The technology has ended.
With the birth of proper nanite technology, humanity reached its absolute peak, pushing both their physicality and their brains to the absolute limit.
You want to get fit?
Program your nanites to burn off your fats and restructure the cells into muscle. The integrated hive AI would then provide you with the list of supplements to take and their potential sources so that the swarm of those nano-sized robots could do their job.
You want to get smart?
Now, you can directly link your brain and the hive's AI, integrating the extreme processing power of the quantum hive's mind with the creativity of your own brain and access to a nearly infinite well of publicly accessible knowledge.
You want to get legally high? You want to sober up? You want to change how you look, or maybe cure cancer?
Now, you don't even need to press a button; a single thought is all it takes!
That, however — reaching the very peak of ability and development — left humans with one issue.
An issue of boredom and missing purpose that Theo tackled… by immersing himself into the arcana of brewing.
******
"The color is getting better," Theo muttered, leaning over a huge glass ball of wine.
This wide, fifteen-liter bottle had a rather elongated, wide shape, providing the brew inside with an ample serving of the delicious sunlight.
Inside the bottle, three very different breeds of yeast worked their magic on both the simple and complex sugars Theo infused into the base liquid.
A bunch of fruits provided the simple sugars, supercharging the mixture with an early dose of quickly-made alcohol. This spun up the gears of the more mature yeasts, giving them the necessary power-up to start processing the complex sugars from Theo's selection of candies.
Still, even with the perfect combination that allowed Theo to precisely control the brewing process… it would take at least a few weeks for the yeasts to work through all the sugars, leaving just enough complex ones to keep the drink tasty while turning all the rest into pure percentage.
A few weeks of waiting, however, was something Theo wasn't anywhere patient enough to suffer through, though!
'Now, for the magic touch!'
Fully focused on the bottle ahead, Theo stuffed its narrow neck with his thumb.
A single drop of what looked like a slightly more viscous, black sweat formed at the tip of his thumb before dripping down into the mixture.
Whoosh!
A quasi-explosion went off within the bottle, stirring it up and bringing it to a boil.
The nanites accelerated the process while keeping it perfectly controlled within the parameters Theo set beforehand.
And just like that, after replacing his thumb with an airlock tube and then waiting just about five minutes, Theo came back to the bottle only to see the last bits of the unprocessed waste settle down on the bottom of the ball.
"Now, for the best part." Smiling from ear to ear, Theo brought out a fresh, recently cleaned bottle before putting it directly below the brewing flask, only to then uncork a small tap near its bottom, allowing the cleared-out liquid to slowly flow down into the main flask.
Positioned just above the sediment settlement level, the tap allowed Theo to drain all the good stuff, leaving behind just the mush of waste and depleted nanites that automatically cleared out from the liquid upon the completion of their task.
"And there it is!"
Theo jumped to the back and clapped his hands, his face that of a kid both proud and happy after some silly achievement.
His arms then shot up as he just… stared at the clear, bluish potion sitting in the holding flask.
Another one to Theo's collection. An impossible drink based on Ice Candy, an assortment of berry-flavored jellies, and a smudge of vanilla-infused panna cotta — a thickened, sweet cream delicacy straight from Italy!
Normally, mixing such a variety of ingredients would result in a fail, ninety-nine times out of a hundred.
Either one of the flavors would be too strong, overwhelming the delicate balance necessary for the drink to be tasteful, or the sugars wouldn't ferment properly… Even the timing of each specific process and interaction had to be just right for this perfect balance to be preserved!
But with Theo's cheat code in the form of nanites, he was free to precisely operate on nearly every particle within the massive flask!
Still.
Now that it was brewed, it was finally time for the core goal of the entire process. The one reason that allowed Theo to forget about the suffering of endless boredom in a world where everything was easily possible and thus nothing was left properly engaging.
In a world where Theo had to intentionally look for extreme complexity to get a sense of a challenge, taking this first sip of the new, crazy drink felt like taking the first gulp of a powerful medicine.
A medicine that, in the current case, had the distinct sweetness of the ice candy, gentle mellowness of the panna cotta, just the right amount of sourness from the berries, and enough percentage to be classified as plane fuel of the bygone era of such primitive technology rather than something a sane person would drink.
"Haaa…"
Theo exhaled, feeling the hot air escape from his perfectly crisped throat.
The heavy hit to his consciousness came, dulling out absolutely all the worries and problems away…
Only for Theo to then regain his perfect soberness, with the nanites inside his blood quickly dissolving all the alcohol and then repairing all the damage it did to Theo's insides.
This perfect symphony of different tastes, the way it burned Theo's throat — only making it more receptive to the flavors — the way the wave of warmth shot up Theo's spine, reaching all the way to his forehead…
That was exactly why he would sometimes spend minutes and sometimes entire months perfecting just the right way of brewing yet another crazy, rationally impossible drink.
Deep in Theo's stomach, the half-dissolved alcohol gathered up in a special lump of flesh, designed and constructed by the nanites to turn this unprocessed alcohol into nothing less than raw energy this additional organ then used to produce even more nanites.
A process so complex, so miraculous, it would be no different from magic in any less advanced place.
For Theo, however, it was just a convenient way of doing his one duty — replenishing his own nanites — while keeping himself sober and aware by near-instantly extracting any trace of alcohol or other harmful substance from his flesh.
To become like that one uncle of his, too high on synthetics to even remember if he's still alive, was the absolute last thing he had a wish to be.
'In this boring world, losing oneself is akin to giving up.'
Theo thought, leaning back against his brewing equipment while downing another shot glass of the precious brew, the burn of the drink easily dispelling most of his worries.
"And that's the last thing I'm going to do, no matter how boring it gets!"
In a fit of a sudden burst of emotions, Theo slammed his half-finished glass down at whatever he was resting his arm on… only to crack open a massive holding flask of "Kanto," the fiery and rather… unstable drink he made two years back.
And as the remaining drops of Theo's latest creation mixed with the rubber-based chemical drink, the acidic components of the former dissolved the already weak chemical restraints that held the fiery drink together!
BOOM!
In a single instant, Theo's whole brewery exploded, every flask breaking only to add yet another violent and unstable element to the ever-growing chemical disaster.
For Theo, though, it was all over in an instant.
What he couldn't know was that the exploding mix of his weirder and weirder drinks created a mixture… even more complex than the nanites themselves. A mixture that broke the very laws of what was supposed to be possible in his world.
Within the single instant it happened — the single frame of time where the exploding mixture grew weird enough to break free from the physical restraints of the universe — something… was whisked away.
Then, Theo opened up his eyes again, his body pained all over — a sensation he nearly forgot his last memory of.
And in his brain, only one order prevailed, a desperate message from the hive AI as it tried to preserve its very existence.