THE WETWARE HORIZON

This is a large speculative paper; a research artefact produced within the practice-based PhD The Climate Chaos Cruise: A Crip-Queer Speculative Voyage through Participatory AI and Performance Art. The argument is the logical extrapolation of trajectories already in motion. The point of naming the cascade is to make interruption possible. The global AI energy crisis has generated three sequential speculative issues; orbital data centres, small modular nuclear reactors, and biological wetware computing. Each addresses a genuine constraint while recreating the original problem in a new way. These ‘solutions’ creating additional harms that are worse in kind. This paper analyses the structural logic connecting all three; arguing they are part of a single cascade rather than independent policy options. The cascade operates through a mechanism the authors term Systemic Negative Panic (SNP). A genuine threat generates systemic anxiety; anxiety generates large-scale response; response relocates and amplifies harm while deferring accountability. The paper introduces a geopolitical dimension absent from prior Brace Brace analyses. Russia and China are not facing equivalent constraints, have already deployed operational infrastructure at each stage of the cascade, and hold structural power over every Western response through control of uranium enrichment capacity, rare earth mineral supply chains, and orbital compute infrastructure. The endpoint of the cascade, under conditions of biome-accelerated civilisational stress and strategic resource dependency, is the political authorisation of human-derived biological computing substrate that may be capable of suffering. An organic entity operating inside defence perimeters as classified national security infrastructure, governed by frameworks that permanently defer the moral threshold question because the dependency is irreversible. The point of naming this is to make interruption possible.