Then the Tribals had arrived and everything ended up getting tossed out because all of the pre-existing concepts had either not applied or been neatly bypassed. The alien distress broadcasts had been sufficiently powerful that some people had received them on their dentures, and the press had ignored the potential for civilization to collapse into a panicked mob in order to get their rating shares and the story out.
The problem was that the Brookings Report and all those findings HAD been right in some respects. There were areas of panic and mobs uprising and cities being put to the torch by mobs of their own citizens. There were those who accussed their own governments of fabricating the whole thing, of other governments of hoaxing the world for hidden agendas, dark mutterings of American multinational corporations deluding the gullible with fake circuses to distract from what they were really doing, and so on. The Flat Earth Society, a group in Texas who insisted the world was flat and that the whole space exploration thing (much less aliens) were faked - remained convinced that it was all smoke and mirrors. Nor were they the only group or even the largest. As a gynoid would remark decades later, the capacity for human self-deception might not be infinite but it was considerable. Even those claiming to be seeking the truth were often only seeking confirmation of their own pre-existing beliefs.
It took years for things to settle down after the Tribals crashlanded. The arriving ships brought the rest of the race and tales of their homeworld. Just the idea of a world whose ecosystem was in the process of shutting down had incredible repercussions throughout so-called Western Civilization. The news people who toured the world of Pragma brought back images, and as had happened before - pictures carried an impact that merely speaking of it did not.
Pragma was a world orbitting a star only a few dozen lightyears away. Even with the FTL drive that the Tribals had managed to get working - it took two weeks to reach Pragma from Earth. The pictures that were returned showed communities swallowed by desert, flooded coastlines, the devastation of earthquakes and active volcanoes trying to turn the planet itself inside-out. Predictions were that within two centuries, Pragma's habitable zone would consist of a set of islands roughly the size of Hawaii. After that the polluting air would eliminate even that habitat.
Even though the Tribals were seen as attractive, exotic, and friendly - there were those who hated them simply for existing. Some because they were alien, others because they represented change. Others clung to their distrust and expectation of alien invasion like an old and familiar friend.
With over four million Tribals petitioning for sanctuary on Earth, there were many countries and areas which simply said 'no'. They didn't want any aliens at all, thank you. They didn't even like foreigners of terrestrial origin that much.
One nation surprised a few by being fairly insular and slightly xenophobic towards foreign humans but very friendly towards these aliens was Japan. Others pointed out that while Japan didn't accept even longterm non-natives completely, they did have a certain fascination with kawaii - and the Tribals definitely fell into that category. There were other areas more accepting of the refugees, some with wide open spaces like in some areas of the United States, Australia, and (being odd bedfellows in this venture) Peru. These countries developed villages specifically for Tribals, while the greater number of the Tribals simply roamed freely within human society.
The birth of the Nekomimi Kizna in New York, then Wulfdottir Ourinne in Australia, further changed things and brought questions up that would cause fierce debates within the media. If the Tribals could produce children with a human mate, and the child was definitely of the mother's race, then perhaps they weren't quite as alien as one would think.
It was on March 3, 1981 that the Jupiter-bound British Explorer Ship Dickens detected the approach of the gynoid ship. This time around there were very few burnings and only a few mobs running around shouting epithets and demonstrating to eager camera crews how they were not going to accept aliens. As with the Tribals, the Gynoids were more acceptable to the society at large than not.
The Second Computer Revolution began, and the effect was widespread. Already the sliderule had been replaced by the calculator. Now the calculator was replaced by the palm computer and from there to wristcomps.
Ranma and Genma arrived in their new world on March 2, 1988, with Ranma being a precocious five year old who was going to be taught the Nekoken if his father could just find a suitable pit.
Overhead, the Lunar Bases of Goddard (USA), Petrov (USSR), Ichikun (Japan), and Alpha (United Nations) were in various stages of operation and expansion. Two LaGrange Colonies were being constructed. Mars was being colonized and there were research bases and satellites in place around most of the planets.
Kizna, the child prodigy/diva who had proved that Nekomimi and humans could conceive, had disappeared from public view for years. When she showed up at age 15 in 1976, she was a genius mechanic and engineer with a Scottish brogue thicker than a London fog. Other than the accent and lack of a tail, she was the very picture of a Nekomimi Tribal. At the time of the Saotome arrival, she was 27 and had developed the next generation of Contragrav discs so that personal transport was now possible. She had spent years working on drive systems in space and came back with a design that would allow ships of less than the previously required 10-meter size to use Contragrav.
It was also Kizna who set the precedent somehow that starship engineers developed a thick regional accent, with even the gynoids getting into this tradition. It was a little disconcerting to hear a human Japanese engineer using a thick "Texas twang" but most would admit it was a strange world anyway.
Into this strange new world, Genma and Ranma appeared -
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(Posted Sat, 19 Mar 2005 05:29)
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らんま1/2 © Rumiko Takahashi
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