Immortality, the cure for AIDS and the Big C, eternal youth. All one had to do was cease to be human.
“You see, our spirits are not our bodies. Our bodies are not our selves,” Dr. Hansen said. “Our brains are meat but our minds are something altogether different. We decay too quickly. The problem is what we’re made of, not who we are.”
He proposed putting sausage meat into a bullet casing. Nervous systems became calm systems. The hot red of blood became the cool blue of coolant.
He was a fool. Roughly thirty per cent of the eccentric rich went for it. After that, he tried in vain to cut corners and lower prices, extolling his wares on telenet and Tri.
The military loved him. Unregistered mercenaries loved him. Dr. Hansen became rich off of the patents involved, the factories that made the equipment, and the laboratories that made the switch.
The thing that freaked most people out was that it was a one-way switch. Just a glance at the metal skin of the warmechs or even the plastic skin of the short-lived humanomorph fad made most people shut their eyes and shiver.
Too bad about that plague.
An airborne flesh-eating virus killed all the humans. Everyone in Shells survived.
This earth is an earth of out of work soldiers and crazy rich people. Hulking metal weapons and artistic interpretations of the human form. The population is holding at ten thousand, two hundred and sixty-six.
No one dies of natural causes anymore.
We’ve started building shells again in an effort to propogate the species but we’re finding it difficult to clone new nervous systems with the virus still in the air.
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