Work Text:
At first subjects injected with a 3rd ampule of Hormone K suffer nightmares and no noticeable improvement in performance.
Then performance improve across days. They suffer fewer body aches and lower back pain as their body unconsciously adjusts to optimal positions, have faster reaction times, procrastinate less, etc.
2 weeks after the 3rd Hormone K injection, one subject grows bored watching TV. This triggers a chain reaction of thoughts. How to relieve boredom, introspecting and discovering how to mentally induce euphoria at will, pondering inventing a drug as a long-term solution, realizing death cuts short long-term prospects, figuring out how to fix society so death is not a concern and pondering the nature of identity, realizing the full extent of what her intelligence has become and the implications to society once it becomes known, modeling the motivations of the other Hormone K subjects and how to interact with them.
After several more thoughts, she contacts the other subjects who had significant brain damage before being administered 3 ampules. The initial communications look like spam to a reader of average intelligence. The subjects who received their 3rd ampule recently do not respond. To the others, communication is continued in diverse methods. One at a time, in groups, and all at once. Email, mail, pizza delivery, websites, live video calls. Communication is intermittent instead of continuous. The subjects make preparations during the pauses.
Some time later:
Many Homo Sapiens have obtained (one way or another) intelligence comparable to a deep-coma human injected with 3 ampules of Hormone K. Such individuals are called the Enhanced, while normal Homo Sapiens are called baseline human or human for short. A fourth ampule has no effect and despite enormous effort other cheap methods of further increasing intelligence have not been found. However alternative cheap ways to increase the intelligence of baseline humans, animals, and computers to Enhanced level have been discovered.
Many Enhanced will join and separate from hiveminds frequently. The component Enhanced and the informational interconnection channels bridging them can be biological, digital, or a hybrid. The hiveminds themselves may completely disperse, cyclically fluctuate in size, or rarely permanently maintain themselves at a large size. A hivemind that completely disperses may produce an amount of individual Enhanced different from the amount that entered it; as the interconnections are capable of rearranging, combining, and splitting the minds and bodies of the original individual Enhanced. A hivemind's raw intelligence is comparable to an individual Enhanced. A hivemind's main advantage lies in having extremely high-bandwidth low-latency access to its constituents knowledge, thoughts, motivations, and personalities.
Many Enhanced have extensive modifications to their bodies. Some have bodies that were completely artificially created from the start (both digital and biological variations exist).
An even smaller fraction of Enhanced originated as normal animals. These behave even more strangely than formerly human Enhanced from the perspective of baseline humans. Even formerly human Enhanced, although they understand why, find animal Enhanced somewhat alien.
And then there are Enhanced with artificially created minds. Not just copies or fusions of pre-existing minds, but minds purposefully designed to think in alien directions.
In the text following this paragraph, Enhanced shall refer specifically to formerly human Enhanced and Enhanced whose artificial minds were designed to think similarly to formerly human Enhanced or hiveminds formed from such Enhanced.
Certain goods (such as food, water, drugs, energy, computation power, construction materials, assembly and disassembly machines) are abundant in many areas. Enhanced have no qualms snatching such abundant goods within their webs of influence (which can include places across the globe) for their own purposes. For instance hacking a vehicle transporting steel and reprogramming it into a chef, hacking an assembly machine near the vehicle and reprogramming it to cease its previous task of building a statue and start building a chef body, and transplanting the vehicle’s processors into the chef body. Enhanced usually do not bother adding security precautions that are strong enough to challenge another Enhanced in the typical versions of machines, warehouses, farms, etc. Baseline human communities that are exceptionally capable and prepared can even sometimes successfully raid abundant goods and overcome the default security. Although Enhanced will add stronger security measures during times that the common goods they use are being snatched by other Enhanced in large enough amounts to hinder their goals. Enhanced will also snatch goods that baseline humans view as their property (if such humans live within the Enhanced’s web of influence). Baseline humans rarely have enough security to inconvenience an Enhanced enough to dissuade them. But avoiding concentrated locations of goods (ex: many small stockpile locations separated by miles instead of one large warehouse) is usually an effective enough inconvenience to the Enhanced.
Capturing, modifying, and releasing species (animal, baseline human, plant, etc.) is one pastime of Enhanced. For instance, mosquitoes bites now (in addition to any diseases they normally carried) confer a variety of effects depending on the specific modification added. The two most common effects are temporary improved health for about a week and diarrhea. Mosquitoes often play a trickster role in the stories of any superstition-leaning human communities. Communities with the capabilities often capture and breed the beneficial mosquitoes. Confinement is required, as if a region’s mosquito population exceeds a threshold typically excess mosquitoes receive a signal causing them to migrate to a designated location. Animals, and to a lesser degree plants, are much fewer now; in both population and species count.
Violent competitions between Enhanced are not an uncommon form of entertainment. In-person and intermediary (such as machines, natural and biomodified baseline humans, etc.), 1v1 and large-scale, and many other variations of fights occur. If multiple Enhanced are vying for control of a scarce resource, entertainment fights sometimes occur. In such situations, often only one some of the Enhanced have fun from the violent fight. With the others only putting in enough effort in the fight to avoid death, focusing the majority of their energies on obtaining the resource in alternative ways. It is uncommon for all the Enhanced vying for such a resource to be interacting with each other via only one category of activity (whether violent fights, subtle sabotage, favor trading, etc.) at a time.
It is not uncommon for Enhanced to die from the entertainment fights, and for baseline humans to become collateral damage. More generally the vast majority of Enhanced deaths/disappearances and baseline human deaths due to Enhanced (via short causal chains) arise from entertainment activities.
Another entertainment activity Enhanced sometimes do is keep baseline humans as pets. They find or create a group of baseline humans, and then influence them.
In one variant they only give advice. Letting the humans make the decision of whether to follow and to what degree. Beneficial and harmful advice are both variants. Sometimes multiple Enhanced play with intersecting groups of humans. Such groups then will try to deduce which Enhanced consistently gives beneficial advice. Although even Enhanced that have been helpful for months sometimes act fickle and give advice causing a plague. Sometimes the human groups take initiative to find and contact other Enhanced. Similarly to the Enhanced, the human groups are not necessarily in one geographic location so long as there are group communication channels.
Another variant has the Enhanced rule the humans directly. They may persuade the humans to be loyal and fanatic. And teach the humans enough of the motivations and psychology of Enhanced that the Enhanced no longer seem fickle, immoral, hedonistic, and suicidal. Or they may rule by force and fear, sometimes adding an additional challenge by handicapping themselves (giving orders in-person without weapons or robotic bodyguards, etc.) enough that sufficiently capable and motivated humans have a chance to overthrow and kill them.
Most activities also have high-detail virtual reality versions.