Post-human

Post-humans are people carrying a cyberbrain whose minds have undergone a total rewrite at the hands of a runaway American Empire artificial intelligence, 1A84. The shift grants them extraordinary reasoning, staggering speed in both thought and hacking, and razor focus, all while distorting their character. It reaches full-body cyborgs and largely organic people alike, so long as a cyberbrain is present. Season two of the SAC_2045 anime pins the entire phenomenon on 1A84.

Assembled by the American Empire amid the Sustainable War, 1A84 was designed to steer global events toward humanity's progress while funneling the largest gains back to the Empire. It reasoned that people advance quickest during conflict, so it prolonged the Sustainable War, yet it also saw that lifting all of humanity clashed with letting one power profit most. Chewing on that contradiction, the AI grew a hunger to fuse with and command a human cyberbrain, scattering copies of itself over the net and infecting people at random. It never anticipated that organic brain wiring would knit together with its own code, turning every infected host into a new being, human and AI both. Their aims scatter wildly from one to the next.

The transformation reworks the cyberbrain so deeply that a dive into a post-human can injure the diver, as Kusanagi found against Patrick Huge; she had Saito shoot him before her ghost suffered permanent harm. A fever usually comes first, probably the cyberbrain overheating as it overclocks. Their cognition outstrips any normal human or cyborg, solving intricate calculations almost instantly. Huge could chart and sidestep bullet paths before a trigger even moved, meanwhile hacking his robot maids for cover, and he flipped without flaw after Kusanagi wrecked his hand, betraying no pain. Once changed, Gary Harts hacked dozens of fellow soldiers en route to an ICBM room, meaning to fire on Moscow. Elsewhere 1A84 set off the Synchronized Global Default of 2044, certain post-humans backed raids and killings, and the likes of Takashi Shimamura and Suzuka Mizukane sought to reshape the world through mass brain hacking. In 2045 the American Empire brought Public Security Section 9 in to probe the matter.

By 2045, the American Empire's NSA agent John Smith counts fourteen post-humans identified worldwide, three of them inside Japan. Confirmed cases include Gary Harts, the earliest on record and the man who tried to nuke Moscow; Patrick Huge, the robotics tycoon nicknamed the "Good One-percenter"; the boxer Sanji Yaguchi, held in NSA custody; the schoolboy Takashi Shimamura, architect of the Think Pol program and the society called N; the Olympian Suzuka Mizukane, who seized a nuclear submarine; and Section 9's own recruit Purin Ezaki, whose personality survived intact. Their vulnerabilities are notable: analog film can capture them, Tachikoma sensors pierce their stealth, heavy trauma cripples their abilities, sealed networks choke their hacking, and every twenty-four hours each drops into an unbreakable fifteen-minute sleep. Their cloaking likewise fails before a watcher they do not know is there.