Welga trailed her fingers along the rough reddish-brown bark of the doorframe tree as they moved inside. The ceiling soared above them, its screen projecting an image of the sky outside. Springy, low-growing moss formed the floors. The primal smells of soil and petrichor and growing plants permeated the air.

In the lobby, heads turned. Other shield teams’ astonishment followed their unusual speed through the expansive area and down the hallway to the main auditorium. Welga allowed a satisfied grin to spread across her face. If Briella Jackson hadn’t wanted to advertise her new zip design, she wouldn’t have given it to them.

Jackson took her position at the lectern. Welga moved to stand below her, in front of the stage and facing the auditorium. Connor and Ammanuel took the wings. An attack here showed low probability—the world would be focused on the speech itself and irate at interruptions, never mind bystander injuries—but they launched their microdrones anyway. Welga scanned the audience members for known troublemakers. The seats were full. People crowded in the back, standing against the wall. All the bots in the room were registered caregivers.

The lights dimmed. Jackson began to speak. Welga only half listened to the words, a hemorrhage of biotech terms that she had little familiarity with. Jackson talked about pushing the frontiers of drug-based modification for humanity, about selective funding of projects and teams with high ratings, and about modeling and testing.

Welga understood snippets from conversations with Nithya, her sister-in-law, as well what she’d learned from her own mother.

“Blah blah blah, drugs and pills are great,” Connor said in their private stream.

She suppressed a snicker.

Jackson kept going with some bullshit about how they were poised at the cusp of humanity’s next great leap, bringing biotech in line with robotics and beyond.

“The same crap we’ve been fed for decades,” Welga subvocalized to Connor. “Promised again and again but never delivered.”

“It has to happen eventually, right? Either we keep up with the machines, or someone will finally figure out how to make them sentient, and they’ll take over.”

“There’s a third option: we keep going as we have been, with people supporting the machines who do the real work,” Welga said.

Soldiers like her, or exfactors with good financial backing, had augmented their bodies, but even with rapid-healing pills and modern medicine, surgical alteration of humans was difficult and expensive. Also, nobody wanted to be a cyborg. That became a dirty word after the fifties, when people used body modifications to compete with machines. The resurgence in jobs for construction, surgery, farming, and other physical labor lasted until those workers’ bodies started breaking down, rejecting the augmentations or injuring their natural parts. Those who could reverse the changes escaped the worst, but plenty of others lost their lives too young.