The Waening: Days Before the Apocalypse by Blade Cort (Over the Precipice Book 1)
Requirements: epub reader, 141 kb
Overview: Boston, 2037. Transhuman tensions are rising. An obelisk falls to Earth. Havoc ensues.
After reading The Waening, it’s impossible to overlook the technology risks facing us in the coming decades.
Peter, Molli, and Ears are science podcasters in Cambridge, Mass, the center of AI, nanotech, and human genome editing. Ratings suck, so they decide to go edgy – and the perfect discussion topic has just arrived from the sky. However, there could be no worse time to make that change, for the podcast crew or the planet . . .
An obelisk crash-lands in Canada bearing news of an impending alien invasion, yet the origin and timing are unclear. Will it become the catalyst to tear apart the few shreds of social fabric that remain in the increasingly divergent world?
It’s a time when human genome editing of DNA has been democratized, with black-market street tech serving any need or desire, albeit not without occasional off-target mishaps. Transhuman hybrids, or ‘varints,’ are increasing in numbers, augmented to the hilt and factionalizing into hybrid clusters. Some sport mammalian tails, manes, or additional appendages and sense organs. Others have enhanced neural network interfaces to AI. Still others prefer human robotics, where flesh and sinew adapt readily to integrated metallic components.
CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing and synthetic DNA have had twenty years to advance and improve, creating widespread medical benefits to humanity. Anti-aging engineering has extended human lifespans, and human-machine interfaces have perfected direct brain-to-computer processing. But with all these advances come the inevitable social tensions – separation of classes, beliefs of superiority, and perceived entitlements, creating a volatile cocktail of dissension between humans and hybrids in a world gone mad from an expected alien apocalypse.
The podcast crew picks up on the global concerns caused by the obelisk, deciding to interview experts who are developing possible defenses to the expected onslaught of invading aliens. With each podcast, the crew discovers that the prospect of an alien attack has whipped the planet into a frenzy. Competing varint voices are jockeying to push their own solution, and nobody wants to play nice in the new dystopian sandbox. As global certainty of doom escalates, the crew’s notoriety grows, but so do threats on their lives. Somebody wants to stop them from doing the next podcast, even if it means death.
Genre: Sci-Fi/Fantasy
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