FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

Our story start as most stories do... with war. Ours is a violent people, with conflict reaching all the way back to the stone age. Greed and envy, wrath and intolerance, prejudice and racism, any cause was a just cause for bloodshed. The myriad factions conquered and were conquered until global technology became prevalent, and our world reached an uneasy peace. There was still war, but it was fought in the shadows now. Bullets gave way to veiled threats, bombs replaced by honeyed hatred. People fought, struggled, and died to survive in a world where the only true difference between them was the language they spoke and the place they grew up.

In those days, it was called Earth. Life was hard, but science provided many comforts and advancements, and as the last of the real squabbles gave way to soft disdain, our world entered a kind of golden age. There was still disgust and idiocy and every motivation to go to war, but the people had collectively thrown in the towel; when hundreds of thousands could be killed with the push of a few buttons, murder no longer seemed a feasible way to solve their problems.

Without combat fueling advancement, researchers turned their aims towards more peaceful uses, and great advancements were made in the understanding of our universe. Death of old age was forestalled, almost until it seemed that eternal youth had been achieved. Fully functional prosthetics replaced lost limbs, returning the crippled and the lame to their former lives. An almost complete understanding of medicine and the functions of living organisms eradicated most common diseases, turning sickness into a vague memory. The strands of DNA determining a human's makeup were unraveled for good, and it became possible to permanently alter a person's genes, allowing for true beauty for everyone, personalized to each person. It was a happy time of prosperity... for about fifty years.

Once-crippled cyborgs stepped into the workforce, and a mechanical arm never grew tired. Youth that lasted to the age of sixty added to the already swelled workforce. Without sickness and plague, less workers were needed. With a medical or mechanical solution to almost every frailty of the body, the population exploded, growing in leaps and bounds until the farmlands not already covered with cities could not support the entire populace. When technology turned the arduous task of learning a language into a simple night plugged into a machine, the world had grudgingly united under one banner. Now, with overpopulation as an extreme issue, they looked for any reason to discriminate against each other.

And they found one.

When mechanical prosthetics surpassed biological muscles, many people flooded into hospitals and surgery clinics, replacing hands, limbs, eyes, sometimes entire bodies with robotic replacements. These Mechanical Augmentationists, called Mags for short, could work tirelessly and with mechanical perfection. Gleaming steel and shining chrome rippled over mechanical muscles, and they viewed machinery as the one true method of ascension.

Rivaling them, outlandish biological alterations gave way to outright customization, allowing many people to shed a soft, weak human for something more... animalistic. These Genetic Mutations, Gems, sneered at Mag machinery. They were convinced that the purity of flesh should not be tainted by oil and gears, and the two groups viewed each other with hatred. As tension swelled, very few full blooded humans remained; they chose up sides one by one, in accordance with their beliefs, and the world divided was on the precipice of war once again.

The Mags consisted mainly of metal; they needed little food to fuel their biological components. They were more than happy to raze what little remained of the planet's surface to build sprawling cities, subsiding entirely on scientifically manufactured nutrient. Such an act was unthinkable to the Gems, who wished to destroy some of the less needed machinations to make room for more farmland and wilderness. Tension boiled over into street muggings and maulings, petty fighting that threatened escalating into true war. It seem all hope was lost... until a long range probe discovered something they had been searching after for centuries. Using new warp technology to plot the vast reaches of space, a far off planet in a distant galaxy was discovered to have life. Real flora and fauna, plants and animals thriving in an untamed wilderness that seemed to lack sentient life. After much debate, the leaders of the Gem and Mag parties made a joint proclamation.

"In order to preserve peace on this world, some of us must depart it. We primal beasts and twisted machines cannot happily share the same soil, this world cannot support two lifestyles so different. Our divided peoples shall join together once more to build a ship... a massive construction utilizing the best of both sciences. This ship will embark on a journey through the stars to settle this new world. All that remains is to decide which of us will go."

The last part was more formality than anything. Earth was almost completely covered with metropolitan cities, and this new world was filled with vivid jungles and harsh deserts, wide oceans and deep roots. A popular vote was put before the people, with an almost unanimous vote by all citizens that the Gems should leave to start anew. They would happily change their bodies to suit a new ecosystem, and they wanted only to leave the beautiful wilderness untouched.

The Ark was named from the tales of old, a massive vessel capable of transferring an entire people, an entire way of life safely within its hull. It was built in space, constructed from minerals mined from the entire solar system, and the collective people spared no expense to ensure that the journey could be made in relative comfort. After a century of labor and ever present tension, the first of the ferries left Earth, filled with pilgrims bound for the Ark.

No man, no woman, no child was left behind. Every Gem packed what they could and abandoned the rest, bound for a new beginning. Filled with bright eyes and full hearts, the ship pressed forwards, clearing the solar system and beginning a journey that would last lifetimes.

We almost immediately abandoned the old system of time. We named one day to be sixteen hours, with an hour of eighty minutes and a minute of eighty seconds. We watched with interest as the drone circled the planet from orbit, relaying video of the surface we would eventually call home. The new world lacked a cycle of seasons; the axis was parallel to its orbit, providing a stable climate year round, which we'd become accustomed to on the stable climate of the Ark's interior. We sailed the endless star oceans fearlessly, knowing that anything we faced ahead would be better than the genocide of certain war that we left behind.

That was generations ago. None old enough to remember Earth still live, and we marked our final descent with them in mind. Now we sit idle in the cold reaches of space, far enough from our yet-unnamed home with trepidation. We have video of the surface, and we can see the bright, blue and green orb from our windows, but... we don't know what's down there. The air might be caustic to our flesh. The fruit might be poison to our bodies. We needed to explore, to discover. The mass mutation hall was primed; ready to change our forms to suit the new world... all we needed to know was what changes needed to be made.

A ship the size of a small city was sent down to orbit, to study the new world. We could have watched and learned from afar, relying on machines to tell us what we needed... but that's what a filthy Mag would have done. We were Gems, and we were proud of it, so it was decided that we would be studying them a little more... first hand. It was decided that one of our own would be mutated into an animal from the surface and sent down to explore and record. A spinal tap would record everything he or she experienced, hopefully providing a wealth of data.

My name is Kenneth Crashaw. I'm the lucky man who gets to have his genes scrambled like an egg, all for the sake of science. I'm not the quickest thinker, nor the best studied. I'm not the fastest runner, not the strongest lifter, not the greatest or the best at anything. I had a quiet job as a cashier for a take-out booth in the dining sector of my wing, no real prospects, no real skills. Life was calm and simple for me, sharing a pad with a few friends, and my life seemed to be cemented in casual lower middle class. I had one thing though, the one thing that apparently made me the best person to be the first on the ground. Can you guess it?

Luck.

Out of the billions of us, my name was drawn. A raffle was held for every able bodied and healthy minded man and woman who wished to volunteer. I put my name in. All my friends did. Everyone I knew did. Beneath the crushing weight of all our civilization, I was the singular name to turn out of the pick. Call it luck. Call it fate. Call it divine intervention. However you slice it, once on the ground, luck would matter more than anything else, and they weren't ashamed of stacking the deck. I'm nobody... but not for long. Tonight, I'm Kenny "Crash" Crashaw, but Next week?

Next week, I'll be the first "real" Genetic Mutation. The first Gem to set foot on New Hope. I'll be the scout and vanguard for an entire people. This is my story.

---

So? An entire planet to explore, with a man transformed into a feral animal to explore it. There's going to be multiple chapters/sections, one upload for each different creature he takes the form of. Before that though... would anyone like to guess what kind of alien beast he gets first? The Biomes are Desert, Savannah, Jungle, Forest, Plains, Tundra, Ice fields, Glaciers, Oceans... but we're starting in the plains and forests. A nice, simple biome that I know well.