We think we occupy a pinnacle
among the diverse hierarchies of terrene evolution; fancy ourselves the favourites of the gods. Even our nearest simian relations are regarded as jokes; though every second we perpetrate barbarisms and cruelties so depraved that our pretensions to superiority are grossly pathetic. Creation has brought us round to a wholly new destiny that we cannot escape, however. Fancying ourselves masters of Creation's powers in our new genetic and bionic sciences we have merely built a new and potent tool by which evolution will catastrophically hammer us into new forms on the hard anvil of harsh necessity. From the Industrial Revolution we enter, naked and afraid, the far profounder and weirder and voraciously shattering Biomechanical Revolution.
Humanic and orgobionic resynthesis is inevitable and completely inescapable. We have a biological hunger to join with our machines. Our fiction is choked with this powerful subverted sexuality.
As a race we innately wish to take on a new form; our mythologies and sacred works resound with spiritual and physical transmogrifications. Every religion and race and art form takes the human concept and redefines it by personification in the natural kingdoms of nonhuman creatures or transmorphs it into an articulation of the divine. Our deepest essence craves the metamorphosis. The coming age of biomechanical adaptation and controlled mutation and unerring artificial genetic design -- the real and undeniable power of creation-- makes all that mythology and occultism a practical approaching reality. Yet we imagine we can regulate and canalize the next great lusty phase of evolution upon the Earth for our utility and profit.
But what comes for us in the next few centuries is a vast and devouring typhoon. I feel its bright abrasive winds and steel thunder approach and rustle the fragile lineaments of our civilization.
As our minds open to time and space and the infinities that comprise our reality, our existence seems transient and futile and horribly vunerable to whims of a hungry, indifferent universe. Our minds move up and down the great marches of time; seeing epochs and extinctions of primal ferocity in the strata and fossils our planet reveals to us as a savage grinning reminder of our racial mortality. Our fear is an instinctive primitive response to our mental and spiritual expansion, and it impells us without rationality to imagine ourselves secure from the lonely and remote unprotected state we have realized. To withstand the immemorial threat of the cosmic darkness and our own self-made motif of the nuclear apocalypse we must take on some kind of stronger, more adaptive and versatile bodily composition. Our very cells cry out for that lively bioreengineering. And our machines, our alloys, our electronic senses, our delicate microinstruments and fantastic nanotechnologies; all of them raise an ache in our meaningful survival mechanism to join with them an let them enhance our ephemeral doomed biological bodies.
I see the fulfillment of all that mythology and metagenesis-invoking religious mania. To survive we collectively and unconciously know that we must neurograft and bioweld and hypermorph into the most intimate symbiosis with the industrial and electronic world; become as living quicksilver able to take on any form or pseudophysiognomy. The contours of body and mind and spirit flowing with the swiftness of mega-amplified imaginative cognition and will into any biomould required. Humanity would become the most creative and stunningly transmutational unicognate ocean of superintelligent cyberprotoplasm; alive and in flux continually with the most wrenching, astonishing boiling biochangeability. To challenge the deeps of space and the planes of infinity we have no choice. But our need is inadmissable - it is too grimly cruel and colossally oppressive a future to grasp. We must leave our soft and spongey carbonaceous fleshshells behind behind; and the principles that governed that semiliquid form. We must become unyielding biometal; take on a heartless spirit of survival in which morality and mercy shall be frighteningly deflected as we struggle to master and stabilize our new biomechanical state of being. Earth itself, so increasingly hostile to us and reactionary against our pollutions and outrages of it, will incubate this new and shocking order of life. That which survives will grasp the stars.
The lands of the future are filled with these weird and novel new archetypes. We approach a crucial ignition point in our evolutionary history; one totally unprecedented in the life of this planet. The great streams of conciousness and psychic energy that spiral around our lives and existence have never been closer to our comprehension. We are on not merely a biological frontier but an even profounder spiritual one. The biomechanical chrysalis will open the collective conciousness as well as multiplying physical and sensory potentials beyond levels of considered possibility. Astral and etheric dimensions of existence will become dynamic and immediate parts of our sentience and play unknowable parts in the conduct of our daily lives. New concepts of time and causality and spirit-organism and mortality will revolutionize our destructive relationship with our planet; perhaps even allow us to touch its ancient unhurried conciousness and comprehend its wisdom despite our maddened cybermentalic hyperactivity.
The lands of the future are Cyberia.
It will be a eugenic wilderness and psuedoorganic outland more fantastic and superhuman and mindshatteringly visionary than the boldest cinema or literary fiction.
I have walked, alone and hideously affrighted, by the biomorphs and devastators and quasimutants and huborgs and cybots and iron golems and grotesque hulking biomechanoids that prowl its gunmetal wastelands.
For the human order will vanish in the cybergenetic typhoon and its earthshattering subsidiary storms. The race will become a living mass of dream-infested mercury, leaving behind a fixed shape of body and mind. The human ecology will evolve into such a complex and differentiated thing that every rule and law and axiom of civilization will be rendered meaningless or must dramatically realign to accommodate new orders of being and mind and spirit and cyberpsyche.
Cyberia is where humanity confronts and emerges from its larval and prefoetal grublike state.
Where we erupt painfully from the swarming biomechanical cauldron all the Earth will become. The ultraviolent and cataclysmic overture to the true emergence of the superhumanic species. And that fresh new phylum will be born into a world remorselessly intent on its eradication.
We have greedily pushed our biosphere too far. Already pollution and bacterial re-evolution poison us and stymie medical therapy. Resource scarcity and dwindling food supplies and climatological irruption from our squalid ill-usage of the Earth will impose on us the harshest disasters and augment the imperative to survive into an overwhelmingly hellish pitilessness. The next few centuries will be cruel and demanding to a degree that will generate the most epic crusading heroism and the most debased technological vampirisms - such lunatic extremes of positive sacrifice and desperate evil as has never been sanely envisioned. A new mythology of real transfiguration and true embodiments of the divine and daemonaic in cyborganic guise will be the immanence of the fabulous tales that are told in Cyberia. That which survives will be fit to strike out into the darkling heavens.
But the Earth will still resound with metal stormblasts and silvern cymballings and rabid cyberpsychic shrieking at such a furied pitch and with such a conciousness of the stunning grandeur that Homo Cyberus has created in its wracking struggle to resist the most determined war of extinction waged by a resistant and implacable homeworld that it will break howling through the opaque biometal cocoon of blind survivalism and at last embrace its invincible chrysalis-morphology. What form it may take is wonderfully unknowable.
Bodies and brains as elastic as the cosmic heights of willpower generated by the collectivization of intermelting intelligences and the supermagnification of the dreaming, flowing liberated imagination. A herculean and olympian world; a new and greater civilization carved out of the biodisrupted hinterland that followed the catastrophic decimation of that culture in which we live and breathe today on sufferance before the coming of the great levelling cyberflesh cyclone. A kind of sociobiology and hierarchicalism and organization and liberty of being so different and incomprehensible to our norms that no moral or biological comparison would suffice. Biocollectives and massminds and composite beings and humanicolony organisms and ultramorphs and supra-archetypes and cyberhives and polypyramid brains; Cyberia will be a tremendous and bewildering place in which nothing is impossible. A pioneer civilization with more frontiers looming majestically before it than the linear human intellect can encompass. And a frontier wildness that will never let it rest.
Cyberia comes with the Millennium.
The plastichrome foetus of that shapeless new quicksilver race lies within us; beginning to struggle and flex as recombinant DNA technology and nanoelectronic sciences veer towards a catalytic and explosive intersection. Biomechanical shadows and cybernetic spectres haunt our prophetic arts and seers; distilling apprehension and exaltation as we feel past biological absolutes dissolving around us and turn towards the luminous realigning geometries of a mighty and merciless future. Cyberia is in our very bones; melting and morphing and recreating and recontouring us so we might walk safely through the chaotic lands of the future, and that in the psychotic mutating hysteria and supertechnological dark ages to come we might truly find our Humanity.
Surrender to the siren-call of Cyberia.
St. Boniface
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