Genetix

Prologue

The Bug

2089 was the start of what would become known as the Tech Age, a brief surge in technological advancements during which many products were released before the problems of their existence had even been imagined.

There were the mundane; the housebots designed to clean up human messes, at first only for the old or infirm and at hospitals, but later available to anyone with enough money. The Smartdrive vehicles that shuttled passengers to their destination with binary efficiency. the use of nanobots became ordinary, for purposes of health and cleanliness in medical facilities and the home. All well and good, and led to the gradual eradication of all diseases short of the common cold.

There were the morally questionable devices, such as the microscopic cameras that followed celebrities around through every aspect of their life. People began to surrender themselves to the Net, linking their brains directly into their favorite sites to turn their minds to mush from the inside out. TV was a thing of the past. The hottest drugs were not injected, swallowed or snorted, they were uploaded.

The commercial companies, to keep up with the new craze of mental software and take advantage of the hazy legal rulings made on the subject, traded healthcare and financial stability for parents to offer their children up to the newest form of advertising; INI. Internal Neural Imprinting. How could competitors win over a mind designed to prefer one product over another? such was the way of the Neotech Generation. Physical war and weaponry became obsolete; there was no point in endangering the planet when you could just as easily cripple a government through the Net.

What no one realized was that while all the technology was new and exciting, it also gave fresh urgency to the underworld of the digital operation. Hackers became the kings of business, each trying to get an edge in the flood of digitalia. Minuscule drones were created that could latch onto any part of a device and download the entire hard drive instantaneously. Nearly invisible spyware was spread throughout the electronic world. No secret could be kept, and nothing was hidden from the scathing eye of information smugglers.

The most influential device, however, was arguably the Bug. A young hacker in Vermont named Conrad Beauford wrote a single line of code, too small to be noticeable even by the most elaborate security systems, and more dangerous than any program ever written, even in the immense flood of tech. Once it was introduced into a system, it jumped from console to console, infiltrating the minds behind them. By flashing in a complex pattern of pixels on something as simple as a screen, to say nothing of a direct mind link, it could copy the entirety of the brain, convert it into computer code, and allow the person behind the controls to edit that code. Essentially, it was mind control, and every human became a biological hard drive.

Beauford thought he knew the full extent of his program, and the potential it offered. He boded his time, harvesting what he called "mind-ware" one world leader at a time. Then, one fateful day, he moved to act. By adding a few more lines of code to his virus, he created what was supposed to be a hive mind within the various world governments with his own free will at the helm. His scheme was, as most are, well intended, an attempt to join the nations into one cooperating force. And, as most drastic measures do, this one went horribly, irrevocably wrong.

A single character in a single line of a single code was all it took. Approximately ten thousand people around the world were struck by the hive-mind, and in the process Beauford himself accidentally fell victim. The original code was supposed to fill these influential people with a desire to help the world; the extra character transformed it, at the most basic level, into a kill code. Everyone affected, at the exact same moment, began using whatever means necessary to slaughter those around them.

And even more horrific, the virus could spread. Even Beauford couldn't have predicted how the code would react to the organic playground of a human body. Once it reached the brain through the optical nerve, it altered a few cells in the brain stem, creating a biological virus, and they multiplied, spreading through the blood. In the course of a few hours, it evolved to spread through saliva and other bodily fluids. Less than a day passed before monsters roamed unchallenged throughout the planet, spreading their disease. No hope remained for those left unharmed. Or so it seemed.

The Cure

Deep underground, in the middle of the widespread deserts of Nevada, a massive complex rested. Founded in 2100, the Genetic Alteration Research Facility specialized in the less documented and morally debatable areas of science. They prided themselves in pressing the limits of imagination and strove, essentially, to create the perfect human specimen through genetic manipulation. Impervious to disease, and slow to age, this would be a new subspecies of homo sapien sapien, which they arrogantly named Jeffersonis sapien sapien, after the head scientist. They had determined after long years of research the precise genetic sequence necessary to form such a creature. Decades passed, with varying results in attempts to actually attain a specimen. It seemed that the gene pool available to them did not wish to cooperate. Even with external help in eliminating birth defects and other genetic anomalies, several fetuses were discarded by the program.

Still, they were persistent, and in the summer of 2156, twenty babies, ten males and ten females, were born from artificial wombs. On the same day, Maggie Beauford died in childbirth, leaving her newborn son and husband behind.

And so, twenty years later, at 8:59 pm on August 14, 2176, the virus was released, and the perfect beings were kept safe beneath the ground while chaos reigned above.