Synopsis: Beyond War

What you are about to learn will change who you are.

Everything you know or think you know, and everything you believe and dream of, will be burned away like flower petals on the surface of the Sun.

Do you want to know, if knowing costs you who you are?

Information in the future is not communicated by words or images or symbols. Language as you know it has ceased to exist in the sense of the telegraph or the clay tablets and cuniform markings.

You do not need to read about the sights or smells or emotions of the enumeration of standing in the breach during the pinnacle of battle.

In this world, you were there in every sense and experience, and that knowledge and feelings as they were are yours to explore - as one might drag the cursor of a video from time to time, place to place, person to person. The voices of every single person in the world at any point at any time or place, when it happened.

Knowledge of this nature remains separate from who you are, and is gone as quickly as if you closed a book without reading the next page, but its knowing changes you in ways that alter how you consider each moment and what you expect in the next.

This knowledge is the fundamental 'literacy' of Beyond War - a technology that allows a lifetime of a civilization to be conveyed - transferred in full and bestowed on any living being - with nothing more than a gentle touch.

This information can be conveyed encompassing millions of years in less than a second, through quantum tunnelling technology, built into soldiers bodies and the weapons and creatures they can create with the engine.

Knowledge of weapons, of training and service, of courage, of fear and loss. Knowledge of love, of joy, of children and family, and of death.

Knowledge that can be imbued in things as well as people and animals, and weaponized, impelling the dying screams of entire civilizations in each touch of a blade and with each strike of a bullet, repeating over and over the trauma of the greatest crimes against life as a tool to destroy the very nature of the mind and soul of enemies touched by these weapons.

Even without these tools, this language, the power to crush steel, rebuild bones, tear apart DNA and re-assemble it again, and to move at the speed of light and walk through walls do not begin to terrify the people in the way that dying while you cannot scream or make any sound in the room where you are being slowly torn apart by hand in front of your comrades and children impose on a human mind.

The terror that, even if your child or loved ones do not see you die, this monster will record and play back the very feeling of satsfaction that it experienced while it holds them in its hands and watches their expression and revulsion - is a new kind of war that conventional and primitive violence cannot prepare you for.

This is a weapon, that if you pick it up and access its full capabilities, will fundamentally change who you are and be impossible to unlearn or remove the experience from your own memory. It is a tool that, like Pandora's Box, cannot be closed again. A tool so terrible, that bestowing it on a living thing is a death sentence of a kind to their true self and innocence.