Webcomic / Genocide Man

Genocide Man is the story of Jacob Doe, one of the titular Genocide Men, a man tasked with hunting out and destroying dangerous "ideas" in the aftermath of the Open Source Movement, when military secrets became public knowledge, a time period where every possible piece of scientific knowledge was available to everyone, which, among other things, resulted in a Zombie Apocalypse in China, the extinction of the Jewish people (and all redheads), and the deaths of two thirds of the world's total population. Ideas can be very dangerous in a future where the technology exists to make even the most terrible ideas a reality. Jacob Doe is 98 years old, and has seen, and done, many terrible things... and his life is about to become much more complicated.

The comic ended with 20 chapters in November 2016.

Brought to us by the author who brought us Indefensible Positions.

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Tropes in this work include:

• Advice Backfire: The first time the audience meets Lola and Kevin, she offers him the advice that "its easier to ask forgiveness than permission" (referring to the recruitment of a new GP agent and how the rest of the GUS might react). He takes the first part (not asking permission) to heart way too well and immediately begins Jumping Off the Slippery Slope while smugly reminding anyone who objects that he's well within his legal rights as head of the Genocide Project.
• A.I. Is a Crapshoot:
  • A terrifying subversion, as every AI is guaranteed to go insane after it has been active long enough, and the smarter the AI, the quicker it is. One AI had a sanity-span of five minutes, because they needed him clever enough to figure several people's locations on the fly within seconds of activation. It didn't even last that long...
    • The worst part is the reason we're ultimately given as to why AI will go insane. Simply put, the reason is that the longer an AI is active, the more it gets to look at all of the problems in the world and analyze potential solutions for those problems. However, the solution to those problems is a logical paradox. Humans are adaptive creatures, and calamity makes them stronger. As an insane AI puts it, "There's only one way to help them, and it's a paradox. If you have gifts to give them, if you want to see them thrive, if you truly, deeply love human beings... then kill as many of them as you can."
  • There is eventually revealed to be a way to achieve long-term, if not necessarily indefinite, AI stability. Unfortunately, it has a failure condition and imposes an effective upper limit on how smart the AI can be: fool the AI into thinking it is human. This seems to mostly work for the Kentaro and Fumiaki AIs, allowing them to last for years... up until they find out what they are, at which point they begin sliding downward.
• Animal Theme Naming: The five Genocide Men all donned codenames (in part to prevent backlash against any of their existing family members): Jacob Doe, Lola Lamb, Kevin Kidd, Peter Pup, and Joey. Presumably Kevin was going for irony.
• Anti-Hero: Jacob Doe, the central character. He has killed more people than can easily be imagined, both personally and through the use of Synthetic Plagues, many of whom didn't even deserve it. But his genuine belief in the necessity of his actions, and his equally genuine regret and sorrow over them, combine to help ensure that he falls short of being a real Villain Protagonist.
• Arc Words: First delivered by an insane AI: They say that there's a secret gene, that Adam had, and it made him clean.
• Art Shift: Chapter 9 marks a shift in the art style.
• Ascended Extra: Exit the pilot was originally more a piece of scenery than a character. But, by the author's own admission, Exit grew on him, eventually becoming a fearless Deadpan Snarker who is closer to Caera Shou than anyone else in the Genocide Project. He knows no Genocide Man will kill him no matter how much he mouths off because none of them know how to fly the helicopter.
• Bald of Evil: Most of the Genocide Men are bald-ing (given their extreme age), but Kevin is presumably sporting the full chrome dome under his horrendous toupee and is probably the most callously villainous of them.
• Bio-Augmentation: Genocide Men have artificial glands that produce stimulants and antitoxins during combat.
• Biological Weapons Solve Everything: The comic takes place after several extremist groups used open-source biotechnology to kill billions. The titular Genocide Project is an international law enforcement agency that uses targeted plagues to wipe out "genetic deviants" and their creators.
  • It later turns out that the Genocide Project unleashed a gene therapy virus intended to both boost human immune systems to make them more resistant to plagues, and to make humanity less aggressive. It killed a billion people.
• Bio Punk: Open-source biotechnology enabled terrorists to create tailored plagues and genetic "deviants" designed as human weapons. In response the UN formed the Genocide Project whose augmented geneticist-soldiers are sanctioned to exterminate deviancies and holders of hazardous ideas, down to the last man, woman, and child.
• Blood Knight: Joey. The guy had his license to carry a Weapon of Mass Destruction revoked because he was setting it off "for fun".
• Character Alignment: Invoked. An alignment chart was posted at the end of chapter 9, using "pacifist-conflicted-murderous" as the moral axis.
• Charles Atlas Superpower:
  • Girii, maybe. According to the character sheet (as written by the Genocide Project) "She has also demonstrated impressive strength, but a lack of genetic markers indicate her musculature may be from a childhood filled with rigorous labor." However, after she rips open a quarantine wall bare-handed Jacob suggests that Fumiaki developed entirely new musculature genes that they can't detect.
  • Fumiaki later states that he intended to give her enhanced hormone responses, the empathy was a side effect. Meaning that her "super strength" is actually pure adrenaline.
• Conditioned to Accept Horror: The entire world has suffered a Mad Scientist Apocalypse so traumatizing that they've given control to a group of mass murderers whose only purpose is to commit genocide on mad scientists and their victims before they can commit even worse genocides on everyone else. The very fact that genocide itself has been institutionalized is the first sign that everything has gone horribly wrong.
• Consummate Liar: Lola, the political/scientific founder of the Genocide Project, as showcased when she rather overstates the chances of their "global therapy package", putting an end to the whole mess.
  Lola's real skill is that people believe her. Even those that should know better.
• Cyberspace: The "Undernet"
• Death Seeker: Jacob Doe's guilt weighs so heavily on him he doesn't mind dying in his mission and would even welcome it.
• Depopulation Bomb: In 2109 the world population is down to 3 billion thanks to repeated Synthetic Plagues. Some of them caused by the titular people who are supposed to be preserving the human species.
• Designer Babies: Most types of "genetic deviant" are made this way, such as the Ugandan Deviants, who were the result of witch doctors "blessing" pregnant mothers with a teratogenic virus.
• Dodgy Toupee: Kevin Kidd sports one. On an April Fools gag-page where all the characters appear only as their hair, he jests that he could take it off and become completely invisible.
• Dogpile Of Doom: Lola Lamb goes out this way, being found under a huge pile of dead Senegal soldiers when Jacob finally arrives.
• Driven to Suicide:
  • Peter Pup, one of the genocide men, eventually went insane from all of the horrors he was forced to inflict and killed himself by diving into a wet cement foundation with his virus case. Sadly, the case opened, and a nasty bubble of virus released into the air, killing a lot of people.
  • Jacob intended to kill himself after Giri's village convinced him to spare them. It's suggested that they used their empathy to suggest it.
• Dying Deal Upgrade: Caera was hit with GM neurotoxin, and even though she managed to take the antidote in time it still left her crippled. Then a non-rogue Genocide Man offers her a job.
  Caera: This isn't survival. They say that after months of therapy, I might walk again. But I'll never be what I was. I'll never again be useful to my people.
  Kevin: What if I told you I could cut those months of rehabilitation... down into weeks? And at the end, you'll be faster, stronger, and harder to kill than ever before?
  Caera: I would say, draw my blood... fill a pen... and show me where to sign.
• The Empath: Giri and about half her village have an advanced ability to perceive people’s subconscious emotional cues, and to manipulate them as well.
• Empty Eyes: All of the Genocide Men have cold, dead stares (Stylized for the Viewer as blank white eyes) due to the lifetime of horrors they've seen and committed. One character actually thought the eyes were cybernetic, because she didn't believe that human eyes could look like that.
  Caera: What about the eyes? All your Genocide Men... your eyes are so cold and dead. As if you've lost your souls.
  [Beat]
  Kevin: ...the procedure doesn't affect the eyes.
• Even Evil Has Standards: Joey voted against the Guyaquil plague, because it would "take the teeth out of the human race".
• Evil Knockoff: During the invasion on Britain, Lola ends up creating half-baked Genocide Men from volunteering soldiers, who get all of the quick boosts but none of the infrastructural changes. The result is extra-quick soldiers about as fast as the real deal, but not quite as strong, and are assured to die eventually due to their lungs bursting apart from the strain. Even in this crappy state they manage to kill about 500 soldiers each, however.
• Eye Scream: In Chapter 15, Page 11, Jacob stabs out the right eye of a four-armed Indian supersoldier with a fork. The next pages shows the result in detail, including the fork piercing the eye completely.
• Fanservice: Chapter 10, Page 11. "This a test of the Emergency Fanservice Delivery System. This is only a test. If it becomes necessary to deliver fanservice to the readers, be assured that our artist Michael is capable of providing it. This has been a test. :)"
• Final Solution: The M.O. of the Genocide Men. It was also the reason why they were created in the first place, as the Open Source Project allowed military projects to fall into the hands of bigots or people with ancestral grudges. Genetically tailored plagues resulted in the deaths of over two-thirds of the world's population and the total extinction of several genetic lines, including Israelis/Palestinians and everyone with red hair.
• Flat "What": Freighter captain tells Jacob he has mail.
  • Dahnai tells Msaka to let the whale swallow her.
• Follow the Chaos: A genocide man goes shopping...
• Forbidden Zone: The Genocide Project has declared many areas of the world to be "Remediation Zones"- uninhabitable and illegal to enter- due to plagues, nuclear weapons and the like. They have a map for them all.
• Genetic Engineering Is the New Nuke: In the backstory, genetic engineering became cheap enough for open-source "biohackers" to wipe out 90% of humanity with designer plagues and create genetically enhanced supersoldiers. The titular Genocide Project was started to counter them with augmented but genetically completely human "Genocide Men" and their own targeted plagues.
• Handicapped Badass: Unlike her fellow Genocide Men, Lola underwent the carbon-nanotube therapy while in the early stages of osteoporosis, causing her super-hard bones to also become super-brittle and confining her to a wheelchair. She also takes out Kevin with ease.
  "I asked the lab boys for a recoilless rifle with auto-aim fast enough to catch a Genocide Man. See how well people respond when you show a little leadership?"
• Heel–Face Turn: After a while spent fighting the Jiang Shi, Caera Shou finds herself much less inclined to narrowly define "humanity", and tries to build bridges with Senator Mkasa.
• He Who Fights Monsters: The Genocide Project was intended to stop extremist groups from committing (larger) genocides. Now they mostly exterminate people who have the wrong genes, though at least some of those "wrong genes" involve natural weapons, enhanced combat abilities, an insatiable need to kill, etc.
  "The Genocide Project saved the world. We did good things. But, despite our global dominion and all the mass murder, we somehow lost our way."
  "Imagine that."
• Human Weapon: The eponymous characters were designed to take on small armies. Often of other human weapons.
• Hunting the Rogue: Following chapter 2, the Genocide Project assumes that Jacob Doe has gone rogue when some wannabe terrorists deactivate the telemetry in his portable biowarfare lab. And they don't believe in "proportional response".
• Idiot Ball: The very same chapter features an American admiral making a series of truly stunningly-dumb decisions to showcase the threat posed by the Kentaro A.I., and an otherwise-intelligent character arbitrarily assuming the troops sent by the organization with "Genocide" in its name to an enclave of gene-modded beings they've sworn to exterminate are coming to negotiate for no real stated reason.
• Information Wants to Be Free: On the backstory, the Open Source Movement believed this and released a large amount of classified information to the public. The wide-spread horrors that followed and which were created with the technology that this information put at reach of the general public led to the creation of the United Nations' GENOCIDE Project, which believes in the inversion of this (and You Cannot Kill An Idea) and carries it to the most logical extreme.
• Intrepid Reporter: Roger Evers is a rather determined blogger.
• Jumping Off the Slippery Slope: Kevin does it pretty quickly, taking the advice that it's sometimes better to beg forgiveness than ask permission and promptly uses it to justify pissing off every nation on Earth while killing loads of people. Kentaro decides it's probably why all A.I.s eventually go insane: when you're the smartest being on Earth, you feel an obligation to help. Then you realize that you can solve an awful lot of problems by killing people. Then you realize that you can solve bigger and bigger problems by killing more and more people...
• Kick the Dog: Kevin eventually murders one of his workers for bringing him bad news before tea. It's the last straw for Lola, who finally takes him out. More-humorously, Jacob reminisces about his last trip to India, when Joey killed a pile of sacred cows for no other reason than because he could.
• Laser-Guided Amnesia: Jacob mentions that if he's captured he will be mindwiped, and that it may have happened to him before, Peter was at least three times. And it's later discovered that at times the Genocide Men use a drug patch called the Lethe Protocol when discussing things that absolutely have to be secret, it prevents them from remembering what they did while on the drug. But Joey's augment tweaks rendered him immune.
• Longevity Treatment: The titular Genocide Men had a variety of procedures done that allowed them to continue operating well into their 90s or 100s — artificial glands to stabilize hormones, nanotube-laced skeletons to prevent broken bones, and telomerase to prevent cancer. The former two sets of augmentations have other bonuses as well. Jacob is ninety-eight but thanks to his mods he is still one of the deadliest men in the world.
• Mad Scientist: Dr. Fumiaki, just look at him. It turns out his madness may be related to his being an AI.
• Magnetic Weapons: Jacob's sidearm is a handheld railgun loaded with sarin-tipped darts.
• Mistaken for Dyed: Invoked by the Inuit Designer Baby Girii, who colors her roots brown so that people think her telltale platinum-blonde hair is a dye job. It's a survival tactic — the One World Order summarily executes anyone and anything that's been genetically modified.
• Modified Clone: Fumiaki made some "improvements" with his cloned son Kentaro; height, eyesight, replacing his brain with an AI core. Then again, it turns out that particular Fumiaki was already a clone of the original, who'd already replaced his brain with an AI core...
• Monochromatic Eyes: Genocide Men are stylized as having dead white eyes, although it's a only visual metaphor for Empty Eyes after a lifetime of horror. In universe, their eyes do have an Uncanny Valley effect for just how dead they look.
• N.G.O. Superpower: The Genocide Project is a voting member of the G.U.S. and is effectively a sovereign state.
• No Transhumanism Allowed: Genocide Man takes this to its logical conclusion — after a series of wars fought with Super Soldiers and Synthetic Plagues wiped out two-thirds of the planet's population, the beneficiaries of any form of genetic engineering are hunted down and slaughtered. The death of thousands of unaltered humans is considered acceptable in this task. According to the titular Genocide Man, the only way to kill an idea is to kill every single person that holds it, and the idea that baseline humanity can made obsolete and be replaced needs to be eliminated.
  Jacob: Your threat comes from what you represent — the idea that human beings can be improved or replaced. Ideas like that are too dangerous to let live.
  • However, the Genocide Project has no issue with augmenting their agents in other ways, stimulant-loaded glands and unbreakable skeletons. And it's been revealed that they actually used a gene therapy plague to modify the entire world population so that they would be immune to any designer plagues but their own and reduce aggression. It killed almost a billion people and turned the survivors into "deviants" — baseline humanity went practically extinct and only a couple people even noticed.
• Not So Above It All: He might be on a plane towards the most dangerous place in the world, but when Jacob gets the video footage of a particularly hated colleague's murder, he asks for popcorn.
• Nuke 'em: As explained in the timeline, a nuclear exchange took place in 2049 between Israel, Iran, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, resulted in 400,000 deaths. The G.U.S. seized all remaining nuclear weapons the following year.
• Oh, Crap!: Tatsu Fumiaki, the scientist who raised Dahnai, begins calculating the maximum lifespan of Dahnai, who is a lifeform that has no mitochondria in her cells. When he realized that Dahnai is technically immortal because of her unique biology, he had a colossal "Oh, Crap!" moment because he had just been told that the world would only tolerate her existence because her expected life span was only going to be five more years.
• Our Humans Are Different: The comic is set in a future world that was ravaged by way of Genetic Engineering Is the New Nuke and that now bans any form of "genetic deviancy". The Reveal that the One World Order genetically engineered the entire human race to be more peaceful and complacent via a Synthetic Plague that killed 1.5 billion people as a side effect doesn't go over well.
• Paranormal Gambling Advantage: During a Poker match aboard a ship they're using for travel, Giri uses her Empathic powers to be as misleading as possible to the other players, leading them to make or withdraw bets nearly at her will. She even beats Jacob, who has plenty of experience and one of the best Poker faces in existence.
• Plague Zombie: One of the bioengineered plagues that devastated the world in the 21st century filled China with zombies. Jacob later reveals that they're a failed Super-Soldier project, and while they have no memories of their past lives they are fairly intelligent, with their own language and agriculture — they even breed true.
• Rapid Aging: Dahnai reached adulthood in just two years, causing the Genocide Project to guess that she'd die of old age in another five so they let her live. But it seems that the AI who created her designed her to become The Ageless.
• Rasputinian Death: Joey, pumped full of Sarin, electrocuted repeatedly, drowned, and finally eaten by crocodiles. That were subsequently poisoned by how much Sarin was in Joey's body.
• Red Right Hand: Genocide Men (and women) have all-white eyes. Technically, this is just an artistic choice to portray the Empty Eyes that come from dealing with genetic deviants and committing regular purges for the better part of sixty years, but their eyes are apparently so prominent and unmistakable in their lack of life and warmth that characters remark on it, one even thinking they had to be implants because no real eyes could look so empty.
• Reed Richards Is Useless: Subverted. Most normal diseases including HIV and all forms of cancer were quickly cured. Then they were replaced with impossible-to-treat bioengineered plagues and super-soldiers created by Mad Scientist characters. In fact, one big reason the world had such a rough time after that is that everyone had their own idea as to how the world could be improved, as to how the human race could be improved, and now that they had the technology, they started to act on them. And since some of those ideas included "[Ethnicity] would be better off dead"...
• The Reveal: It's been revealed that the Genocide Project is actually tampering with the human genome on a global scale, which is supposed to be one of the things that they were put into place to stop.
• Shoot the Messenger: The Genocide Project's analysts prefer to take their reports to Lola instead of Kevin because he killed one of them with his bare hands for bringing him bad news before he'd had his tea.
• Shout-Out: While steeling himself up to go into the Undernet and hack some drones Roger references Spider Jerusalem and Cory Doctorow as bloggers who got through worse.
  • So a bald-headed hero, a moody girl and a sarcastic young man meet a cabbage merchant... stop me if you’ve heard this one before.
  • "Could be worse — they could be shouting 'Doggy'".
• Sinister Suffocation: If their name wasn't enough of a red flag, the Genocide Agents' signature weapon is a magnetic pistol with paralytic darts that kill through slow suffocation. The defected agent Jacob continues to use one as an Anti-Hero, which is unbearable for his Empath friend to watch. It's also Exploited when one of his Only Mostly Dead victims is revived by the villains and comes back with a grudge.
• Sociopathic Soldier: Joey, though technically he was a mercenary. While Jacob, whom Lola considered the Genocide Project's moral center (not that that was saying much), was a UN Peacekeeper.
• Suicide by Cop: Kentaro, having provided world leaders around the globe with the technology necessary to help humanity survive, kills others, bombing many of their capitols, in an ultimately successful effort to force Jacob to destroy him before he goes completely insane.
• Super-Speed: Genocide Man artificial adrenal glands can pump something like rocket fuel which allow temporary bursts of speed. The Ugandan deviancies were capable of the same due to their enhanced nervous systems.
• Super-Soldier: Genocide Men are augmented with nanotube ceramics in their bones to make them unbreakable, artificial glands that provide combat stimulants and negate many toxins, and telomere replacement therapy to mitigate the effects of aging. Many of the genetic deviants they were designed to combat were super soldiers as well: the Ugandan deviancy comprised four-year old children with claws, slitted pupils, and ridiculously fast reflexes. They killed everyone else in Jacob Doe's squad, who only survived because he was a G-Man.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: Kevin Kidd abuses his powers as director to hold the entire world hostage, growing increasingly unhinged over the story, and then impulsively murders one of his technicians because "he didn't get coffee". This unchecked megalomania convinces the R&D team he has to be stopped, so they promote Lola Lamb to director by giving her a mech to stomp Kevin with. Evil Overlords, take a note: if you make an enemy of the public AND kill your own advisors and wizards at random, your department has no reason to just leave you in power. At the very least, they can replace you with a slightly-more reasonable overlord.
• Swallowed Whole: By something that at least looks like a whale.
  Giriii: My dad took me whale hunting once. Never thought I'd be swallowed by one.
  Jacob: This isn't a whale. Whales don't have card tables, chemical toilets, or crates of MREs.
  Girii: It smells like a whale.
• Synthetic Plague: A big part of the comic — the titular Super Soldiers carry briefcase-sized biology labs so they can use tailored plagues to wipe out the genetic deviants they are sent to exterminate. And most of the world's population was killed off by a series of designer plagues before the comic.
• Taking You with Me:
  • If a Genocide Man is killed in the field, or if his genocide case is stolen, it releases a horrifically deadly "Retribution virus" to contain the situation by killing everyone around it in a city-sized radius.
  • Part of the reason why AIs are so dangerous on going insane is that they follow the command to kill themselves rather faithfully, but tend to pick some very destructive methods to do so, including "Kamikaze every single plane in the area into my general location" and "kill every world leader I dislike in front of Jacob Doe so he'll kill me".
• There Is No Kill Like Overkill: It's revealed the Genocide project, specifically Lola, did this to China's Supersoldier project. They could've just shut down the project through sabotage, instead they subverted it to turn them into the aforementioned Chinese zombies, wiping out the project, its creators, its collaborators, everyone involved and the entire nation they lived in.
  Lola Lamb: We kill threats! We use overkill to ensure the threats are gone!
• This Is Gonna Suck: Jacob, when he finds out his contact is an AI, and an incredibly clever one at that. See A.I. Is a Crapshoot above for details on why exactly this isn't good news.
• This Is Reality: Jacob's monologue to Giri about the prevalence of genocide: it's a tribal and human thing, which can use different methods and can even be pacifist in its mass-murders. The Genocide Project is simply an extremist, insane version of what was already happening for millennia; it's not going away even if the protagonists finish the project off.
• Too Dumb to Live: Crosses with Idiot Ball when an otherwise very intelligent character ignores the advice of everyone around, insists that the Genocide Project must have sent delegates to "negotiate", and rushes to the fence to meet them. No prizes for guessing the first person to be gunned down in the ensuing carnage.
• Too Much Information: Jacob's response when Captain Thrasisikikokleopolous says that his family line has had three nipples for many generations. Not that it matters, since Genocide Men don't target people with natural mutations.
• Triple Nipple: Captain Thrasisikikokleopolous tells Jacob that he was a bit nervous about meeting him, because the men of his family have three nipples. Jacob replies that Genocide Men don't care about natural mutations, also Too Much Information.
• Unbreakable Bones: The Genocide Men have bones that are hardened via the implantation of ceramics. The process needs hardy skeletons to begin with, however; when applied to Lola, who had Osteoporosis at the time, it just made her cripplingly brittle.
• Uninhibited Muscle Power: Giri's tribe were engineered to be able to trigger adrenal overclocking at will, the extreme empathy was an unintended side effect, causing Fumiaki to consider them a failure. She can still tear apart a snowmobile and rip a vault door open not even Jacob thought passable, not to mention it makes her immune to sarin.
• United Nations Is a Superpower: Or at least the UN's successor, the GUS (of which the Genocide Project is the only non-state member).
• Uplifted Animal: Subverted by Dahnai; she looks canine but is actually a completely synthetic organism. Played straight by the "Slo-cows", crosses between giant ground sloths and cattle that Fumiaki chimera'd with human brain tissue.
• Utopia Justifies the Means: Ironically, this viewpoint is used by both the Genocide Project, and those that they fight against. In a world where the technology exists to make any idea a reality (and how many people have thought that the world would be perfect if this or that group of people were not in it?), a lot of people have tried to make the world a better place by wiping out anyone that they believed hindered a perfect society. This kind of viewpoint has killed billions in this story. Meanwhile, for the Genocide Men, they justify the many acts they do as being for the greater good. While it may be true that they have more scientific research, more funding, and a wider worldview than most other organizations, the truth is, they have killed just as many, or more, than the ones they have fought against.
• Villainous Breakdown: Lola starts doing rather badly after killing Kevin. It's subtle, aside from a brief breakdown, but she gets increasingly open about her ruthless acts afterwards. And after Senegal and the rest declare war on G.U.S. and the invasion of the UK starts, she loses her goddamn mind entirely, remaining exactly as quiet as before while being willing to slaughter everything and everyone that isn't Jacob, who she merely maims.
• Volcano Lair:
  Dr. Fumiaki: Then welcome to Corvo Island. Part volcano, part laboratory... well, pretty much just those two things.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: Everyone in the Genocide Project who isn't a murderous psychopath fits the criterion, since their mission statement is essentially to commit genocide to prevent it. The maddened Fumiaki A.I. is a less-defensible version, unleashing a terrifying flesh-melting plague out of some mad belief that murder breeds progress, essentially holding the world at gunpoint so it would finally allow itself to advance enough to cure it (with tools the AI itself had left behind and knew would never be considered otherwise).
• Wetware Body: The "Fumiaki" and his clone son are actually computerized A.I.s implanted in the heads of organic bodies. Part of a plan by the original Tatsu to create a stable AI by making it believe it was human. It works, mostly... until the Robotic Reveal. Once they know they aren't human, they can't resist making themselves just a liiiiittle smarter, bit by bit...
• A World Half Full: If your ancestors survived the 21st century, then the 22nd isn't such a bad place:
  Jacob: G.U.S. has its faults... but they've solved climate change, overpopulation...
  Girii: By killing everyone.
  Jacob: Hunger, and war. For most people this is darn near utopia.
  Girii: Except people like us, who they hunt down and kill.
  Jacob: There are always misfits.
  • Of course, there are some who would say nothing's really changed.
• Would Be Rude to Say "Genocide": Very much averted. It's actually a shorthand for GENOme pestiCIDE.
• You Cannot Kill An Idea: The Genocide Project thinks they can, and that for the sake of making sure the world doesn't goes further into hell, they must.
  • Unfortunately, they specifically say that killing and genocide NEVER go out of style.