History of the hanyos

Historically the hanyos existed from circa 2025 to 2123 or thereabouts. They were human males infected from birth with Male Hypertoxic Syndrome. In infancy this led to their having hypersensitive skins and hyperactive immune systems, though the skin sensitivity died down to well below normal by the time they hit their mid teens, leading to a multitude of behavioural anomalies such as thrillseeking, obsession with causing pain in others and inability to sleep. Since they also did not sweat, they tended to overheat.

Origin and aetiology

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 disease, pointing out that the fathers 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 aetiology, all the men showed a very high proportion of Y-bearing spermatozoa, the diagnostic indication of exposure to Humane Choice, which 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 overload their sense to the point where they had seizures. They also had extremely hyperactive immune systems and reacted with anaphylactic shock to baby formula, the emollient solutions in baby wipes, and even the lanolin in wool. All the babies died in terrible agony within days of birth. It is likely that the causal agents of the disease had already spread rapidly through the world and changed human genetics before the rise of MHS, as the Broken Pot controversy seemed to suggest. Shankar's sponsors, the Ramdhun corporation and its CEO, Swastik Vaghela, 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 of 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'

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 with MHS. 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 Shankar Clinics. Extreme secrecy was maintained in these wards, and no one could see the babies. The mothers were accommodated in special milking 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. In order to avoid skin contact, he passed ceramic wires coated with anaesthetic gel through the babies' long bones and hung them up in a gymballed frame, where they had full freedom of movement but no contact with anything but air. These frames were hung from the ceilings of clean rooms with air filters and robotic arms with more sprayguns for wiping bottoms. Judging correctly that the mothers would have been shocked by the sight of their children in that state, Shankar allowed none but authorised staff to see them at first. His method worked: two weeks into the treatment he was able to announce to the world that the boys were alive and well. He showed the press video clips of their faces, apparently happy, but made sure only their faces were visible and no details were disclosed. Requests for further information were blocked by corporate secrecy protocols.

Bogdanov versus Shankar

As the Ramdhun story unfolded, the world was galvanised in early 2026 by an announcement by Lionfist, a corporation based in China and hitherto known mostly for its space programme, that it too was pioneering a method of saving MHS babies. The doctor who made this claim was Boris Bogdanov, who ran a chain of surrogate motherhood farms under the Lionfist umbrella. Bogdanov used medically induced coma to spare his boys their suffering, and claimed to be able to stimulate their brains and even communicate with them through a neural interface he had invented. Ramdhun media swooped down on these claims and unearthed the fact that the neural system he was using was originally called Neurokick and Bogdanov had developed it for a mafia-linked client for interrogation purposes in his native Russia. Bogdanov merely shrugged at these rumours, and was able to show the TV channels clips of peacefully sleeping babies, thereby temporarily winning the propaganda war against Ramdhun. Fathers flocked to Bogdanov to sign their sons up for the programme. However, some channels pointed out that most of the top brass of Lionfist had already enrolled their sons in Shankar's programme. Basil Quan was one of these children.

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, and had either interpolated new genes into the male circuit, or had turned on a different set, one that was incompatible with life. As evidence, they cited the racs of Broken Pot cases in the 2020s, where a large number of girls were found to be genetically XY, but their bodies were incapable of responding to testosterone and other male hormones so they had developed into females. The Gaia Collective stated that this had been a transitional state between normalcy and MHS. Retroviruses, they said, were known to incorporate themselves into human genes: that was why they were used as drug and gene delivery systems. Not only many diseases were so caused, but even helpful mutations could result from this process.

Shankar pounced on the 'helpful mutations' quote and began stating that MHS boys were actually better than normal ones. When asked why he said this, he responded, 'They are growing up in state of the art facilities and getting the best care in the world. Have no fear, your investment will give you a fabulous return.' He could say this becausehe had discovered that the boys' skin sensitivity was decreasing: at four months, they no longer screamed when their butts were wiped, and showed some willingness to gingerly touch themselves. Shankar speculated to his boss that possibly the hyperactive immune system was attacking the nerves and shutting them down. At six months, Shankar decided to take the wires out. There were some transitional hiccups, but soon he had the babies crawling around their clean rooms as if they were perfectly normal. However, the allergies were still a problem, and one child died, the only casualty the First Thousand suffered while under Shankar's care. Mothers were now allowed to view their babies, and the world exploded with jubilation and relief. Not to be upstaged, Bogdanov claimed his children were alive and well and he was using hypnagoguy to teach them to speak.

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 detailed press releases about their education. He showed them 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 Shankr 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. Bogdanov was gradually waking his boys from their coma, giving them some hours fo wakefulness every day, but they seemed apathetic and uninterested in the world outside their eyelids. His client list was shrinking, and he was serving mostly Russian oligarchs who wanted their sons saved on the cheap. He sent the older boys home and prepared to wind up the project.

Social Integration

The early phase of hanyo contact with society did not go well. High profile abuse cases, bullying by hanyos of normal girls and boys, as well as bullying by normals of hanyos, and deep disagreement among doctors, educators, parents and administrators on how to deal with these boys were common problems.

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

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. On examining the new recruits, Shankar discovered two facts he had not previously known: the hanyos had almost no sweat reflex, so they tended to overheat very easily, and they could not sleep, because when they shut their eyes in silence, their deadened skins made them feel like they did not exist. Shankar developed powerful tranquilisers for them, and a 'sleep pod which played music and scenes till they fell asleep. he found to his great satisfaction that 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 very press conference, even going so far as to say that the hanyos were 'humanity's next step forward'. 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. Paradoxically, this made them calm down a bit, and the more socially integrated of the hanyos were allowed strictly controlled home visits. All over the world, because of the social fallout of trying to integrate hanyos with normal kids, rival corporations had been forced to set up schools for their hanyos on the lines of RIB. 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 gve 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. Because of the effects of Humane Choice/globetrotter flu, the number of live births of girls had also reduced drastically to about fifteen percent of all live births: the rest were hanyos. Many schools were shut down for lack of pupils. Some families saw this as an opportunity to invest in their girls, but most were too consumed by the tragedy and drama of their sons to give much attention to their daughters. 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.

Babelion and the 'Feminist Spring'

Ouside the protected facilities of the hanyos, a generation of girls were growing up without brothers and male peers. This induced a sense fo freedom and militancy in them which older men did not like, and furthermore older women, emboldened by the gutsiness of these kids, began to revolt as well. 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. Ramdhun Records offered her a contract which she printed out and tore to bits on Ramdhun's most prestigious chat show, Meetings with Mitali. The clip of this incident went viral in seconds and had been liked several million times by the end of the day, causing Ramdhan servers to temporarily crash.

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. Shankar dismissed all of this as unscientific blethering.

World domination

In the second phase of hanyo rule, the graduate of RIB and similar institutions moved into corporations and inherited the empires of Old Men who promoted them. They were able to do this by playing on the fears of Old Men that they were losing control of the world, and by proposing themselves as worthy successors not subject to the weaknesses of normal males. Videos of hanyos laughing as women in dominatrix suits branded them, carved their initials on them or scratched them with their nails were widely shared by men's groups and corporote recruiters alike. This might have been the inspiration for Fat Peggy an underground anonymous webcomic.

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 and the Protocol of Rightful Nocopy

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. The corporate world was under tehir thumb; now they started to think about governments.

Their first big move and trial balloon was the Protocol of Rightful Nocopy (PORN), proposed in 2037 and widely believed to be the brainchild of Nitin Wilson, who was now Head of Public Relations for Ramdhun. It was an offer to bail out governnments in financial crisis that owned national art treasures. These treasures were after all subject to theft, and security for protected sites was costing a tidy sum in taxpayer's money, and while they were owned by the government, they earned very little revenue. The corporations proposed to digitise all art treasures, then destroy them to protect the copyright of the copy, and make the copy available as a virtual reality walkthrough, free for citizens and with a paid premium experience provided for the rich, which would monetise the venture. This proposal was interpreted by the Bitch Groups as a call to arms. Ramdhun's attempt to digitise the Taj Mahal in 2038 was bombed by the militant group Mothers of Dead Babies, destroying state of the art equipment worth millions of dollars and removing a chunk of the famous central dome. This was the PR victory the hanyos had been waiting for. Throughout the world they moved to label the Bitch Groups terrorist organisations and hunt them down, while the last resistance to the Protocol of Rightful Nocopy crumbled under the world's outrage at the thought that 'extremist' women were organising and building bombs for terror.

The next decade saw conflict all over the world both virtual and real, but much more worrying than that were the sharp rise in 'female' diseases like endometriosis and in domestic abuse of ordinary women. The Bitch Group Sister Health warned women not to go to hospital if they were sick, because 'the hanyos are waging biological warfare on half the human race.' In response to this Chip Takanashi, now head of Shigenobu Corporation, said, 'Half? This is further proof that women can't do math.' In fact the word 'woman' became so abused and hated that many female humans opted to call themselves 'people' instead.

Another notable arena of conflict was popular culture. Suddenly the entertainment channels were flooded with soapy romances,'victim chic' was everyone's new thing, and Fountain of Life, an all-hanyo band whose logo was a stylised phallus-gun, overtook Babelion for the firrst time in the popular charts. Babelion had fallen on bad times. In 2039 she fell in love with her publicist and had a male child with him. Overnight her radicalism vanished and she became brand ambassador for Ramdhun Wellness, gushing from her milking room about how well Shankar was treating her and her baby. While she was in the hospital her home, a modest suburban bungalow in Laos (she had never believed in the rockstar lifestyle) burned down, killing her lover and her sister. Babelion turned on her former fans and allies, calling the Bitch Groups 'insane', 'evil', 'anti-child' and 'unwomanly'. She went on Potent News several times to appeal to young women to 'love your man and do your job'. After her 'conversion' most people agreed that her songs were insipid and uninspired, mere apologias for the status quo.

Although this period of 2035-2047 is generally known as the Bitch Wars, there was very little open conflict after the bombing of the Taj Mahal and the arrest and sentencing to death of fourteen members of Mothers of Dead Babies. The other major violent incident was the shooting of Nitin Wilson by a trans man known only as Sheila. This assassination speeded up the development of the samsa suit to protect the hanyos from inadvertent self-damage, attacks by hostiles and overheating. 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 Double Money Standard

The Helios Fail

The Helios Fail ended the Bitch Wars and also finished off whatever was left of world governments. In 2047 Antarctica was opened up to oil prospecting. Some Bitch Groups vehemently opposed this and pushed for more funding for fusion research, but they were shouted down by the rest of humanity which pointed to the increasingly sub-famine state of the world and the desperate need for cheap energy. The Helios Corporation, an energy supercorporation based in New York, bagged the first contract and immediately began operations. Previously Helios had specialised in undersea fracking, and they claimed to have an unblemished safety record. Perhaps they were unlucky, for within months of their first fracking, three eparate volcaones erupted under the Ross Ice Shelf on the other side of the continent, causing devastating tidal waves in teh southern hemisphere and raising the ocean levels by five metres in two months. The rich scrambled to evacuate, and all of Helios's executives survived to face bankruptcy proceedings, then get hired by rival corps. Since most national capitals were coastal cities, this effectively ended the Era of Governments.

The Sweep

The next phase of the hanyo takeover involved getting all males, whether hanyo or normal, to enter corporate employment and live inside the corporate enclaves. the original impetus for this seems to have come from Shankar, who was now unofficial superdaddy to all hanyos. Shankar was worried bout two things: the tendency of Old Men to support Bitch Groups, or at least stand aside and not interfere, and the possibility that these groups might hijack sperm banks of force men to give them genetic material, thus obviating the need for men at all. Since most women no longer depended on their husbands for support, and many had already been deserted by their upwardly mobile men, the breakdown of traditional family life was already happening. There were also fears that women would hold the aging population of Old Men as hostages to force the hanyos to conceded their many demands. Shankar came up with the Masterchair Tours to combat this.

The Masterchair Tours

In order to solve the largely media-generated 'manpower' crisis, Shankar proposed to tour the countryside inviting Old Men to come and 'just talk to us'. The Masterchair, a big leather CEO-type confection, was heavily publicised as 'the number one perk of manhood' and ad viewers were saturated with the message that it could 'make the least of us feel like a man'. During 2048-2049, men were encouraged to come and sit in the chair and tell the hanyos what they thought of them. In return they could ask for anything they wanted: dream job, dream house, dream family, dream lover. Family men could bring their loved ones to the corporate enclaves and get a better future for their children, moral men could work for good, clever men could read and study, ambitious men could rise. The extreme scarcities bordering on famine, the uncertain weather, and the very bad law and order situation persuaded most men to at least try for the Chair. Some men speculated on why the corporations were 'giving it away', but they were answered by carefully planted news stories about 'the need to preserve the future of humanity' and 'gender solidarity'. As Chip Takanashi of Shigenobu Corp said, 'The world must never see anything like the Bitch Wars again.'

During the Masterchair Tours, a small minority of men would get up and walk out at the end of their interview, and they were celebrated like heroes and given a 'Strong Will Prize' by the hosting corporation. What nobody but a handful of technicians knew was that the chair was rigged to permanently sterilise any man who sat in it. An even smaller minority of men, mostly tramps and crazies brought in by force, refused to sit in it, and were quietly given lethal injections and disposed of.

The effect of this initiative was that by 2050 there were no more than a handful of men left in remote regions; all the others were in the corporate enclaves. Zigsa's father was one such 'forgotten' man. Needless to say, the hanyo promises mostly did not materialise once the men had signed up for corporate jobs. The high level of interpersonal violence among hanyos, their ruthlessness and contempt for anyone 'weaker' than them, and their willingness to react with lethal force to any attempt to thwart their will made the hanyos very stressful co-workers. By 2065 most Old Men had died of heart attacks or stress-related health problems, and the remainder were in institutions of various sorts.

History of the hanyos

Contents

Origin and aetiology

The 'First Thousand'

Bogdanov versus Shankar

Social Integration

The Nitin Wilson case

The Ramdhun Institute for Boys

Babelion and the 'Feminist Spring'

World domination

The 'manpower' crisis

The Bitch Wars and the Protocol of Rightful Nocopy

The Double Money Standard

The Helios Fail

The Sweep

The Masterchair Tours

The Corporate Wars

The Robot wars

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