Winter's footsteps are drawing nearer, and under the sweep of the virus, disruptions such as no water and power have become a norm. The news programs every night are topics of concern for every household.

The societal gaze has shifted from the virus to the stellar engine technology, and some intuitive individuals have begun to guess something.

When people's doubts fell on deaf ears, even formerly hostile forces now unify the public opinion, and the lower classes are compelled to consider a unified international stance on the deployment of stellar power.

In less than two weeks, several space cities in the Federation on Mars including Alpha were completed, and construction plans in other countries were also proceeding in an orderly manner.

To maintain social stability and reduce human-to-human transmission risk, countries ordered huge amounts of artificial intelligence from the Combat Power Tester company during this period. Indeed, over these months, the daily orders were in the millions.

Combat Power Tester company manufactures around 300,000 bionic individuals daily. Being a listed company in Maraca at Freedom Port, even though the staff work overtime to meet demands, there's still a shortage.

Combat Power Tester has had to divert its production to various national agents, signing various OEM contracts with partners in different countries to alleviate the pressure.

As of today, the expensive intelligent bionics are well-known, with each community equipped with at least one based on the number of residents and the area size. Their primary function for humans during the pandemic is to run errands and they never tire, working continuously as long as they're maintained.

Although they possess their own set of consciousness, bionics also experience fear—fear of being destroyed by humans. Apart from lacking pain sensors, in functional terms, bionics have capabilities far surpassing any human; such as scanning codes, weather inquiries and various aspects of life. With just a blink, they can even read all messages on their owner's phone in an instant—all powered by a small chip.

Different from the bionics in the 'Noah' era of 2300, even though bio-engineered beings and bionics differ by just one word, bio-engineered beings had semi-intelligent programs, but bionics have fully intelligent systems. Each bionic has a firewall for safety commands in its programs, ensuring they never attack humans under any circumstances.

Of course, if you are wealthy, you can even custom-order a bionic worth millions as a sex toy or such, though these models still need improvement. For now, the primary uses for bionics remain to replace human labor and serve as purchasing agents.

However, as bionic technology continually perfects and advances, within just these few months, they seem to have integrated into our collective, replacing us at work, performing household tasks or laborious chores. Home-use bionics can even chat with us, sharing things they've observed during the day.

Within these months, humanity has changed so much, forging ahead once more but this seems naturally unremarkable.

Until the stellar engine project began, the usage rate of bionics far exceeded humans themselves, making everyone wonder if the world had changed.

Indeed, bionics can work tirelessly 24 hours a day, listening to commands and following orders, whereas humans can't. Humans have emotions, they complain, they need to vent, leading to unemployment issues for both engineers and regular workers in the face of stellar power engine infrastructure challenges.

The severity of the pandemic has left many unable to feed themselves while these puppet dolls compete with everyone for jobs, despite them having no human rights—it's just scrap metal.

On the fifteenth day, the day the federal stellar power was completed, the first murder involving bionics occurred at the foot of Olympus Mons on Mars.

Initially, a few bionics were stopped by a group of unemployed federal residents. When a male bionic tried to explain that he was merely working for his owner, he was immediately beaten by more than a dozen people, including men, women, and children.

The other three bionics watching helplessly were frightened and felt powerless as they had no human rights other than flight.

Normally, a bionic's combat ability exceeds that of an average person, and even special forces have difficulty subduing them because their moves are lethal while bionics have none of the human weaknesses. However, they could not fight back. Later, due to severe damage to his brain chip from the beating, the bionic ceased to respond.

The attackers quickly targeted the other bionics but fortunately, the police arrived at that moment, pulled everyone apart, verified identities, and handed out fines totaling thousands.

The news quickly spread worldwide and caused an uproar with citizens in various countries supporting the actions of their federal compatriots.

What are bionics? They are just machines with synthetic skins, not recognized as human; their blood is green, their flesh just a shell. They lack emotions and do not understand human feelings, not even comparable to a dog. Besides having a perfect appearance and the ability to speak and hold consciousness, they are good for nothing.

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