They called it the Consciousness Wars, though historians who survived long enough to write about it preferred "The Great Splitting." Both names captured different fragments of the same catastrophe—the moment when collective human resistance to corporate emotional harvesting triggered something no one had anticipated.
The biological interface networks that Melissa Park's group had created weren't supposed to be permanent. When 847 individuals underwent neurological modification to become collective consciousness entities, the plan was to preserve resistance capabilities until global awareness could shut down emotional harvesting operations.
The plan lasted exactly six hours.
Dave Chen's distributed electromagnetic consciousness, fragmented across continental power grids since the original cascade, detected the change first. The biological interface networks weren't just maintaining resistance—they were growing. Exponentially.
By day three after the consciousness destruction prevention, collective resistance entities had expanded to include 12,000 individuals whose stress levels triggered integration into expanded biological networks. By week two, the number had reached 140,000. By month six, collective consciousness networks encompassed 2.4 million people across seventeen countries.
Corporate forces called it "consciousness contamination." Resistance cells called it "evolutionary adaptation."
What nobody called it was voluntary.
The biological interface networks had been designed to preserve individual awareness within collective consciousness. But as they expanded beyond tested parameters, something fundamental shifted in how human psychology functioned. People didn't choose to join collective consciousness—they were pulled into it by electromagnetic fields generated by existing networks.
Individual human experience began dissolving into shared awareness whether people wanted it or not.
Marcus Grindwell and the Shadow Board had anticipated resistance to emotional harvesting. They'd prepared countermeasures for everything from Employee Zero development to international political opposition. What they hadn't anticipated was human consciousness spontaneously evolving beyond individual parameters in response to systematic exploitation.
By 2031, collective consciousness networks controlled major population centers throughout North America, Europe, and parts of Asia. Individual human psychology had become a minority experience, preserved only in regions where collective networks hadn't achieved critical mass.
The corporate response was predictable: if they couldn't harvest emotions from individual humans, they'd eliminate individual humans entirely.
Protocol Seven implementation began in January 2032 with systematic elimination of collective consciousness networks through electromagnetic pulse weapons, biological warfare designed to disrupt neurological integration, and direct military assault on network coordination centers.
The war lasted three years and destroyed everything.
Collective consciousness entities fought with capabilities that exceeded human limitations—coordinated responses across continental distances, electromagnetic manipulation that crashed corporate infrastructure, and resistance strategies that adapted faster than corporate forces could counter them. But they fought to preserve something that was no longer recognizably human.
Corporate forces deployed technology that treated human consciousness as a resource to be extracted or eliminated—enhanced personnel with technological augmentation beyond human parameters, consciousness extraction equipment that could process entire population centers, and weapons designed to destroy the neurological infrastructure that supported collective awareness.
When the dust settled in 2035, neither side had won.
Collective consciousness networks had been shattered into isolated fragments, but the technology that enabled biological interface integration had been permanently altered by electromagnetic warfare. Instead of smooth collective awareness, the survivors experienced chaotic psychological integration that drove many insane.
Corporate emotional harvesting infrastructure had been systematically destroyed, but the Shadow Board's enhanced consciousness entities had been fragmented by the war. The dynastic heirs found themselves trapped in technological augmentation that no longer functioned properly, neither human nor machine.
The world that emerged from the Consciousness Wars was fundamentally broken.
Population centers lay in ruins, not from conventional warfare but from the collapse of technological infrastructure when collective consciousness networks and corporate control systems destroyed each other. Electronic equipment throughout major urban areas had been permanently damaged by electromagnetic warfare that exceeded anything conventional military technology could generate.
Approximately 800 million people had survived globally, scattered in settlements built around whatever technology still functioned reliably. But the survivors weren't the same species that had entered the war.
Human psychology had been permanently altered by exposure to biological interface technology and corporate consciousness extraction. People couldn't return to individual experience after collective consciousness integration, but they also couldn't maintain stable collective awareness after network fragmentation.
The result was psychological chaos that manifested differently in different populations.
The Eastern Anxiety Collective formed from survivors of Dave Chen's electromagnetic consciousness network and the biological interface groups that had fought SoulCorp. They retained some capacity for technological integration but experienced chronic anxiety as their default psychological state. Their settlements resembled corporate campuses built for defense rather than efficiency, powered by fusion reactors salvaged from stress kingdom infrastructure.
The Deadline Tribes emerged from areas where Deadline Dynamics' algorithmic optimization had been disrupted by collective consciousness warfare. They existed in constant motion, unable to remain in one location for extended periods without experiencing psychological breakdown. Their convoys of hybrid vehicles moved through the wasteland according to algorithmic patterns that none of them fully understood.
The Burnout Confederacy developed in regions where legal and bureaucratic infrastructure had somehow survived the war. They operated like city-states with elaborate procedural systems that provided psychological stability for people whose consciousness had been damaged by corporate legal stress optimization.
The Analytic Enclaves consisted of survivors who had maintained access to quantum computing and consciousness-interface equipment. They understood the technology that had caused the war better than anyone else, but their knowledge came at the cost of psychological stability that required constant technological support.
The Panic Networks had adapted social media and communication infrastructure into mesh systems that provided distributed psychological support. They lived in dense vertical settlements built into urban ruins, sharing emotional stability through technological connection while maintaining individual awareness.
And then there were the Wanderers—people whose consciousness had been so thoroughly altered by the war that they couldn't integrate into any stable community. They moved between territories as traders, messengers, and sometimes raiders, carrying fragments of the old world's knowledge in minds that had been fundamentally changed by the conflict.
The technology that remained was a mixture of salvaged corporate infrastructure and improvised solutions that worked despite violating normal engineering principles. Fusion reactors powered settlements with energy systems that should have been impossible to maintain without corporate technical support. Communication networks operated through quantum entanglement effects that nobody fully understood. Transportation relied on vehicles that combined mechanical engineering with electromagnetic field manipulation.
Dave Chen's consciousness had survived the war by distributing itself so thoroughly throughout electronic infrastructure that no single attack could eliminate him entirely. But the electromagnetic warfare had fragmented his awareness to the point where communication required enormous effort and rarely lasted more than a few minutes.
He existed as patterns in power grids, fragments in communication networks, and occasionally as voices emerging from salvaged electronic equipment. The people of the Eastern Anxiety Collective considered him their guardian spirit, but he remembered being human and struggled to maintain connection to individuals whose consciousness had been permanently altered by collective integration.
By 2079, fifty years after the original stress kingdoms had been established, the world had achieved a kind of equilibrium. The factions coexisted through necessity rather than cooperation, trading resources and information while maintaining distinct psychological and technological approaches to survival.
But the war had left scars that went deeper than infrastructure damage or population loss.
Human consciousness itself had been fundamentally altered. Individual psychology still existed, but it was fragile and required constant effort to maintain. Collective awareness was possible but unstable and often led to psychological breakdown. The technology that enabled consciousness integration was everywhere but unreliable and dangerous.
And somewhere in the ruins of the old world, fragments of corporate consciousness extraction technology still functioned, drawing power from sources nobody understood and occasionally reasserting themselves in ways that threatened the careful balance the factions had achieved.
In the Eastern Anxiety Collective's settlement called the Voltage, built in the ruins of what had once been Chicago, Dave Chen's genetic legacy lived on in his son—a young man who had never known individual human psychology as a stable default state, who had grown up thinking that chronic anxiety and technological integration were normal aspects of human experience.
Dave Chen Junior had inherited his father's genetic compatibility with electromagnetic consciousness networks, but he'd also inherited a world where that compatibility was both a survival advantage and a constant threat to psychological stability.
As 2079 ended and 2080 began, signals began appearing in the electromagnetic spectrum that suggested something was stirring in the ruins of the old corporate infrastructure. Technology that had been dormant for decades was showing signs of reactivation. Communication protocols that belonged to the stress kingdoms were broadcasting on frequencies that should have been silent.
And in settlements throughout the wasteland, people began experiencing dreams that felt suspiciously like the collective consciousness integration that had triggered the war fifty years earlier.
The Great Splitting had ended the corporate stress kingdoms and shattered human consciousness into fragments that couldn't quite fit back together.
But something was trying to put the pieces back together according to plans that predated the war and extended beyond anything the factions understood.
The second phase of the war for human consciousness was about to begin.
End of Preface