Prologue - Age of SOWN

by MadGenuis

"All over the world people are by now holding their breath as the highly anticipated day of the largest joint project ever undertaken by the human species will finally reach its conclusion and for the activation of the enormously debated and controversial Superorganic World Nexus, or as it is more commonly known, SOWN. As the final minutes before this historic moment tick away, we will take a trip back in time with Doctor Kenneth Peterson, the inventor of SOWN, and in an exclusive interview learn how it all began. Rhoslyn Flores is on the scene at the CERN headquarters in Switzerland, where Dr. Peterson and his team are waiting for the moment when the leaders of the world activate their SOWNs and change the world forever."

The picture switched from the middle-aged guy in a suit to an attractive blond woman in a navy-blue dress with abundant cleavage to show off her impressive bosom. She smiled toothily at the camera with blindingly white teeth.

"Thanks, Caleb. And may I just say that it's a huge honor to be here, where it all began, with the people who made it all possible. History is going to be made today, and this is the center of it."

Rhoslyn turned to her right as the camera panned with her, moving to include the picture of a large futuristic laboratory with several machines standing about, most the size of average residential buildings, and all in a color-scheme of white, black and a little yellow, and extremely clean. At the center of the picture stood the biggest machine of the bunch, a nearly sixty feet tall tower of metal framework around a ridiculously complex core, with numerous discs and antennae perched at the top high above their heads.

Arching her eyebrows and sending the camera another blinding smile and a thoroughly impressed look, the reporter turned another couple of dozen degrees, the camera panning to follow, until the focus came to be on a surprisingly young Caucasian man, pale, scrawny and blue-eyed, with long brown hair in a ponytail. He was wearing a lab coat over a tuxedo, and grinned uncomfortably at the camera.

"It's Dad!" Cathryn chimed happily, bouncing on the couch as she pointed at the TV. Her mother patted her head lovingly, but did not take her eyes off the picture of her husband that was being televised before her.

Smiling at both of them, sharing his mother and baby sister's pride in his father, he shot a quick glance at his older sister, Sylvia, who had been eerily quiet since the countdown encompassing nearly all media to the great activation started a little over two hours ago. As always she barely seemed to notice Adam or the others, acting as though she was the only one in the room, staring intently at the TV.

Sighing, Adam turned his attention back to his father on the screen, where he and the reporter had just finished exchanging the obligatory pleasantries.

"Tell me," Rhoslyn Flores encouraged Kenneth thousands of miles away, "when you first started working on this project, did you ever imagine that it would one day be the most debated subject in the world and indeed come to change the very structure of society, as it doubtlessly will very soon?"

Kenneth pushed his glasses further up the bridge of his nose and hesitated a moment before replying. One could tell that he was young to be in such an important position - like Adam's mother he was only twenty-nine, and like Angela he looked young for his age. Adam's parents had only been fourteen when they had Sylvia, and frankly even though Sylvia was only fifteen years old, she and the parents did not look like the age difference was all that significant - more like five years than one and a half decade.

"I can honestly say that it never crossed my mind," Kenneth admitted, a bit ruefully Adam noticed, once he finally gathered up the courage to speak to the billions who were liable to be watching. "I mean, it was never meant to be used on such a huge scale. I would have done something different if I knew, I think... maybe."

Rhoslyn flashed another smile at the camera, and Adam came to realize that he was starting to get horny from watching her trying to flirt with most of the population of Earth. He made a mental note to replay this broadcast privately, later. What could he say? He was thirteen, and Rhoslyn Flores was quite hot. It would not be the first time he masturbated to fantasies about her smile and cleavage, and he doubted it would be the last.

"Oh? Like what?" she asked with exaggerated interest.

"Uh, lots of things, I guess. Small things. Complicated stuff. You said I should keep things on a level where laymen could understand it, and I sincerely doubt I could explain myself and do that at the same time..."

"That's all right," she hurried to interrupt him. "Maybe you could remind us what SOWN is, while you consider?"

"I suppose," he shrugged. "Basically it's a step in another direction for human evolution - whether it's a leap forward millions of years or just a sidestep to become something different altogether, but without really improving, I can't really say for sure yet. I guess that doesn't explain much, though. Umm... You know what a superorganism is, right"

"Remind us."

"Right. Simply put a superorganism is an organism made up by many organisms, a single entity made up by a multitude of individuals, acting with complete unity and always with the general good of the superorganism set above the individual. It's also a matter of sharing everything within the superorganism, ensuring good health and a pleasant existence for all members thereoff. It's really the recipe for a perfect society, or so some people think, in which no one thinks only of themselves."

"So like ants, then?"

"Ants are an example of a species that make superorganisms, yes, although what SOWN does can't really compare. With ants or bees and such, it's a matter of the individual being of little importance, and only the hive - the collective - matters. We've all seen ants or bees die in the hundreds just to try to gather food for their hives, yet the collective continues almost unaffected by the loss. What is trying to be done now, with us, is nothing of the sort. Rather than make the individual insignificant, SOWN will make every single individual matter to every other individual. It will create ultimate solidarity. No one is left behind, no one is ignored, and the welfare of others will be as important to us as our own welfare is. It's not that we're all going to be thrown away by the 'hive', it's that the collective will do everything in its power to ensure that everyone is well."

"Yes, I think you got that point through by now, Dr. But how will SOWN manage this?"

"SOWN is a device that works extremely complex patterns of wavelengths and energy synchronized to the workings of the human brain, both a transmitter and a receiver. When a SOWN is activated, the Seeds - I'm sorry, the people within its range will have their brainwaves registered by the SOWN, replicated, boosted significantly and broadcast with many times the range and intensity it would otherwise have had, using every single human within range as relay beacons - all in real-time, so fast that we won't even be able to sense the delay from the activity in one brain occurring to the next receiving it."

"And what does that mean?"

"It means that anyone in range of the SOWN will sense what everyone else within range of that SOWN is feeling or thinking. If one hurts, they all feel the pain, and if one is happy, they all feel the joy, and if one experiences pleasure, it pleases the collective. If one is scared, all the rest will know to help and comfort that person. It also allows for communication on an unprecedented level - we've used the SOWN here at the lab for several months, now, and we've never worked as efficiently. In fact that's what I built the first one for. I never intended for it to be used for more than that."

"But won't that lead to a loss of identity?"

Kenneth expression suddenly turned grim. "Let me emphasize this for you as much as I can: SOWN won't create a hive-mind, and it won't make you forget who you are. Every brain will continue to function exactly as it does now, individually, and your own thoughts will continue to be your own. You won't be changed, SOWN will function without the need to. You won't be bombarded other people's thoughts so that you can't figure out which thoughts are your own, either... Most human thinking is too quick and complex for even SOWN to interpret and relay, so only slow thoughts that you concentrate on - the ones you form into words, mostly - will be successfully shared with others. Emotions and such will be shared indiscriminately, that is true, but that can be a good thing. Others' happiness might ease your own unhappiness, for instance, and others' courage null your own fear. The majority will influence the minority, one might say, so that if most are happy, everyone feels that, and so on - therefore it will be our natural instinct to ensure that as many of us as possible will be happy, because the more of us are, the happier we feel."

"You make it sound like a solution to all of our problems."

"Maybe not all of them, but SOWN definitely will help with a lot of issues. Testing has shown that connecting someone mentally ill to the same SOWN as just several mentally healthy individuals will cause the deficiency in the former to be negated by the activity of the latter. Additionally we've found that people connected to others through SOWN are generally happier, healthier and capable of heightened mental and physical performance. It's quite amazing."

"Are there no downsides at all?"

"Unless you think extreme closeness to all other human beings is a bad thing, no, not really. We will feel incredible loss whenever someone dies, that is true, and we will share the pain of those who get hurt, but it will all give way to greater unity among mankind, and make us literally only do to others what we would want them to do to us, because what we do to others, we will be doing to ourselves. Crime and war will cease. It will, by the definition of the word, create a worldwide Utopia."

"Which brings me to my next question: how did you manage to convince the leaders of all but three countries of the world to support a project as revolutionary and extensive as this?"

"As if they needed coaxing," Angela sighed somewhat impatiently, and Adam nodded to himself. They knew this story only too well.

"Simply put I didn't. As I said I never wanted to use SOWN like this, I was quite happy with it being used just to make myself and my colleagues work more closely and efficiently, and maybe share it with a few other workplaces around the world. It was actually the US that approached me, first, inquiring about the project, then the EU, and finally even the UN. They all wanted to make SOWN bigger and use it on a massive scale, to make society function more smoothly, I guess. Wanted to 'help me make the world a better place', they said. It's worth noting that they only came to me when SOWN was actually working, and that was months ago. In the end I was pretty much pressured into accepting for the good of everyone. I didn't want this."

Rhoslyn seemed genuinely surprised. "You didn't?"

"No, I didn't. It's too big a change all at once. We've been using these past several months running numerous experiments, subjecting more and more people to SOWN and such, and everything has been working perfectly. But I'm still nervous about it. Even if we've successfully had several thousand Seeds connected to a SOWN, now we're talking about connecting almost ten billion! Scientifically that's a wholly unacceptable escalation."

"I see. So you think something might go wrong after all?"

"No, I don't think that - otherwise I wouldn't have let myself be persuaded into letting SOWN launch today. We've done everything we possibly could to counteract any side effects we could think of, the most obvious one being to make many smaller SOWNs rather than one colossal one, running independently, so that we won't be bombarded with the thoughts and emotions of billions of humans all at once but only joining the immediate region. The possibility of something going wrong is infinitesimal... it's just a big responsibility. That's also why I built a counter-signal to block the SOWN, in case something happened. I pushed to have those ready in designated areas all over the world, where people can go to be themselves, I guess. They're not finished yet, though... they were deemed a low priority."

"A counter-signal? Are we in one now, then?"

"No. If something happens, I want to feel it immediately so I can right my wrongs, so we are connecting with SOWN when everyone else is. And if some catastrophe occurs, I feel like I should suffer with the rest. It's my invention, and my responsibility."

"So there are no functional counter-signals?"

"Oh, yes, there are two sources currently. One is just over there." He pointed at something outside the screen. "It's just turned off at the moment - if we need to make emergency adjustments, we will turn it on to be able to do so privately. The other is in my home, with my family. That one's turned on."

"Why?"

He looked at the reporter in a way that plainly stated that he had never heard such a stupid question. "They're my family. If something happens, I won't let them suffer. I will suffer, gladly, but not them. I'm not letting them connect to SOWN until I'm sure it's working correctly."

"Such a big softie, your father," Angel chuckled. Cathryn giggled, and even Adam smiled to himself. Sylvia remained silent, and seemed to stare at the TV more intently than ever.

"I'm sorry, but I'm being told that it's time to switch to the final countdown," Flores said, taking Kenneth's hand and shaking it. "Thank you very much for the interview, Dr. Peterson. Maybe next we speak, we will do so with our minds! This has been Rhoslyn Flores with Doctor Kenneth Peterson."

The picture switched to one of a timer counting down from one minute and thirteen seconds.

"It's exciting, isn't it?" Angela asked, a nervous edge to her voice. Her green eyes kept looking from the countdown on the TV to her three children, sitting next to her and by now looking at the diminishing numbers as well. She was scared. Kenneth had been so nervous about this, and had wanted to wait so bad, make more tests... but he had been pressured into launching SOWN now.

She was positively trembling, so much so that her reddish-brown poufy semi-short hair seemed like it had a life of its own, strands of it occasionally falling over her sharp, round eyes. She sat there unconsciously hugging her own curvy frame, incidentally squeezing her C-cup breasts together and producing abundant cleavage in her white V-neck shirt, while her legs were drawn up in front of her so she could hug her knees, making her jeans hug her wide hips and round ass magnificently.

Sylvia just sat there, still seeming tense, but nowhere as nervous as her mother, and watched the timer. Her hair was brown and in a ponytail, like her father's, and her eyes were blue, like her father's - in fact she looked like Kenneth in many ways, and only more so due to her also wearing glasses. Her eyes were narrower than her mother's, but both they, her eyelashes and the curve of her lips was so deceivingly feminine that one would never expect her to be as much of a tomboy as she really was. Her hands rested in her lap, on her slender legs, exposed as they were past the hem of her short frilly skirt that barely covered her modest butt. Her fifteen-year-old frame was generally slender and almost fragile-looking, and her breasts were a big A-cup that were being accentuated nicely by her very tight T-shirt, the kind of which left most of the stomach bare.

Cathryn seemed to be the only one wholly unaffected by the tension in the air, just sitting on the couch and kicking her legs, unable to stay interested in the television for the duration of the countdown. Cathryn was only eleven years old, had brown hair and big brown eyes, and was extremely much a little girl, her body having yet to experience any kind of meaningful maturity, wearing a knee-length yellow dress with shoulder-straps and with her hair arranged in pigtails. She was utterly adorable, and by now quite indifferent to the screen and more concerned about getting her mother's permission to get some ice-cream.

Adam tried to act calm, but he, like his mother and elder sister, was really nervous. His hair - also brown - was short and disorderly, and his eyes were gray and insecure. He was built quite well for a thirteen-year-old, being fit and reasonably strong, and despite his young age was already starting to exhibit quite masculine traits. He was thin and compact rather than visibly muscular, and furthermore liked to wear loose-fitting pants and T-shirts that made it difficult to tell that he was actually quite well-built.

The countdown reached zero, and suddenly the TV lost signal. The family briefly heard surprised shrieks from outside, until something inside the house started producing a continuous high-pitched whine that grew louder and louder with every passing second, erasing all other sounds. Angela shouted that everyone should get to the basement, but no one could hear it, nor did they have time to do so, for within twelve seconds of the countdown ending there was a loud bang somewhere in the house, and the whining abruptly ended.

As with one will, all four of them closed their eyes and instantly fell asleep. Outside the screaming continued for just a few more seconds, then it stilled, and the world was left in utter silence.

The age of SOWN had begun. But it was not what anyone had expected.