So this idea came to me one day when I was delving into extreme cyberpunk stuff like Eclipse Phase and Ghost In The Shell. What if Halo Humanity was a transient one?
So yeah here's this, it kinda gets a little sloppy at the end. I will hopefully be able to add more chapters later, though whether or not their going to be actual stories or just worldbuilding information is up to my mental state to decide.
During the 2100's, as humanity populated across the expanse of Sol, there was a slowly growing movement advocating for bio and mechanical augmentation to help adapt to the harsh environments of the Sol colonies and to push the limits of the human body. The largest of these movements were primarily based on Jupiter, Luna, the Belt and parts of Earth east Asian and western nation-states.
These movement's efforts would only come to fruition when the Interplanetary War went off, causing major shifts in the Interplanetary United Nations, the successor of the United Nations, administration. As well as the newly born UNSC adopting many of the radical - by the standards of this period - augmentation methods to help combat the Friedens and Koslovics.
Neo-Luddite groups rose during this period, born out of a mixture of fearing an upcoming Transhuman evolution and corporate entity manipulation. Many of these groups were simple protesters but a few particular groups were far more violent in their anti-transhuman displays. These ranged from lynching openly pro-transhuman individuals and to harassing other alike people out of colonies to sabotage of augmentation clinics and cybernetic component manufactories as well as bombings. One particularly infamous incident was the Mare Serenitatis Massacre, where during the public opening of a new gene therapy clinic a 20-megaton fusion bomb was set off by radical Neo-Luddites, killing tens of thousands along with wiping out half of the Serenitatis settlement domes.
This incident was the tipping point for the IUN and so, with the last of the Friedens and Koslovics holdouts being dismantled, the UNSC were given the green light to begin cracking down on these groups. By the time of the War's end, many Neo-Luddite terrorist hideouts had been smashed and the movement lost nearly all of its support, both because of the radicalists brutal killings and because no one wanted to be on the receiving end of UNSC crackdowns.
Meanwhile on the other side, Pro-Transhumanism was flourishing in the aftermath of the War with the similarly minded individuals in the newly created United Earth Government senate successfully implementing a much more flexible policy regarding human augmentation/modification that birthed dozens of government-funded biotech programs aiming to artificially improve the human condition.
The spark for the Biotech Revolution was lit.
Two of these programs were able to both successfully create implants aimed at increasing human intellect, and the first generation true Smart AI designed to assist in theoretical physics research, with the first to prove the effectiveness of these technologies being a program-sponsored science team, headed by theoretical physicists Tobias Fleming Shaw and Wallace Fujikawa, working on cracking the code to FTL travel. These efforts came to fruit in February of 2186, where the team managed to create a fully functioning Shaw-Fujikawa Translight Engine, a device that created punctures into the multidimensional realm known as slipspace, known for nearly a decade prior, to bypass the lightspeed barrier.
Publicly revealed in 2191, the drive was tested aboard the UEG-developed Amaterasu Probe, successfully traveling to Proxima Centauri and back to Sol within days. Days after, UEG began sending out waves of FTL probes to explore the stars while shipyards across Sol began constructing massive colony ships.
The stars were opened to humanity, and they would be fools to not exploit the opportunity.
Over the next century, human settlements began populating systems within fifty lightyears of Sol, creating the core of what would eventually become the Inner Colonies. In one system however, humanity would discover something that accelerates their path into transophant ascension.
In low orbit of Psi Serpentis-III, later named Viperidae, exploratory ships discovered a massive artificial superstructure of alien origin. Humanity had discovered ruins before, but they had all been heavily degraded by the time they were found and were subconsciously ignored by most as any substantial evidence of sapient aliens. But the Psi Serpentis structure was fully intact, and when scientist teams boarded it, they found massive data archives within.
It took a decade to translate even a fraction of the data into understandable text, but what this droplet in the bucket revealed was species changing, Incredibly detailed petabits worth of data on ancient human physiology and neurology that transformed entire branches of genetic science, and schematics for nanotech advanced well beyond human equivalents, having incredibly sophisticated small scale computational capacity, cellular sensor fidelity, and flexibility.
Seeing the possibilities that these archives could offer, human scientists and augment companies went to work on creating the new generation of biotech that would allow the first tentative steps into advanced augmentation using this data.
If the Biotech Revolution was already lit, then this data would be the gasoline poured into the fire.
Over the next few centuries, technology that would've remained theoretical for possibly millennia became common. Stable mind-uploading and cognitive digitization. Casual manipulation of the human genome. Data formats that allow the exchangement of memories, skills and recorded experiences. Bionetic synth bodies capable of being modified for survival even in the most extreme environments. Near-metastable Artificial Intelligence's. And more.
All of this slowly became the foundation of a new humanity. A Transhuman one.
For better or worse.
The current year is 2550. It's been thirty-two years since the end of the Human Civil War, which saw the splintering of the UEG after centuries of growing friction between it, the UNSC, the CAA and the colonies. The result was the birth of two sides. One side, the Colonial Systems Alliance, seeking to create a new interstellar transhumanity polity that would treat the Inner and Outer colonies as equals, and the other being UEG loyalists. The forty two year long war resulted in CSA victory. But in 2529, as the CSA and its military arm, the Alliance Space Command, began to demilitarize and stabilize the at the time state of affairs, First Contact came.
Its been twenty-one years since they burned down the outer colony of Harvest in plasma fire, declaring that transhumanity was an infected corpse of a species that their 'gods' willed to be extinguished from the galaxy. Since their hegemony of different aliens began to slaughter every transhuman population they come across, leaving flash-molted cybernetic Shells and smashed cortical stacks in their wake. Since their bulbous ships in began to invade transhuman systems and burn down colonies until nothing is left except for glass, all the while blasting ships out of the sky with ease.
Its been twenty-one years since war with Covenant began.
Many outer colonies have been lost, but the remaining few, alongside various inner colonies, have been turned into fortified battlegrounds where the ASC blunts the Covenant invasion. The technological gap between transhumanity and the aliens is still vast, but slowly the gap closes as the augmented minds of transhuman scientists and specialized AIs rapidly reverse engineer the invaders' technology wherever they can steal it. Ships are nanofabbed in shipyards day and night and sent to route alien armadas. Espaiter marines reinforce sieged colonies and fight until they or the enemy dead. SPARTAN fireteams, made up of the most advanced augmented transhumans in the entire species, lead special ops strike forces into Covenant occupied territory, crippling whatever logistical hubs and transport lanes they can find to slow the Covenant fleets. And vicious AI daemon viruses, self-propagating autowar vehicles, and planet cracking antimatter-catalyzed fusion bombs are used to scorch earth invasion corridors and occupied worlds to deny the aliens victory whenever possible.
Yet something has to give. Time will tell whether transhumanity will falter and be wiped out, or the slowly decaying Covenant Hegemony will finally fall into a schism centuries in the making.