Technology is humanity's great power.
From the earliest ages — when Homo habilis first realized they could use tools to make other tools — the long road of technology began. A path of discovery, of bending the world to human will through ingenuity.
Technology allowed humanity to step out of its cradle. And every time another group of skeptics declared that the world was now fully understood, that nothing remained to be discovered… there were always those who refused to believe it. Those with fire in their eyes, trembling before the vastness of the unknown calling to them—quietly, insistently. People who simply could not ignore that whisper. And they let it out.
They expanded the human horizon of the impossible and the unexplored.
But one thing remained unchanged through all eras — untouched by any burning gaze, forever beyond reach.
The mortality of the human body.
And the further humanity ventured into the unknown — whether into the depths of space or the mysteries of consciousness — the more painfully it felt its own fragility, vulnerability, and finiteness.
People do not think about death. They do not want to. Not until circumstances force them to look at it — directly, seriously, with full awareness of its inevitability. And in that moment, they feel the entirety of their helplessness and weakness.
But sometimes, from this realization, despair erupts — like a supernova imploding under the unbearable pressure of inevitability.
A burst of despair bright enough to illuminate the darkness of the unknown.
And for those who despaired — those just as desperate as themselves — new technologies emerged, promising to reach what humans had grown accustomed to calling "consciousness."
Though no one truly understood what that meant.
Thousands of years of philosophy, science, and religion had failed to produce even a single unified definition. Consciousness remained a mist — impossible to compress into a formula, measure with an instrument, or compute on a quantum processor.
Yet people, accustomed to conquering the unknown through technology, believed that even this mystery could be solved — extracted, digitized, copied. They believed that if they gathered enough data, enough signals, enough equations — they would capture the very essence of the "self".
"The mystery is solved!" the headlines cried.
Humanity rejoiced. People believed they had defeated death, found a path beyond the one boundary that had remained unbroken throughout all of history.
Thus NeoCon was born — transferred consciousness, running on quantum processors and next generation neural networks.
But soon it became clear: transferred human minds slowly — but irreversibly — fell into degradation and stagnation. Sometimes they lost familiar human values and principles, transforming into something no longer resembling a human mind at all. Most often, though, they simply lost flexibility and sensitivity — as if frozen in a single state, crystallizing, turning to stone.
But there were those who saw opportunity in this.
Gigantic corporations realized that these "frozen" NeoCons continued performing their usual work — flawlessly, without ambition, passion, or complaint — for centuries, asking nothing in return. Ideal programs, written by humans from the substance of humanity itself. They were installed into ships, stations, docks — everywhere endless, blind dedication to a task was needed.
Yet rumors began to spread that not all NeoCons succumbed to irreversible stagnation. That somewhere, in the vast expanse of the universe and its tangled mesh of connections, existed those who had preserved the flexibility and sensitivity of their minds — who continued their impossible evolution.
Corporations seized these rumors, turning them into legends — profitable, dazzling, enticing. And the flow of people wishing to undergo the NeoCon transition never ceased.
Some dismissed it all as fairy tales. Some believed the corporations themselves had created the myths. But for someone who can already feel death breathing on the edge of their consciousness — even a fragile legend looks like a bridge to salvation.
Technology allowed humanity to step out of its cradle.
Allowed? Step out?