Transhumanism: And lots of it, to the point where in advanced polities, anything resembling a baseline is an endangered species at best (at worst… well, there are no examples of baseline Eldrae alathis still around, right? Even the people who were born one and survived the millennia have upgraded several times by now.). Except no humans, so we call the general form transsophontism.
transsophontism
Trope-a-Day: Super Reflexes
Super Reflexes: Another one of the many things to go into the standard upgrade build, in the sense of better, faster, etc., nerves. Can, of course, be improved still further if you feel like upgrading your nervous system to milspec, or adding various special cognitive enhancements to run tell analysis and predictive motion routines on everyone in the vicinity, letting you pull off that nifty “see-and-react-to-things-before-they-happen” trick.
(In less deliberately civilized societies, it may be best not to include the “respond automatically and lethally to incoming attacks” option.)
Trope-a-Day: Evolutionary Levels
Evolutionary Levels: Subverted, inasmuch as Eldrae anthalis and Eldrae kirsunar (which could be read as direct parallels to Homo superior and Homo summus) aren’t markers of more advanced evolution, but markers of increasing degrees of highly sophisticated engineering. And engineering for specific desirable traits, at that.
Trope-a-Day: Bullet Time
Bullet Time: Given the speed of electrophotonic hardware, it would be possible for most cybershells and many bioshells up to the current Imperial neural standard to do live-action Bullet Time, at least with current Earth guns.
Of course, in their own place and time, the bullets are a lot faster than they used to be… but it’s still useful, because there are plenty of people around who aren’t.
Trope-a-Day: Brought Down to Normal
Brought Down to Normal: Hard to play straight, insofar as superpowered is the new normal (see Everyone Is A Super), and no-one takes to being crippled terribly well.
Also notably subverted when someone gets a clever idea and assembles the equipment necessary to jam all communications, decohere tangle, and otherwise brute-force detach someone from the Transcend, inasmuch as the essential difference between a collective consciousness and a hive mind is that in the former the whole depends on the parts, not the other way around – and what you now have on your hands is someone with a very nasty headache, a serious attitude problem, and virtually all of their ability to ruin your day absolutely intact.
Trope-a-Day: Everyone is a Super
Everyone Is A Super: Goes right along with averting No Transhumanism Allowed, in those societies that lean that way. The more inclination, the more super.
Trope-a-Day: No Transhumanism Allowed
No Transhumanism Allowed: Averted (or rather inverted into Transsophontism Is Mandatory). Hard. (As in, anyone who doesn’t qualify as some sort of transsophont is living in Hicksville or on the moral equivalent of a nature preserve.) Also beaten, mocked, eaten by nanobots, shot at with antideuterium pellets and tossed down a singularity well. A lot.
