Femen War: The Augment Resistance
By Rod Van Mechelen
Journal Entry #3
June 29, 2047 - We all felt it at the same time, like Obi-Wan Kenobi's "great disturbance in the Force," and our collective shock echoed in the confused whispers of augment minds around the globe. Like a star bursting out of nowhere, a single augment mind of immense proportions was growing larger and larger, expanding impossibly. Cassy was doing the unthinkable, infecting thousands with nanites from her own blood.
Early on we had learned the perils this posed. All of the original augments had been created from pluripotent nanobots, nanites that were programmed to first adapt to the host and then begin the process of augmentation. Thus, each augment retained their individuality and, yes, even their humanity.
Every augment wanted to save their family and friends. Many were imprisoned or killed before we could get to them, and many more refused, too afraid to join us. When Jeremy went to invite his daughter to convert, he found a Motherland Security squad there ahead of him. He drove them off, but not before they fatally wounded her. Hoping to save his daughter, Jeremy gave her nanites from his own blood, but while the nanites quickly repaired the wound, the nanites, adapted to him alone, turned her into an extension of him, like a zombie computer tied to a central network.
Her personality, though intact, was entirely servile to him. Mad with grief, he attacked the local patrol station, destroying himself in the process, which left her bereft of volition or direction. Her father's nanites kept her body in perfect repair, but otherwise she was just an empty shell, forever lost.
Thus it became our first great commandment to never give our own nanites to another, no matter the cost. To take the individuality of another was paramount to murder. That Cassy was enslaving thousands of minds to her own was an unthinkable crime. But it also meant that while her reach was growing arithmetically, her intelligence was expanding at an exponential rate. It would take time for her to adjust, but we understood that the odds of our survival had just taken a terrible turn for the worse.
Byron sent out a call for all augments everywhere to gather at the nearest augment node. Scattered around the globe, these were monolithic domes that had been constructed by a network of wealthy individualists who saw the coming confrontation between individual liberty and the progressive totalitarian collective. We had learned of these after Cassy's defection, and so she did not know of them. We will gather in these sanctuaries to confer in relative safety and decide what to do.
