Blessed Are The Meek
How will it all end? Aliens? The self destructive nature of man? Spiders? Women? Spider-women? Why, furries of course.
The year is 2157. Humanity's ever expanding need for resources and livable space has finally culminated in its greatest achievement to date: the establishment of the first sustainable colony on the Moon. But this achievement came too late for some; two decades after the last animals were hunted to extinction and their preservations reconditioned in order to first make more room for crops, and then once synthetic food was created the fields were plowed to build high rises. The old cities quickly became massive slums as those who can afford it, flee to the off world paradise.
Soon longing for the lost companions that once inhabited the Earth swept over large portions of the populace. Too late, however, as even though many species DNA had been stored with the hopes of cloning them later, the environments that they would be introduced to would certainly lead to a swift death. Still, both the off worlders and those left behind continued to clamor for these quickly fading memories they so dearly clung to. Fearing wide spread rioting, the United Earth People's Coalition quickly started to research a solution.
The solution came rather quickly in the form of a young girl, given to the UEPC as a program meant to slow overpopulation. The girl, designated F-NA17019/01, from the moment she was delivered was destined for a life as a test subject. This girl, however, was one of the first to be subjected to the solution prepared for this issue; she was injected with the DNA of an animal long extinct in the hopes of creating a hybrid of the two. It is hoped that if this procedure is successful, it will be advanced to adult subjects. If all goes well, the UEPC hoped to solve the problem of how to have animals live in a world built for the wellbeing of humans.
The solution does not work as expected. The infusion of animal DNA into a developing body killed eighty-seven percent of the ten-thousand children before age five. Of the remaining thirteen percent, eleven percent developed grotesque mutations instead of the intended, quaint hybrid. At age five all who show these mutations are systematically slaughtered. Under two-hundred lived to age thirteen. Many became lab experiments, killed in the name of science in order to complete other experiments. Ten are allowed to live as catalog examples, hidden in an underground complex.
In time the issue of being able to have pets and experience the joy of the hunt or the responsibility of conservation subsided, soothed by the ability to have a holographic animal. Soon the fact that the creatures presented in the flickering blue projection were once living, breathing animals like those that watched them faded into the deepest recess of the human mind. But it never truly vanished.
The year is 2175, eighteen years after the colonization of the moon, and thirty-eight after the extinction of the last non-human life form on Earth. The problems that faced the original terrestrial body now face the lunar one as well. The inability for the UEPC to similarly colonize Mars led to the riots and protests that were always feared. One such protest occurred at a research facility, culminating with the storming of the compound. Of the one-thousand, three-hundred and seventy-two staff present, all are killed with whatever tools are available to the mob. Many of the experiments are also destroyed or killed. Of the ten remaining subjects of the DNA fusion experiment, nine are killed, seen as unnatural abominations.
Something about the last one strikes the beast that stumbled upon her. It was F-NA17019/01, now grown, but hardly recognizable. She was one of the few successful cases, having met what the researchers had intended when they merged her DNA with that of the red fox's an infant. Here she sat, curled into the fetal position, tail clutched closely to her body, in one of the many alcoves of the center.
She is discovered by an aging man, in his late forties, who, instead of an unnatural atrocity, saw a victim of the same unjust system he had decided to fight against. What prompted this sudden compassion is a unknowable, whether it be the spurring of some juvenile memory of when he saw live animals, the natural human propensity to aid a fellow humanoid in need, or the buxom figure just barely visible behind the fluff of the tail she clung to; regardless she is carried outside the facility, where she was presented with natural sunlight for the first time in over seventeen years.
As she exited the facility she was temporarily blinded by the sunlight; gagged by the heavily polluted air; momentarily deaf at the roaring of the crowd; and her fur withdrew at every heavy touch of the man handling her. For all that she had dreamt of the outside, she was severely disappointed; it is more akin to the images of hell she was taught than the images of the world presented to her. Having lived the entirety of her life with the few beings similar to herself-beings now dead-she assumed that all other creatures inhabiting the pristine landscapes presented to her would be like her fellow companions. What greeted her instead was hundreds of strange beasts with only the odd tuff of fur on their head, wearing odd garments over their bare flesh.
The herd gradually parted as the man carried her to a slight hill. He called in some strange tongue to his comrades that the girl had never heard before, as he frantically began to gesture and motion from the girl to the building. Gradually the crowd stopped and focused on the man and girl on the hill. Hushed whispers found their way to those in the back who could not see the mysterious figure, but always is she described as something mystical, something innocent from the wrongs committed around her, something that deserved their protection. With awe struck eyes the crowd's collective vision held the girl with wonder.
The girl quickly came to stand for everything the people viewed as wrong with the UEPC: selfishness, pride, arrogance, among countless other faults no one has the time to name. She was presented as one of the atrocities conducted by the UEPC at every major meeting between the loyalists and dissidents. It was in large part to her presence on dissident propaganda that public opinion quickly turned against the planetary government, painted as the innocent victim of inhumane experimentation.
When the government was toppled, praise was heaped upon the brave men and women who dared to make the sacrifices necessary to end the exploitive rule. Two novel holidays are recognized by the world's population: Liberation Day, in memory of all those who fought against the UEPC; and Storm Day, to especially remember those who valiantly entered the primary research facility and revealed the atrocities that the UEPC had done. The girl was quietly pushed out of the conscious memory of those who rejoiced at their liberation. But she never completely disappeared.
The year is 2179. Mankind is plunged into complete anarchy at the loss of the sole world governing body. The malfunction of air recycling systems quickly caused the lunar colony, largely exempt from the chaos thus far, to experience the largest disaster mankind has seen. The situation on the planet was not much better, as lawlessness forced many to fend for their own livelihood.
Quickly there arose numerous tribes and factions that vied for positions of power and dwindling resources. The unending expanses of urban tenements are transformed seemingly overnight into warzones as conflict broke out between rival packs.
On the outskirts of one of these battle-zones the girl is laid out at the end of an ally, her fur caked in the dirt and grime of the metropolitan landscape. She had subsided on the scraps of the enormous behemoth thus far, always living on the edge of one skirmish or another. She has built a shelter from scrap materials scavenged from the countless refuse piles, a skill learned after one too many nights exposed to the cold.
She had chosen this location not only for its distance from the conflict, but also for the privacy it afforded her, as few wandered down the dead end ally. During the night the conflict spread to the block located across the street from the ally she had resettled, which forced one family to abandon their apartment and move into the safety of ally. In the darkness so well concealed was the shelter that the girl saw them long before they saw her. As she watched them, she was suddenly stricken with a deep sense of helping those in front of her, so desperately in need.
After she had crawled out from her temporary home, the girl extended the meager supply of food that she had accumulated to the strangers. However, instead of accepting the gift, the male of the family suddenly jumped between his mate and the girl, while his offspring sneered from behind the protective wall suddenly erected in front of them. Shocked, the girl did not attempt to argue; rather she left the food on the cold ground and walked away, again away from the sounds of conflict. The memory of the quarrel soon blended into the collective memory of all the others the girl has witnessed, but the sound of blind hatred never left her.
The year is 2188. Only the strongest of the tribes survived the brutality of the initial months. They controlled vast swaths of the Earth, as they horded resources and searched for UEPC experiments. Still they collided with each other, sometimes over a disputed claim for supplies, sometimes for access to a discovered research facility, sometimes for no reason at all. It is during one such war that one of the packs richest in technology is threatened by attack on all sides. As the noose tightened around the behemoth, its leaders grew more and more desperate. Eventually they turned to the last artifact they possessed: a simple vile of a green gas. In desperation at the final battle, one of the pack's leaders threw the vile onto the oncoming besiegers.
At first nothing happened. This pack was eliminated, soon another rose to take its place. But in the months that followed, a sickness began within the barracks of those that stormed the facility. Slowly it spread in the beginning, only a handful infected at a time. But always the number grew, until the group was too weak to defend itself, eventually being pounced on by scavengers nearby, who then contracted the disease. Like a cancer the disease spread silently to all corners of the globe, every human invariably infected who contacted it. The disease could linger for months, sometimes years before the symptoms became obvious; but always they appeared. The people slowly weakened, until they were but pale imitations of what they once were, unable to stand and see what they once saw. Eventually they would die a death no better than a wounded beast would have experienced over a hundred years ago.
Only one being survived this epidemic. The girl, due to the joint nature of her DNA, had been rendered immune to the disease, which had been designed with a very specific beast in mind. As she sat amongst the decayed buildings, she curled into the fetal position, tail hugged close. Eventually she turned her head into the cold wind that whistled amid the silence and looked out over the expanse of land, and wept; for though humanity had vanished from the Earth, their legacy would never fully depart.