We humans have a special way of pulling ourselves up and kicking ourselves down at the same time. We’d achieved more progress than ever before, at the cost of wrecking our planet and destabilizing our own governments. But things were starting to look up.
With exponentially accelerating technologies, we reached out into the solar system, terraforming worlds and seeding new life. We reforged our bodies and minds, casting off sickness and death. We achieved immortality through the digitization of our minds, resleeving from one biological or synthetic body to the next at will. We uplifted animals and AIs to be our equals. We acquired the means to build anything we desired from the molecular level up, so that no one need want again.
Yet our race toward extinction was not slowed and in fact received a machine-assist over the precipice. Billions died as our technologies rapidly bloomed into something beyond control … further transforming humanity into something else, scattering us throughout the solar system, and re-igniting vicious conflicts. Nuclear strikes, biowarfare plagues, nanoswarms, mass uploads … a thousand horrors nearly wiped humanity from existence.
We still survive, divided into a patchwork of restrictive inner system hypercorp-backed oligarchies and libertarian outer system collectivist habitats, tribal networks, and new experimental societal models. We have spread to the outer reaches of the solar system and even gained footholds in the galaxy beyond. But we are no longer solely “human” … we have evolved into something simultaneously more and different—something transhuman.
