The Third World War
The Third World War: From Technological Superiority to Ruin, By Xiaping Wu, War Historian "The Third World War"
The Conflict
Prelude
Several hundred years ago, humans were plain. Boring. They were born and lived their lives in their normal bodies. Their modifications were only skin deep, useless, and only affecting their physical attributes. They cared about their image, so much so that they began to go to greater and greater lengths to make themselves look more beautiful or masculine or threatening; they wanted to look like the person they felt they should have always been. In the year 2036, Mirabel Industries one of the largest pharmaceutical companies, was the first to make a fully cybernetic arm: the Swiss Army knife of limbs with limitations only bound by the imagination. The arm was first used by a celebrity, a very famous comedian of the time, named Donatello Fark. Fark had lost his arm at the age of twenty due to a bout of flesh-eating bacteria. With his great and useful cybernetic arm, he likened himself to a super hero. Other limbless people soon started following his example, requesting these smart limbs in droves. The variety of smart body parts broadened rapidly. Suddenly, blind people had X-ray vision and paraplegics could run marathons. Smart limbs quickly grew cheaper as Mirabel tried to lead more people to the fad. The playing field began leveling between the abled and disabled sections of the population. Several years later, a great shift occurred. Five-time gold-medalist sprinter, Mateo Matthias, elected to have his legs removed and replaced with smart legs that made him run faster and jump higher. Cosmetic mechanical augmentation had been born. The trend setters began calling themselves mechs, in order to distinguish themselves from humans, or what they had begun to view as the less fortunate subset of the population. The global economy was steadily on the upslope as populations grew and scientific research boomed. In the wake of the cheap prices, quality of cymods began decreasing and becoming increasingly dangerous where malfunction, maiming, and death were common. Division began to grow. Others were against cybernetics, arguing that they made people more like machines and caused humans’ natural skills to fade away. They called themselves the neo-luddites and boycotted all cybernetic modifications. They began refusing to serve mechs, work for them or even frequent the same public spaces as them. The mechs protested this discrimination with murder, kidnapping and riots. The neo-luddites were looking for a way to retaliate. They found it in Dr. Madeira Greysoft, heir to Greysoft Laboratories, who had been developing human gene mutation to create desirable qualities—superhuman qualities. This modification involved slight exposure to radioactive particles and could be reproduced cheaper, safer and more easily than cybernetic modifications which involved the introduction of foreign materials to the body. Greysoft hoped these mods would make humans more powerful and lessen their desire for dangerous, painful, and occasionally horrifyingly disfiguring cybernetics. Gene modification required virtually no material from mines or digs and produced far less waste than cybernetic manufacturing, thus lessening environmental impact. Mirabel Industries began vying with Greysoft over control of the consumers as one generation passed. In 2082, Fiskar Sykos, grandchild a modified first neo-luddites was born with a specialized version of his father’s new-gene. He had one Skill, where his ancestors had many, which was ten times as powerful. As the genes were passed on through to subsequent generations, the Skill mutated and became stronger until the neo-luddites, now called savants, rivaled the mechs with their super-human abilities. The appearance of the inherited gene mutation threatened to undermine the entire “consumer economy” because it had been discovered that cybernetic modifications lessened the power of the Skill. Savants weren’t shopping, and the companies were losing money. Capitalism became active on a worldwide scale. The democratic government had long been realized ineffective and corpulent, ceding their power to the companies that paid their salaries. Violence also escalated and the Tech War began.
Comments