Weapons of War

2034 was a year of hope, a year of optimism. Neuralink was about to make a new brain-to-computer chip that would render traditional computing obselete; Musk's Mars plans were nearing completion as well. The rich were getting richer, and the poor were becoming desperate and disenfranchised. The 2034 election in Aotearoa was big news; CNN was covering it nightly.

- The tech billionaires had bought themselves an executive board seat with their generous donations to keep Aotearoa's economy afloat during the property bubble doldrums of the late-2020's, and soon electronic voting and all kinds of new theories were populating the discourse. The CEO Prime Minister was gone, but his legacy was very much intact. The election was on a knife-edge: neither of the major parties had a clear path to victory, and a coalition of the fringe parties was looking like a real contender. - One of the fancy features of this new chip was the use of mirror neurons. If two people both had the Neuralink chip, then they could activate 'mirror mode' and literally feel what the other one was feeling. It was as close as anyone had gotten to uploading martial arts. A few peeks under the hood, and suddenly everyone could become an expert. All of this was custom-built for a hacker exploit, and some Kiwi coder had clearly had enough of Musk and Thiel. The election was in November, so the hacker launched their project in March. Within weeks, the country was in disrepair: a fake update, and suddenly all the chips in Aotearoa were joined together into a new kind of Internet. The manifesto/introduction/braggadoccio that the hacker left behind was brief: all it said was that unfairness had tainted the Internet, and they wanted to restore balance.

- As with all computer chic terrorism, the new Internet took the form of a game. People had scores out of 100 based on their mana within society, and those were constantly shifting goalposts: every interaction could tip the balance. Those with high mana were able to set rules regarding forbidden words or appropriate behaviour: think meow meow beans, but with brain explosions! One of the fun things the hacker cobbled together from the mirror neuron network was how to make microagressions real. Someone could give a suspicious glance, and the mirror mode caused the negative vibes to be reflected back onto the offender. It turned out people were very sensitive to criticism. Some people, though, got off on it. Those people became the soldiers of the censors: turned on by extracting pain from other human souls; decades later, these would be the cannibals. - Nobody knows what politics the Neuralink hacker believed in, but it was the resurgent right who exploited the exploit. They reverse-engineered the process so that their words could literally become weapons, inflicting psychic and physical pain on their enemies. Censored words couldn't be spoken; the chip could physically stop someone from verbalising those. Soon the censors had all the mana, and language had become a literal battleground. -

Jill had been involved in a few environmental activism stunts back in Germany, but in New Zealand she had become part of an anarchist cell living in the impoverished suburbs of Wellington. They'd adjusted to the culture shock of being in a reality TV video game quite well. The mana ratings looked favourably on veganism and environmental stewardship, though they also coded individual self-preservation and individual liberties as more important than collective concerns. The PR wars hadn't caused a rash of deaths, but suicides were rising and the levels of psychic pain were beginning to become unsustainable. Keyboard warriors were suddenly arbiters of justice in a new kind of total warfare. - The free speech debate had been silenced by the chosen few, who banned any speech that they considered to be woke or in any way derogatory. This was a noble goal, but it had the unintentional byproduct of empowering some of the unspoken butt monkeys of modern society: the obese, the elderly and the mentally ill... all had their turn under the unforgiving gaze of biased mirror neurons, shocking them into a new empathy. Jill's cell had a brilliant idea: a free speech rally. Their engineer had cracked a way of disconnecting their chips -- it only worked for around 15 minutes, but that was enough. Each of them had a laundry list of deleted words, painstakingly kept over the 6 months of chaos.

- The election in this gameified world had a strange twist too: it cast each of the candidates as the literal embodiment of their party. Whatever their party members did would be reflected in their overall mana. Suddenly opinion polls became physical reality. Scandals became pain, and privacy took a back seat to censorship. With all the censored words, it was a wonder that there was any debate at all, but people became expert at reading between the lines. Signs and images became coded with the deep meanings of words that had been blocked by the censors, rallying cries for people disposessed of language. With all this freaky brain-reading going on, you'd think that people would level up and suddenly become psychic or something, but for the most part people were lulled into stultifying conformity: people copying their favourite artists on the new TikTok or Instagram for Neuralink. -

The anarchists arrived on Parliament Grounds. It was 12:30 in the afternoon, and the weather was on the grey side, with a little drizzle. They had their megaphones. As soon as their chips were disconnected, they began: 'fat cats,' 'robber barons,' 'fuckers,' 'wankers,' 'bandits,' 'bullyboys,' 'smiling assassins,' 'land rapists' Agents of the privileged swung into actions, hurling their own invective: 'spoiled brats,' 'fags and dykes,' 'avocado brains,' 'champagne socialists,' 'beta cucks.' Their words had no effect; the megaphones continued blaring... 'cunnilingus,' 'anal penetration,' 'word masturbation impoverishing the planet', 'give us our freedom of vocabulary' ... the 15 minutes were soon up. One by one, they all fell unconscious; alive, though, and that wasn't a guarantee when they began this stunt. The livestream had been a success, ratcheting up several thousand views. The privileged class looked like a bunch of children, and the hippies like freedom fighters. - The liberal candidate from the fringe parties won the election. The PR Ban of 2034 was their first move, and the brain chips were quickly decommissioned. There are times that technology leapfrogs human prejudices; this was one of those. The techbros soon lost their board seat, as Aotearoa became a republic.