IRIS

IRIS; Intuitive, Reconstructive Integrated Symbiotics, is a colony of nano machines that swarms through every one of us, even before we are born. It makes us stronger, healthier; eliminates the creeping threats that would otherwise fester within our bodies. The ravening of disease and the pollution of excess fat are things of the past. We have reached the pinnacle of human health, though few enjoy it as the wonder it truly is. They do not know what it is to be weak, to be crippled. IRIS has made disease and early death virtually unheard of. It is through IRIS that we reached the golden age in which Horizon was founded, yet it also fell; however we may reach for the apogee of our evolution, we cannot escape the pull of our primal human soul. We are, and always will be, imperfect.

IRIS began its life as a military technology, enhancing the capabilities and resilience of front-line personnel. Over time, it grew and changed, becoming a feared weapon of superiority in its own right. Soldiers infused with IRIS discovered they were faster and stronger than their opponents. They could charge enemy positions in a blur, kill with their bare hands, then disappear towards their next objective just as quickly. Bullet after bullet could be spent on IRIS soldiers; sometimes it worked, more often it didn't. Demoralized and fearing for their lives, mere humans could only flee these super-beings. The political sphere went into uproar, but those who developed IRIS did not deny what they had created. What was there to ban? this was not some horrific biological weapon, it did not level cities full of innocents. Simply put, the soldiers had transcended their enemies in every way meaningful to combat. Soon, every major nation had rushed to build their own nanotech enhancement program. The original, IRIS, ramained dominant nonetheless; it was more versatile, more reliable and above all, more potent. The black market flourished selling IRIS to foreign parties until all the old stalemates had returned. IRIS was no longer a young idea; in less than a decade it had become the backbone of every major military.

As the years went by however, conflicts passed and in the end IRIS went the way of all human achievements: the path of greatest profit. Pharmaceutical giga-corporations had been swift to see the shadow looming over their business and with the expenditure of incredible resources, they took first advantage in the civilian market. It was they who developed IRIS into the technology that we know today. Sweeping the human race, it left no disease, no deformity or weakness in its wake. Hygeine as we know it became a luxury without purpose, a novelty enjoyed by the wealthy and the decadent. As IRIS continued to evolve, the companies who had created their economic elephant were now made to ride it. New updates and enhancements emerged often for those who could afford them. For those who could not, back-room lobbying produced regular calibration checks, reasonably priced, but made compulsory by law. In the end, all felt the gravity of the IRIS industry.

In the mean time, the Earth had been plundered ruthlessly for its resources. Of the planet's eleven billion men, women and children, any who could afford it carried a few Kilograms worth of metals in the form of IRIS. To say demand for materials was high would have been a gross understatement. As Humanity grappled with its emminent stagnation however, a young research company was exploring other frontiers. Its name was Shiniku Solutions and it was developing IRIS-based capabilities into something never before imagined. Conventions of human rights forbade their disturbing experiments, and so in their need to be free of surveillance, they established a research facility on a remote, barren world. It was there, under the guise of a cosmological testing station, that they worked to bring about their ultimate goal: the next stage of human evolution. Though time would prove them successful, it was never in a way they had anticipated. For a time, this was enough, but then there was the discovery of Horizon. A world without laws, without the strict observations of the governments and their spy sattelites. A whole planet upon which their work might be accelerated. Through their single-minded determination and sheer luck, Shiniku had become the only enterprise with colonization experience. It should have been little surprise that they were the first to launch for the new world. To the population at large however, who knew nothing of the company's shadowed past, they had gone from anonymous to breathtaking news.

On Horizon, research progressed almost too quickly. Shiniku was forced to begin mass abductions under the guise of conflict and espionage. Entire shipments of resources bound for Earth were stolen in the name of their righteous goal. All around them, suspicions grew, but were never directed towards Shiniku itself. Instead they fuelled the animosity of a people already bristling at the greed of Earth and its crippling levies. The heads of Shiniku did not care. If they were successful, none of this turmoil would matter in the shadow of a new humanity spreading its wings. They never fully understood the desperation they had catalyzed until they had already doomed their own most fervent desires. The recently amalgamated Earth government was forced to exert its authority over Horizon, but its monstrous fleet did little to win the people's cooperation. In a bold political move, significant resources were diverted into the rescue of a single man. He had become stranded on a remote, barren world where a certain cosmological testing station had recently gone silent. Having abandoned the facility to its fate, Shiniku personnel assumed their experimental samples would die, never realizing the nightmare they had released by doing so. With the rescued man's return came Shiniku's own demon: the Feral Plague.

welcome to Horizon, the world that greed bore to the abyss.

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