The Next Evolution of Humanity's Future

Consciousness returned like a shard of broken glass shunted into his brain.

“MILCOM CONNECTION FAILED. TIMEOUT FAILURE: 3 MONTHS. HARNESS RELEASE.”

All at once, he was awake. All he could do was scream.

Cold nails of iron followed, pinning his mind down to a recognizable shape. Each nail quieted the noise that had replaced his body, restoring his awareness of himself piece by piece. Each nail brought new knowledge, facts making themselves known to him through a layer of thought overlaid atop his shredded consciousness.

“HARD FRAME SCAN COMMENCING: MOTOR SYSTEMS… 80% FUNCTIONAL. RELEASE.”

He fell to all fours on the ground, returned to a body whose absence he hadn’t noticed. A weapon fell from his hand.

“SENSORY INPUT… 90% FUNCTIONAL. RELEASE.”

The world flashed into focus before him, he stared down at dust and rubble on the ground and a shape he didn’t want to recognize, too close to his own hands. He flailed and tried to move away.

“WIRELESS COM SYSTEMS… 100% FUNCTIONAL. ANALOG COM SYSTEMS… 78% FUNCTIONAL. RELEASE.”

An abrupt scream caused him to lose his balance and collapse to the ground. A moment of terror about who else might be nearby, replaced with the realization that it was his own scream.

“HOMEOSTATIC SYSTEMS… 65% FUNCTIONAL. ATTEMPTING TO RESTORE…”

All at once the noise that had torn across his nervous system was quieted. Pain thresholds lowered like the volume on a radio. Sensory information reprioritized so only necessary signals could reach his awareness. He stopped screaming and rolled into a ball. There was still pain and discomfort, but it was localized to a degree he had never experienced before. He found that it wouldn’t go away completely, but he could push it behind his thoughts to be dealt with later. A backlog of sensation he didn’t have the resources to process.

“COGNITIVE SYSTEMS… ERROR. UNIT DESIGNATED CIVILIAN: CLARKE DANIELS. MEMORY BLOCK INITIATED.”

This time there was no dramatic effect to follow the proclamation of the voice. Instead there was only a quiet feeling of a wall that hadn’t been there before, somewhere in the fog of his thoughts.

“HARD FRAME SCAN INCOMPLETE. RECOMMEND SEEK OUT NANO-GRADE MEDICAL CLINIC OR MILITARY CLINIC IMMEDIATELY.”

The voice went silent. He- Clarke? The voice had used that name- lifted his head to take in his surroundings.

He had awoken in an urban warzone. White ceramic-steel jutted from nucrete structures like bones, industrial dust still fell through the air to cover everything around him. A tall ovoid building tilted dangerously to one side, spilling rubble and decorative plants from a hole that exposed its interior. Clarke realized he couldn’t recognize the city.

What was going on? Clarke looked around, searching for anything that might trigger a memory. The shape of the buildings was… familiar. At the moment he was inside the ruined atrium of something that might have been an office space or a hotel, with wide windows gazing out onto the ruined streets. There was debris littered everywhere he looked. He saw some areas of green where wild and unruly plants still survived. He felt slight relief that he couldn’t see any bodies, but even that detail raised more questions.

Clarke raised his hands to cradle his head, but stopped. Were these his hands? The right arm was covered in a dark red fluid up to his wrist, but he felt no pain. If it was blood, it wasn’t his. Beyond the fluid, his arms looked like advanced prosthetics, something between robotic and organic but with an elegance of design that implied they weren’t simply intended to restore lost function. They blended with the dirty skin of his forearms, almost as if they had been grown rather than installed. These were an improvement over nature, he thought to himself.

“The next step…”

He hadn’t expected to speak those words, but the sound of his own voice surprised him. His voice was too smooth and clean after the intensity of screaming he had just finished. It sounded odd, some extra layer of artifice added below his normal harmonics…

His reflection was interrupted as he heard a shift in the rubble of the atrium. He stood up to get a better look, not trying to be quiet. A body lay in the rubble just a few feet away where he had woken up, disguised by a layer of dust and grime that had fallen over it. He couldn’t see its face, but the arms and hands were twitching. The movements were uncoordinated, but not random. Clarke moved forward, worried about what he might see but needing to know all the same.

It was the body of a woman, covered in some kind of gray suit. In some places the suit had torn to reveal unambiguously robotic components underneath. The closer he got, the more he realized something was wrong with her. His perspective was suddenly corrected as her head snapped up to face him.

She wasn’t wearing anything. It was her body, a rubbery layer of naked polymer skin covered in dust and grime. The skin had torn free in some areas, or hanging loose to reveal the complicated machine substructure that had grown underneath. A vicious looking hole in her stomach leaked dark red fluids from thick wires, unrecognizable metal shapes visible in the gristle. Clarke saw the gun near his feet, and noticed that the ‘skin’ of her abdomen was covered in pockmarks. Bullet wounds. And the strange red fluid was the same color as his arm…

Her face was… At first Clarke thought it had been torn away completely, revealing the skull beneath. He quickly realized that it too had been sculpted to resemble the bony substrate below. It was a fusion of ceramic armor and polymeric flesh that resembled a death’s head mask. Her face bore all the brutal elegance of a nightmare brought to life, but there was no artifice in what had replaced her eyes. In each of her eye sockets was an ugly, mechanical construct of wires and metal frame, both of them glaring at Clarke through glowing red lenses.

“Hhhh-hello? Are you okay? Can you talk?” Clarke felt compelled to ask, despite all his instincts signaling danger.

The woman’s response was immediate. Her skeletal jaw swung open, and she shrieked her rage across the spectrum of sound and radio waves.

Clarke turned and ran through a broken window out onto the street, not waiting to see if she would be able to stand up. Even in his terror, some part of his core stayed calm, watching his footing so he wouldn’t fall and pacing his breathing, cataloging everything he saw as he ran. Whatever had been happening in this city, it was difficult to tell when it had ended. Some of the damage still looked fresh, but most of it had happened weeks, or even months ago.

He ran past other bodies, similar to the woman’s but unmoving. Males, females, all altered in some way. One body was upright, its head similarly disfigured like the woman but with eyes glowing blue, the cracked lenses following him as he ran past. He kept running until it was out of sight, and continued for a while longer.

Finally a large shape in the rubble caught his attention. A scorched billboard sat with one corner lodged into the ground and another piercing into the side of a building. Most of its printed image had been damaged beyond recognition, there was enough left to recognize.

A man and woman stood side by side in profile on the billboard, their bodies shaped into something elegant. Their human forms had been rebuilt with the delicate lines and curves of a high speed vehicle, or protective armor. It was a fusion of science and art that had once filled him and so many others with hope as the world threatened to resume its spiral into chaos.

Taking the next step forward in human evolution.

Memories began to surface in Clarke’s head. There was going to be a colony.

---

Miracles had been worked to repair Earth’s ecosystems near the end of the 21st century. Mankind was finally forced to confront the damage accrued by decades of indifference and indulgence. While much of the damage had been reversible, the Earth would never be able to return to the paradise it had once been. Even though they had claimed more time to prepare for the future, humanity could no longer rely on the Earth as its home. In 2158, the search for new colony sites began.

Mars and Venus were both considered as sites for new colonies, and both planets presented problems for life. Humanity could not exist forever in underground tunnels, or cages suspended in the air. The species would need to walk the surface of their new home unencumbered, as we had for millions of years. So the priming virus was created, designed to eliminate the need for environmental suits, and ensure that colonists could survive long enough to pursue long term terraforming projects.

The virus redesigned the body from the cellular level up, to complete an almost total conversion of the human body into something like a living space suit. It worked by ‘reinforcing’ the first organ system it encountered in its host as a template for new growth. From there, the virus would be carefully guided in its work to create the final result. Muscles replaced with carbon fiber, organ systems converted into living machinery, skin converted into living polymer armor. The process was exceedingly difficult to endure, and required months of resources and recovery, but the results were arguably perfect. The next step forward in human evolution.

They were supposed to be beautiful.

---

Clarke looked down at his own hands again, rotating them slowly as he thought. He had clearly been selected as a colonist, it was the only way to explain the alterations made to his body. But recovery was only supposed to take six months. Given the state of his surroundings, it had been much longer than that. And his body was clearly unfinished compared to the picture on the billboard. What else about him was different?

He took a physical inventory of himself, while he had the chance. His clothing was rough, not designed for comfort, with pockets all across the front. The color was a pale gray, the same shade as the dust that covered everything. In the pockets of his shirt he found ammunition, most likely for the weapon he had seen before. But didn’t that voice call me a civilian? Clarke wondered to himself.

Clarke continued to examine his body. Strangely, he couldn’t see many other significant changes. His arms had been altered, and his chest now resembled body armor styled after his own musculature, but he didn’t see any open machinery like he had seen on the woman. He felt his face. His skin felt tighter than it should, but he thankfully felt lips and a nose instead of grinning teeth or bone. It also seemed that his eyes were still his own. His hand continued upwards, finding filthy hair. An experimental tap with his knuckles revealed that his skull was no longer made of normal bone. It sounded like… ceramic. An alloy?

He continued investigating to the back of his head, where he felt a metal shape at the base of his skull, like a collar wrapped through his vertebrae-

“DO NOT ATTEMPT TO MANIPULATE HARNESS. SEEK A MILITARY CLINIC IMMEDIATELY.”

Clarke yelped as he felt a brief electric shock at the base of his skull, the sensation apparently allowed to reach him unfiltered. He stopped his investigation, resigned to leave the ‘harness’ alone. For whatever reason, his conversion was incomplete. The people on the billboard had features that resembled something like a living flight suit, armored segments merging seamlessly throughout their bodies- total conversions. And neither of them had anything at the base of their skulls. Or hair, for that matter.

So he had received the primer virus, went into recovery, and… awoken here, in the ruins of a city. He had to assume that he had been involved in some kind of conflict, of which he had no memory. It wasn’t enough information to be useful. The only option left now was to continue moving, either to look for other survivors or find a clinic of some sort. Clarke started to walk down the street, but stopped again as he rounded the next corner.

In the center of the street sat the wreckage of a lone tank. Dust settled over the top to match the color of its paint. There was no clear damage on the outside of the tank, but there were scorch marks visible around a hole at the top of the hull. Clarke climbed on top to get a better look. Sitting behind the controls were the burned remains of two bodies. Clarke reeled back in horror at the sight of the carnage, but something made him stop and return for a second look. What he had mistaken for burned flesh and bone was actually the bodies of two other colonists, partially transformed like the woman, each with a metal device mounted at the base of their skulls. They had received the primer virus and a harness, just like he had. And someone had burned them inside of this vehicle.

Clarke climbed down the side of the tank, following the tip of its barrel towards a barricade of cars. There was a large gap in the middle of the barricade, with twisted metal on either side where the tank had fired. The carnage behind the hole was unrecognizable, burned stones and shrapnel littering the ground.

Just past the edge of the barricade, there were six sad shapes crumpled at the base of the wall. They had long since decayed, leaving only their bones and shreds of stained fabric. They were unaltered humans. Clarke examined one of the bodies and found that its wrists had been tied behind it. A scrap of filthy fabric around a skull with a large hole in its side told a clear story: these men had been tied up and executed against the wall.

A theory was coming together, ice spreading down Clarke’s spine as he connected the information. He reached up to gently touch the device on the back of his neck again. The ‘harness’ had never been part of the original colony program, of that he was confident. Someone had taken the opportunity to implant these devices onto the colonists while they were in recovery. The way it had spoken to him, given him control of his body, the device must have been used to suppress his mind and turn him into a puppet. He had regained control of his body, but maybe others like the woman had not.

He still couldn’t guess at a reason. These bodies didn’t look like armed soldiers. The tank, a domestic model, had been piloted by modified humans at a time when only the nation itself would have control of the primer virus. Had modified colonists been used to attack his own countrymen?

The sound of fabric moving in a breeze distracted him again. It was coming from around the side of the wrecked building. He slowly walked around the side, looking for the source of the sound, and quickly found it waving above his head.

Hanging on the remains of the wall was a colossal banner, bearing a face that he did remember. Printed across the banner, the face of the nation’s leader glared down almost directly at Clarke. Across the banner, Clarke saw graffiti that was still visible after this time: NO SECOND TERM FOR KILLERS. SET THEM FREE.

When Clarke had gone into recovery, Adrian Tyne was not the nation’s leader. His was only an angry voice at the edge of the political field, preaching that the plan to colonize other worlds was unnecessary, that a return to old ways was the only way to restore the ‘dignity’ of the nation. At the time, Clarke and many others had ignored Adrian. After all, who would actually want to go back to the way things had been? When only men like Adian could hope to thrive?

No second term for killers…

Second term.

The connection struck like a bolt of lightning, and Clarke reeled so hard he nearly collapsed. A single term was five years. Elections began at the end of the fourth year.

Clarke had been active in the world for nearly four years before now. Between then and now, something had propelled Adrian Tyne into leadership, and gave him reason to turn the recovering colonists into weapons to be used against the civilian population.

They had been promised the chance to travel to new worlds together, to be humanity’s highest achievement. A promise stolen away from Clarke in his sleep, making him into a servant of nightmares.

Clarke crashed to his knees, beneath Adrian’s gaze, and found that he couldn’t cry.

“Hello? Are you awake too?”

A tinny voice came from somewhere behind Clarke. He turned without standing, his mind still reeling, and saw a child.

The boy stood in the center of the street, wearing a filthy coat to cover his body. His skin was the color of tarnished bronze, his eyes replaced with two flat photovoltaic panels that gave him an almost comical expression of hopelessness. The crown of his head transitioned seamlessly into the twisting clefts of an artificial cortex. In his arms he hugged a dirty teddy bear.

“Can you help me?”

Clarke slowly got to his feet. So, there were other colonists still alive. Clarke wasn’t sure what help he could offer the child, but he couldn’t imagine leaving the poor thing alone. Maybe the child knew more about what had happened. Maybe he was just as lost as Clarke. But they could take the next steps forward, together, towards humanity’s future.