Chapter 010: The Party

Transhumans were created during the Humanity 3.0 Project. A large-scale attempt of genetic and cybernetic tampering that was supposed to become Mankind's answer to the Wall of Reason. All limits on human improvements put in place by the Solar Commonwealth were temporarily rescinded, and numerous prototypes of new humans were created.

Each of the resulting Lines represented a widely different approach to the improvement of Mankind. The Pure Line - genetics. The Mechanist Line - cyborgization. The Virtual Line - brain upload. And so on. However, each of the Lines were, in the end, prototypes in Mankind’s largest scale human experimentation.

The idea was to allow the spread of new forms of Mankind while observing the resulting transhuman autonomies and picking the most successful design elements of all Lines. Once enough time would pass and enough data would be gathered the Humanity 4.0 Project would be launched - and the word ‘human’ would be radically redefined, resulting in Mankind being improved to the point of overcoming the Wall of Reason.

The Humanity 4.0 Project was never launched. Instead, the War of Purity started. When it ended, the transhumanity was reduced from close to half a billion to less than twenty five million members - and universally reviled. No more attempts on improving Mankind were made, and the majority of technologies associated with the concept of transhumanism are either forbidden under the pain of death or under extremely strict watch.

Encyclopedia Galactica

Book 3, page 765

***

EGS Echo - Crew Deck

15:22 15.04.2610 STT

Cadet Christopher Hall

Four days after his awakening, Christopher was allowed to leave the medical bay and return to his normal schedule, though with a dozen more microsurgeries scheduled for the next few days. They were mostly minor things left, as Lieutenant Commander Athalia explicitly stated that even complete failure of all remaining implants lodged into his body wouldn’t be enough to kill him.

When he finally left the medbay, nobody was waiting for him. In fact, nobody had visited him during his stay there. Which would have bothered him greatly if not for the massive VR party that was thrown when he regained consciousness. The rest of his time was spent on playing VR games from the hospital bed, meaning he was constantly spending time with one or more of his teammates.

As a whole, it was a very nice break from work, if you didn’t consider the circumstances. There was also the fact that he had spent ten out of seventeen days in the far future in the medbay - he was already scared of what Chief Tiaa was planning for him.

When he entered the living room, he immediately noticed that Ryan and Tendrik were there, busy playing a VR game. The state of comfortable rest with almost no movement save for breathing was unmistakable.

Christopher planned to return to his room to change his clothes, but he didn’t even get through the living room when Tendrik and Ryan woke up from their slumber.

“Christopher! You’re back!” Tendrik spoke first. “Why didn’t you tell us that Athalia was letting you go? We’d have come to pick you up.” Ryan agreed with the cyborg through a scarce nod.

“C’mon, guys.” Christopher replied. It was rather touching, he had to admit. “I could find the way to the quarters on my own. I’m not Nekia.” The fact that the catgirl could somehow get lost in the ship even with helpful pointers on her personal computer was a subject of many laughs. This time all it achieved was some chuckles.

“Actually, you’re back almost right in time.” Ryan said. “For a… deceleration!”

Christopher winced in almost physical pain. Athalia mentioned something about the ship getting close to Carmotia, an outlying colony of the Republic of Triana. Thus far he had tried his best to keep the implications out of his mind.

The fact that Ryan seemed to have serious mixed feelings about the whole ordeal - despite laughing about it - was a tiny bit amusing. It was nice to see him having a healthy distance to otherwise irritating things.

“Jokes aside, I have something that I wanted to ask you about.” Ryan seemed unusually serious about it. He even rose from the seat to face Christopher. “It’s about Carmotia.”

“Oh?” That was unexpected. Christopher had no idea what sort of business Ryan could have with the country that had forsaken him almost lethally.

“Well, we’re going to spend a few days there.” Ryan said. “Shore leave and so on. And I thought about hitting some local entertainments. How about going there with me?” That was unexpected.

Christopher had only a rough gist of what Ryan was considering as entertainment. But he already had an opinion of it.

“Err…” Christopher quickly decided how to handle the issue. “I’m not exactly a party animal, you know? My type of entertainment is to play a videogame, not go clubbing or anything like that.” His limited number of real life acquaintances had greatly contributed to that. Besides, he had always leaned slightly towards the introverted end of the spectrum.

“And that’s why you’re perfect!” Ryan said something completely stupid with a completely straight face. “Listen, I want to go with a few folks from engineering. But it is a good idea to have someone who’ll stay sober, and I know you aren’t drinking anything stronger than beer. You know, someone who’ll make sure we won’t run into some troubles once we get really into it, and that will find our way back to the ship.”

“And let me guess…” Christopher immediately figured out where this was going. “You promised them you’re going to find someone, and now I can’t refuse you or your image of a dependable person will be ruined forever.” Ryan blinked a few times, completely surprised.

“You sure you awakened telekinesis, not telepathy?” Ryan asked. The existence of telepathy brought some disturbing implications. It was bad enough to see some people aboard the Echo act strangely. How much worse was it to feel what was happening in their heads? “Well, you’re right. And honestly, you are my only hope.”

“I am?” The idea that Christopher was literally the only person fit for this task was rather unexpected. Ryan seemed too friendly towards everyone to not have some more acquaintances with a tendency towards sobriety.

“Well, yeah? Obviously?” Ryan sometimes appeared to have problems remembering the fact that Christopher was really outdated in more ways than one. “Inviting Tiriel to the nightclub is like inviting a nun to the brothel. Kivanna and Rukh are a straight nope because I prefer to ask such things in person and, well, I barely see them at all. Bringing Nekia would be akin to inviting a sheep to the wolfpack’s annual lamb tasting extravaganza. Tendrik is a transhuman, so he's not an option. That leaves either Patches or you. And I think you’re more qualified.”

That made sense. More or less. But there was something that didn’t sit right with Christopher.

“Err… I thought you were chill with Tendrik.” It was almost surprising how fast it had happened. Ryan had treated Tendrik as some mythical man-eating monster when they met for the first time. Now they seemed well on the way to becoming a rather odd pair of best bros.

“Oh, I am totally chill with him.” Ryan replied. Tendrik looked slightly relieved. “But he is going to get shot twenty-three times due to ‘accidental weapon discharges’ before getting through customs on the spaceport. I think it’s best to avoid that.”

Christopher saw the validity of the statement, even if he had no idea of everyone's contention with the transhumans. They were a focus of popular prejudice and hatred. It was as if someone gathered every single popular bias of Christopher’s times and switched the resulting superhatred onto a single group of people.

“Ok, then I guess I can accompany you.” Christopher said, while Ryan’s face lightened up. “You’re paying for my beer, though.” Ryan almost jumped with his hands in the air in joy.

“Awesome!” He shouted, a smile plastered on his face. “Spacesickness is going to knock me out for a while, so I’ll best prepare everything first. I’ll see you later.” Then he ran out of the room, leaving Christopher to wonder what part of the shore leave required any ‘preparations’.

“I’m playing Underworld.” Tendrik announced when Ryan disappeared. “You want to join me?”

It actually took Christopher a second to remember. The diggy-shooty game with the massive Hole and minecraft-like construction of things. He tested so many games recently that he started to lose track of their names. But he already started to notice a few of them that were obviously becoming his favourites, Underworld included.

“Well, in a second.” Christopher decided that this was a moment as good as any other to get an answer. “Can I ask you a question first?” Tendrik nodded. “Why are transhumans treated like this? In my time transhumanism was pretty much a cool sci-fi idea that had lots of people giddy with excitement.” There were also quite a lot of writings and games exploring the worse side of them, but this was beside the point.

Tendrik looked at Christopher for a few seconds in silence while gritting his teeth.

“Well, I guess I can answer.” The cyborg said slowly. It was rather obvious he didn’t like the idea of talking about it. “Any particular reason to ask?”

Christopher settled himself on the part of the couch abandoned by Ryan.

“Well, I saw enough cases of people being treated badly due to some stupid prejudices in my time.” Christopher answered. “And I’m seriously bothered by my teammate being on the receiving end of that. I thought it was some regional issue initially, but Ryan told me once that it’s only ‘marginally better’ in the rest of the Confederation. So it’s something more widespread.”

“Prejudices?” Tendrik asked him. It was a strange question said with a strange look on his face, but Christopher decided to answer it nonetheless.

“You know, unreasonable problems and accusations towards someone based on something stupid. Like being of another race, of wrong gender and whatnot.” It sometimes felt like his age’s favourite pastime. Everyone had problems with each other.

“Oh, I assure you that this prejudice isn’t unreasonable.” Tendrik sighed, leaving Christopher to wonder if the prejudice was so strong and culturally pervasive that even the victims of it started to share the belief. “Listen, what was the political ideal of evil in your times? As in, if people had issues with someone’s politics being evil, to whomst did they compare them?”

“Adolf Hitler.” Christopher replied. “Stalin, Mao or Pol Pot. Depends on who you ask.”

“How many people did they kill?” It seemed that whatever the transhumans supposedly did, it was something genocidal.

“Well, Hitler and his allies killed something like six million Jews and eleven million others, if you count civilians and prisoners of war.” Christopher replied. Of course, the estimates varied, but that was something that was a relatively safe assessment. There was also the part where the Hitler’s definition of Jew was rather skewed, which he decided to ignore for now. “The others…” He was about to continue and give much larger numbers (though at least partially caused by horrible economic policies rather than open genocides), but Tendrik interrupted him.

“Well…” The cyborg said with a solemn look on his face.. “Transhumans were made to be better than the baseline humans. In everything. Unfortunately, also in war crimes. We scored fifteen to twenty billion victims during the War of Purity.”

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Christopher stared at Tendrik for several seconds.

“Fifteen to twenty billion?” Christopher finally managed to utter. The number was too large to comprehend. Twice the entire Mankind of his times.

One death a tragedy, one million a statistic. Fifteen to twenty billion is just too much to visualize. And completely abstract.

“Yeah, the Transhuman Alliance destroyed so many pre-war population censuses that it’s hard to say how many people died.” Tendrik misunderstood Christopher’s words. “Five billion people being pretty much ‘lost’ is a cherry on top of the cake of trauma.” The contrast between his usual self and the current self was startling.

Christopher stayed silent.

“Everyone would have gone past that already.” Tendrik continued. “Some purely human groups have managed to reach a similar kill count much later, though with Mankind many times more numerous. Transhumans pretty much killed half of Mankind, so we still lead when it comes to percentage. But the biggest problem is that nobody really knows WHY transhumans suddenly started butchering everyone.”

“What?” That sounded strange, especially to a historian. “Centuries have passed and nobody knows why the war started?”

“That’s why transhumans almost won the war during its first day.” Tendrik replied. “Everything seemed alright. Transhuman autonomies paid taxes and slowly spread their branches of transhumanism throughout the Solar Commonwealth. Numbers indicated that in a century or two there would be no more Variants and baseline humans. Bioconservatists grumbled but were an embattled minority in human politics. Then, out of nowhere, an all-out assault.”

“So people are afraid that you’ll just…” Christopher paused for a second. “... switch into a genocide mod or something?”

“In short, yes.” Tendrik nodded. “Though it’s a bit more complicated. It wasn’t just a sudden KILL EM ALL on the Alliance’s side. They had arguments for the war, though all of them included a really large stretch of logic. They claimed that the Solar Commonwealth wanted to secretly exterminate them. Mankind was evil, so it certainly planned to do that, despite no proof ever being found and the Commonwealth’s government being super favourable towards transhumans.”

“And this was… enough to make the transhumans as a whole support genocide of this degree?” Christopher said. It was even more abstract than the number of victims.

“Well, no.” Tendrik replied. “Initially the general Transhuman Alliance was kept in the dark. But as time passed, more and more of its citizens knew what was happening and supported these actions in their entirety. During the closing years, the overwhelming majority quite literally wanted to kill all humans. It was like a plague of genocidal madness that spread throughout the Alliance like a wildfire.”

Tendrik sighed. He didn’t like the talk, obviously. But he also felt somewhat relieved that he finally had it.

“Despite decades of investigation, the Solar Commonwealth found no ‘physical reason’ for all of it.” Tendrik continued. “So it wasn’t something as easy as some exotech virus. Which is bad, as without an explanation, transhumans were obviously at fault. ‘Too alien’, ‘too divergent from Humanity’, ‘detached from normal logic’ and so on.” He added bitterly.

Christopher remained silent. He wasn’t sure how to respond to all that. He hated himself for that, but he could at least understand why Mankind turned to be so distrustful towards transhumans. Tendrik was obviously as human as you get, though.

“When the Commonwealth found out about the genocide happening behind the frontline, it went berserk.” Tendrik continued. “The Alliance was burned to the ground in retribution. The remnants of its fleets and armies fled to Discord. They’ve continued waging guerilla warfare against Mankind for something like three centuries now. All of that while periodically committing horrible atrocities to remind the Confederation of Mankind and the Solar Republic why they hate transhumans so much.”

“And… you? The transhumans within the Confederation?” Christopher asked. It was an obvious hole in the explanation.

“All descendants of the Unforgiven.” Tendrik replied. “Transhumans that remained loyal to the Commonwealth or switched sides early on. It got significantly harder later on. By the closing days of the War of Purity the remaining transhuman death camps were mostly busy killing off those transhumans that didn’t like the idea of killing all humans.”

Tendrik went silent. He was staring at Christopher attentively. It was rather obvious that the talk had ended. Now was the time for Christopher to decide how it influenced his opinion on transhumanism as a whole - and Tendrik. No wonder the cyborg seemed so worried.

“Well, that’s… more than I expected.” Christopher replied. The common fear of transhumanism made some sense now. If nobody knew why they went genocidal once, nobody could be sure that they wouldn’t suddenly do it again the next Tuesday. “Then again, you guys are all descendants of those who stayed sane, right? And it’s not like you are three hundred years old, so considering you somehow at fault due to what happened ages ago sounds like a stupid prejudice, alright.”

Tendrik was relieved. Overwhelmingly so. He was probably not used to people reacting this way.

To Christopher, it was the final piece of the puzzle. The explanation for why the future was so strikingly NORMAL. He didn’t expect humanity to turn into omnipotent energy beings using black holes and planets to play interstellar golf by year 2610, but he at least expected body surfing, genetics-based immortality and brain uploads to be a thing. A widespread thing.

If the entirety of Mankind was traumatized by the War of Purity and actually expected any large scale redefinition of humanity to end with Holocaust 3.0… it explained the stagnation. Christopher himself would probably be super careful with such technologies if someone used them to wipe out half of Mankind.

“We call them exhumans.” Tendrik added, while not looking at Christopher. “You know, these guys who fled to Discord. They are pretty much what the entire transhumanism was about in the first place. If anything, it’s us, the loyalists, that went back to being mostly humans. The ‘exhuman’ term was a rather pitiful attempt of rebranding the remnants of the Alliance so that we would no longer share the name.” PR agencies seemed to be doing fine in the future, even if they didn’t always succeed.

Christopher resolved himself to read more about the war. And to find out what the ‘Discord’ was. But that could wait.

“Didn’t stick anywhere outside of transhuman states of the Confederation, though” Tendrik paused for a second. “It’s actually easy to discern us. Especially mechanists. The loyalists tend to still resemble humans. If you see a mechanical spider with remnants of a human face in a place where it doesn’t belong, it's probably those assholes.”

Christopher resolved himself to use that term. After all, ‘exhuman’ sounded like a better term for someone who completely abandoned the very concept of ‘human’. ‘Transhuman’ seemed to sound more like a ‘better human’ to Christopher.

“You know, I actually noticed something strange a while ago.” Tendrik said suddenly. “You arrived in the future on the 28th of March, right?”

“Well, yes. What about it?” Christopher replied. It didn’t really matter to him what day he arrived.

“That’s also the day the War of Purity started.” The cyborg replied. “28 of March 2266. The Day of Sorrow. You think that’s a coincidence?”

***

Carmotia-III, City of Tham

03:22 17.04.2610 STT

Cadet Christopher Hall

Christopher was actually looking forward to his first shore leave. Sure, it was rather apparent at this point that the Republic of Triana was a horrible place to live in. However, officers of Echo seemed to be sure that there was no threat to the crew members for as long as they didn’t act like complete idiots.

The planet of Carmotia-III could be compared to Mars. It was cold. It lacked a breathable atmosphere, and its gravity was abysmal, forcing the cities to use simgravity just like ships did. Its surface was just an endless sea of regolith, with occasional rock formations exposed by asteroid impacts. The only significant difference was that the original and interesting reddish tint was replaced with Moon-like boring gray.

Christopher checked the details of the world beforehand. It was, quite literally, useless. The Republic of Triana had settled it merely because the world could theoretically get terraformed, though it would take decades to get anywhere and cost more money than was in circulation within the subsector. Seizing a planet just to make sure nobody else could seize it was an epitome of wasting time and resources in Christopher’s opinion.

Around one million inhabitants in a few dozen settlements of various sizes. Tham was the planetary capital, with a population slightly surpassing one hundred thousand. Like other cities of Carmotia, it was a maze of corridors and rooms not dissimilar to the insides of Echo. Half of it was underground and all of it looked like it had seen better times.

One hundred thousand people was enough to warrant some entertainment. Tham was also frequently visited by crews of passing starships, which meant the locals were used to dealing with outside visitors.

Christopher quickly decided that the Republic of Triana was even worse than he had imagined. It was like watching a cyberpunk dystopia, evolved from a world where the Third Reich had won the Second World War.

Ubiquitous surveillance - cameras were everywhere, not hidden but displayed proudly to keep everyone reminded of their existence. The security forces were also omnipresent, looking like the straightest case of sci-fi nazis he had ever seen - the locals had to really love black.

Besides, the whole place was significantly run down. Littered. With a significant amount of neon signs which together with network announcements displayed by his personal computer advertised a wide variety of goods and services. Including drugs and prostitution which seemed oddly common.

Just as notifications about Citizens having to obey the Elites, and reminders that having children without governmental approval was forbidden for non-Elites (and required passing some sort of genetic tests to discern the ‘worth’ of ‘resulting offspring’).

Compared to Triana apparently being some sort of eugenic cyberpunk dystopia, the fact that some of the locals wore strangely limited amounts of clothes was barely an issue. Besides, this of all things could be explained by the city being a closed one. Weather and air temperature weren’t issues.

Christopher soon started regretting his agreement to this venture. Especially as Ryan’s friends from engineering (six people led by a petty officer named Bogdan Frolov) had found another nanny: a serious looking marine, adamant about not being interested in drinking alcohol.

He got nicknamed Grunt, as that was the only answer to the question about his name. Christopher overheard the engineers gossiping about the marine being ordered to accompany them by Colonel Nowak. Just in case something went wrong.

Christopher was also painfully aware of everyone but him and Ryan being armed. The engineers carried simple pistols. Grunt had something like a compact submachine gun, a cross between the Uzi and MP5.

The night club in question wasn’t as bad as Carmotia as a whole, but certainly not a place that Christopher would ever visit on his own. He had never been to one on Earth, so he had nothing to compare it to. But if that’s what the night clubs were about, he was happy with his lack of experience.

Loud music. Crowds. Flashing lights everywhere. Wide selection of alcohol at the bar. People trying to pick up other people. Waitresses navigating through the crowd with even more alcohol and very little clothing.

Christopher felt like an alcoholic at a Muslim wedding: out of place and lonely. Ryan was right at home and rather quickly singled out some local girl that he was now busy seducing by the bar. The engineers were spread around the club. The marine was leaning on the wall and looking stoic and austere.

There was no warning. A few of the clubbers were in position to see the start of it, and none of them were given enough time to understand what they were seeing. Twenty-seven people died instantly when the grenades thrown into the dancing crowd detonated. More joined the list when the attackers fired into the shocked survivors, clearing the way.

Christopher’s first reaction was hiding behind a pillar. Ryan leaped forward, pulling the girl behind the bar’s counter. The marine sprung to life, pulled his gun out and opened fire while running towards the nearest cover.

Gunfire, screams and still raging music created a deafening cacophony. Christopher didn’t feel like a hero. He curled up behind the pillar, covering his ears.

The marine got to cover and kept shooting. Christopher could see two of the engineers firing their pistols in the same direction, but he couldn’t see the enemy from his position. People were running in every direction, some of them torn and thrown to the ground by the bullets.

Please, let it end.

The selection of alcohol behind the bar’s counter was suddenly massacred. Bottles exploded, dozens of them at once. The attacker had brought some heavier guns. The marine fired in a different direction than earlier and after a few seconds the roar of the machine gun died out.

A second later the marine had to dive behind his cover as the attacker finally focused on him. Then one of the two engineers got shot in the shoulder and landed on the ground, disappearing from Christopher’s sight.

The marine repositioned and fired again. Christopher regained enough courage to just slightly lean away from his cover. The dance floor was a mess, and a handful of armed soldiers was advancing towards the bar area. They were equipped properly - each of them wore something resembling a SWAT trooper outfit and carried an assault rifle. The only reason why they didn’t kill Grunt, Christopher and everyone else near the bar had less to do with the defenders’ gunfire and more with the bodies littering the ground that slowed the attackers down.

One of them threw a grenade. Christopher responded without thinking and froze the grenade mid-flight with his telekinesis. He failed to keep it up in the air for more than two seconds before the side effects had broken his attention, but it was enough.

The grenade exploded. Two of the nearest assailants were hit by shrapnels and thrown to the ground. This left the other attackers vulnerable - Grunt immediately rose up from behind the cover and killed one of them with a burst of bullets.

On the far end of the club, more armed people stormed inside. For a second Christopher was terrified, thinking it was the attacker’s reinforcements. Then he recognized the space-nazi style uniforms of the local police. The assailants nearest to the entrance opened fire towards the new arrivals, to which they responded in kind.

The attackers changed tactics. Three of them stayed behind, trying to slow down the police, while the rest abandoned all reason and simply charged towards the bar, firing their guns to keep the defenders suppressed. Christopher hid behind the pillar again when bullets started whizzing around him.

Grunt responded by firing back at the attackers until a few of their bullets hit their mark. A few seconds after he hit the ground, the two surviving assailants who got close enough exploded.

The last thing Christopher remembered was the ceiling coming down.