It seems pretty obvious, when you think about it. The Angels, I mean. It was a brilliant marketing strategy. ANJ Medical started with life-saving prosthetics and internal hardware, and the new survivors were dubbed "ANJels." It was cute, I guess; people brought back to their loved ones from the brink of death, like angels.
It didn't take long before the Angels started showing up in the news. Formerly wheelchair-bound people running faster than Olympic Atheletes with artificial legs. A mother with artificial lungs was able to hold her breath for hours at a time. A blind man with ANJ eyes could see better than the best marine sharpshooter. It wasn't long before stories like those started the push for ANJ devices as consumer goods.
Spreading into the free market lead to Angel Technology to expand on itself exponentially. There were ANJ implants for every imaginable purpose. Cybernetic limbs made for increased speed and strength. Artificial organs worked more efficiently than the natural ones could ever hope to. Chips inserted in your brain boosted concentration to genius levels. Soon anybody who could afford it could have whatever sort of "super powers" they wanted.
It wasn't long before the remaining natural human beings were made into something of a relic. I watched the "special" Olympics surpass the regular Olympics in terms of both records and profit. The entire nation rushed to the support of our first Cyborg President. Naturals became relegated to a punchline, almost before they started acting like the backwards extremists they were made out to be.
I grew up with video games. I can't remember a time when they weren't a viable form of entertainment. I raised children who couldn't imagine a world without cellphones or the Internet. And then I got to watch as my daughter brought my first grandson into a world where consumer cybernetics weren't just acceptable, they were the norm. An entire generation of Angels. With man-kind pushing their evolution forward so drastically with technology, it seems the only real surprise was how fast and how hard our biology would swing back.
The Angels seem obvious in hindsight. It's the Demons that still shock me.
