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The ReMaking of Man

Excerpt of The ReMaking of Man, 2038

The key, some say crowning, development in the quest to fully harness our biological brain occurred with Augmented Consciousness Access and Visualization (ACAV). The protocol is still found in solution-stacks of brain-machine interfaces.

ACAV was birthed by the United States military’s DARPA in the Late American period. As with U.S. military research successes including atomic weapons, the internet, GPS, smart weapons, stealth, and prosthetic limbs for wounded soldiers (discussed in the next chapter), ACAV also trickled-down to civilian use in ways unforeseen by the Pentagon.

The tools forged to make pilots and special operators more effective in their warfighting duties became the foundational technology for the largest leap in consciousness since language. The basic ACAV protocol runs on “bare metal” cyber-infrastructure, creating a dynamically-defined network. On top of this can be installed a Hyper-cortical Control Panel (HCP), versions of which are used to rewire networks throughout our brain and modify the behaviors by which we satisfy our fundamental needs.

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Traditionalist Backlash

Excerpt of 1945–2041 Rise and Demise of American Hyperpower, 2049

The United States of America was the last of the classical hegemonic hyperpowers. The end-point of a line connecting the Achaemenid, Greek, Roman, Chinese, Mongol, Dutch, and British Empires.

The U.S. was not entirely culpable in its own demise, many metafactors intervened to hasten the decline of the nation-state paradigm. However, America was responsible for the largest disruption in world order with the eruption of its Traditionist Backlash.

Traditionalist Backlash
Throughout the 2020s a core demographic that centered on traditional values continued the fight for social and political power in Western and other industrialized nation-states—but none with such significance as the U.S. Even as urbanization rapidly increased, burbclaves and privatized exurbs in America rose in population.

The Reconstituted Grand Party of the Republic (RGPR) came to power in the U.S., creating a crisis unseen since America’s 19th century Civil War. Old geographic boundaries were replaced in the civil-political conflict known as the American Social War, the precursor to the Great Social War. The calamitous transition started in the U.S. and reflects the peculiar American landscape of wildly incompatible suburban and urban worldviews.

First, the “Monster Codes” pass, legislating physical augmentation to one’s body. Then the “Mental Health and Morality Act for Unreal Activities” bill attempts to regulate virtual and real interactions between humans and synthetics.

While replacing a soldier’s lost limb was without controversy—even a reason to celebrate American technological prowess—the growing number of unneeded procedures discarding healthy body parts for biotechnological replacements was viewed by Traditionalists as abhorrent.

Personal Choice advocates, celebrities, and trainloads of lobbyists argued that individuals have the right to do with their bodies and minds whatever they choose. This carried over all of the intensity and vitriol of 19th and 20th-century civil rights leaders fighting discrimination of race, religion, sex, or gender identity.

Advances in programmable matter and AI/SI breakthroughs opened a new front along social battle lines. “People are choosing to become more mechanical while mechanical entities are becoming synthetic people.” Sexbots with realistic-enough intelligence become the biggest boon to pornography since the web browser. Traditionalists’ see synthetic people as soulless automata, even ‘zombies,’ that Humanists treat as if imbued with God’s imprimatur. The Traditionalist belief system would not allow for negotiation on the matter.

In hindsight, 2032 is seen as the year Postmodernism fully gave way to Posthumanism, the aesthetic that technological advancements in VR and cybernetics, which augment the human experience, is natural and good. Robotics, cyberspace-grade VR, and the pursuit of true AI was fait accompli—and disenfranchised Traditionalists broke loose from their political/civic moorings to righteously rebel against the authority of the state.

Questions of morality and spirituality polarized American politics at the city, state, and national levels. “Blatant atheism” and “evil” Humanist and Transhumanist thinking were seen by Traditionalists as a religious and cultural affront. But a new cultural elite had emerged to tout a benign and advantageous extension of the human experience. Virtual worlds encourage collaboration, visualization, productivity, and profit.

Profit being key, as the urban centers had 95 percent of U.S. wealth production. Coastal urban regions actually increased economic productivity with 3D and nano printing breakthroughs and by otherwise completely outsourcing manufacturing to Mexico, Asia, Africa, and elsewhere. The American Democratic Coalition (ADC), “Jeffersonian Democracy for the 21st-century”, comes to power with a clear mandate: Stop Internal Terrorism!

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7-14-41

Excerpt from 1945–2041 Rise and Demise of American Hyperpower, 2049

Immediate comparisons to the First World War and Pearl Harbor were made. American President Phạm’s reading of both July 1914 and July 2041 was that Russia likes to play global chess, using pawns and proxies. Consistently pushing its anti-U.S., anti-Western worldview and enabling non-state actors—from the Serbian Black Hand to Russian-backed Estonian cyberterrorists.

One hundred and twenty-seven years after the Great War, world powers found themselves embroiled in another, far shorter, July Crisis. In 1914, the heir to the Austrian-Hungarian throne and his wife were assassinated by Russian-backed, Serbian state-sponsored terrorists. In 2041, a murky network of cyber, nuclear, and biological terrorists was coordinated to conduct the devastating attack that became known as 7-14-41.

The aftermath of the July 14 attack left the people of the United States shaken and frightened. It is obvious that the 7-14-41 attack was intended to 1) terrorize the American people, 2) target military infrastructure, and 3) target economic infrastructure.

To say there was an overwhelming popular demand to strike back at the perpetrators would be an understatement. Early on, Russia was openly speculated by U.S. and international media as a likely suspect. Massive rallies around the United States denounce Russia as the key subject in this monumental crime.

Although there were many “Traditionalists” Americans who dogmatically denied Russia was involved, the spirit of the day carried condemnation of a confirmed interloper in American affairs.

7-14-41
On the morning of July 14, 2041, a coordinated attack detonated 16 small atomic and radiological “dirty” devices in targets including Manhattan, Washington D.C., Newport News Shipbuilding, Fort Bragg, Fort Campbell, Fort Hood, Hartsfield–Jackson Atlanta International Airport, O’Hare International Airport, Boston, Arlington, the Houston Ship Channel, the Port of Los Angeles, Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport, the Big Hill and Bryan Mound Strategic Petroleum Reserve salt domes, and the LNG pipeline to Europe.

A simultaneous cyberattack targeted the U.S. energy grid, financial institutions, civil entertainment distribution, Pentagon systems, and air traffic control. This cyberattack was immediately tied to Russian-backed terrorists.

There was also a deployment, its first use in war, of a weaponized psycho-sexual biological agent, dubbed “Bliss”. The Bliss release occurred in high-density areas in Manhattan, Washington D.C., Queens, Brooklyn, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Reston, San Diego, Houston, Miami, San Francisco, Seattle, San Jose, and Denver.

By itself the Bliss attack, with best calculations in zones also exposed to nuclear or radiological damage, left over 9,000 Americans dead after a state of fatal sexual arousal that was broadcast live to panicked viewers. Almost 15,000 people exposed to a lower dose survived, but became “medical refugees” requiring intensive treatment that overwhelmed local resources. It would be called the “sex-zombie apocalypse.”

“The attack on America was the work of inhuman terrorists, an attack on all of Humankind,” proclaimed Moscow, offering the people of the U.S. “heartfelt condolences and solidarity in bringing those responsible for this atrocity to justice.”

Prominent European and Asian leaders urge calm, invoking the decision of Austria-Hungary to invade Serbia as the mistake that triggered a devastating world war. Comparisons to the First World War were continuously made in the following 72-hour period by diplomats and journalists around the world.

Phạm’s response 
“Austria-Hungary took 37 days to respond,” wrote U.S. President Phạm. He believed the mistake of Austria-Hungary was the failure to seize the initiative while world sympathy was at its peak. “They should have recalled troops from harvest leave and not allowed a month to pass before waging war,” he wrote in his journal the day after the attack. President Phạm took three days to write his own—considerably larger—blank cheque.

Twilight Dawn
Operation Twilight Dawn commenced at 0100 Vladivostok time on July 18, 2041. Near Vilyuchinsk, off the coast of Kamchatka, the U.S. attack begins. Top secret Stealth Autonomous Anti-Sub (SAAS) “hunter-killer swarms,” which have been tracking Russian ballistic nuclear submarines, swiftly eliminate Russia’s second-strike capability.

A volley of SLBMs target Severomorsk, Gadzhiyevo, Graham Bell, Nagurskoyo, and other facilities—clearing a path for the next phase. More than 8,000 U.S. personnel on submarines and surface vessels, as well as naval aviators, are lost in this initial naval-centric front.

U.S. space-based HK swarms destroy Russian orbital platforms, GLONASS3, and military satellites. Combined with the integrated American cyberattack, Russian military and civilian infrastructure on and off-world are crippled. (This disrupts the international Indra One manned-mission en route to Europa.)

With Russia suddenly blinded and its second-strike capability disabled, the next American stroke is directed at the other two legs of the Russian nuclear triad—bombers and ICBMs.

The third stroke is an orchestrated, and massive, American special operation to decapitate and disable Russian continuity of government (COG) and use captured government officials to access Russian cybersystems. Critical facilities around Moscow, St. Petersburg, Vladivostok, Novosibirsk, Yekaterinburg, Samara, Volgograd, Nizhniy Novgorod, and other military/strategic installations are targeted.

The operation includes:
1) Orbital-drop commandos attacking Russian ODON internal security troops (guarding strategic facilities and vital underground railways for Russian leadership)
2) 302 AI stealth B-23s bombers (with elaborative killbox assignments)
3) All 217 human piloted USAF strategic assets attack VKO bases (in what the commander of Air Force Global Strike Command dubbed Operation Focus2)
4) The first use in war of nuclear-powered, armored battle suits (which the media instantly call “Mecha”).

And, of course, a limited American first strike of ICBMs bolting skyward from their heartland silos. Many of the variable-yield warheads tuned to a less destructive setting against heavily populated targets. ICBM reserves maintained to ensure credible threat capability against China/Pakistan and other state-actors.

Over 550 Designated Ground Zeros (DGZs) were blasted, mostly unrepulsed, in America’s blitzkrieg response. Russia replies, but only a few additional American cities are disrupted due to the success of Twilight Dawn orbital-drop cyber-commandos and U.S. anti-missile defense.

In Europe, orbital drop troops and B-23s “liberate” Baltiysk and the Kaliningrad enclave while conventional special forces and rebel opposition “secure” the Baltic States, capturing the “Russian-backed cyber-terrorists” that America claims is responsible for part of the 7-14-41 attack. The U.S. State Department announcing the “recovery of evidence that Moscow is complicit in the attack.”

The truth of Russian involvement in the 7-14-41 attacks has become a conspiracy industry displacing even the JFK assassination, but it seems clear that the factual debate is over the degree of complicity by Moscow—not the fact of deep state support for non-state terrorists.

Media maneuver
U.S. President Phạm steps to the podium. He will deliver a speech to the world explaining why he took the actions he did. He will show images of the horror and suffering in New York and Boston to billions of shocked viewers, then pivot to the culprit: Russia.

His concise recap of hundreds of years of Russian history, including Sazonov in 1914, the Soviet Union, the Russian mafia, Putin, Georgia, Ukraine, and many other unlawful incursions. Then to Russia’s second-world economics in the hands of a kleptocracy, inability to diversify from oil and gas, the brain-drain to Western societies, and declining birth rates to paint Russia as weak.

That’s why Moscow operates through proxies, “not getting Mother Russia’s hands dirty.” But nuclear and biological attacks on American cities—and vast damage to energy infrastructure that will take many years to fully repair—is, as evidenced by the title of President Phạm’s speech leaked to the media, “The Final Undeclared Act of War by Russia Against the United States and the Civilized People of Earth.”

Russian counter response 
Russia chooses that exact moment to begin a massive air, ground, and cyber campaign against Western Europe. Telecasts interrupt Phạm, just as he begins speaking, to break the shattering news that the Western Alliance is at war with Russia.

This is seen as an upstaging across Earth that diminishes President Phạm in stature. News focus switches to Minister of Communications and Mass Media Nikolay Krasnov, now Russian President after American decapitation-strike operations.

Krasnov, Western-educated in London and Berlin, delivers in English a passionate speech about “American war criminals” and “atrocities against humanity.” Images of the horror and suffering in Moscow and St. Petersburg are seen by billions of shocked viewers as Krasnov demands the prosecution of “all the American war criminals.”

The phrase “American war criminals” dominate media and net queries, becoming the narrative to billions. Russian tanks and “special mechanized units” using flight-capable battle suits make gains across a front extending from the Baltic to the Balkans—overrunning U.S. preemptive advances in the North.