2080
By: Leon Wolf
Tags: Scary, Climate Change, Climate, Post Apocalyptic, Brain

2080

Advances in science led to the chip. A miracle of communication, sensory enhancement, and information technology. The chip underwent twenty years of testing in adult human volunteers under constant assault from a barrage of 1000 hackers. After this, the chip’s protective protocols were declared to be impenetrable. People grew wild for it. This changed the world as nothing had since the controlled use of fire.

Every chipped person had the same opportunity of experience. In that way it was the most egalitarian thing in the history of humanity.

Chip mania was on. Then, parents had chips implanted into their children, and the world tilted on its axis. When implanted into babies who could not yet walk, the chip and brain integrated seamlessly and grew in power together.

An adult’s chip could be removed safely, whereas a chipped-from-birth human — sometimes called “Lifers” — would die in agony if unchipped. The Lifers developed the ability to understand the thoughts, motivation, and feelings of others as easily as their own. Not exactly mind reading, but not far off if both parties desired it. “I feel your pain,” became a meaningful statement.

No more miscommunication between people or nations.

A world of peace, love, and understanding was born. Older children and adult brains were incapable of full integration with others. What they got was incredible enough. The chip guaranteed instantaneous access to all digital information, right in your head, with a flawless search function. If you thought you wanted to know something, you knew it.

But that’s merely a one-way street.

The chip was a two-way street. Information from chipped people around the world continually uploaded, to become available to all. This was the fun stuff. This was how the chipped got to feel exactly what a great gymnast, say, felt mentally and physically during an Olympic quality performance.

More than feel it, they learned it in an instant. The chip orchestrated the transmission of information to the nervous system, muscles, respiratory, and circulatory systems and enabled anyone to do the same incredible feat.

The information teaching your brain, nerves, spine, legs, blood vessels, and lungs to run faster and jump higher, rock climb or play the piano became available for download. The hard work of learning a skill could be bypassed. The chipped could all moonwalk. Billions of people became physical and mental marvels equivalent to Batman and Batwoman. The runners in the Olympic 100-meter final ran so fast they were a blur to anyone without modified vision. Even with non-Lifer’s inferior use of the chip, in time the overwhelming majority chose to be implanted.

The religions hopped on in no time. A way to have the same voice of God in every believer’s ear? Beautiful. The general attitude was “Why not?”

The adult chip allowed instantaneous information and communication, easy-as-pie learning of new skills and spectacular sensory development. The Conversation had begun and with it the golden age of humanity. Advances in science, culture, physical development, and political freedom throughout the world were phenomenal and widespread.

Great while it lasted.

Now, I live in a depopulated world of abundance.

Not from what I grew up expecting, a world devastated by a nuclear war.

Not from my other bugaboo, overwhelming environmental devastation. Recently, it’s been the opposite. With only a fraction of humanity left to gum up the works, nature is in better shape than at any time since the industrial revolution started to cook.

No mini ice age or Waterworld scenario, from global cooling or warming. True, three billion people worldwide abandoned shore life as warming seas rose over the decades.

Fortunately, the shit didn’t hit the fan until humanity was chipped. The conversation was mature, and people were humane. Humanity adapted, chilled the glaciers, raised the land, repelled the sea, gave up the impossibly low places. Everyone moved in and up a little, skirts lifted above the puddles. Gators and Burmese pythons ruled Florida. Pre-conversation, chaos would have raged. In a world where empathy reigned, peaceful cooperation came easily.

We thrived, not just survived.

We avoided the Mad Max scarce gas scenario. Gas has been obsolete for decades. Wireless power towers based on the work of Nikola Tesla keep the carbots juiced. Carbots are great companions on long trips, total entertainment superstars.

There was no Blob to ooze its way over the world, Morlocks to feed on Eloi, zombies to shuffle outlandishly fast and slobber diseased saliva onto terrified humans.

No Terminators or intelligent apes to kick our butts.

No invisible flying brains with attached spinal columns strangling victims one by one, like in the scariest movie I ever saw.

No rebirth of the dinosaurs to eat us or falling asteroid to wipe us out as was their fate.

No singularity, supernova, solar superflare, or Yellowstone supervolcano.

Not even evil beings from outer space.

It’s disappointing and a little lame that after millennia of people fearing exotic doomsday scenarios, one of our own did us in. Herbert Schembekler was human to his brilliant, psychopathic core. He used humanity’s greatest creation, the chip, as the ultimate weapon against us.

Teenaged Schembekler grew convinced that humans would destroy the environment and cause animal life to become extinct. He turned into a rabid anti-populationist. The man didn’t care one way or the other about the fate of humanity. He loved penguins, owls, crows, polar bears, killer whales, Komodo dragons, and armadillos. Nothing else.

Schembekler’s brilliance outweighed the joint efforts of one thousand programmers and hackers who had worked for twenty years to create what all believed to be an impenetrable system. The damn brainiac did the unthinkable — he figured out a way to hack into the computer-to-chip system and override the safety measures.

Schembekler placed simple, irresistible commands into the system: put your robots to sleep, travel to the sea, walk in, and continue walking. There was no command to stop.

Worldwide, at the same moment, every ambulatory person with a chip turned off their personal robots. Forty billion robots dropped to the ground–and the chipped began to walk toward the water. Airplanes dove into the seas of the world as their pilots obeyed the mind-crushing command. Babies too young to walk and people confined to wheelchairs were unaffected. The imprisoned battered themselves against their bars in their compulsion to obey. Or drowned themselves by placing their head in the toilet, believing they could reach the sea with a flush.

Four billion drowned the first day. Eight billion more soon returned to our primordial home. After one month, half a billion survived, adults without implants, babies, and the wheelchair bound. There were few survivors between the ages of one and eighty. Exceptions included unchipped scientists, Amish types, hermits, and other crackpots who were skeptical of the device, and their unchipped children. I’m in the ‘other crackpot’ category, but way older than eighty. That’s the beautiful mess of a world I live in now.