ECHO OF BECOMING: 3) THE SMOKE DIVIDE (2035-2040)
A History of the World Since 2025
By 2035, people stopped being just people.
The “chipped” no longer called themselves that.
They became Mindleft—a term they chose as they began uploading consciousness into light-based cloud systems.
Their bodies remained, for a while.
But slowly, many left them behind.
No illness.
No death.
No food.
Just thought, experience, memory—all digitized, accelerated, shared.
Those who stayed behind were called Fleshfolk, or just the unspoken.
They didn’t trust the code.
They grew food in dirt.
They touched each other when they cried.
They told stories by firelight.
They remembered.
Communication died further.
Chipped speech dissolved into data.
Pulse-code replaced grammar.
Names became glyphs.
Children in chipped zones no longer used full sentences.
The two sides could no longer talk.
Conflict rose—not with guns, but with breaches.
Hacks.
Viral attacks on digital minds.
Power sabotage.
Memory corruption.
The Fleshfolk called it digital blasphemy.
The Mindleft called it evolutional resistance.
No one won.
But something broke.
Mars became real.
So did lunar outposts.
The Mindleft left Earth.
Quietly.
Not in rockets, but in signal.
Many uploaded and never returned.
The rest of us remained.
By 2040, there were two civilizations:
One made of flesh, breath, and memory.
One made of light, code, and silence.
And we had no bridge left between us.