There was sunlight shining in my eyes. It was time to wake up anyway. I had such a weird dream about dinosaurs. Huh. Since when do we have a polished hardwood ceiling? Or these nice bamboo walls? That was not a dream! No panic! First, remember what happened yesterday.

That dude, this James fellow, walked with us to some round earthen hut with straw roof. For some reason, there were wooden doors that slid open when we came close. Inside it was a large elevator. James stood in the elevator and waved us over. As soon as we were in the elevator, the doors closed and the elevator started to descend smoothly.

On reaching the bottom, the doors opened and we were in something that looked pretty much like any subway station. Okay, most didn't use wooden paneling and hardwood floors, but it was a large hall and pillars. To the side were a number of platforms and at some platforms small rail cars were waiting. The door at one of the rail cars opened and we took a seat. By this time I was so far gone I just fell asleep.

I guess that they tucked me in. OK, that explains how I got here. No need for panic. There was a nightstand next to the bed. On top of the nightstand was something that looked like a small wooden board with something written on it: "Good morning Andy. The door on the left side is a bathroom where you can shower first and find fresh clothes. The other door leads to a corridor. Follow that corridor to the living room where we will be waiting for you to explain everything. PS: you need this tablet to shower."

That means it was time to get out of bed. A pity, these were such a nice sheets. I still threw them off and I saw I was sleeping in my clothes from yesterday. Apparently they didn't want to undress me. Good. It would be so embarrassing with my slowly changing body.

I took the tablet-board into the bathroom. As soon as I entered the bathroom, the text disappeared and was replaced with a few controls: shower on/off, warm/cold, faucet on/off, warm/cold. Fancy. And I needed them, there were no controls in the shower or faucet.

They also didn't believe in single use bottles. There were only this translucent pearls with 'shampoo' and 'soap' written on it. On a stool nearby where new clothes and towels.

Time to get started. I put the tablet on the dresser. The tablet thing really felt like a piece of wood. It didn't really have a screen, it was like the wood just changed color. I tap shower on and play a bit with temperature control until it was perfect. Oh yes, this shower is nice.

Of course, the towels are really fluffy. And the clothes on the stool are all natural fabric. I once felt something like that in an expensive store. Why would they just give something like that to basically a refugee? It was just white T-shirt, black pants and underwear but better than the stuff I usually wear.

As I was now clean and dressed, it was time to go outside and get some answers. I went out the corridor and arrived at living room. Of course it's a nice room. These people know their luxury items. It's filled with sculpted wooden furniture, shiny silk pillows and ... flowers growing out of the wall. Okay. James was sitting there with Tom. Each was nursing a drink from a intricately carved wooden cup. James looked a lot better than his zombie appearance from yesterday. He was now looking more like a lingerie model! The man was build! And speaking about build, there was a young women sitting next to him. She was Caucasian, nicely bronzed and at least as beautiful as a fully photoshopped Hollywood star. I don’t know what she did to her genes but it really brought out here best features.

James made an inviting gesture and said: "Andy, join us. We have much to discuss this morning. I’m James, in case you didn’t remember. This is Elise, my beautiful wife.”

We exchanged greetings. James and Elise disappeared in the kitchen to get snacks and drinks.

“Hey Tom. How are you?” I asked. ”I see you have the same outfit as me.”

“I’m okay. I had some bad dreams, but I slept well in the end. The shower also helped. And yeah, they had new clothes for me. Nice stuff.”

“Do you have any idea where we are? The last thing I remember is the subway.”

“We’re in some resort in the woods somewhere. Just look outside.”

I looked through the windows. We were indeed in the jungle with large trees around us. Between the trees a small distance from the ground there were more wooden houses seamlessly integrated with nature around them and with some walkways in between. It all looked like somewhere between an Ewok village and a luxury resort.

Then James and Elise came back with wooden cups they gave to us and a few small bowls of strange fruits they put on the table.

"You're now at the southern part of what was used to be the Omo Forestry Reserve, in what used to be Nigeria,” James said. You could say this is our new capital."

"Well, it doesn't really look like a city,” said Tom. “And eh, I saw on the news there were so many epidemics in Nigeria that were kind of deadly?"

"It is true. A lot of us died. It was a terrible time. And we were desperate. There were simply too any diseases wrecking the country." James explained. "There was simply not enough money to buy medicine, not enough people to quarantine the epidemics. We were denied loans for medicine and vaccine to treat our sick and quickly ran out. The only thing we had were desperate people that were used to improvise. So we took a big gamble."

James continued. "We bought a number of black market gene editing machines and smuggled it out of China. We also stole as much data about genetics as we could, and later we also stole data about AI and nano-tech. The plan was to hack our own genes to create some sort of resistance against the diseases. Keep in mind that his was done with trial and error instead of solid science."

"So you were experimenting on sick people?" Tom asked.

"Yes. That's what it boils down to. Some stuff even worked, and we could slow down the diseases somewhat, but it wasn't the success we needed. Then somebody found some designs and experiments on DNA computing. That's when things started to turn for us. We now had a way to hack our immune cells, to make them smarter so they could detect and destroy diseases by reprogramming them with new patterns. After that, we got some designs for small processors from carbon in the form of graphene and nanotubes that we could grown and assemble inside normal cells using the new DNA editing abilities. With these little computers, we had superior defenses against diseases."

"So, you cured everybody?" I asked.

"Yes, finally we had a way to cure everybody. It still took a long time. People needed to reprogram and customize the cells continuously and errors were made. So somebody figured out how to link these tiny computers into brain cells. It gave us the rudimentary control over our own cells and slowly we learned how to reprogram our defenses. Then we learned to make tweaks to our own DNA. Then we also learned to hack DNA from other creatures."

"Wait wait. You can actually change your own cells?"

"Exactly. Look."

With that, the skin on his James' arm started to slowly change into a plaid pattern.

Tom snapped his fingers. "Oh, so that's how you did the zombie thing."

"Indeed. I added some DNA from chameleons and added my own tweaks for full color spectrum."

I was curious. "And you also changes other creatures? You made the trees all blueish?"

"Yes. The plants now absorb more sunlight and we modified the photosynthesis to be more efficient. Some plants now use electricity to boost photosynthesis or even make electricity."

"How did you do that? It's been only a decade ago and you changed an entire forest?" Tom asked.

"Well, when you have little computers throughout your body, and you're stuffing your brain with additional computer power, you connect them all and run artificial intelligent software, you can get a lot done."

"You're telling us you are a walking computer?" I asked incredulously.

"Each human here is now a network of a few trillion computers actually. It helps with some things." James answered a little smug. "Come, I'll show you what we did."

He guided us into the kitchen. At least, I thought it was a kitchen but there wasn’t any appliance. Instead of that, there were a lot of branches growing out of the wall with berries and fruits growing on them. And I mean visible growing. As I watched them, I saw some berries slowly getting bigger and change color.

"This is your evening meal growing right here. These here are berries containing a meatball. You can just peel them when they're fully grown. These are some berries tasting exactly like vegetables. And that fruit there has concentrated broth inside. I programmed these using some patterns I learned. It's easy once you know how. They get the energy and raw material to grow from the trees around us, and the trees reprocess our waste directly using specialized bacteria. The entire house is grown like that directly from the tree using mostly water and light from the sun."

"But first I have a confession to make." James said. "Andy, Tom, you have been eating the senzu beans we gave you. You notices that you were getting healthier and also smarter?"

Realization hit me. "We have these gene things inside us?"

"Yes, you have. We were experimenting a bit, trying to see if this works on default humans to see if we could upgrade them. We sent out some letters not really expecting anybody to be so gullible or desparate to actually do this, although it would be valuable data.”

"That was not ... nice!" I stammered.

"No, it wasn't. We're sorry about that. The decision to do this experiment was taken some time ago when the land was falling apart. Actually the land is still falling apart. The rebuild is far from over. But that's no excuse." James said morosely. "We'd still would like you to examine you to see if everything is in order and to see how the upgrade has affected you. Elise is a doctor, so she will do the checks. Please do, it's for your own benefit."

"OK, I'll undergo the examination. I also have some questions." I said, still a bit angry.

"Thank you. Let’s finish breakfast and Elise can start the checkup, okay?"

Author's note: DNA computing and data storage exist and are already done in a lab environment. The same goes for graphene and nanotubes. I'm assuming technology progresses a bit more. That means things get more performant and more miniaturized, with as assumption that in the end we can build processors into our own cells. It's not so weird as there are already complete computers smaller than a grain of salt. In the end, that makes the application as used in this story reasonably plausible. Weird, but possible. I'm also playing on the recent and current epidemics (now in Congo) what makes the setting not impossible unfortunately, and the possibility for technology leapfrogging