DEVO: A Near Future Apocalyptic Thriller

Future technological advances may dramatically improve our quality of life.

Or they may make it worse. Far worse.

No one predicts the abrupt and disastrous environmental changes of 2054.

In the early 2050s, the world watches as stunning technological and scientific achievements better humankind.

Human genetic therapy becomes widely available, abolishing most disease and genetic conditions. Genetic engineering replaces evolution’s role in advancing human capabilities. Evolution is relegated to the dustbin of history. Molecular biologists still study evolution using engineered viruses in highly contained labs.

More sensitive MRIs finally map and characterize all the circuits of a human brain. This map allows construction of the first fully sentient supercomputer. This miraculous development makes the world far safer by replacing illogical human decisions with logical computer thought.

These marvelous developments in unrelated fields are uniformly expected to dramatically improve life on Earth.

But these expectations prove drastically wrong. Unexpected consequences of these two advancements unleash the apocalypse.

DEVO is a near future, pre- and post-apocalyptic thriller packed with understandable technology, accelerating action, unexpected twists, and four distinct main characters, one a sentient computer. In a two-million-year romp, DEVO reminds us that technology has both upsides and downsides, and that our “advancement” depends on the environment. The end result raises the oft considered question of what it means to be human.