August 13, 2017 at 07:50PM

Reddit scan:Being geographically distanced from mainland Geneva, the overseas territories in the Pacific did not venture down the exact same cultural pathway. That's not to say that there weren't distinct influences, but being surrounded by the Pacific Rim, the vanguard of innovation for many years, French Polynesia and other nearby territories had followed an entirely different route of 1970s-80s society: Maker Culture.The 4th Industrial Revolution brought mass-customization to the forefront of innovation and with it an extremist 'DIY' attitude to some of the more enterprising people caught up in the resurgence of maker culture. Economic innovation in French Polynesia had largely consisted of scattering SEZs across the territory's islands and upgrading energy and transportation infrastructure, essentially leaving the finer points of societal development up to its inhabitants. Already, there was a great tendency to "make do" with scant resources, and when automation really started taking off in Geneva and the first cybernetic implants started rolling into the Pacific territories, they didn't have any shortages anymore, but they still retained the skills that they had used to shape their livelihoods. They chose to pass them down, resulting in what was in a certain sense the largest makerspace in the world.Telecommuting came to the forefront of jobs innovation in the 2040s, and with it, people in places like French Polynesia no longer had to emigrate to get the highest-paying jobs. Taking advantage of a culture that emphasized self-reliance and technological know-how, many French Polynesians ended up in important positions not only in Genevois technological startups and industrial giants on the mainland, but also on the hordes of micro-businesses that popped up across the islands when trade with Asia was opened up through the TEP and Genevois manufacturing surged ahead. A nickname for Faa'a became "Shenzhen's liberalized little brother", owing to its residents' technological acumen.While billions were dumped into infrastructure, it was ultimately telecommuting that ended up dragging the territories from poverty, and it was well-supported by every administration that passed through the Palais Olympique: Le Foll and Lemoine leaped at the opportunity to get low-cost labor without dealing with immigrants, and previous presidents were glad to provide opportunities to some of the more unfortunate citizens of the country.This has made French Polynesia into one of the various centers advocating for Genevois transhumanism, a relatively touchy subject that doesn't get much governmental attention, despite the widespread use of cybernetic implants. Instances like the murder spree by a heavily modified surgeon nearly a decade ago seem to be preventing progress from occurring (publicly at least, Subjects 8 through 11 would beg to differ regarding the state of transhumanism in private corporate and governmental programs).That hasn't stopped the populace of French Polynesia from supporting body modification by an enormous margin, and while it has definitely resulted in several important innovations in terms of implant miniaturization and nanomachine development, the path towards a new type of human hasn't always proceeded smoothly.The 'Oro Incident' is the preeminent argument against body modification in French Polynesia, often touted by Neo-Luddites of the same cloth as those that reject the rise of cybernetics in mainland Geneva. A lot of people, however, view the Oro Incident as inspiration, but that's not in any capacity endorsed by the local government.Alan Dubois, one of the early adopters of telecommuting, was a port administrator and software engineer who oversaw many of the initial cybernetic imports into Tahiti. In the social circles that he moved in, Dubois was well-recognized as one of the pioneers of the Polynesian Maker Revolution, especially in Papeete. He was often described as single-minded when working on a project, and some of the people close to him have confided that they suspected he may have had undiagnosed high-functioning autism.The path taken by Alan Dubois was one of runaway body enhancement, which culminated in the first homemade exocortex in history, a feat that at the time was matched only by tech giants, and had been secretly perfected several years before by Nestlé in a Libyan test facility. Dubois' design was unique, linked directly into a pair of bionic contact lenses of his own design, providing the necessary processing power to view multiple wavelengths that hadn't been accessible by commercial smart contact lenses, and wouldn't be for at least a decade. The exocortex that he had haphazardly installed into the back of his neck using a surgical robot provided Dubois not only with vision and a HUD that was incomparably powerful, but also provided a suite of tools that he could, and would, use to monitor datastreams from wherever he was, including traffic flows, covert and public communications, biometric data, automation protocols, and countless of other information resources.In tandem with this technology, Dubois had cobbled together a poweful coilgun loaded with tungsten-tipped, surgical-grade flechette bullets that could (allegedly) penetrate a tank's armor. This handgun was linked directly into his exocortex datastream, and in combination with a few physical modifications, including some musculoskeletal adjustments using smart fullerene to help with his aim, Dubois had transformed himself into (allegedly) the best marksman in the world. Accessing medical records and superimposing animated anatomical diagrams over X-Ray or IR visualizations of targets essentially ensured that every bone-shattering, gut-tearing bullet from Dubois sidearm was guaranteed a kill. If he could see you first, shoot better than you could, and draw faster than was humanly possible, there wasn't much to do but preemptively give up when he announced you as his quarry.Who was Dubois hunting? Why did he go through all this trouble to transform himself into something that would have been illegal for simply existing?It's simple. Alan Dubois wanted to fight crime.Enter the Oro Incident. A day in Mid-June when Alan Dubois tactically annihilated a branch of the Yakuza that had been festering in Tahiti for the past 5 years, allowed to grow by a corrupt police force and an apathetic citizenry. By the time that Dubois had erased himself from any database that he could and hopped on a cargo ship bound for Tuléar, the local government had only just begun finding pulped corpses strewn about an abandoned warehouse.After he had reached Madagascar, drone strikes had been authorized against him, to be dealt with in the same way that Subject 7 had initially been approached. Where Subject 7 was able to provide an unconventional solution from raw material, Dubois chose instead to counterattack, doing the impossible by downing two strike drones before disappearing into the jungle in the center of the island. It is strongly suspected that Dubois' exocortex had brought up schematics for the UCAVs he was being targeted by, and provided the necessary wavelengths to intercept the aircraft, before plotting the likeliest course for him to fire upon. In order to accomplish something like this, Dubois' device would have had to use an incredible amount of energy, but there was no other viable explanation for what had occurred, besides luck, and in the case of Dubois, luck didn't seem incredibly likely.As if to corroborate this theory, Alan Dubois was found 4 days later, facedown in the mud about 20 kilometers from Tananarive, dead of rapidly-onset caloric deficit. His equipment was, however, in working order, and the DGSI quickly removed the body and covered up what they could. Alan Dubois would become another case file in the slowly growing listing of rogue transhumans, starting with an insane surgeon, progressing into the ill-fated Nestlé experiments, and ending with Alan Dubois, with dozens of smaller, less-consequential cases between them.The Oro Incident was the first case of dangerous body modification combined with vigilantism, but it would not be the last. From the government's perspective, it was an unmitigated disaster, and they knew that Dubois would be the first of many. For the neo-luddites, he was a clear symbol for what they had always espoused. For cybernetics manufacturers, he was an economic setback. For military analysts, he was curiosity, morally and technologically.But for others? For the random person picked off a street in Tahiti?For them, Alan Dubois was the world's first real superhero. http://ift.tt/2uSR7fe by Towson Makerspace