Hanyo

A hanyo in the Antisense Universe is a human born with Male Hypertoxic Syndrome. It is a Japanese word meaning ‘half demon’ and was first used around 2030 in New Singapore.

Origin and history

See also History of the hanyos.

The first babies infected with Male Hypertoxic Syndrome were born around 2022 in southern Asia, although it is possible that early MHS deaths may have been misdiagnosed so exact dates are difficult to set. Almost immediately, media channels not sponsored by Ramdhun Corporation linked MHS with Dr Pradip Shankar's controversial Humane Choice vaccine. Shankar himself denied any link and instead blamed globetrotter flu for the diease, pointing out that the fahters of many MHS cases were not his patients and had never taken the vaccine. However, these men showed every sign of having come in contact with a very similar pathogen to the Recombinant Adeno-Associated Virus Analogs that Shankar used to create his vaccine. Regardless of etiology, all the men showed a very high proportion of Y-bearing spermatozoa, the diagnostic indication of exposure to Humane Choice, whichc had been developed to rig human reproduction to produce a preponderance of sons.

Babies born with MHS showed extreme skin sensitivity, to the point where being picked up and hugged could cause seizures. They also had extremely hyperactive immune systems and reacted with anaphylactic shock to baby formula, the emmolient solutions in baby wipes, and even the lanolin in wool. All untreated MHS babies died in terrible agony within days of birth. CEO, Swastik Vaghel, who was a long time client of Shankar's, were extremely unhappy at this turn of events, and the Ramdhun publicity behemoth swung in to action to produce mountains fo data, media and research to show that the cause fo MHS was 'the maternal environment'. They based this argument on the fact that MHS babies were perfectly normal in the womb: the onset of the disease appeared to be triggered by the separation of the placenta.

The 'First Thousand'

See also the First Thousand. Whatever the cause might be, it was clear by 2025 that the world was looking at a major humanitarian crisis, as fully forty percent of male births were infected. Ramdhun changed tack, and Shankar announced to the world that he was going to save these boys. He asked for one thousand of the world's richest and most powerful fathers of MHS boys to send their children to him. 'Give me one year of absolute freedom,' he pleaded with the public. 'I will give your sons back to you.' He set up special wards in the Shnkar Clinics, his worldwide chain of human fertility research facilities. Extreme secrecy was maintained in these wards, and no one could see the babies. The mothers were accommodated in special rooms above the babies' wards, where they were hooked up to breast pumps and had headphones that played their babies' cries back to them, to cause letdown. The milk was triple-filtered to remove antigens and fed to the babies by sprayguns. Part of the reason for the secrecy was Shankar's process, which in the first six months of life was rather shocking. Once the babies were a year old, Shankar allowed families to see them on video feed.

Bogdanov versus Shankar

In early 2026 Lionfist, a corporation based in China and hitherto known mostly for its space programme, announced that it too was pioneering a method of saving MHS babies. Dr Boris Bogdanov, the architect of the Lionfist method, used medically induced coma to prevent the babies from dying, a process he claimed was more humane than Shankar's. Initially there was a great deal of interest in Bogdanov's process, but Shankar and Ramdhun were eventually able to take away his market share.

By 2030 all recorded male births were infected with MHS. The rapidity of spread baffled many observers. Shankar feverishly wrote papers to muddy the issue, stating that the disease should actually be named Maternal Hypertoxic Syndrome, but a group called the Gaia Collective based in Malaysia countered his research with their own findings. They claimed that contrary to popular belief, the Y chromosome did not code for maleness: it was too small and too simple to do that. Instead, it acted like a circuit breaker, rerouting the default female development of a child through the male pathway, turning on a number of chromosomes like stations on a chord loop of a railway line. MHS had broken this switching system. Shankar did not deny this but stated that MHS boys were actually better than normal ones. At four months, the babies no longer screamed when their butts were wiped, and showed some willingness to gingerly touch themselves, leading Shankar to think that possibly the hyperactive immune system was attacking the nerves. At six months, Shankar decided to take the wires out and let the babies crawl around their clean rooms. However, the allergies were still a problem. Mothers were now allowed to view their babies, and the world exploded with jubilation and relief.

For the next seven years, the world watched the babies grow, learn to walk by holding robot hands and speak. They caught on quickly and soon learned to control a computer screen with gestures. Shankar gave the world detailed press releases about their education. He showed the boys videos of the outside world, taught them to play games and gave them treadmills to exercise on. By age four they could do simple arithmetic, and Shankar claimed they were all growing into supergeniuses. Privately he was worried. The boys were getting bored, and banging their heads to enjoy the pain. He gave them more and more engrossing video games to stop this trend.

In 2032 Shankar announced he was ready to send the First Thousand home. Their skin sensitivity was now close to normal, and their allergies were under control. By now his clinics had wards of MHS babies all over the world, and Ramdhun had become the richest corporation on the planet.

The Nitin Wilson case

Shankar warned the parents of the First Thousand that there would be some adjustment issues at first. The boys had grown up withut human contact and would have to be carefully introduced to it. He particularly warned mothers never to hug their children, and recommended that parental care should be limited to feeding only. Each boy came home with his own educational tablet with special content developed for him personally. They had no need to go to school, Shankar insisted. Some parents, however, afraid that their sons would not integrate with their peers or learn social skills without school exposure, sent them anyway.

Problems arose immediately. While the MHS boys had been in the hospital, their sisters and neighbours had been growing up without boys to play with. Shankar could tell the parents to leave his kids alone, but he couldn't get other kids, whether they were girls or normal boys, to do it. Kids of both genders reacted badly to hanyos, as they now became known in popular parlance, and there were several cases of bullying of MHS boys on social media and in real life. Their complete lack of empathy and their persistent belief that they could snap their fingers and make the 'pictures' disappear, as one MHS boy said about his sister. However, some girls and gay boys were powerfully attracted to MHS boys' air of mystery and isolation, and several fan groups were formed on social media. Randhum announced it was sponsoring a new yaoi anime series, Child of Darkness, featuring an MHS hero.

Also, Shankar was hiding a secret: some of the boys had lower than normal skin sensitivity, and the ability to sense hallow pain pain was dropping in all of them, although deep muscle sene seemed unaffected. Almost immediately there was a rash of complaints of harassment, both of and by the boys. Shankar would go on the Potent News Network, Ramdhun's main publicity arm, almost every day to appeal to families to keep in mind the special needs of their MHS sons. HIs warnings had no effect, and in 2033 Nitin Wilson, aged eight, stabbed his mother with a ceremonial kris when she tried to call him away from his video game and make him eat. Shankar exploded with outrage, fumlinated that 'unskilled labour' could not bring up 'his boys'. He announced that he was setting up the Ramdhun Institute for Boys, where MHS children would be properly trained and socialised by professionals. Ramdhun announced what Croctiger, a comedy duo well known to the Dark Web, called the 'world's biggest product recall'. Shankar gave all MHS children treated by him free admission to the new school.

The Ramdhun Institute for Boys

See also the Ramdhun Institute for Boys.

These schools were set up under the aegis of the Shankar Clinics so that MHS boys could continue to receive specialist medical attention in 2034. Shankar claimed 'his' boys were better off here: their intelligence was consistently higher than normal and they were showing a strong competitive urge when not threatened by 'normalcy'. He harped on these two findings at every press conference. He also got Ramdhun to ban the word 'hanyo' within its territory on the ground that it was 'hate speech'. He recommended the use of the word 'achiever' to refer to them instead.

As the boys grew, their skins deadened to the point where they felt almost nothing by their late teens. It was hoped that, once they reached adulthood and their health issued had been adequately handled, the boys might have an easier time entering society. However, in places less well equipped to handle the hanyos, there was an almost warlike situation where the hanyos, now largely immune to pain, banded together to hand out pain to all their enemies. The hanyos, taking Shankar's lead, saturated the media with claims that their mothers were to blame for their disease, and that their families owed them for the torture they had suffered, which gave them the right to inflict further torture on whomever they thought was responsible. Old Men fulminated that the soubriquet 'half demon' was well earned. The rhetoric of these incidents was savage on both sides.

In practice the boys had nothing to worry about, because the waiting list to adopt a hanyo or to get one's as yet unborn child into a Shankar Ward was years long. The number of live births of girls had also reduced drastically to about fifteen percent of all live births: the rest were hanyos. Free from the pressure of always having to dress, behave and make choices with the needs and tendencies of boys in mind, these girls were free for the first time to decide how they wanted to grow up.

The Bitch Groups

Outside the protected facilities of the hanyos, a generation of girls were growing up without brothers and male peers. This induced a sense of freedom and militancy in them which older men did not like. The youth icon of this generation was Babelion, a twelve year old Thai-Australian singer in Cambodia who came to fame first on social media with her gutsy anti-patriarchal lyrics and high-energy chaotic arrangements.Babelion's most controversial song was 'Let Them Die' which questioned why so much of the world's resources were being wasted on saving kids who would very likely be incapable of normal life, who hated everyone, did not understand friendship and intimacy and who had shown themselves ready to be gleeful abusers when given half a chance. A group called The Future of Humanity sought to ban this song on grounds of obscenity and hate speech. In response, fans of Babelion set up the LTD Movement, the first organisation to be called a Bitch Group by the media. The Shankar and his allies dismissed this as typical feminist bellyaching, and Shankar went on record to say that mothers who thought like this were the real problem. 'It is inhumane,' Shankar said of the LTD Movement. 'These are little children we are talking about. Our boys, the future fathers of our race. We cannot abandon them.' However, Shankar continued to deny other doctors access to his research, a fact which many people blamed for the poor understanding and treatment of the disease, and many people stated that they would rather find a way to prevent the disease than manage it.

The 'manpower' crisis

With the drastic drop in the number of young men, many rich men feared for the future of their empires. in the short term, they got by through recruiting men from the middle and lower classes into higher management positions, but this could only be a temporary solution and the overall aging profile of companies remained. Paradoxically the hiring of women dropped during this period, probably because of a newfound sense of vulnerability among the Old Men. Croctiger did a webseries called 'The Wimmin are Taking Over' which attracted intense hate from men across the world. As the 2030s wore on, the streets became increasingly feminised. Women shopkeepers, bus drivers, construction workers, sportists, pilots, mechanics became commonplace. Fields which had been male preserves were now filled with competent, confident young women. Croctiger celebrated this in their webseries, but as Lila Bintam, a feminist scholar from Turkey observed, boardrooms and governments were still male, and still talking about a mythical 'manpower crisis' that they felt the world should worry about. It was true that the birthrate had fallen to ten percent of the rate of 2001, but with world population at nearly eight billion this could hardly be a bad thing. 'We still have time to fix this,' said Bintam, calling on researchers everywhere to find a way to reverse whatever damage the Old Men had sustained and restore normal human reproduction. However her appeal attracted no funding dollars, and some male scientists condemned it as special pleading and unhelpful. They endorsed Shankar's statement the the hanyos were 'Men 2.0' and that the world should try to adapt to them, not the other way round.

When the first hanyos graduated from RIB in 2034, boardrooms across the world breathed a collective sigh of relief. The graduation ceremony was supposed to be televised, but Ramdhun showed only the first fifteen minutes of it, up to the point where the valedictorian Chip Takanashi took his place on the podium to make his farewell speech. All recordings of this speech were pulled, and it only survived for some years on the Dark Web, fuelling conspiracy theories and unsettling Old Men from time to time. In his speech, Takanashi said, 'We are the New Guys. We are the Achievers. We are taking over, and the Old Guys are going down.' This was followed by rowdy scenes where the eighteen-year-old hanyos threw chairs and yelled threats aimed at prominent members of the LTD Movement and other Bitch Groups. RIB was put in security lockdown for a day, and Shankar gave all the men involved a severe talking-to. He told them that the Old Men were falling over themselves to hire the hanyos and claim the future, and they were not to ruin it by behaving like idiots. 'I have taught you that there is other pain than the physical,' he pleaded with them. 'I worked hard to keep Nitin out of jail. Don't put yourselves through that.' But the hanyos merely laughed, secure in their own invincibility. Then they left for their high-powered corporate jobs all over the world.

The Bitch Wars

See also Bitch Wars. By 2035 there were feminist organisations all over the world, trying to warn decision-makers that this new plague of hanyoness would take humanity to a very dark place. The Bitch Groups went largely unheeded because the world's climate and economies were in severe crisis. Petroleum was so depleted only the rich could afford it for their musclecars, GM crops were falling apart like genetic jigsaw puzzles kicked by a toddler, and global temperatures had risen so steeply that airconditioning was tax deductible in the northern hemisphere. livestock were dying in droves amidst allegations of biological warfare bandied about by corporations. Many of these corporations were now headed and boardrooms were staffed by hanyos in their late teens and early twenties who had profited mightily from the guilt and confusion of the Old Men to set up their empires.

Their first big move and trial balloon was the Protocol of Rightful Nocopy (PORN), proposed in 2037 The protests around PORN made it possible for the hanyos to label many Bitch Groups terrorist organisations. The next decade was a period of intense conflict, but the war was largely fought in private spaces, bedrooms, kitchens, stockrooms, toilets, dark alleys, and it was largely fought by Old Men in the employ of the hanyos against women. the hanyo bosses made clear to Old Men who liked to hurt women that they would face no reprisals for doing so, and for some Old Men it was as if they had been waiting for this moment all their lives.

The Helios Fail of 2047 ended the Bitch Wars and also terminated most governments, leaving the world open for the corporations to take over.

The Sweep and the Double Money Standard

After about 2050 hanyos were the only living human males on the planet. They defined themselves in opposition to normal men, their fathers, whom they called Old Men or Old Guys.