients and others were overjoyed with their new, enhanced body parts. For instance, though Amy was technically disqualified from running any races with her new bionic legs, she was allowed to run alongside competitors on the track of the 2020 Olympics in Istanbul as a NeGePro promotion. To her great joy, she destroyed the all-time meno s record for the 5K set by Kenenisa Bekele sixteen years ago with a new (albeit unofficial) time of nine minutes, eleven seconds. Mr. Yu meanwhile completed his final years of service in a blaze of glory as he quickly became renowned for his ability to pinpoint and identify trace forensic evidence.
It did not take long for feelings of jealousy from unenhanced humans to ooze to the surface like worms after a rainfall. The next-generation prosthetics were supposed to be withheld from all but those who lost body parts or functionality due to disease or legitimate accident, but an influx of patients who had deliberately severed limbs in order to unlock access to the products forced the medical community to release them to the public. The prosthetics themselves, the surgery to integrate them into oneo s body, and the regimen of anti-rejection drugs were all extremely expensive (in addition to automatically disqualifying you from competing in every major league sport in the world). So, unless you were fortunate enough to be chosen to become a walking advertisement for the next up-and-coming prosthetics company, non-vital prosthetic implantation was a procedure normally reserved for the very eccentric and very wealthy. The proportion of criminals who sought out black market prosthetics was a growing concern, but was more than matched by the number of law enforcement officials who obtained government-subsidized implants. The balance of the world was appearing to hold steady.
The turning point, if I had to guess, was the Brain Chip by Axiomatic Prosthetics. Marketed as a foolproof way to boost your IQ by ten to twenty points (o results may vary, but 90% of our patients report improvement of upwards of 10% on all aptitude tests!o ), the Brain Chip was the first of the o non-messyo prosthetics; that is to say, the average person did not feel squeamish in the slightest at any point during the one-hour procedure involving the implantation of a chip smaller than a garbanzo bean into the front lobe of the brain. The price was still very steep, as each chip required a great deal of time and specialized equipment to custom-make and implant. Thus almost overnight being born into wealth (or not) became the single most important factor in deciding oneo s aptitude for any skilled career o lawyers, engineers, architects, mathematicians, professors, doctors, and mechanics soon all became expected to have obtained a chip. The changes in education were equally swift; as the guaranteed improvements of the chip became greater, it became simply impractical to teach o mixedo classes in which half of the students had intelligence near to or even surpassing that of geniuses Einstein, Leonardo Da Vinci, and Sir Isaac Newton and half the students were the usual blend of dim to ordinarily bright. The schools became segregated; the parents became outraged and, as the quality and quantity of next-generation prosthetics increased, this outrage spread. Owners of the prosthetics were ostracized, insulted, or beaten; graffiti appeared denouncing them as non-human; factories and hospitals supporting implantations were torched; Amy was attacked so often at school that she had to retreat to home-schooling; Mr. Yu, now happily retired, has his house broken into one night, was knocked unconscious as he slept, and had his eyes gouged out and sold. If o enhancedo individuals attempted to use their abilities to fight back, they were condemned by public media.
When people began to realize that the prosthetics were here to stay, the focus of such activity shifted from the destruction to the obtaining of implants. This was the next phase of the apocalypse. There was an enormous upsurge of low-to-middle-income families selling everything they had, defaulting on every loan, in order to purchase a Brain Chip for their wretched children; debt soared; riots began in earnest; the offices of prosthetic manufacturers were stormed and looted; the police, low-to-middle income themselves, were as often part of the riots as part of the defence; black market prices plummeted and contraband surgery gained ground; risky procedures were conducted in damp basements and secluded motel rooms. o Luckyo Luciano IV, leader of the Sicilian Mafia, gained a reputation as the most modified human in history and put this reputation to use, breaking into banks, casinos, and jails with his stainless-steel fists and mechanical muscles. A group of radicals calling themselves the o Purists,o comprised of people from all walks of life who for whatever reason rejected the modification of the human body, attempted to pass laws banning prosthetics once and for all. It was, of course, much too late o at this point, nobody was willing or able to stop the production of prosthetics or reduce the abilities of the prosthetics already in place. Those who had experienced life-changing augmentations would never have submitted to o downgradingo surgery.
Around the time Amy Rapello celebrated her twenty-fifth birthday, NeGePro and Axiomatic Prosthetics both went bankrupt along with virtually every other technology company o those having obtained the Brain Chip now had the intelligence to design and build their own prosthetics. Employment plummeted as an entire generation found themselves jobless and aimless. The same year another extremist group was formed, presumably as much out of boredom as due to ideology. They were comprised exclusively of modified individuals and with membership well into the millions, named themselves the Superior. The majority of their membership were those who had been children or adolescents at the time of the inception of augmented prosthetics o those who could not quite remember what life had been like before they had been able to climb walls, outrun motorcycles, or outwit their parents; those who truly did think of themselves as superior by virtue of someone elseo s research into the technology they now claimed as their own. They had members all around the world. They were able to communicate through custom-built internet-screens integrated into their eyes and quickly developed into a dangerous force to be reckoned with. At first, they had motivation to do something but no direction in which to pour their efforts. Then they decided that the Purists and their senseless denunciations of the Superior lifestyle had to go. As they had no schools to go to and no obligation to work to pay for items they could easily steal, the main activity of the Superiors became the hunt. It started with those entirely unmodified but soon spread to the cowards who had only obtained one measly Brain Chip or a solitary replacement limb and eventually progressed to those who had roughly half their human flesh still vilely un-augmented. There was no attempt at all the persecute those who were exterminating the humans; the issue was far, far beyond legal control. The thin veneer of stability shattered in civilizations the world over. Humanity had entered total anarchy. Superior members competed in their race to become as completely unified to technology as possible, and all around the world efforts were made to attempt to conceal any and all conspicuously human traits.
The last of the major developments had to be the rapid discovery that the new, modified humans were quite simply unable to procreate. It was of no surprise to anyone o after all, what did people expect if they exchanged their ovaries for a small electric generator that freed them from the need to eat? At any rate, death by natural cause had effectively ground to a halt. Anyone already augmented could simply continue to replace their human parts as they failed, the recent development of the ability to upload oneo s brain onto a Brain Chip helping things along. And it was just a matter of time before any remaining Purists could be destroyed. New pseudo-humans could be constructed, if needed.
So these remaining Purists retreated. Each isolated pocket comprised of those who had worked together or lived together and were now preparing to die together. There was no way for the pockets to communicate without interception by a Superior or a Superior sympathist. A group of us who had been stranded in Hong Kong since we had happened to be at a convention there when the airlines had simultaneously collapsed (personal wings were a bargain ten thousand U.S. dollars, if you knew who to talk to) made our collective way out to a small unnamed island in the Pacific. We were largely ex-scientists, laughed out of our jobs by modified individuals with two or three times our IQ, so we were able to quite easily take up abandoned geological research sites and call them our home. Where the other Purists went, I do not know o I assume they scattered, attempting to hide in extreme environments where sand or ice would gum up the joints of the modified. Each pocket of Purists was totally isolated from each other. But there was a certainty, I believe, that extinction was a matter of time. We would live out the last of our days and die peacefully in our secluded micro-towns.
We were wrong, of course. Remaining hidden from a population of geniuses is no easy feat. At this point about four billion former-humans remained, and though only a fraction of these actively wished us ill, hunting isolated pockets of humanity was probably the hunterso only form of entertainment. And they knew better than we did how large the world was, and how unlikely it was that they would actually be able to hunt down the remaining humans. So I assume o I can only assume, since we had no news in our last miserable days o they devised some kind of final solution. The non-Purists were, after all, largely invulnerable to anything that would endanger a human: they fed off of electricity, heat, or sunlight rather than food; plague and illness could not touch them. So what they did was induce a global crisis like that which had been so painstakingly avoided in the late 1900s o they destroyed the ozone layer with a well-chosen blend of nitrates and chlorofluorocarbons, vaporizing the mantle that protected the Earth from deadly UV light. What did they care if Earth became a desolate rock? They had no need for vegetation and animals and scenic coral reefs. So came the day we were awoken by the UV alarms going off all over the station marking a UV index of 16. I have no idea how they managed to cause such a drastic change overnight, but it doesno t matter anymore. That first alarm was about a month ago and we are all at deatho s door. Nobody has been able to go outside for more than five minutes without their skin beginning to crisp; vegetation has withered; animals are either dead or far underground. We have collectively lost the will to live, and I think most of us have starved to death. The horror of the situation, as we discussed last week while splitting our last two boxes of raisins thirteen ways, was that none of us could envision any other outcome of the world. The specifics may have changed in a slightly different situation, but this had all been a quite natural progression of technology. So had we been doomed as a race as soon as the first stone was sharpened by an ancestral caveman? Or has hunger and imminent death been making us overly pessimistic? I could not tell you even if my life depended on it. I can feel darkness circling in, and I think that I just heard someone collapse in the next room. For some reason, I have Axiomatic Prosthetico s jingle stuck in my head. Hook line and sinker o o 10% improvement!o o we were all taken in. Even those who rejected it all o look how we ended up. Lose humanity or lose life, that had been our choice. Ito s a catch-22. And is quite possible we are o or had been? o the last humans alive, because we had a fair amount of food at the beginning of the crisis and we were all able to retreat to the underground portion of the station when the UV hit. Now, as I struggle to look around, I see some of my fellow Puristso lifeless bodies o I might even be the very last human in existence, there is no way to know for sure. That last thought is making tears come to my eyes. There were many hypothetical ways for humanity to come to an end o media had tended to hark to the zombie or natural disaster or plague, but no matter what, the survivors always went down fighting. Sometimes a ragtag group of them had to cannibalise each other to make it through, but end of the world be damned they made it. Instead, here I am writing these words on scrap paper by dimming candlelight. I think Io m going to lay my head down now o just for a second. Out, out brief candle o lifeo s but a walking shadow. Goodbye, homo sapiens.
| Gender | Female |
| Model | Steve |
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I have a texture pack in the works, but it isn't related to the story... I don't think I can pull off sci-fi very well, but maybe I'll give it a shot when my first pack is done.
nobody read that