It started in 1982. By 1987, the White Plague had spread worldwide. Men got sick. Some died. Women, on the other hand, were dying in droves.
Attempts to save the female populace were frantic. Some were locked away in quarantine, to never emerge outside their homes again. Women's rights took a nosedive.
It had been obvious enough in 1983 that cloning technology was being pushed through, and a breakthrough occurred in 1985. Several young girls proved to be VERY clonable, and with a little genesplice - the clones were all disease resistant. The technology to accelerate maturation didn't occur until 1989, and even then only would accelerate to a point somewhere between 14 and 16 biological years.
There were moral and ethical questions bandied about. If these WERE completely human beings, then they couldn't be mass produced. They couldn't be essentially sold off to the highest bidder. Purchasing them was quite improper. Using them as slaves or sextoys was not acceptable either.
If they were PRODUCTS, then they could save the human race from dying off. The female half of the human race could be reborn. They would have no rights or responsibilities, and any of the things that could NOT be done with them as fully recognized human beings then COULD be done.
Some surviving women didn't clone well, but had survived and weren't sterile. Some merely didn't produce quite as perfect a copy or their copies had some common flaw.
One of these, a woman named Nodoka Saotome, came up with a solution during her third pregnancy. Just as a temporary solution, she suggested a status similar to Pets. The various splices had the neogirls showing some nonhuman traits or abilities anyway. There were, in most civilized countries, laws to protect and give some recognition to pets. Nobody wanted to see Koreans barbequing some girl in a family picnic, so some internationally recognized laws and regulations regarding these neogirls would be in the best interest of the pets and the society at large.
Among the payments and recognition she obtained for this concept, she ended up with copies of all the major neogirl types for her son - who was apparently on a training trip with her husband.
Setsuna Meiou covered her face with her hand and said a few nasty things about the perverse nature of the cosmos and the cosmic nature of perversity.
The Makeup transformation had been bungled into things, and that was producing some of the very alterations that was pointed to as a divergence from "baseline" humanity.
Not at all what she would have liked to see.
Now there were smart Ami types, enthusiastic Minako types, friendly Usagi types, tomboyish Rei types, domestic goddess Makoto types, innocent Hotaru types, elegant Michiru types, tough Haruka types, cold Setsuna types.
Waitaminute. COLD?!
Everyone had their favorites, and the overwhelming majority were loved and appreciated by their owners. There were shows and competitions involving neogirls, completely devoted otaku to a specific type, and so on.
It was all so horribly horribly WRONG!
Things were screwed up from Ranma Saotome's point of view as well. Not only did he have a LOT of half-sisters, his mother complying with her civic duty and having a child almost immediately after delivering the last one from 1987 - 1992 and turning out to have ALL daughters, but his mother had been cloned four times successfully so there were little girl versions of HER running around. If that were not enough, he and his father had been tracked down in order to deliver a neogirl "pet" back in 1988 when he'd reached the young age of twelve.
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(Posted Sat, 22 Oct 2005 09:43)
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らんま1/2 © Rumiko Takahashi
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