Verum I: The Awakening

0: The Bridge the Awakening

Notes:

!!!It is recommended to skip this part and jump straight to the next one!!!

This is my first work. It is far from perfect and English isn't my native language, but I hope to learn how to write as I continue this series. Verum might be inspired by science, but I can assure you that there will be many inacuracies. So I beg you to bear with me.

05.03.2024 is the day this was posted. On this exact date Luce Balton, our protagonist, has been born.
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Have you ever wondered how the future might look like? Wonder no more! Then if you see the word "Bridge", you sure are about to receive some answers!
Though beware, as an extradimensional being, you cannot ever be sure if what you read here will apply to your universe. Still, everything that is stated here is true for an infinite amount of universes. There's a non 0% chance that yours is included.

Welcome to the first bridge of this story. A bridge is a part between the different chapters, so that you can cross from one chapter to the next. The storyline will always be the same, following the maincast. But the places they are in and the world around them won't be, for you will jump further and further into the future.

The bridges will tell you how far you have traveled and what the world has become. A bridge usually includes five topics: technology, space, medicine, nature, societies and sometimes other sciences.

With all that information out of the way, welcome to the year 2045!

Medicine

We all probably know, or have known, somebody suffering from cancer. It was one of the greatest takers of life in our world. The great news is that the cure has been found. Nobody has died of cancer since the end of the twenties.
The most popular cure is done with a virus. This virus will attack the cancer cells, while leaving healthy cells alone.
The immune system helps too, to destroy the virus, it has to destroy the cancer cells themselves.

Other cured diseases that are important to mention are autoimmune disease, alzheimers and dementia.
Autoimmune disease is a condition where the immune system attacks the body itself. The only known "cure" to this illness was to turn the immune system off. And that meant that just catching the flu could end up deadly. A chip attached to the thymus, the underrated organ that controls your immune system, helps our little buddy out in its work. The chip is also used for people with a weak immune system. Thanks to this chip, anything that's put inside the body, may it be a new organ, cybernetics or prosthetics, has a zero percent chance of being rejected.
We got rid of alzheimers and dementia thanks to gene editing. First step is to rewrite the parts of our genetic code that causes dementia, the second step is to repair any corrupted data in our DNA and to repair it with the help of AI. We'll get back to this in a minute.

Now that I have already mentioned prosthetics, I should mention that neuroprosthetics are the most common solution to the loss of a limb. If you don't know what a neuroprosthetic is, or how it works, then let me explain. Neuroprosthetics are robotic. Your nerves are connected with sensors attached to your skin, specifically with your nervous system. Now there's a connection between your brain and the prosthetic. You are able to feel with it too. At first, you need to learn how to control it, but eventually your new limb will feel like your old one.
We believe that in the future, more and more of the human body can be replaced by technology. Not long, and the human body will not only be one of biology, but one of biology AND technology. It is the next step in evolution.

Thanks to the eradication of fatal diseases, the human lifespan has been prolonged for a few years. People born in this century and living in wealthy countries are guaranteed to reach an age between 100 and 110. The lifespan of people in still developing countries has become a little longer too. The life expectancy of poorer countries is between 80 and 85 years. Though these prolonged life spans exist more or less thanks to the developments they have made in the past years.