HiRO Implants

The most consequential implant in human history was first installed in a patient who died thirty-two minutes later.

Several centuries ago, an experimental hijacker implant was installed in a test subject identified as Human Zero. The patient’s name was simply written B. Ancheo. Once installed, the implant was turned on and monitored in a laboratory. The location was guarded, and the exact time of the experiment was kept secret. Thirty-two minutes after the procedure began, it’s said the patient died from complications.

The experiment did not end with a flat pulse.

Exactly seven days, three hours, and thirty-two minutes later, the body designated Unit XA01 downloaded a command packet from an animus test server. The corpse was calm, responsive, and capable of following instructions.

It could not speak.

The technology became known as HiRO, derived from the Hindbrain Reanimation Omni program that produced it. Its original program director, Gaussia Upheaux, disappeared aboard the medical cruiser Virexhal shortly after the test succeeded.

Three days later, unauthorized shipments of HiRO implants arrived at corporate headquarters across known space.

Humanity changed almost immediately.

Ever since, HiRO implants have been installed near the hindbrain of all children and serve as a communication interface between the human nervous system and the wider network of animus nodes. During organic life, the implant provides a pathway through which information, instructions, and other systems can interface with the body. When certain conditions are met, including the loss of vital signs and transition into half-death, the same infrastructure can override the body’s normal control.

The person stops responding. The body does not have to. A command packet can be downloaded. Motor functions can be redirected. Cybernetics still function. An organic worker can become a Daphemi corpse unit operating according to instructions transmitted through the network.

It prolonged usefulness and made death economically valuable

Before HiRO, moving human labor across interstellar space was expensive, politically difficult, and notoriously inefficient. Workers became tired. They resisted deteriorating conditions. They demanded better compensation. Injuries removed them from production. Death represented the permanent destruction of training, transportation costs, and whatever investment had already been made in the worker’s body. Cybernetics pushed human productivity further, but they came with their own problems. Parts required maintenance. Rival corporations and manufacturers controlled service agreements. Insurance schemes, hacking, planned product cycles, and corporate ownership of technology created increasingly hostile relationships between augmented workers and the organizations employing them.

There remained a point at which a person could simply refuse.

HiRO moved that point.

The first large populations of corpse units rapidly displaced organic labor throughout mundane industries. Daphemi carried cargo, maintained installations, worked factories, filled security positions, and eventually entered military service. A worker who died on the job was no longer necessarily a lost investment. Under the right conditions, the same augmented body could simply continue. It could also be fixed more easily.

For Earth, the consequences were catastrophic.

Although humanity had spread across a large portion of the galaxy, Earth had remained the political center of human civilization. Governments, military leaders, and corporate representatives still passed decisions through its institutions, even as megacorporations increasingly controlled entire regions of space.

Earth also possessed one resource in enormous abundance: people. HiRO sharply reduced their value and destabilized the center of governance. Corporations dismissed organic workforces in favor of corpse units that were easier to transport, cheaper to maintain, and incapable of negotiating their conditions. Some colonies were reportedly starved into submission and converted. Earth governments watched one of their remaining sources of influence disappear while military forces expanded in an attempt to absorb populations the corporations no longer wanted.

The relationship between the living and the dead changed with it.

The implant became part of the infrastructure of ordinary human life. It sits behind body contracts, corporate ownership of the half-dead, the animus network, and the expectation that an augmented person’s usefulness may continue long after their organic life ends.

Far too complex for all but the most specialized and experienced surgeon, each HiRO implant is both a chain around the neck of cybernetic life and a life-giver for those born into squalor. The implant changed millennia of civic evolution and firmly imprinted the role of cybernetics into the daily lives of humans. It also removed the greatest hurdle to space colonization and allowed for the explosive growth of interstellar corporate interests.

Now that you’ve been introduced to HiRO implants, continue exploring ChromaSpyke by learning about the Daphemi corpse units they make possible or the body contracts that determine who retains rights to an augmented body. Or return to the ChromaSpyke universe page and explore other lore articles.