On the Wings of Hope: Prose (Chosen)

C.H.I.P.

That night Ray had nightmares once again – cutting and slicing the remnants of his human consciousness with the blades of truth of which it tried to get rid off and failed time and again over the past few nights, condemning itself to ruthless self-repetition lessons like a careless student who was punishing himself for his own earlier silliness.

The truth... Here it is, standing right before him in these dreams that so vividly resemble the former reality that had been cruelly taken away from all of them. The truth about what should have never happened.

Three mega-corporations, three new earth Gods under the iron fist of which the Earth once groaned: "Cybergenetics", "Neosoils" and "Neurodynamics". The first is the world's largest producer of cyber-bio-implants, the second is the maker of biogenic food that was grown in test tubes in the labs, and the third is the creator and curator of the cybernetic neural network, which has become a new parallel world for many. The products of these transcontinental giants that had taken over the states once became so demanded by millions of still imagining themselves as intelligent beings that they voluntarily surrendered their own lives, bodies, and destinies to these experienced corporate hands. Could these people have done otherwise? Ray's dreams had no answer to this vital question.

In these dreams that had tormented him over the past few days, people had ceased to be people and became something completely different. Cyber-implants gave them infinite power over the surrounding world and those who did not possess such a "gift from the above" from their corporate gods.

Integrated into arms combat blades that were made from neodine – synthesized in the laboratories of "Cybergenetics" metal that could cut through titanium almost effortlessly. Implanted into hand's palms gravitational pulsators, allowing one to freely manipulate small objects with a magnetic field in space, just like some extraterrestrial juggler, who has descended on the unfortunate Earth just for fun. Soldered into the cornea of the eyes bio-scanners and cyber-lenses which had replaced the imperfect biotics and became a new form of "augmented and added reality glasses", so that people could form a completely different vision of things shortly before their own downfall.

"Don't trust your eyes..."

Military modifications of eye cyber-implants combined with energy batteries that were embedded into the spine allowed for the short-term projection of laser beams directly from one's eyes, melting the target of your gaze in a matter of seconds. "Tesla versions" of these implants allowed high-voltage bolts of lightning to descend into the world right from your fingertips...

"What have you become, human, and for how long will you remain humanistic?"

The peak of the joint development of "Cybergenetics" and "Neurodynamics" had to be the "C.H.I.P." project – "cranial human intelligent processor" or "Eye of the Buddha", as it was tacitly named by some of the high-ranking engineers who participated in its development. Embedded in the frontal lobe of the brain, this chip combined many successful functions from the previous developments of these two corporations: a radio information signal transmitter, a wireless payment identification module, a geo-positioning module, and a terrain bio-scanner, an augmented and enhanced reality generator, a bio-amplifier and a neurostimulator... The full list of its capabilities was kept in the strictest secrecy even ten years after the start of the mass process of its implantation to newborns. But the most terrifying trait, which proved itself during the first year of the Last War, was the ability to generate wide-range psi waves and influence the psyche of surrounding people.

The experiments and insatiable appetites of corporations demanded more and more material and human resources with each passing year. For the sake of single success, a thousand failures could be allowed. For the sake of "greater good" – a thousand of thousands of failures. And only war could give a clear answer to the question of where to get these thousands of thousands of test subjects for megacorporations...