Theriandroid Foreward: This is a basic setting description for a setting I intend to start writing short stories for. Feel free to use this setting as well with a link to this post describing it, or steal inspiration from it to form your own. At it's core, the setting is a memetic mutation from the Android universe featured in the board game of the same name, the Android: Netrunner card game, several novels and others. I've changed the background to introduce furries, and shifted the focus to be a bit more hypersexual and less about cyberpunk crime. (However, that last shift is more of a change in focus of the stories. No doubt Android has plenty of sex in its world and Theriandroid has plenty of crime. What follows is a brief history of the future describing what brings us to the "present day" of 2234 AD. The actual story begins in the next submission. Over time, I may come back here and update to add more setting facts that don't fit the flow of a story, or which were introduced in a story but may be of general interest (and aren't overly spoilery). Introduction: Around 200 years ago, the furries took over. It wasn't instantaneous.. in fact it took about a hundred years to play out. Mankind had always had a fringe that looked to modify their own bodies. Tattoos, piercings, sometimes other mutilations.. the first tiger-striped human got that way without any genetic modifications. But then genetic modifications started to hit the market, and we achieved a whole new level. At first it was a fringe thing. The first few wolves and foxes walking the streets got a lot of strange looks and had a hard time holding down jobs. The bunny chicks practically couldn't work as anything other than prostitutes or strippers. But over time, as the technology improved and got cheaper and more practical, it became more and more common for people to get modded for the practical advantages. Improved physical strength, dexterity, reflexes, toughness. In time it became mainstream. The heritability of the mods contributed to that as well. It was one thing to pidgeonhole someone who had chosen to transform into a bunny, and another to do the same to some kid that had been born that way. The mods were all done on the X chromosome, and needed to pair with an unmodified X or Y to function correctly (or indeed survive). So a modded woman had a 50% chance than any of her children would share the mod. A modded man would have all modded daughters and unmodded sons. A modded couple would have modded children with the same mod as their opposite gender parent, or unmodded sons. (With an increased risk of failed pregnancies, but these failed immediately and would simply result in a late period.) As the unmodified humans dropped to a narrow minority, it became very common for those born that way to chose their own mod as a sort of coming-of-age ritual. Those few that remained unmodified into adulthood became the "freaks" that got strange looks. The old racisms of the past slowly became unenforceable, as "blacks", "whites", and "hispanics" became a thing of the past, and new stereotypes and prejudices arised based on the animals people (or their ancestors) chose to resemble. While all of this was going on, society was slowly changing in other ways. Low wage labor continually rallied for higher and higher minimum wages, squeezing out more and more businesses that relied on cheap labor to make their goods or services affordable. The rising cost of labor drove an out of control inflation, facilitated by governments trying to print their way out of debt. Eventually the world's major corporations ducked out of the system and standardized on "credits", a modernized version of the ancient "bitcoins", which were by then a more stable currency and protected from the machinations of governments. But even this couldn't avoid the minimum wage issue. So instead they developed new forms of labor. This is how what some of us call the "slave wars" began. It was more of a corporate trade war than a shooting war, though you keep hearing about actual shooting fights being part of it along the way. A public research grant into studying the human brain made an incredible breakthrough in being able to make a fully functioning computer model from a CAT scan of the brain. Within two years, the first plug-and-play virtual reality implants were available, allowing you to plug your brain into a computer and experience a virtual environment as if it were real. Once the implants were installed, you could also surf the web in your own brain while otherwise still living in reality. All the major media players bought each other out in the aftermath, until VNN, the Virtual News Network, was basically the source of everyone's news and all mainstream entertainment. That same year, one of the major genetic modifications companies, GenTech, developed commercial grade cloning technology and got the courts to approve the sale of wholly genetically designed, tube-grown, brain-formatted clones as essentially slave labor. In the same month that the clones were approved, a Japanese corporation called TokyoToys launched a line of therianthropic robots which were driven by brain scan emulation. While their bodies were much like furry versions of the Terminator from ancient legends (expect for a number of obvious 'tells', including pupilless, gemlike eyes), there minds were virtually humanlike aside from some strongly imprinted directives and the undeniable impact of their "brains" being directly tied into electronic coprocessors that made math and memorization trivial. These "bioroids" used a layer of synthetic flesh and fur over their electronic and mechanical insides to make them more person-like. A third corporation joined the fray the next year by applying the brain mapping technology and a sort of inversion of the mods humans had been using for a century to create uplifted animals. These strongly resembled our own modified selves, but were much more instinctual. Sentient but relatively simpleminded, and easy to manipulate. The uplifts, clones, and bioroids collectively became known as "theriandroids". All of these new work forces shuffled in to fill all of the need for low cost labor throughout society. They were effectively the new slaves, content to work for nothing but their literal needs. They also helped to fulfill societies sexual needs as well. The fact that mixed mods were fatal had caused our birth ratio to go from around 50%-50% to about 2 males per female. And young men with no prospects tend to be violent young men. Male theriandroids were generally designed with no sex drive except those that were made for that purpose, while females were made very eager to please. All of them were intentionally infertile. This expanded labor force allowed for some incredible feats of construction, including a giant elevator leading out into space, followed by colonies on the moon and Mars. Untalented laborers were completely unable to compete, leading to a greatly expanded welfare state and increased taxes to support them placed on the very corporations who had driven them out of the market. However, talented managers, people with good empathy, insight and people skills, and talented and creative artists were able to thrive in this environment. The theriandroids all thought too much alike (at least like their own respective kinds) and too straightforewardly, leaving plenty of demand for creative, out-of-the-box thinking. The Net had an endless hunger for new and original entertainment, especially to distract the unemployed from the meaninglessness of their real lives, and non-technical artists quickly learned how to collaborate with their own theriandroid workers to create the technical implementations of their grand artistic visions. As time marched on for the hundred years since the theriandroids came to market, they have not only gotten better in a technical sense, but also much, much cheaper. Anyone with a job can easily afford to buy and maintain a few if they like for personal uses, and even the unemployed usually manage to get a used one to help around the house (mostly older-generation bioroids, as they can live a lot longer than us. Clones suffer all the ills of old age that we do, and age through our first twenty years of life in the year they spend in the tubes being quick-grown and brain-formatted).