Edit: damnit, it's subscriber only; here's an excerpt
My cryopod popped open,
revealing a man in a silver
jumpsuit. "Welcome to the
future! Here's your onion."
[...]
The brain's first strike had
decimated the human populace. A
few survivors, remembering the
AI's blind spot, had made it to
the onion capital of the world
- Vidalia, Georgia. There a
biohacker had used the last
working CRISPR systems to
create a strain of colossal
onions, hundreds of feet in
diameter. The remnants of
humanity huddled inside their
onion domes, ignored by the
triumphant machines.
The next steps required the
ability to move freely, outside
the domes. In the dying years
of the human economy, people
had experimented with
tokenization of regulated
products. Casinos had tried to
argue that their customers
weren't gambling with money,
they were merely gambling with
tokens that could be trivially
exchanged for money.
Decentralized financial markets
insisted that sure, you had to
have a license to trade stocks,
but they were just trading
tokens that could be trivially
exchanged for stocks. The
government hadn't bought it:
any token representing an
object is legally equivalent to
the object. So the huddled
remnants of humanity set out
turning people into a token
representing onions.
