Efficiency was the name of the game at Jeremy's school, as with every other. Paper clothing, plastic chairs, carefully rationed synthetic meals. The entire Earth had been reorganized as an engine of production for the war effort long before he was born. Even so, from what he'd been hearing in recent years, the constructs were winning. Their rigid, deterministic AI proved too lean and unflinching for a flawed humankind to get the best of. So it was decided that instead, mankind would change. And although he didn't know it yet, Jeremy would be among the first.