Prometheus Accords

The idea of an oldocracy was also rather disturbing to many. The stagnation and eventual (if temporary) collapse of the United States, and eventually each of the remaining powers, was often blamed as bureaucratic inertia simply due to the age of those in power.

As the seven problems came to be solved, the means for distributing them was hotly debated. Eventually, the solution was wrapped up in a viral addition and modification to the human genome, which solved the above. As the virus was, both by design and necessity, quite fragile, it had to be administered, and the question of who would receive caused wild uproar.

Considering this problem to be a microcosm of what will happen in the future, intellectuals world leaders of all types gathered in Athens, Greece, and drew out the Prometheus Accords. To this day, it was the largest and most public conference in human history, with the opinions of over a billion registered in one form or another.

The Accords were in stark contrast to the libertarian trends seen in many governments, but the prevailing attitude was that denial itself has a cost - a kind of social burden that must be paid in order to properly reap reward.

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"The gift of knowledge has shown us many things. It has levelled cities, lowered mountains and raised valleys. Now it has found for us the Fountain of Youth. Like fire, we must treat her with respect." - Brazilian president, Prometheus Accords, 2152.

The first act of the Prometheus Accords provided the layout for the Alpha Strain, and its distribution and methods, over a ten year span. In this period, every member of humanity that wished it would be granted the Strain, and its price would be adjusted daily to be halved every six months, becoming free in the tenth year.

The second act of the Prometheus Accords proposed a systematic elemination of genetic diseases. This would begin with the most common and eventually weed its way down to the one in a billion level in the course of the next century. At less common levels, it was believed that the benefits of a mutation need to be individually weighed, and public support suffices for extreme exceptions.

The third, and perhaps the most controversial, act proposed the refinement of the alpha strain into alpha excelsior, and the development of the beta strain, and its later refinement into beta superior. As the discussion of exotics became known, a tenative project for a gamma strain was considered, which, as of the 23rd century, is called the gamma project.

The remaining accords were a long list of dos and don'ts, wills and won'ts. These are not always held with the same reverence as the first two acts, but the terms for those who break these rules show the majority opinion on the subject. Abominations and degenerates, by their terms alone, take racism to new levels in the 23rd century.

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There were those who did not believe in such actions, however. For one reason or another, they rejected the Accords outright, including the Alpha Strain. Slowly - if sometimes violently - retracting from the rest of civilization, they returned to agrarian lifestyles, and eventually to hunter-gatherers.

These 'backwards' souls eventually faced discrimination on civilization-wide levels, being actively policed to prevent them from repeating the developmental mistakes so many cultures before them did. During the 22nd century, as the bulk of humanity moved into arcologies, tools and technologies became taken from them, and by the dawn of the 23rd century, few of them now living are witnesses to the Great Heresy.

More seriously, they were more and more isolated from the reality of the world, as roads were removed and wilderness reclaimed more of Earth, they became to be treated as any other animal of the wild - regulated, preserved, and looked down upon. Across Earth, they now number about ten million, even though billions were in their original numbers.