The History of a Broken America
In 2065, the world changed and gave birth to a powerful new American political party, the Modernists. True to its English literature and poetic roots, the Modernists preached a so-called undying philosophy of the Haves vs. the Have Nots. To wit, it was more advantageous to take risks, gamble, fight, and even cheat to become one of the Haves than to hope for fairness as a Have Not.
The intolerant, class-based philosophies of Modernists quickly spread throughout North and South America, then Canada. It was adopted by Indians in Mumbai and spread to Central and South Africa, then Europe and Italy. The progress was made so quickly through a simple promise: We shall give you all you need if you let us run the government on your behalf.
It was the promise of abundance. It was a promise given freely, accepted universally, and changed dramatically. The divide between corporate CEOs and proletarians became glacial, but once the power was given, it could not be taken away. The masses that once served their heart’s desires on a silver platter soon saw their excesses become shortcomings, and their faux opulence became scarce. There were no repercussions upon the 3%.
The world changed, giving birth to underground political parties that challenged the status quo. Contesters to the might of Modernists emerged from both high and low, Right and Left, from religion and science, and spiritual and natural.
Meanwhile, Modernists became entrenched in an autocratic wheel of power that shifted from one person to the next. Their infighting gave rebirth to the concept that whoever has the most wins.
And it was true. But this idea gave birth to another segment of society that believed that as long as you acquired enough, there should be no concern about where you obtained it, only that you possess it. This resulted in a new, more scientific approach and a more competitive endeavor to assist in accumulating stuff, legally or otherwise.
Enter Big Pharma. With its fingers on the pulse of emerging societal trends, an industry of multibillion-dollar pharmaceutical companies launched massive R&D missions to help fine-tune what God had left up to chance: the genetics of success and leadership. In short, the money was lucrative enough for Big Pharma to step into the ring with God and pummel him. No, they weren’t playing God or even replacing God. To them, God was a man-made concept, and like all man-made products, the engineering included planned obsolescence. It was time for God to die and be put on the shelf with the fax machine.
Under the Modernists, technology boomed and waned, science boomed and waned, social media boomed, politics boomed, military initiatives boomed and even the Black Market boomed. There was a smorgasbord of opportunity for anyone clever enough or devious enough to become a master manipulator of the system. Modernists became a new world order both supported and attacked by the people who once thought the ideology was timely and beneficial and, conversely, supported by those who once thought it was hideous and abhorrent.
Traditional hacking faded away and was replaced by a three-dimensional computer coding language transcending common coding symbolism to include biochemistry, physiology, genetics, physics, and all-natural sciences. By the new hacker standards, a person had to be a scientist as much as a computer coding enthusiast to be successful. Only the most brilliant earned enviable wages. As it became known, hacking, bio-hacking, or gene-hacking became a new and demanding industry immeasurably lucrative for the properly initiated.
To keep up, would-be hackers turned to Big Pharma for the right stuff. They gorged on prescription pills made to support and enhance brain activity and then on pills to combat their overactive brains to help them sleep at night. Then they gorged on a new type of pill, the bio-physio regulator class of steroid that was designed to monitor and maintain all bodily functions by overseeing and regulating all bodily functions through a chemical AI interface.
Like the vaccination that saved the world decades earlier, the pill again became the thing.