The Rise of Szu

It wasn’t always this way, but it seemed to be happening more often of late. I rolled out of bed this morning with an urgent feeling in my bowels. Still half asleep while sitting on the john, I peeked below only to notice the contents stubbornly coming out in streaming congealed mass, completely the wrong color. My body was clearly not built for the sort of abuse it was subjected to as of late.

Things are always changing, but to call this a change would be using the word lightly. Ever since Earth’s imminent depletion became a driving force in politics, the surmounting struggle for survival gave way to a series of actions that ultimately superseded the moral framework that society used to hold so dear. There were plenty of tell-tale signs that life was facing extinction, and humanity was to either undergo some very rapid adaptations or go the way of the dinosaurs. The problem was conveniently overlooked until it became a reality, but when hindsight is 20/20, the finger-pointing game is sort of a no-brainer. Even from the earliest debates beginning the late 20th century, the issue was never anything less than an impossibly complex political nightmare.

World War 3 wasn’t exactly what previous generations thought it would be, but neither did it come as a total surprise. In a world approaching a population of 11 billion, the war was largely a struggle for control over the planet’s remaining resources. It began as a last-ditch effort born out of desperation, as widespread hunger and disease was no longer a problem isolated to developing nations. Shortly before the war, social unrest erupted worldwide as things reached a critical threshold. Money had already become less valuable than the paper it was printed on, but the real snapping point occurred when The World Bank publicly admitted that the credit system was no longer valid. Even as emerging technologies sought to address many of these problems, lower and even lower-middle class families were already dying. Hospitals became overwhelmed to the point that the health care industry couldn’t even maintain its own health. As untreated disease spread from a resurgent outbreak of Bubonic plague, quarantine camps grew into quarantined cities, and entire states and regions. Much of the upper class soon became the new lower class, and the remaining upper class consisted of those with paramilitary control over fertile lands and production facilities. It wasn’t long after that government infrastructure crumbled from the inside-out as the private sector revealed itself as the true power. A very select few corporations possessed the one thing that the government could no longer provide: Food. They alone had the means to keep the privileged class alive, a good part of which incidentally belonged to the food industry. If one were outside the system, serving in a paramilitary as a corporate mercenary during this short-lived era could guarantee food on your plate; a decision that condemned most to their death anyway once World War 3 started. Instead of just protecting manufactures from the angry mobs of local citizens, corporate employed armies now had to fight over seas to secure international business interests. The chances of survival on these missions were poor at best, but for some, it was still a preferable way to die compared to starvation. The so called Apocalypse that everyone so feared ended with a little in irony in that, instead of humankind destroying the Earth, it was Earth that fought back and destroyed most of humankind. There’s also a bit of irony to be found in the fact that we used to call ourselves “mankind,” because that certainly isn’t an appropriate designation anymore; and not for sociopolitical pleasantries, either. Humankind exists now. Mankind is a relic.

It’s almost one-hundred sixty years ago that the human genome was mapped, but nearly 70 years would pass before scientists were able to actually understand most of it. The world’s engineered food supply eventually plateaued on the little soil and water that remained contamination-free, so in turn we began genetically engineered people to survive on less. The focus shifted toward efficiency. The body needed to be more efficient in utilizing the declining available oxygen. It needed to absorb more nutrients from increasingly sporadic meals. It needed a dynamic metabolism that could be self-regulated to spe

... more on the forums ...