The Main Storyline

## ***Chapter One***

2021, October 28th they appeared.

Without warning, and for reasons that are still a mystery to us. Some arose from the depths of the oceans walking on to our coasts, some descending from mountain ranges and others materialized out of thin air.

Chaos broke out... National Governments frenzied about how to address their appearance. Some imprisoned and interrogated these faceless beings. Others put them on a pedestal and admired them as gods.

A reason for their existence was never truly established.

These faceless beings attempted to communicate with us using a language that no human being had ever heard before. However, one thing felt intuitively true…

Their appearance represented a warning. Something monumental was about to happen, unless we changed something dramatically.

What was it they wanted us to change? Maybe it was the way we were abusing the planet we called home, maybe it was the way we abused fellow human beings. Pondering what could be changed resulted to be mere a triviality in the grand scheme of things.

In hindsight the torture we were inducing onto ourselves, was simply a different medium which represented the same torture that we were about to endure...

As the faceless lived among us, their enthusiasm to communicate with us dwindled. Eventually we had reduced their morale to a state of silence.

Then one day, it happened.

It started quietly at first, an unnatural ringing sound beginning to rise from the distance...

This grew to an unimaginable volume, so biblical it could be heard from the outer limits of our galaxy.

The brightness was blinding...

The screams were not heard...

The ascension had begun.

## ***Chapter Two***

Steve Jobs had once said, “You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.”

The irony is painful, the very technology that he helped launch into being, was the very thing that set the us down the wrong path.

The term ‘singularity’ became taboo, people refused to accept that technology was not only becoming part of our lives, it had become life.

The first iterations of AI integration with human cognition were primitive.

God bless those poor souls who were the first to attempt the bridge. Left in permanent state of delirium and mania from uncontrolled cognitive expansion.

However, after the first revisions. The technology grew sophisticated, and seamless.

The effect was instantly recognisable and haunting. The bridged looked at the rest of us with a sense of sympathy. The same look you give to children struggling to overcome some arbitrary calculation.

Why wouldn’t they? The internet of things, available in an instant, to any individual that was bridged.

Complete cognitive supremacy was just the start. Physical revisions were an inevitability.

Energy usage skyrocketed; concerns of the climate became drowned out by the obsessive need for more technological progress.

Those with the capital to get exposed to this technology became instantly dethatched from the rest of humanity.

Countries who were less economically developed, descended into chaos and complete civil unrest. It was not hard to see what this meant for those who couldn’t keep up.

‘Upgrade or die’ was common to see written in graffiti across the streets.

Morals became an annoying inconvenience, not a standard to hold yourself to.

However, the line was only truly crossed when the final “dilemma” was solved. Complete bio-regeneration with intentional functionality.

Without the possibility of death, life took on new meaning…

Abstract almost.

The 28th of October was when the first death-free human became a reality.

In hindsight, its obvious.

This was also the day they arrived…

## ***Chapter Three***

No one will forget the day it happened…

Ringing so immense you could not hear glass shattering across the city. A white-hot flash so severe covering your eyes was not enough to reduce the burn.

Complete sensory overload—so overpowering, it felt as though I had been transported to some blank void where nothing existed. Not even my own thoughts. Empty chaos.

I remember thinking, “This must be hell” but then… the ringing stopped.

And I saw what hell really looked like.

The screams.

Who you were or who you knew was meaningless. At that moment of dread all sense of compassion was lost. The weak were trampled into the ground beneath the shoes of those who could still stand. People scurried like animals—rats, chucking each other aside clawing at the entrance to that godforsaken bunker desperate for the salvation that awaited inside. That last ray of hope glistening in doom.

Self-preservation was all that mattered.

I am not proud of what I had to do to get into that filthy hovel we called our ‘sanctuary’, but I’d be lying if I said I wouldn’t do it again.

Far off in the distance, a giant dome shield reflected sun rays our way—The Utopion. It lay tranquil against the foreground of mayhem surrounding our streets, completely unfazed as it always had been towards the suffering of our people.

I wish I saved myself from watching what happened next—to bathe still in that blissful ignorance…that unknowing peace. It was inevitable, I guess…our undoing, our downfall. I suppose to them we were only sub-human. Inferior. A stain of the imperfect past waiting to be cleansed from the gene pool of the future. A crack in the cog of evolution. A defect.

The Bridged, that’s how they saw us.

“Look! It’s moving!” —a frightened shriek from the corner. I redirected my gaze towards the voice, then eyed where its speaker was pointing.

My heart stopped.

The Utopion Dome had opened for the first time…ever.

In that instance, I knew what was coming. Total annihilation. Absolute. Destruction. I witnessed the entire scope of civilization as I knew it, the one I called home, rendered completely decimated without mercy of a second thought.

I saw it. I felt it. It was…evil.

That day ended in pain—agony, torture, loss…I thought it was over, all of it. Everything.

It wasn’t. Our suffering had only just begun.