First consider this: what happens to 300 million people when the transportation network lets you travel over 50 miles in 1 hour and the communication network lets you send realtime streaming video worldwide? People leave the city and live in the 'burbs. Small towns become large cities spaced ... surprise! about 50-100 miles apart, then slowly expand and merge in a massive sub-urban sprawl. Kids grow up and move far, far away from their parents and neighborhoods. People are connected 24x7 but are physically surrounded by strangers. People are information-saturated yet ignorant, overfed yet malnourished, empowered yet unmotivated. In short, what happens to 300 million apes when they no longer struggle to survive? They become fat, dumb and lazy.

Now, what happens when anything disrupts those communication and transportation networks? Suddenly 300 million apes with no idea of how to adapt to their new envorinment go batshit insane and start killing each other for toilet paper and bottled water. It doesn't take nukes; anything that makes us doubt our government's ability to provide us with safety and a lifetime supply of french fries and video games could push us over the edge.

Cybacs sound like such a powerful, transformative technology that I would expect massive economic dislocation. Entire industries would crash and burn as computers became as obsolete as buggy whips. Fortunes would collapse and be built almost overnight. Almost every job imaginable would come to *require* cybacs, people who didn't or couldn't afford to "upgrade" would become a massive underclass and exploiting that underclass would underpin the economy. Many people would sell themselves into practical slavery and be implanted with cybacs owned by a corporation; their own bodies would become company property. That kind of opression is a powderkeg.

There would be a conservative backlash against cybacs (as with stem cell research) but adopting such a technology is an economic imperitive, it will hit sooner rather than later no matter how much you resist it. (Unless, like nukes, the components are "easily" monitored and controlled. Even then ...)

Here's an interesting question: Let's assume we didn't feed and house all 16 billion people. I think it's more likely we "stabilize" at 10-12 billion but 6 billion of those live in abject poverty, the population kept in check as always by war, disease and famine. Now what happens when 2-3 billion desperate, starving people in Africa are accidentally exposed to various cybacs? This seems inevitable to me.

Thank you for these thoughts, they're quite tasty.

Thinking more about affording cybacs: the concept is that of saturation. Everyone has some cybacs whether they want them or not, because they are rampant. But perhaps control/interface cybacs are harder to come by. At least initially, because of course you pass them on to your children...

They are not easily monitored and controlled. If they were the whole scenario breaks down. They breed and evolve on their own to a large extent. Imagine five or so base strains are created with the intent to mitigate ozone depletion, for example. They're directed at problem spots, but they drift and multiply, and soon they're everywhere to some degree. People are breathing them and eating them.

Now the same thing is happening for thousands and thousands of other uses... everyone is building up their own random colonies of cybacs over time. The air, water and soil become a slurry of these things; they are as prevalent as bacteria and spores.

I agree with your view of the effects of disruption. The apocalypse is often portrayed as a flash; here we have a definite event, but it plays out as a slow burn.

It is important to the base assumptions that most people are moderately well off. Population stabilization is dependent on sufficiency.

Double points for double posting!

Anyway, short answer is I don't think your scanario would be a slow-burn; it would be a meltdown. But let's assume it is a slow burn and work backwards.

For simplicity, lets say we have an effective World Government (in practice if not in name), nominally democratic, with 16 billion well-fed, reasonably happy people. How often would they gather in groups of more than twelve? Schools? Rock concerts? The military certainly.  So over the span of one month it becomes obvious worldwide that gathering in large groups can be fatal. The military is ideally suited to handle situations like that, a directive goes out ... no more large formations. The army would already be on a path of "smaller is better", focusing on squad sized special forces teams ideal for controlling brushfires and working in urban environments; this would just kill off any remaining "big army" hold-overs. The army would almost certainly be the second organization to field cybacs (after the Intelligence community) so cybac super-soldiers would make the transition more practical.

Companies and schools likewise would adapt quickly; there are few good reasons to get that many people in the same room. Now your "all-hands meeting" is entirely online instead of mostly online. No big deal. That's assuming work and school aren't entirely virtual for most people by then.

What would happen during the morning commute and in the city center? Will cities themselves be obsolete in 200 years? Banks and legal institutions would be the last facades standing in the city, could they "go virtual" quickly enough to avoid an economic catastrophe? Let's assume yes.

So would anyone really care if large assemblies were fatal? Would anyone even notice in this scenario?

There are your two extremes, G. Your game falls somewhere in the middle. Awesome ideas by the way, kudos!

I had imagined a brief meltdown, the panic stage, perhaps a year or two. Then several decades of slow burn, as resources get redistributed and people migrate and spread. Then several generations of isolation and xenophobia based around small family groups. Then a trend towards reintegration on a smaller scale, which is when the campaign picks up.

The path you're following depends on reliable communication and energy supplies, which I think would be seriously gimped. Purely cybac-based communication is possible, but you would have had to had it in you already. Most people would rely on some kind of blend, or their traits wouldn't be inheritable, and the communication network would take a big hit after a single generation.

Where is the energy in 200 years going to come from? Of course that's a question many people are asking now in much seriousness. Let's assume fossil fuels have been depleted. What are the options we know of? And let's assume this world of the future has quadruple our current energy requirements.

• Renewable sources - solar and wind. Probably improved, but probably still supplemental.
• Nuclear - Probably bigger. Did we get fusion working? That would affect the debate if yes.
• Bio - Growing things for the purpose of making fuel. Hard to do when you also have to feed 16 billion.

I don't really know about this yet. It's an important question, which actually drove the development of one of my other games.

Okay doing some actual research.

• Total human-habitable land on Earth as of now: 52 million square miles.
• Global population stablizes at 9 billion in 2075.

An even spread based on those number is 180 people per square mile. Setting the resonance of cybacs anywhere below that mandates some percentage of the population goes bye bye, regardless of energy usage or communication structure.

OK, that clarifies "slow burn". There is an inevitable tipping point, a "Black Monday" in any such scenario when the bottom falls out of public confidence and it all goes to shit overnight. How far civilization falls at that point is crucial to creating your desired end-state.

Why is a stable worldwide population required or desirable for this scenario? The developed world is already stable or negative population growth, the developing world is either catching up fast or "stable" in the sense of going nowhere long-term.

If the end-state is post-post-apocolyptic pseudo-fantasy, why is the "cybac resonance" necessary? What does it prevent that would be, ummm, un-fantasy-like?

If cybacs are evolving, what does a viral cybac oubreak look like? Such outbreaks could have created an apocolypse all on their own, and they are well suited to slow-burn destruction over several years. Black Plague with Bluetooth networking!

As for energy, orbital solar satellites are my pet solution. Clean, free, effectively limitless, gets mankind into space. Maybe in your scenario human orbital presence is enough to meet growing world energy needs (barely) but not yet self-sufficient enough to survive the collapse. Maybe cybacs are up there right now keeping the whole show running without human supervision. Since power is transmitted to ground via microwaves, you have an available power source for an enormous soup of airborne cybacs.

Another random idea: you assume most of man's knowledge is lost do to the apocolypse. Remember that most of man's knowledge is *already* lost (or was never really "found") ... it only exists in a handful of brains and databases. Suppose cybacs practically replace larger, purely electronic computers in the space of a few years in the ultimate format war. No one has time to migrate all of those obsolete databases before the crash. Steven Hawkiing and gang are forced to farm or starve. There goes most of mankind's knowledge in less than one generation without massive destruction, just the breakdown of human networks. Cybacs are still networked but physicists can no longer call up their colleges around the world when they want to discuss an idea and anyway, people are focused on survival, not physics.

This is what I'm going for, yes, exactly. And then, over several generations, those people with some hereditary connection to those abandoned networds start picking up signals again. And then a few start broadcasting.

At that point it is no longer needed, which is why it has faded significantly as time goes on. Small cities are possible once again. Justification: peoples' relationship with their cybac colonies has largely gelled into a kind of symbiosis.

I agree that a networked plague would be horrific, but it isn't an angle I want to explore. Plague apocalypse has been done many times.

Worldwide stability is not required, but since this is basically a wonky thought experiment, I'm trying eliminate as many variables as possible.

I was also thinking about space power. In Transmetropolitan, for example, Mercury has been converted into a giant solar panel. But while ambient microwave energy would provide a good power source for environmental cybacs, it wouldn't have been designed that way, because you want a concentrated beam of energy that you can capture and redistribute. (Also if it had been designed that way, it would have been too easy to get around the resonance problem. You'd just turn off the satelites.) So maybe the big beamers are up there, firing away still, but the receiving stations aren't working anymore. Would the result be similar to a nuclear blast site? A small patch of earth that has been bombarded with concentrated microwaves for no reason for centuries?

Actually, no. The receiving antenna is supposed to be hundreds of yards across, just wide wire mesh suspended above farmland. The beam is harmless and pretty wide even if you live and work under it. At least that's what they tell the people who live under it. (Similar radiation exposure to working under high-voltage power-lines.) So for the cybacs it's a simple matter of re-targetting the beam to feed an airborne swarm directly instead of feeding the now unnecessary power grid. "Magical power" is literally in the air!

These things have been in blueprints since the '70s and they were barely viable then because of launch costs. They are viable now and would be by far our best option if we can get to the point where we forge the basic sturcture in space from Lunar or astroidal material instead of launching it.  - Citation -

You totally made that word up.

Misspelled but not invented.

Main Entry: ¹as·ter·oid
Pronunciation: 'as-t&-"roid
Function: noun
Etymology: Greek asteroeidEs starlike, from aster-, astEr
1 : any of the small rocky celestial bodies found especially between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter
2 : STARFISH
- as·ter·oi·dal /"as-t&-'roi-d^&l/ adjective