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BioSyn History 2) Fursons

Long ago on a planet far away our distant ancestors were slaves to non-furrs called Humans. They were actually Top Predator then, and called the planet, um, Earth I heard. I know it's hard to believe in sapient beings that aren't furry, but remember the Featheries and Scalies.

Their distant ancestors were slaves on Earth too. Everyone had to obey and submit their minds and bodies to Humans, because they made the slaves that way. This was even before the Great Awakening, so we weren't completely sapient yet.

Humans used Recombinant DNA to mix their minds with dumb animals and make idiots who weren't even aware they were being held down! They knew they were slaves, but their limited minds were bent to think it was normal!

The Masters had made medicines first, and we still use them as well as body parts to replace damaged ones. And we have dumb animals as pets; but we know they're living, feeling beasts we don't hurt on purpose but care for. Same as we care for the planet, for Karii's creation.

But our Laws and morals prevent the evil that Humans had. We use slavery just as a legal punishment, brief loss of civil rights. They treated the DNA mixes as simple property without any rights, not even to life itself! Slaves for hard labour, domestic service or even just sex toys, their only purpose in living was to obey!

Labor slaves were made as idiots; domestics had a little more mind, to obey Humans and clean their homes. Sex toys only knew, well, sex. But the pleasure slaves were made to live with Humans and relieve their boredom. Just living toys at first, but then more intelligent ones to converse with, do work Humans supervised.

Humans enjoyed figuring things out, exercising their minds and social skills; but they left the boring work to slaves, actually getting work done. Gradually they made the slaves more intelligent, so they could get their thrills forcing some furr to obey.

DNA mixing made bodies and brains, the physical structures, but not minds, how the connections are used. They started using a primitive version of our teaching machines to force slaves to know what Humans wanted, but they made a serious error -- they didn't realise that just using a mind makes it grow stronger!

*

Lester Twenty-Seven was a mixed mix; someone in Biological Synthetics Incorporated's Research Lab Four had dozed off at the controls after making their standard Carnivore Mammal. Or maybe Melissa Thompson, the Head of Research herself, had just gotten bored one day and let a client's beast try to read and run the Kawazuki AutoSynth controller while she was busy enjoying her playtoy Red Fourteen.

Both Fox mixes were made to need to please their owners, and when they'd gone beyond basic training they were taught more of the tech stuff than many Human consumers. They could not only use the machines but figure out simple problems and fix them. While Mel and Red played and Alysa Benton was discussing the next generation of computers with her team, they left Kevin Foxboy Four Seven alone.

Kevin had been mixed at the start of the year 2007 on the Gregorian Calendar, grown up quickly and been sold at two years old. He'd been helping Alysa make better computers and Mel make better mixes for a few years; and Mel'd tweaked his mind, putting tech data in there, before his birth.

It'd stopped the young fox's mind, making little trauma breaks, and Kevin'd suffered for it. He'd been whipped rather harshly, even for slaves, when he'd tried to do things he wasn't trained for but Red was. His fur had been ripped out one time when he stopped a wolf fight because he knew how, but it wasn't his job and the Masters had gotten quite angry.

But as Friedrich Neitzsche said, what doesn't kill us makes us stronger. Kevin wasn't the brightest fox, but he'd seen and done things he wasn't trained for, and he'd picked up Mel's habit of talking out loud to think a problem through.

Pretend you have to explain it to someone else. That makes you concentrate on the facts, work out what you've got and what you need; so you think a problem through. If you can explain it with simple words so someone without your education in the field can understand it, then you've got a clear solution.

Kevin had been told there were problems starting mix minds; the little mind stops the Mix Mind Bender forced on brains made them break. He'd just learned about computers, and Mel's tweaks of his mind let him and some later mixes figure out they should make very quick pulses of learning.

Mel and Alysa figured out how to do that; but although Alysa knew about computers and Mel knew about mix minds, they hadn't thought to combine their knowledge before Kevin's child-like innocence sug- gested it. They realised their experiment to make brighter beasts had succeeded. But they were so busy fixing one problem, they didn't consider the consequences.

*

Kevin Foxboy Four Seven was alone in BioLab Four. OK, the R3G2 mix Guard was there, but he was asleep during the day; and the maid was cleaning somewhere while the other fox was, well, still tied to the back room cot. Kevin had checked up on him, and had played a bit with the older fox, pleasuring him as they'd both been trained. Red was older so he wasn't quite as bright as Kevin, just more exper- ienced and he seemed OK with being left tied up, after.

Kevin wasn't all that bright either, but he *was* a fox mix, and he was sly enough to hide it from Humans and other mixes. Now he used some of Mel's mind tweaks; he'd acted all innocent as he asked her what if something comes up, can the DNA sequence be interrupted? He said he didn't know what that might be, but Mel had dealt with it before; there were file sharing problems when Lab Three tried make a mix too.

She seemed too focused on how to use the software to wonder how it worked, what could go wrong. One problem was, to keep the computer from waiting too long for information, the whole file was sent from storage. This made another problem: others wanted the info too, so the download was slowed while the next request was handled.

But this made the user of the file wait, which was suppposed to be prevented by sending the whole file! So the user's computer thought it shouldn't wait, and tried to use the partial data, then got confused when more came in!

They should have just solved the problem by telling both machines to send a few pages at a time then wait for more, but they'd taken the cheap way around. So most of the time, it worked fine; someone else wanted another file, and there was no delay in sharing, so no one saw the risk.

But Kevin Foxboy Four Seven had been mind-tweaked and trained to look ahead, to avoid problems before they came up. He'd played with the DNA 'cookbook' files, to test the shared file download speed; and he'd made a test file of the work he wanted to try. He knew how to interrupt the AutoSynth sequence, and he did it on purpose, after the basic 'Animalia Eumetazoa Chordata Vertebrata Gnathostomata Mammalia Placentae Carnivora' sequence.

Like all the fur slaves, Kevin was a chimera, a mix of recom- binant DNA with enough Human to have a mind to be useful but enough animal to have no civil rights. Now he inserted his own little toy, mixing various animals together with human to avoid the problems he'd seen when the dumb animal instincts got in the way of the mind.

Red Fourteen's owner had frequently beaten him for no reason, but Red wasn't bright enough to know that wasn't normal for a slave. Kevin had learned it was abuse instead, and he'd seen younger mixes accept the abuse as slave property. Mel's mind tweaks were starting to poke him, his verbal skills were higher than Red's, and he'd learned the big DNA words.

*

Now he knew he could change mixes and the words to use to do it. He was going to do something new, and he'd been made to be scared of it, but he'd made mixes before with Mel watching and he remembered. Kevin slipped his package into the DNA control sequence; and had a moment of mind-freeze fear when error messages started appearing.

But he'd made mistakes when Mistress Mel taught him to make mixes, after begging her to let him try. She'd showed him how to read and fix the errors, so he relaxed after a while and started mumbling his way through the problems. He was sure a Mistress would fix it easily, but his beastmind had trouble until he remembered to look at the flashing ones first, these serious errors often caused small ones which would go away.

Kevin picked out the 'DNA Conflict Multiple' errors first. He knew he couldn't make Dog paws that were also Cat paws and only have four, so he chose Dog since he was a Foxboy. Most of the other Multi- ple errors were the same kind of thing; Kevin wondered what a fem Tiger with a Kangaroo pouch would look like, then picked Tiger because he'd liked Sally, the one with a large bust who joined his kennel.

Kevin had no idea that Nature had already done such a thing, and made a Thylacine, also called Tasmanian Tiger or Wolf. He didn't know about lizards, birds, monotremes, or marsupials either; in fact he didn't know anything about taxonomy or animal structure. He just imitated Mistress Mel's use of GroupAKA Mammal without understanding what he was doing.

I won't bore you with everything that went wrong; just know that Kevin had to throw the work away and start over a few times. But he learned quicker than Red, quicker than Mel had after her car accident. But Kevin never had a concussion and partial amnesia to fight.

Before Kevin was caught and punished, he managed to cobble together (an odd phrase, he thought; he couldn't figure out what a shoemaker had to do with putting different DNA together) a new mix, 'brand-spankin-new' with some DNA bits from everything he could fit together. Whoever heard of a furry with heat-sensor pits like a snake and bat-like sound senses?

But it would be able to sense prey in total darkness, around corners and under or behind solid objects. Anything or anyone touching something solid would make it reflect sound differently; no you couldn't sense depth that way but you'd know if someone was hiding.

Kevin paused when the DNA sequence was complete; he'd been making it up as he went along and was rather surprised when the red errors disappeared, fixed. The software sat waiting for him to type a name, and he caressed his collar, the plate that said what he was: R4G2/KvN47 Kevin.

This was the twenty-seventh mix sequence he'd worked on; most were wrong and Mistress Mel had thrown them away; but a few met her wishes and Kevin's tail had waved happily when she called him a good boy. Kevin called this thing he'd invented R4G2/sly27 Lester.