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Chapter 2: The Hybrid Man

With the sheer power of his connected mind, he could create societies out of thin air with a following larger than any media organization from ages past and all the while never moving a muscle.  He could consort with great minds both living and deceased and defy the limits of mere organic thinking.  He was the Hybrid Man.  He could come and go, walking freely among new, very real worlds of thought and concept.  His existence was not limited to the physical world alone, but expanded and unbound, allowing him free dominion over the cyber utopia that was the Outernet.  He never doubted, was never puzzled or left impotent, he never even once asked a single question consciously.  He was a superhuman; a super-intelligence.  His thoughts were actions and his results were always instantaneous.

The primitive humans he never knew were said to use only 10 - 20% of their brains, but his cerebral usage was not even on the same scale as these long dead barbarians.  His world knew no war, his 218 billion contemporaries knew no conflict or anger.  These frustrations were a long dead relic solely used as concepts within historical accounts and fantasy experiences.  Napoleon Bonaparte would have killed to have his raw informational and organizational power.  In the Hybrid Age, all humans took this power for granted, and all humans shared and generated an infinite source of free knowledge.  Everyone was what their ancestors would call super-humans, but this heightened intelligence was now a status quo.  There were neither idiots nor geniuses, all enjoyed a full range of mental agility and depth.

He would live a total of 231 years, 27 days 14 hours 34 minutes and 53 seconds.  He chose to know this fact, as most people did, when he came of age to care to think of his own mortality.  He felt pity on those poor souls from earlier eras who were said to have lives of constant toil and stress which led almost all of them to an early grave, their bodies deteriorating slowly at around 65 and debilitating diseases taking control of their minds through the remainder of their average 85 years of life. He saw this as an injustice, or some cruel trick of evolution.  Luckily for him, his modern society took evolution into their own hands and from a sheer force of will, created itself as one of almost endless enlightenment, minimal suffering, and a full and rich lifestyle for the majority. He himself was considered a "mid-lifer" and he'd already completed 128 years on the planet.  He'd never once "caught cold" and even sneezing was a highly rare occurrence.

His physical health, and mental sanity were all 100% insured and guaranteed by a constantly evolving cutting-edge security system embedded in the symbiotic device that grew itself near the root of his brain stem when he was an embryo.  Indeed, it grew with him, providing him his standard share of "mental superpower".  It represented the synthetic part of his brain and it connected him to the vast and infinite cosmos that was the Outernet.  He could navigate this cosmos as one or many, he could experience the birth of a star first-hand, instantly gain any knowledge before he was even consciously aware that he didn't know it, and solve the problems of a million worlds before a day was through.

Of course, knowledge, no matter how infinite or instant it is, does not imply subjectivity.  He had his own opinions, though highly informed as they were, he was still able to differ in thought from his contemporaries.  It was a well known fact that for order to exist, chaos must also exist.  He tried to keep his chaos as tightly managed as possible, but the rest of his brain was still human, and perhaps it's what made him and his peers unique.  He was an individual but he could also think as one with a much larger group of other people.  It was his individuality that he exchanged as the price of being connected.  There existed no money, only data.  Each human generated voluminous heaps of new and useful data every second of every day.  This data economy existed as an almost hidden background-noise which ebbed and flowed, self organizing, pushing and pulling the information tides across the plains of technological progress and kept society functioning at maximum capacity.  He needed society as much as society needed him. 

Anything he wanted, he only needed will it, and the Outernet provided it him.  Instantly printed products and gadgets, sexual pleasure as a recorded or generated full-sensory experience, new games, new languages, everything individualized and custom tailored for him.  He, alongside the Outernet, co-created these things and they seemed to materialize before his eyes. His imagination seemed to have it's own direct outlet into his physical reality and his reality was directly filtered through the Outernet like a feedback loop.  His connection was truly all that he ever had, an all that he ever would have.  Material possessions, land ownership and dispute over such things were all long obsolete.  If a material was needed, it would be synthesized at the nearest Outernet Material Synthesis Point.

Personally he had downloaded large volumes of information about Synthesis technology as it was one of his favorite past times.  One of the first things he synthesized was a small and effective portable synthesis machine.  His synthesizer could not create large-scale structures and it was limited to the amount of input material that was available.  One of his favorite materials to synthesize from was beach sand.  It was a treasure trove of base elements that could be used to create a wide variety of materials.  He worked wonders in the blink of an eye. He expertly authored nano structures and small machines which further aided him in generating larger scale items.  In primitive terms he would have been considered something like a carpenter.

He was a respectful and generally timid man.  He was well known throughout the different worlds of the Outernet and often did remote synthesis as tributes for his fans.  He was relatively tall, had short hair, brown eyes, deep brown skin and his name was Seth 25772.

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