Rise of the Supermen, Part 2
The middle of the 21st century was a heady time for human enhancement. Advances in all fields were promising – and delivering – improvements to human cognition, health and well-being. There were even those taking the ultimate step into posthumanhood, uploading themselves and becoming something different. The use of machinery was not the only route to improvement however, if the easiest. What was eventually the most infamous of these was originally an attempt to forge such an alternate route that would be more accessible for the poor.
South America was never at the forefront of human augmentation; too many researchers were lured to hotspots north and culturally there was a greater amount of conservatism when dealing with what amounted to sticking a bunch of electronics in your brain. Rejection issues were rare, but they did happen. Plus of course there was the everpresent ‘ick’ factor. Biotechnology offered an alternative to this however.
By culturing specific retrovirals and applying appropriate hormones, it was possible to ‘naturally’ enhance performance. While this was not innovative in and of itself, in much of the West these techniques were hampered by both government regulars and lack of mindshare. However, it was an ideal solution for the poor of Latin America. Several governments seeded money together to bring it into being.
Early volunteer trials were successful, but before development could deliver the requisite level of cost-efficiency for government release, it ran into something entirely unexpected: Popularity.
The rich and the elite were always the first to take advantage of any advancement for all of human history. Human advancement was no exception and many of the well-off in Brazil, Argentina and other South American countries had such technologies available to them already., were they so inclined. However, the retroviral techniques had the twofold advantages of being (relatively) cheap and perhaps more importantly, they were domestic in origin. It did not take long for commercialism to creep in; the people of South America wanted their own world-class domestic biotech industry. And for a time, they had one.
The biotech revolution swept through South America, with San Paulo becoming the center of it all. Success bred success, and within several years related developments began to crop up as well. Even hard-implant technology startups soon made an appearance, riding on the coattails of the fast-growing biotech. Outside of South America, the European Union was a strong partner, with firms from both allying and merging in a flurry of growth.
Then the problems began.
At first it was minor issues. A stastically slight increase in psychological problems for those with retroviral neural upgrades. The occasional particularly violent offender who'd engaged in heavy modifications. For a time these too were too minor to notice. But as retrovivals became more common, more extensive and often repeated, ugly truths began to become clear. The retroviral changes to the brain for increased cognition were, in many cases, having adverse effects on the psyches of those who'd gotten them. Irrationality, all-consuming foci, autism, uncontrollable violence, clinical megalomania - all these and more were the unanticipated but ultimately unsurprising side-effects of toying with the brain's biology and biochemistry. European regulatory agencies woke from their laggard unconcern and began to critically investigate. The South American agencies followed in turn. 'Insufficient long-term risk analysis' was the least damning allegation levelled and it only took a few high-profile examples of a Retro'd up athlete or student snapping and killing his neighbors for the moral panic to set in.
Of course the question was; what to do with all these people that had unknowingly turned themselves into ticking social time bombs? It was a popular topic for the talking heads and the policy-makers, but ultimately it was a typically human solution that 'resolved' things. Feeling ever less welcome in their nations of origin, these people began to depart en-masse onboard colonization jumpships, heading for what would eventually become known as the Expanse. Along with them, many of the scientists and technicians who'd been involved in the 'Brazilian Experiment' departed as well. In many cases facing significant criminal proceedings, a goodly number took the opportunity to slip away from Earth.
It was almost a century before the core powers began to regret not being more diligent in stopping them.