Primary Setting: Commonwealth City
Current Year: 2187 AD
By the early 21st century, humanity had already crossed several irreversible thresholds:
Genetic engineering was viable
Cybernetic augmentation was routine
Cosmetic body modification was socially accepted
Identity was increasingly self-defined rather than biologically fixed
What hadn’t changed yet was a deeper assumption:
That “human” still meant one acceptable body plan.
That assumption would not survive the next century.
The earliest anthromorphs appeared before the Second American Civil War, and for reasons that had little to do with ideology.
Therapeutic Uplift Programs
Animal neural structures were studied and selectively uplifted for research, companionship, and ecological modeling. Early failures were numerous. A few successes proved sapience was transferable.
Adaptive Genetic Engineering
As climate stress intensified, some populations experimented with non-human traits—fur for insulation, altered respiration, enhanced senses. These were initially partial and utilitarian.
Post-Human Cosmetic Extremes
Late-stage body modification culture blurred the line between aesthetic choice and biological commitment.
At this stage, anthromorphs were rare, controversial, and legally ambiguous.
They were not yet a people.
The Second American Civil War and the Third World War changed everything.
Medical triage favored viability over purity
Genetic and cybernetic interventions were used aggressively
Ethical oversight collapsed alongside state authority
In this chaos:
Some uplifted beings proved fully sapient
Some hybridized humans survived conditions baseline humans could not
Some experimental lineages reproduced successfully
Anthromorphs ceased being curiosities.
They became survivors.
As mainland systems failed, the offshore Platform that would become Commonwealth City began accepting refugees without rigid morphological criteria.
Early anthromorph populations arrived:
As workers
As families
As undocumented survivors of abandoned programs
The Platform’s governing bodies faced a practical question:
If someone can think, consent, and contribute—
on what grounds do we exclude them?
No convincing answer emerged.
The Unowned Charter did not explicitly mention anthromorphs.
It didn’t need to.
When personhood was defined by sapience and consent, morphology became irrelevant overnight.
Anthromorphs gained:
Full civic status
Equal access to survival systems
Protection from classification as property, experiment, or asset
This was not a moral victory.
It was an administrative inevitability.
Once survival systems stopped asking what someone was, the question stopped mattering.
Normalization did not happen through celebration.
It happened through boring adaptation.
Civic interfaces adjusted
Public spaces became body-agnostic
Fashion, cyberware, and tools diversified
Education stopped framing anthromorphs as special cases
Soft discrimination persisted:
“Efficiency concerns”
“Maintenance compatibility”
“Non-standard ergonomics”
But these arguments lost force as anthromorphs became:
Engineers
Artists
Technicians
Council members
Maintenance leads
Cultural anchors
Visibility turned novelty into familiarity.
By the mid-22nd century:
Anthromorph lineages were multi-generational
Identity became cultural, not experimental
Morphology stopped being remarkable
Children grew up seeing anthromorphs as:
Teachers
Medics
Neighbors
Officials
At that point, normalization was complete.
Not because prejudice vanished—but because memory moved on.
Anthromorph populations did not concentrate in Commonwealth City by accident.
They stayed because the City:
Did not demand assimilation
Did not fetishize difference
Did not restrict survival based on body plan
Did not require justification for existence
Elsewhere, anthromorphs were tolerated.
Here, they were ordinary.
Anthromorphs did not replace humanity.
They expanded it.
They are not symbols of decadence, transgression, or novelty.
They are the result of a simple truth revealed under pressure:
When survival stops being conditional,
the definition of “person” finally has room to grow.
And once that happens,
there is no going back.