We always thought the Armageddon would come screaming in, obliterating us in our vain attempts to fight. In truth, it slowly happened, as we watched it and egged it on. Hi. I’m Zane Ross. I’m the last human alive. The last real human anyway. Everyone else is just a mindless slave, more robot than human. It wasn’t always this way, of course, but for the last year, I’ve been on the run. If you are listening to this now, you are obviously one of the battle mobilised troops sent to quash any rebel pockets. Well, congratulations. You hearing this means I’m dead, so your mission is complete.
I’ll start from the beginning, as I don’t know how comprehensive your memory is, they’ve probably wiped you clean. I suggest you play this to the largest gathering you can, I want EVERYONE to hear this tape.
It began a year and a bit ago. With Ambracorp. A small medical engineering company, nothing flashy, just x-ray machines and occasionally a new bit of pacemaker style tech. All of a sudden, they started making bigger and bigger leaps, getting into mainstream news as well as science texts. People were hanging on for dear life as Ambracorp jolted them forwards into a whole new age of technology. Devices that could seal wounds and erase scars with a touch of a button, biochips under the forearm that would administer a coagulating agent in the event of injury, everything you’ve seen in any science fiction movie. I was in my own little heaven.
Never an ordinary 17 year old, I was into science to an almost unhealthy degree. Physics, Chemistry, Biology, they fascinated me. My room was a mess of parts, textbooks, whiteboards and experiments. Just on my window sill I had three seperate sunlight tests going on. So when Ambracorp started releasing this revolution in bio-engineering, I had to have it all. I worked day and night, testing programs, doing graphic art, selling things I didn’t need, working at the bowling alley part time in between school. I was determined to buy at least one piece of the almost magical technology. Then they released “The Defender” and I knew what I wanted. As you may have guessed, being such a science nerd, I was a target for bullies. They didn’t really bother me, it made sense. You couldn’t fault them for doing what comes naturally to humans, and hurting other humans. Still, it was getting irritating having to redo work they’d ruined, or buy new shirts that didn’t have my blood all over them. So the Defender was perfect. A subdermal neck implant that read and monitored stress levels, pain levels and, using virtual mapping software, maintained a constant image of where everything and one were in the immediate vicinity. Then, if you were attacked or threatened, it would assume nervous system control and use your body to fight you out of the situation. Now, the fact that this entailed full control of your entire body being given to a computer chip, it was understandably a very touchy issue. I had to buy it and have it installed before it was removed from circulation.
The Ramblings of an Internet Loser 