Across the Schism, Intro
#2 of Across the Schism
This is my first furry story, which I hope to incorporate some of the staples of works like Firefly and Battlestar Galactica into. In other words, space travel (duh), love, theological debate, and plenty of fighting, both in space and planet side. Enjoy!
To tell you how it feels to be beaten down, when the sheer mass of bodies piles on top of you is impossible. There is no way to convey what it feels like to be buried under the angry mob, to have them kicking, hitting, beating you all they can, calling you names, to have the guards watch the whole thing, knowing they secretly want to join in, but seem to be having as much fun watching you have the shit beaten out of you. They only step in once you try to fight back, when the claws come out and you eviscerate someone, then they pull out their stunguns and load you up with so much electricity that it isn't until three days later that the sky isn't purple anymore...they torment you, to them, you're no more than the cats they tormented in their youths, the cats they hit with sticks when they clawed back.
Welcome to my life. Pretty awful, eh?
In the 2408, humanity was pretty much still a mess. Always has been, always will be. Political corruption, corporate greed, crime, corrupt law inforcement (in fact, pretty much corrupt everything)...you had to wonder at what point God just said to mankind, "screw you" and stuck them into his major-f-ups folder.
One of the most bizarre things though, was self modification. I'm not talking simple piercings, tattoos, or enhancement surgery here, I'm talking full-fledged changing of skin color (there's nothing like the first time you see someone with green skin), people growing tails and shit, and then...
It all started with the creation of a drug called Dreltaform. Dreltaform would make the body into sort of clay that, with the right chemical imprint, could be made to develop in a desired way. Want a long nose? No problem. Blue skin, pink hair? Screw the dye, all you need to do wis go to any sort of department store, buy the right pills, then just pop 'em. Tails, horns, claws? Slightly more difficult...
So, anyway, Dr. Rubert Augustus, the guy who made the stuff, is raking in millions, and don't even get me started on Lawrence Elbert, the President of EPEP (Elbert Physical Enhancement Products, pronounced E-pep). Then, almost two decades later, in 2425, they came out with the next big thing: FEV, forced evolution vector.
The premise was simple: you bought two syringes: one full of FEV, the other with the desired evolutionary target. You injected yourself with the first syringe, waited at least a minute, then inject the other...and then changed.
FEV, would, over the space of about a month, turn you into into a humanoid image of an animal of your choice. First you would grow fur all over, then the tail would pop out, then your teeth would start going, to be replaced by fangs. Next came the painful part, from what I've heard, when your head starts changing shape, when your face starts elongating, changing...
I think that Elbert, and the rest of EPEP as well, thought it was going to be a big hit. After all, who wouldn't want to look like a fox, or a bear, or a wolf? It wasn't all that different from the weird fashion trends that were already there, and hey, it looked pretty damn sexy, most of the time. All of the "anthros", or "furries", were pretty much accepted as another sub-species in the great freak-show that was the human race. EPEP was satisfied. They had yet another success.
They were wrong.
About two months after FEV kits first went commercial, the reports started cropping up. FEV, it seemed, didn't just evolve the body - it evolved the mind as well.
Anthros would wind up with intense prey and sex drives, and all of these weird instincts that went with their chosen animal. Sometimes it would just be weird stuff, like sniffing strangers or licking to show affection, but then there was that poor tiger who put a bullet to his head after he accidently put his daughter in the hospital, just because he got a bit carried away while they were roughhousing. People started getting nervous, and the press, realizing that people wanted stories showing the furs as unstable and dangerous, immediately started over reacting to every thing involving anthros.
Then came the uproar over inter-species relationships. You see, the children of anthro and human parents are almost always anthros, and, after about five generations of this, they become "pure strain", in other words, all traces of human DNA are gone from them, the two species are no longer genetically compatible, and a new species is pretty much born. It wasn't long before there were species like Homo Vulpes, Homo Lupus, Homo Leonis, and so on.
It wasn't long before people realized that, if someone had a relationship with a pure strain individual, then techinically it was cross species love. Now, for some reason, you humans have a big problem with your genitals going anywhere near the genitals of something non-human. I'll never quite get it, but, anyway, people started freaking out, and we basically had segregation all over again.
Furries were thought of as less than human, sometimes less than animals, and so they wound up in crappy schools that gave them some education, but mostly a message reminding them of their place at the bottom. They mostly had jobs that involved labor, and there were a lot of factory workers and miners. There was gang violence, too, between furs and humans, in places like Los Angeles that were already pretty nasty.
Yet, as if all groups of oppressed individuals, the furs finally got sick of it, and decided it was time to fight back, and suddenly, the humans had a civil rights movement to deal with.
It didn't go well. You see, while we may have had numbers (we bred like rabbits, in fact, some of us actually were rabbits), what we didn't have was a great leader, a leader like Ghandai or Martin Luther King, someone who could help us do it without violence.
Almost immediately, war broke out. People were shooting each other in the streets, no one knew who to trust...then came the nukes...then the Schism.
I remember what happened. I was nine years old. Dad was playing baseball with me. Mom was inside, making cookies with my little sister. It was a perfect fall day in our little town in Colorado, away from the war...also the little town, where, as it turned out, there was a massive fur hideout.
From the minute the air raid sirens went off, I knew I had stepped into a nightmare. Almost immediately, we saw them on the horizon, v-formation: the Mark-7 ASB Hummingbirds.
They were bulky, ugly things, and from here, you could see the huge pods that I knew contained enough firebombs to level the whole town, ten times over.
Dad almost dropped the bat.
"No...not here. Not now...no, please God, no..."
The firebombs rained down, coating the town in an inferno. One hit the house, and I remember how it caught ablaze, the screams of my mother and sister as it burnt readily from the chemically assisted fire, then how they were silenced as another bomb dropped on it, blowing the structure apart. My father howled with grief and rage, and I just clung onto his waist, disoriented, hardly aware of what was going on.
Then, they came...in gasmasks and fully body armor, carrying machine guns. I remember how they saw me, pointed, ran over, reaching for me.
Dad snarled with rage, clobbering one with the baseball bat, hitting him so hard it left dents in the aluminum of the makeshift weapon. He was almost on the next one when the machine guns tore him apart, sending him crashing to the ground. I cried out, ran to him, knelt over him, sobbing into his fur. They just laughed, and dragged me off of him, holding me by the scruff of the neck, dragging me along with them.
As my tears flowed freely, dampening my fur, I reached out, and grabbed from around dad's neck the golden cross that had been given to him by his father, who had recieved it from my great grandfather, and so on.
It was all a blur from there. All I remember was being loaded onto a ship with other children, all anthros, and then the nukes coming down.
It was unknown who got the last laugh: the humans, who had stolen the children of the furs, or the furries, who hacked into the orbital weapons platforms and then rained down nuclear wrath upon the earth. I don't know. I'm twenty-eight, and I still don't. All we know is that when the "Schism" happened, the humans flew off into space on way, the furs another.
And here, I am, with nought but the cross...here, in the great Empire of Humanity...
I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I did writing it, and know that there will be more from where that came from.