Femen War: The Augment Resistance
By Rod Van Mechelen
Journal Entry #2
May 11, 2047 - There was a time when we could buy organic food that was rich in vital nutrients, but after Monsanto drove all the legitimate independent farmers underground and became the soul legal source for the global food supply, nutritious food was available only to the global elite and, later, the femen elite. While the variety of flavors and textures of food available to the rest of the global population has increased, it is so bereft of nutritional value that anybody who relies on it invariably suffers, both from reduced intelligence and a shorter lifespan.
For several years after the Monsanto victory we were still able to buy nutritional supplements, but the pharmaceutical drug cartel drove them all underground, too, using the FDA to designate all nutritional supplements controlled substances. So now only the wealthiest and most powerful have access to wholesome food and the vigor and long life conferred by the regenerative medical technologies. This disparity is beginning to express itself in marked differences in physical and mental differences. The ruling elite are taller, stronger and far more intelligent than the underclass.
This is making it very difficult for us to find suitable candidates to join the ranks of the augments. We learned the hard way that when you augment somebody who started with a very low intelligence and defective phenotype, that the results are unpredictable and often terribly destructive. So it has become imperative for us to assist those whom we can to improve their nutrition.
When the ban on nutritional supplements went into effect, some went underground. While the Life Extension Foundation remained active in the public eye to facilitate research and maintain a database, they could no longer sell to the public. One of the most innovative formulators had moved to Nevada in 2012, and following the ban they and their suppliers moved underground. Our mission was to make contact with them to commission creation of an undetectable catchall supplement that we could introduce into local food supplies.
Nobody had seen the formulator in several years and we had only old images of him to work with. Our graphene-cellular lattice conferred a chameleon-like ability to make limited changes to our appearance, and to become all but invisible. At first we had tried to do this by bending light, but it required an enormous expenditure of energy and also left us blind. But then we developed an application for capturing and projecting images from all angles. With the nearly infinite computing capacity afforded by our spintronic cellular processors, this proved an easy task once we figured out how to do it.
So we began our search for him by making discrete inquiries and then invisibly following through multiple contracts back to the source. For a man of well over 100 years, he didn't look a day over forty. He and his family, along with the other members of their rebel community, had achieved this all without the use of nanobots upon which we relied.
Naturally they were alarmed when we revealed ourselves, but as soon as we made it clear we were not with the femen empire they welcomed us and soon we found ourselves sitting down to the kind of a meal we had not enjoyed in decades. Meat, the real thing, non-GMO vegetables, and a beverage that, even for our spintronic-enhanced brains was invigorating.
They agreed to supply us with a powdered supplement that could be spirited into food and drink to provide superior nutrition, but it would strain their resources to provide enough even for a relatively small community, and we discussed suitable locations for our effort.
While there were known to us several liberty-leaning minded communities in South America, Europe, Asia and North America were dominated by the femen empire or controlled by their puppet states. Before Cassy turned on us and joined the femen, bypassing all security measures and tapping into the net had been a simple matter. But she knew all our tricks and had set several traps, so rather than risk detection Don flew to Los Angeles to tap into a UCLA data port.
While awaiting his return, we shared the benefits of our transformation and they also agreed to join us. I sent a very brief pulse to Byron with a pre-arranged signal. Cassy would pick it up, but it was not enough to give away our location and without knowing the context, meaningless. It was a single word: Yes! By the time Don got back from UCLA, Byron had already dispatched a team with the necessary equipment to augment the entire community.
Resistance to the femen empire is growing. While violence to defend ourselves is sometimes necessary, our enemies are too powerful, our resources too limited to engage in armed conflict. To ordinary citizens we may seem like super beings, but as the recent death of one of our comrades demonstrated, we remain all too human.
