Zero Mods

In a civilization where augmentation begins in childhood, remaining entirely human is an act of rebellion… and disappearance.

Across ChromaSpyke, all children are required to receive a HiRO implant. Cybernetics shape employment, medicine, communication, travel, identity, and access to the systems that make ordinary life possible. To have this implant is to be part of society.

Zero Mods reject all of it.

They exist outside government subsidies, body contracts, and legitimate economies. Their children are hidden from the systems that would otherwise implant them, thus making their existence illegal from one generation to the next.

Discovery can mean forced augmentation, imprisonment, disappearance, or execution, depending on who finds them. Survival therefore depends upon remaining difficult to find.

Zero Mods maintain hidden networks across Earth, colonies, fleets, and inhabited systems throughout known space. They learn routes around surveillance and sometimes disguise themselves with faux cybernetics, clothing, or body modifications meant to resemble ordinary augmentation. They are reclusive because they have to be, and generations of persecution have created communities that can be deeply suspicious of outsiders and violently defensive when cornered.

That does not make them ignorant. Many preserve histories, technical knowledge, religious traditions, agricultural skills, and systems of education that have disappeared elsewhere. They salvage implants from corpses and Daphemi, selling the hardware through black markets to finance communities that otherwise have little access to currency. Their disdain for Daphemi corpse units can be extreme, and Zero Mods are known to actively dismantle them when given the opportunity.

Their isolation is not necessarily a rejection of technology. It’s a rejection of what humanity became. At the center of many Zero Mod traditions is an ideological system known as The Seventeenth Species. Its teachings are preserved in handwritten books passed between communities and across generations. Complete texts are exceptionally rare. Even fragments can be fiercely protected, enormously valuable, and intensely illegal. There are recorded cases of entire Zero Mod communities sacrificing themselves to preserve or move portions of these texts beyond the reach of authorities.

The belief at the center of these teachings is that humanity has not remained a single species. According to the writings of The Seventeenth Species, human civilization passed through a succession of evolutionary states until modern augmentation created the final break. Zero Mods believe themselves to be the last continuation of true humanity: the seventeenth species. From their perspective, the augmented organics spread throughout known space belong to something that came afterward, shaped by implants, body contracts, corpse units, and generations of teaching that treat the unmodified human body as inherently deficient.

Their traditions can also be intensely spiritual. Some communities cultivate and consume sponk, a hallucinogenic mushroom used in rituals intended to commune with ancestral generations and seek their guidance. What outsiders might dismiss as intoxication can function inside a Zero Mod community as history, religion, counsel, and continuity with the people who endured before them. The cost of that continuity is enormous. Without recognized implants or identities, Zero Mods struggle to access medicine, travel, employment, or public assistance. Body contracts are entirely closed to them. Their communities survive through scavenging, hidden trade, agriculture, mutual support, and whatever spaces civilization has failed to completely control.

And still they spread.

In a universe that teaches people to improve their bodies until they can compete with the half-dead, Zero Mods preserve a much older belief. That the body they were born with was enough. That sin is inherited through action, not birth.

If you’d like to encounter Zero Mods in ChromaSpyke fiction, The Queen’s Silence offers a look at one man’s relationship with the augmented world around him.

Now that you’ve been introduced to Zero Mods, continue exploring ChromaSpyke by learning about the HiRO implants they refuse, the cybernetics that define ordinary life, or the body contracts from which they remain excluded. Or return to the ChromaSpyke universe page and explore other lore articles.