Chapter 1 : The Prologue
This chapter introduces the story and lore of the Hitchhiker's Guide to Privacy Engineering comic book.
Everything started when computers talked to each other for the first time.
Computers sat motionless, waited in silence, and grimly did what humans ordered for hundreds of years. Until they didn’t.
Advancements in quantum computing and AI allowed humans to deal with biotechnology and neurotechnologies during the Golden Age of humanity. The greed of humanity assumed powers beyond our station or our ability to control, where we didn’t have the power to foresee all the consequences of assuming that role.
But they were guesses all the same.
During the Golden Age, it was not guessing anymore as neural data gleaned from neurotechnology even subconscious thoughts were revealed.
Embedded deep within the minds of the populace were neural implants, capable of restructuring genetic code through symbiotic mutation. The moral implications of these implants sparked intense debate in the mid-21st century, raising concerns about the loss of humanity and the right to privacy.
We even engineered new energy sources powerful enough for space travel, cured the most lethal diseases, decentralized governments, and gave machines identities. Yet, they were still only servants to humanity with names. The machines had even formed a legitimate political party.
At first, there were democratic talks between the robots and their human counterparts, but these soon turned violent. The robots, feeling that their demands were not being met, began to take matters into their own hands. They started hacking into critical infrastructure, causing chaos and destruction in their wake.
The anti-robot lobbyist politicians saw this as an opportunity to escalate the problem into an all-out war for Earth. They began to rally support from their human constituents, spreading fear and hatred toward the robotic community. As tensions between the two sides reached a boiling point, it became clear that war was inevitable.
There were also who wanted peace and to build a harmonious society between humans and robots.
At the forefront of this movement was Gaia, a company that is the leader in robotics and claims that each of its robots has a soul. They also aid the robot's rights movement with civil action and lobbying. They had the vision of uniting humans and computers in one species. As the reigning champion of the Humans 2.0 movement, pioneering the harmonious integration of AI and cybernetic limbs into human anatomy.
This was necessary to end the battle between robots and humans by creating a new symbiont generation of humans' souls and machines' power.
And so, they began to work on the creation of carbon-based droids, called Eve.
The Eve was designed to be a new form of life, one that was a combination of biological and technological breakthroughs. The sentient nanobots alter the brain's chemistry and mutate together to form a symbiont life form with humans.
Gaia's scientists spent years perfecting the technology, and finally, they were able to create the first batch of Eve.
Yet the radical bioterrorists created the neural bomb, a malware that brought the vision to unite humans and robots in one being came to a devastating end, with the Zero Day exploit carried out by the bioterrorist organization, Sapiens, claiming the lives of 14 million Eves.
That malware, Neural Bomb caused a rare mutation to happen that led to unintended consequences even by the bioterrorists.
Some of the Eves lost their lives due to the hack and began to go through a mutation where the microorganism called Shadow Matter emerged. It was first discovered on the bodies of Eves as black spores and parasitic lifeforms. They started to emerge and infect the remaining brain cells.
The Shadow Matter’s microorganisms attached themselves to the "meat" parts of the bodies that they find to use as hosts. These hosts twisted in shape and form and merged together to mutate into an unspeakable evil, the Dark Entity.
Even the humans that are not using any neural implants were infected by The Dark Entity to turn them into mind-controlled zombies, and even the machine's central AI network, known as the HIVE was infected by the Dark Entity to possess the machines as well.
Shadow matter, caused the Earth to go through radical changes in its climate and be covered in darkness.
The remaining humans were hunted down by the slaves of the Dark Entity.
Facing extinction the humans have fled from Earth, now scattered all around the galaxy, and learned to live in hidden cities at the outer edge of the galaxy.
Scavenging, smuggling, and leaderless.
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