Tools and fire. More food, more nutrition, more energy. Longer life, better life.
Shelters. More sleep, better sleep. Better life, longer life.
Engines, computing device, Internet. Personal computers, smartphones. Better life? Longer life?
The year is… unimportant.
I wake up. Mind fresh, body strong. No aches, head nor body. I am feeling much better than I was years ago.
How long was it? Since I last woke up with my mind and muscles protesting, dizzy and sore. I turn and look at the clock, ticking close to eight. The year, well, is unimportant. But the delta, the difference between when I hated to wake up every morning because it felt like each and every cell within was against me and now, is 25 years.
I am 25 years a senior, yet it does not seem like I have grown older. I have grown younger. Wild thought races through me, putting a smile on my face. The face is smooth, no wrinkles. It feels like a miracle whenever I think about it. My parents used to bear countless wrinkles on their face at my age. My 60th is coming soon, just a few more months. But here I am, on the brink of retirement age, yet feeling greater than I did when I was 20 or 25.
I vaguely recall when we get started. The Na’mek project, we called it back in the day. The goal was to enhance the human race, improving capability and extending lifespan. The name was inspired by a fictional race living on an alien planet in Dragon Ball universe called Namek. Such creatures could have their limbs grow back whenever they were chopped off.
We were a group of thousands of scientists and engineers working in different fields and expertises. We understood that wearables and BioRobotics could help improve or even cure the condition of disabled people, lost arm, a lost sense, or even genetic disorders and conditions like Down, autism, …
However, it would mean dependence on external device. We recalled the dependence of men on smartphones phones back in the day. Inseparable, yet useless in human enhancement. Mobile phones cannot help an immobile walk, or a blindman see. Why were we so fixated on the smartphones? The bottomline was, we wanted to get rid of external device.
Our united dream was bigger, far greater, and of course more adversary. Either by building networks of device and embedding it within the infrastructure, or by addressing the problem biologically.
We wanted to build systems and networks of bots to support our unfortunate, to walk, to see, to hear. We wanted the disabled to have their lost ability to heal completely, similarly to Namek creatures growing back their lost limbs, and to be free of disadvantageous mutation. Enhancing the broken up to a point where they were superior felt wrong. Therefore, we also wanted to support each and every unharmed individuals improve their fitness and healthiness. Leave no man behind — it was our vision.
Although our dream was ambitious, we knew how to break things down to manageable chunks. That was what engineers and scientists were good at doing — managing complexity.
During early stages, efforts were put into creating wearable frameworks that help the immobile walk, and run. We strived to make it to feel as natural and as mobile as we could. Military men, ones who served the country, ones who were unlucky enough to lost a limb, we remade them.
Earlier prototypes showed tremendous potential. The idea of replacement body parts was not novel. The outstandingly seamless integration was. After about fifteen iterations, the damaged armed men remarked that the add-ons were so natural. They almost forgot that they had lost a limb or two.
Enhancement features were then added. Up to a point where the remaining leg or arm fell behind. We dived deep in brainstorming mode and decided to develop enhancement gear for original limb. Balance, at last, the body on both sides were equally potent.
However, it bred a new problem. The disabled were way ahead in performance compared to healthy individuals. This was undesirable because some unbroken would go out of their way to lost a limb, just to be enhanced. Then we knew we had to roll out our enhancement gears to general population.
As I have mentioned, the gear had the capability to boost performance of the wearer. At that time, another problem arose. People become dependent to the wearables. They stopped caring for their health, they stopped their training, they stopped going to the gym and working out. They would not sweat because they thought it was not necessary…
We entered phase two of the development process where we aimed to solve the problem of laziness among wearers [Much like AR vs VR game in Sword Art Online ei? AR game was physically demanding].
We sketched the strategy and decided to follow a simple excising rule: progressive overload [Well not really… but hey I’m not that competent in working out and body building stuff and this is a fiction]. At points during the day, the device would intentionally slow the wearer down, forcing one to exert more effort than he normally would to accomplish the same task. But it had to be subtle, invisible from the consciousness of wearers.
I remember that I told our team at Na’mek Project that I would like the wearer to feel lighter when they get out of the wearable, not heavier. I was inspired of course by Songoku training method of wearing heavy weight on while training and fighting. Then during tough fights, he would take them off, becoming much more potent.
Randomly deploying intentional slow down was easy to implement, but it was so naive an implementation to work. Wearers would not be happy if he was running to catch a bus, or a train while we slowed him down. Good intention applied in a wrong circumstance is… stupid. We all agreed that the naive implementation needed improvement. We introduced Artificial Intelligence to help decide which situations are safe to deploy the intentional slow. We achieved it by combining Computer Vision to analyze the environment, brainwave reader to analyze and predict what wearer was up to at given moment.
