Part 3 here:

While Josh's friends were having success in their newly enhanced lives, this wasn't true for everyone. 

There were no news stories of catastrophic failures. There were no PSAs. There were only stories. 

There was a story of a prominent politician, a mayor in some large metropolitan area, whose brain seized after receiving his implants. He was comatose and never did recover. 

The official story was the he'd had a stroke which to some extent may have been true. 

Witnesses to the event, however, tended not to agree. Their observation was that a couple of days after the implant procedure, after the short recovery time, he'd gone back to be "activated." 

Immediately upon connection with the network,  he suffered a grand mal seizure. 

The technicians disconnected him. The doctor and nurses tried to assist but to no avail. He was beyond repair. 

The staff of this facility had all signed nondisclosure agreements regarding the goings on of daily operations and patient identities and so forth. There was no reason to think that anything would come of this. 

Then the doctor was killed outside his home in a "botched robbery attempt." None of his valuables were taken. He had been shot behind the ear with what was probably a subsonic .22 from close enough that powder burns were evident. 

The two nurses similarly died of mysterious circumstances. One of which died with her husband and three children as their autonomous vehicle suffered a glitch and sped over a cliff. The other apparently suffered a heart attack. Traces of cigarette smoke and prussic acid were on her face. She was 26 and was allergic to tobacco. 

The facility director committed suicide by shooting herself in the back of the head twice while swimming in her pool. No weapon was found. 

The two technicians saw the writing on the wall and after disseminating the story, background, footage and records of the event, disappeared. 

For the most part, though, people seemed to fare well.

But there was some strangeness going on.

People were becoming less individualistic and more hive-minded.

They seemed to be buying the same products, wearing the same clothes, having the same shallow conversations. 

It was like they were all being forced fed advertisements for only one vendor in any particular product type: Coke not Pepsi, Levi's not Wranglers, corporate farm raised not home grown or organic. 

It was becoming a cookie cutter world with no room for choice. 

Image Credit: "Cave sunset" by benketaro is licensed under CC BY 2.0