It's the year 2057, those of us still holding out are huddled together little more than insects behind a wardrobe waiting for our last supplies to fade. Who would have thought back in 2020 things would have turned out this way? Back the game of imitation was all the talk, computers imitating recipes, imitating stores, imitating emotions.

Then Musk redirected all his efforts into Neuralink, sewing tiny threads by a high-precision robitic surgeon directly into our cortex-- thousands of the tiny fiberous threads. Who would have thought the data this created? Initially promoted as a means to help disabled people, quadrapalegics and those with locked-in syndrome- no one would argue against helping these minorities. But then it came to the public, the operation required being little more than a minor inconvinience.

The first receivers showed remarkable cognitive function, polymaths capable of direct access to wikipedia and so-on. By 2030, Riemann released the versions of applink- large fibre capbles connecting to mega-facilities, aka internet 2. By 2032, the entire applink team were receivers, self-optimising and improving by themselves. Things went quiet for a while, save for the odd protest.

January 7th, 2047, applink opened its doors to its mega-facilities in East-Asia, Europe, Russia, and America, to a swarm of surgical drones. They spread immediately to areas of possible resistance, then proceeding family-to-family. Just a few of us in h1v3 remain, a n isolated underground facility in north Scotland, completely separated from the rest of society. Applink receivers now consume the planet, and appear to be developing large transhuman research centres conducting experiments, even on children, and developing new augmented species. How did we let this happen? What did we do wrong?