In Magdalena's timeline, there are several technological advances that lead to a majority of Earth's population electing for a neural surgery to implant a microchip to communicate almost telepathically. When this technology is hijacked by unscrupulous forces, it renders a majority of the population into a comatose-like state.

It was big in China first, I think. That was where it was invented, anyway. Took off slowly. People didn’t like the idea of having things inside them at the start. But they were just so damn useful! Everywhere you went, it was there. 

You could just think it and there it all was, TV, the internet. Then they made it so you could buy things with it, have details about everything just pop up right in front of your eyes. The real change was when they let them communicate with each other directly. You could think at someone, and the message would appear in their head. That was the difference. It changed the way people communicated. They didn’t have to speak. They couldn’t be misunderstood. Language didn’t even matter, not that it had before with these things translating everything as you heard it.

Grim, foreboding. 

Then there was a man called Soledad. I heard he was from South-East Asia somewhere. The Philippines, somewhere around there. Of course, people were worried these chips could be hacked but the makers said they couldn’t be. Now and again someone found a way to hack into them but the ways in were closed right away. But Soledad was the one who worked out how to hack them all at once.