First came the vultures, circling the carcass of the past. Ancestral Heritage and Tourism. Christ, someone always lines their pockets. HER Immersion Centres—sensory overload chambers promising to mainline your grandpa’s hangover or your great-aunt’s wedding night. Hyper-realistic history for the masses, the rubes eager to pay for a ghost’s touch.

  Quickly followed with HER-Based Entertainment—living history for the brain-dead. Ancestor porn, they should’ve called it. Reliving some peasant’s famine or a king’s gout. Accuracy was the selling point, the grim authenticity of a life you never had the misfortune to live.

  Then the Genealogists, dressed up as storytellers. ‘Professionals’ – ha! – curating your family’s greatest shits and triumphs into palatable little narratives. Interactive, naturally. Gotta keep the suckers engaged.

  For a while, it gleamed, a fool’s gold promise of understanding. Historical Forensics and Truth Verification strutted in, all high and mighty. HER Historical Analysis Firms—suits poring over dead men’s memories, claiming impartiality. Governments, museums, the lonely saps wanting to know if their grandma really did bed that stable boy.

  HER-Based Legal Services. They set about digging up the dead for inheritance scraps, trying to pin the sins of the fathers on the sons. Ancestral accountability. A lawyer’s wet dream, ethically twisted as a pretzel.

  Even the self-help gurus got their claws in. Ancestral Behavioural Profiling—blaming your bad temper on some long-dead Viking. HER-Informed Therapy—dredging up grandpa’s closet skeletons for your fifty-minute hour. “So, your great-great-grandpa was a horse thief. How does that make you feel?”

  Then the Data peddlers, the Ethics charlatans. HER Data Security and Privacy Firms—locking down the ghosts in your genes, for a hefty fee. HER Ethical Consulting—preaching on the morality of rifling through dead men’s drawers. HER Data Interpretation and Contextualization Specialists—they span the ancestral dirt into digestible tales.

  They Genetic Compatibility Services (Beyond Romance) made big bucks playing God with your DNA, making sure you didn’t accidentally knock boots with Cousin Cletus or, God forbid, a twig off the Jesus family tree.

  Ancestral Relics and Recreations turned dead lives into trinkets. Replicating grandpa’s dentures or grandma’s chamber pot. Tangible connections to the void. Came in handy when the truth got torched, the history books going up in smoke in the bonfire of the early thirties. Nietzsche’s descendants got to watch him scribble, the original words resurrected. Government tried to scrub the net, a digital lobotomy, then quickly slammed the lid on public use of HER.

  The Data-Driven Identity and Rights Governance tried to cage the wind with Evolved Privacy Laws—good luck with that. Genetic Heritage Rights—who the hell knew what those were. Ancestral Data Trusts—another bunch of suits lining their pockets, pretending to be guardians of the dead.

  It just kept on pouring through the screens and into people’s minds. Citizen History Initiatives—letting the proles play archaeologist with their own bloodline. Open-Source HERPlatforms became a digital free-for-all. They were Citizen Historian Networks that armed the masses with shovels to dig up the past. Even a HER-Based Education Reform—feeding the kids a sanitized version of their own messy lineage.

  And the one constant, the bitter truth scraped from the bottom of the ancestral barrel: information is power. Always was, always will be. And power needs a leash. New forms of control. So they cracked the whip and built them.

  Genesis HER, rebranded as the Genealogical Republic—a company, or was it an organisation, or a movement, or a: whatever, you get the point. Whatever it stared out as, it became a state that sank its teeth into every damn thing. The mid-thirties was a dogfight. Corporations fat as ticks, governments on their knees. Private armies, guns for hire, pointed at the resource-rich dirt, bypassing flags, dealing with companies that were just their own shadows.

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  Intergenerational Councils – handpicked puppets representing bloodlines, guiding policy, they said. Looking out for the long haul, they lied. The Jesus and Mary bloodline got their seats, front and centre. You’d see why soon enough.

  Historical Impact Assessments arrived—new laws to right old wrongs, based on the dead men’s tales. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was a goddamn show trial for the ghosts. HER-Driven Reparations Programs handed out pennies for centuries of pain. National Ancestral Narratives—sanitized history for the masses, airbrushing the ugly bits. Restorative Justice Initiatives – more talk than action, healing circles for wounds that never closed.

  People being people, they kicked back. Took a while, a few years simmering in the deep-deep dark of the web, hackers went like rats in the wiring of the big boys' DNA. Sniffing out the backdoors, letting the genetic ghosts spill out for anyone with the guts to look. And you learn one thing digging in the dirt of a person’s past—you dig deep enough, you’ll find the rot that even they didn’t want to smell. Dad a rapist? Doesn’t sit right. Grandma a whore? Not exactly Sunday dinner conversation. Great-great-grandpa a Nazi spy? Or worse, a happy camper at Auschwitz, getting a goddamn hard-on from the screams. Turns out, a lot of folks came from a long line of filth—pedos, murderers, slavers, the whole ugly parade. We thought we wanted the truth, glorified the dead, spun fairy tales because nobody was left to tell the real story. They were gone. But seeing your dead grandma with her legs spread or finding out you had a little bit of Hitler in you? Started to wear thin. Maybe the past should’ve stayed buried.

  But now we could see it all. Every goddamn twitch and tear. And with the right code, the hackers did their thing, aired out the dirty laundry of the top dogs, especially the ones with kids. One bastard snagged a DNA sample—off a coffee cup—of the Genesis prick, not the garbage trucks I drive, but the corporation that owned the world’s damn DNA, the HERmachine and all its guts. See, back in ’28, they made it law. DNA on file. Didn’t need to get nicked for protesting or for posting a wrong word online. They just grabbed you on the street, or knocked on your door, gave you a ‘choice’—blood, or the new, private prisons popping up across the countryside like concrete tumours. Even Jersey, the whole damn island, became a cage. Turns out, prison labour is cheaper than… well, anything. And once inside, another ‘choice’—sixteen-hour days and ‘re-education,’ a form saying you’d lick the government’s boots, and even after your time, they could drag you back if you stepped out of line or ship you off to fight their private wars. Life, cheap as chips.

  The revolution? Lasted a week. Squawk? Arrested. Protest? Arrested. Disagree? You guessed it. All those new prisons to fill.

  So, they had everyone’s code. A few years, a few glitches ironed out, and they had the whole damn history of humanity humming in a computer, replaying our sins. And the rest of us? Shut up and put up, obviously. Either that, or you ended up in Jersey for a decade.

  Who made the decision that affected our past, present, and future? Who decided ‘drugs’ were bad and should be banned? Did aliens really land in Roswell? All big, important questions of the past you might think. But they didn’t look there (I mean, why would they?) They looked at past crimes. And through their Historical Impact Assessments, they went through every cold case (genocide on hold for now, focusing on the little guy). The Truth and Reconciliation Commission tracked down some poor bastard descendant and used the Reparations Program to lock them up for what their ancestor did. Sure, Adolf and Genghis played their role in the mass slaughtering of millions, the whole of Christianity was a farse, but your great-great-great-great-grandma, well she killed her husband because he was a kiddy-fiddler. So you gotta serve their time.

  Look, I didn’t make the rules, had no say in them either. I just sat and watched this ideological infestation roll-out and take over like a Japanese knotweed of the brain. Leaving people scared to go anywhere, do anything, talk to anyone—all that was said now was, who were you in the past? What did you come from? Who built you? It left people sitting in the dark thinking about their past and when they would get that knock on the door.

  One thing HER didn’t record, though. Thoughts. Words, actions, environments, yeah. But the thought police weren’t all the way in our minds. That is, until yesterday.