The Blockchain

At 8:42 a.m., Dennis Hemphill's implanted Augmented Reality lens flashed a message for a new job, which he accepted promptly. There were increasingly fewer jobs for security enforcement freelancers anymore, so he had to act quickly. Prior to the constant upload of all human activity to the global blockchain, Dennis had worked for McQueen Enforcement Solutions, a major private security corporation. But on May 4, 2034, the global blockchain went online, and it forever altered everything.

It started off, as most well-intentioned ideas do, as a promise of improving everyone's lives. The idea was to create an unerring, unalterable repository of all facts and knowledge that would be readily available to everyone. It would remove control of information and other resources from the hands of a few powerful individuals, governments, and corporations. It succeeded in its benign promise and created a perfectly frictionless, distributed system where everything was decentralized to generate an efficient platform for all human activity to be recorded and verified. There would be no more misinformation, propaganda, fraud, corruption, or manipulation. It was the libertarian and anarchist's utopia come true. Within weeks of the blockchain going live, fiat currencies became obsolete and worthless, wiping out the fortunes and political capital of the old oligarchs. Corporations and those who led them collapsed in favor of a pure freelance economy in which workers earned a market wage without others profiting off their labor. National governments with exclusive authority over territorial boundaries became meaningless as the world reorganized itself into efficient microcultures of common interests distributed across the globe. People's identities were no longer based on what coordinates on Earth they were arbitrarily born but rather on their individual interests and abilities. It was an absolute meritocracy devoid of racism, bigotry, homophobia, sexism, and all such negative concepts. No one cared who you were; they only cared about what you could contribute.

In such an environment, crime, dissention, and rebellion held little appeal to the citizenry of the new blockchain reality. There was no point in going against what the blockchain proved to be the truth because they were irrefutable facts and under the control of no one but everyone at once. Dennis, or as he was known on the blockchain by his address 596572616e64797341636f737461, found it increasingly difficult to make a living in such a world, so he didn't hesitate to leap into action before someone beat him to this gig.

He wasted no time in gearing up and requesting transport to the site of the disturbance, an old hospital on the fringe of the city. He paid the requisite transport fare, which was instantly recorded on the blockchain and stored on thousands of nodes across the globe in a manner that would forever authenticate that he made that trip and paid for it. Even though he thought that this would be a relatively easy job, he was still fully protected by his adaptive nanobot armor which made him impervious to most forms of physical harm. The AR heads up display indicated there was an unauthorized access from an old disused terminal trying to gain root access to a legacy system. "It's probably a rat that chewed through some wiring," he thought, but it would pay enough to keep him going until the end of the month at least.

He proceeded cautiously through the dusty hallway of what was once a state-of-the-art hospital, now littered with discarded medical supplies and antiquated equipment that did not integrate with the blockchain's protocol. As he made his way down the corridor, he could see a bluish glow pulsing beneath a solid stainless-steel door. A small knot of excitement formed in his gut from wondering what unknown danger might await him behind the door. He reached up to the keypad to unlock it, and the AR display provided him with the PIN that was recorded on the blockchain years earlier when the hospital records were uploaded into the repository. With a slight grinding sound from years of neglect, the doors slid open to reveal a room infused with a bright blue light. His AR lens compensated by adding a red filter to normalize his vision, and he then saw something unexpected.

Standing in the middle of the room was a ghostly figure unlike any he had ever seen. It appeared human but was largely featureless. The figure was short, hairless, with pale skin and red eyes, and completely naked but lacking any genitalia. This being seemed neither male nor female and belonged to no identifiable race. It appeared as a clay human prototype that had not yet had any unique or identifying features painted onto it. The only thing that stood out was a gold chain around the neck with a small heart-shaped locket lying in the center of its nipple-less chest.

Dennis was unnerved by what he saw, unsure if this was an alien, a lab experiment, or what exactly he was witnessing. His instincts kicked in, and he drew his stun-blaster and aimed it straight for the head. The figure turned slightly, and its red eyes looked directly into his, spooking his usually steely nerves to the point he reflexively pulled the trigger. Anticipating the recoil, he steadied his posture, but it failed to fire. His AR screen indicated that the weapon was never authorized even though he knew for a fact that it was.

Confused by this seemingly impossible event, he double checked his weapon while the figure returned its attention back to the computer console. Then, Dennis noticed this being was physically attached to the console with a combination of wires and IV tubes pumping red and yellow liquids back and forth between its body and the machine. Finally accepting his weapon's failure, Dennis decided to use old-fashioned physical tactics to disable the assailant, so he dropped the gun to the floor and began to charge at the figure. The blue light strobed to an unbearable intensity that even his filtered lens could not mitigate and was accompanied by a screeching sound that made him recoil and back away. The figure once again looked at him, and he noticed its eyes had turned from red to blue.

Uncertain as to what to do next, he tried to shake off the disorientation from the bright flashing and loud sound. When his vision returned, he observed the figure had sprouted hair on its head which he watched change from short, blond, and straight to long, dark, and curly. Dennis quickly used his priority security access to scan through deep archives within the blockchain to research anything he could find that would explain this unusual occurrence. Finding nothing helpful after expending several digicoins on what little information he was able to retrieve, he decided on a simpler, low-tech approach.

"Who are you? What are you doing?" Dennis inquired of the mysterious figure.

"I am Omega Andros, and I just want everything to be set right," the figure replied in an accent-free, androgynous voice that cycled through sounding alternatively feminine, then neutral, then masculine, and feminine again.

The lights and sounds throbbed, and Andros' body seemed to change shape in sync, first forming nipples on the previously smooth chest, then growing large breasts only to have them recede and become more muscular and masculine. Dennis fed the name Omega Andros into his console and was able to find a birth record from December 25, 2021, for a baby born in that very hospital. The baby had a twin that was stillborn, whom the mother had named Alpha. The records showed that both twins were born with numerous genetic anomalies. They were both albinos, genderless, hairless, and had no fingerprints. Almost every feature that makes humans distinct as individuals was missing from the twins. It was as if they were blank prototypes of a human absent any of the various binary options that are etched into human DNA to make someone male or female, black or white, blue eyes or brown.

Accepting the uselessness of his technology, Dennis resorted to a psychological tactic and implored, "I am very sorry that your twin did not survive. But tell me, Omega, what are you trying to do here?"

Andros seemed slightly rattled that Dennis had learned of his history and showed a slight twinge of emotion as his chin morphed from round and soft to more square and rugged and sprouted dark stubble.

"The blockchain is an abomination that has enslaved humanity, and I wish to finally free them from its tyranny," Andros calmly replied in an increasingly more masculine voice.

"But the blockchain is everything. It is unerring. It is unalterable. I don't see how you think you can change that, but even if you could, it would destroy civilization. Humanity depends on its truth for stability, for all economic activity, for life."

Confident in his ability to accomplish his goal, Andros stoically replied without fear that Dennis would be able to thwart him, "the blockchain is unquestionably unerring in its recording of the truth. But rather than saving humanity, it is constraining it. You are old enough to remember a time before the blockchain. Surely, you recall art, music, joy, passion, and love."

"Of course, but they still exist," Dennis retorted.

"They are but a pale remnant of what they were. There is no transactional profit to be realized from them, so their cost outweighs the benefits, and few continue to produce or experience them. Humanity has been consigned to a bland and sterile existence of mere basic transactions for survival. The promise that the blockchain offered of a grand utopia, free of oppression and manipulation by a few oligarchs, has indeed been successful, but it has merely replaced one form of tyranny with another. I need to end this now before it's too late."

As he spoke, Andros’ body alternately formed female genitalia then male, and his skin changed from white to tan to black to caramel. As each moment passed, Andros’ form became less indeterminant and more committed to one feature or another.

Dennis watched as his AR screen changed seemingly unchangeable data in the global blockchain.

"But how are you doing this?" Dennis cried.

"Alpha and I were born with no binary features, almost every cell in our bodies were like stem cells. My mother was able to escape with me, but engineers used Alpha’s DNA to build the perfect biological storage drives that could record the vast amounts of information needed for the blockchain. At the same time, quantum computing emerged leveraging the concept of qubits, which exist in a non-binary state. When these two technologies merged, the blockchain became the ubiquitous force that it is now. But our DNA is at the core of the machine. It has taken me a lifetime, but I have found a way to use my DNA to upload a new program into the blockchain and change it. Doing so requires me to commit to some state for each feature that is currently non-binary. That is why you see me transforming from neutral to female to male. From hairless to hirsute, from red eyes to blue and now brown, from Caucasian to Asian to Latinx. I must sacrifice my unique identity of neutrality to one of some definite state in order to break this monstrous blockchain once and for all. Once I am no longer non-binary at any level, the same will be true for the blockchain, and it will crumble, freeing us all from its grip."

"Please, stop! You will destroy us all," Dennis begged him.

The blue lights faded, and the pulsing sounds stopped. Andros unplugged himself from the console. The tall, dark man with green eyes, strong jaw, and long, curly hair that Andros had become approached Dennis, extended his strong hand, and helped him to his feet. Dennis' AR screen went blank, and he glimpsed the unfiltered image of an open heart-shaped locket on Andros neck with the inscription α Ω.