Humane Choice

Humane Choice was a vaccine invented in 2010 by Dr Pradip Shankar in Chandigarh. The vaccine used a Recombinant Adeno-Associated Virus Analog to knock out X-bearing sperm cells in a man’s body, thus ensuring a very high probability that he would only sire sons.

History

In 2007, Pradip Shankar graduated at the top of his class in gynecology from the Ideal Medical College, Chandigarh, and married his classmate Priya, a paediatrician, who had come second. He began practicing in Chandigarh, but quickly fell foul of Himmat Singh, a local strongman. Shankar made offhand remarks while doing a routine ultrasound of Himmat Singh's first child, leading Singh to believe the child would be a girl. Himmat Singh had the child aborted. At that time this was an illegal procedure if done for sex-selection purposes in the former Indian state, but this rarely stopped men of influence and wealth from making it happen. The child, however, turned out to have been male. Himmat Singh was furious, barged into Shankar's clinic and threatened to break his legs if he ever practiced again. Shankar was forced to become dependent on his wife's practice.

For a while he brooded, to his family's dismay, and to get out of his funk he returned to some research projects he had begun as a student. One of them was to do with the nature of spermatogenesis and the question of whether human endoviruses could help or harm this process. Filled with resentment at the treatment meted out to him, Shankar decided to invent a vaccine that would prevent any doctor from ever having to suffer as he had done. He used a common virus found in semen, the Adeno Associated virus, and rejigged its genome to attack only X-bearing sperm, which are slightly larger and heavier than Y-bearing sperm. This would influence the probability of son conception from roughly fifty percent to nearly ninety percent.

Shankar was wary about introducing his vaccine to the public, and he was particularly afraid that the law might take a dim view of his invention. So he began paying attention to his wife's patients, and got her to point out to him those wives who were desperate for sons. He told these women that just one shot of his magic vaccine would solve their problem forever. He got them to bring their men in and gave them a 'flu shot', in reality the Humane Choice vaccine. It is possible that a genuine flu vaccine could have gotten mixed up with his source serums at this time.

By 2015, Shankar's fame had been spread by word of mouth between satisfied wives, and the men too had figured it out. A thriving 'Humane Choice underground' develop whereby men from all over the world came to Shankar for 'treatment'. Around this time, however, the Amar Ujala Nuclear Plant just outside Chandigarh blew up. Shankar already had a backup plan for leaving the country in case the law challenged his vaccine; he now packed up his operation in a matter of hours and fled to New Singapore with his wife. Swastik Vaghela, the CEO of Ramdhun Corporation, which had built New Singapore after the old city was destroyed in a tidal wave in 2023, was a patient of Shankar's, and had extended a standing offer for Shankar to come to New Singapore and merge Humane Choice with Ramdhun Wellness. Since New Singapore was the first 'national territory' to be wholly owned and managed by a corporation, he need have no fear of the law there.

New Singapore and the Shankar Clinics

The Shankar Clinics did much more than dispense Humane Choice: Shankar quickly diversified into in vitro fertilisation and surrogate motherhood. In any case, demand for the vaccine was falling, because all over the world an epidemic of male births had begun. Some news channels voiced the opinion that this trend in human reproduction might have something to do with Humane Choice, but Shankar vigorously denied this, instead blaming a new worldwide epidemic: globetrotter flu.

Broken Pots and Beauty Pageants

In 2029, Smiti Chen became Miss New Singapore and qualified for the Miss World pageant to be held at Doha. Once there, however, within a few hours of arriving she was disqualified by a routine genetic test which found she was genetically XY, She was sent home in disgrace, and it was not lost on anyone that her father was a patient and close friend of Shankar's. It was further discovered that she had early-stage germline cancer from retained testicular tissue in her abdomen. Shankar held a press conference to state that Smiti had Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome, that the condition, though rare, was not unheard of, and that none of this was his fault. To make things worse, a rash of such cases now came to light, several of which Shankar had probably known about. These girls, who had no uteri though in all other respects they were indistinguishable from normal women, came to be known as Broken Pots. The stench of a coverup grew stronger, and Swastik Vaghela called Shankar to give him the roasting of his life. Shankar revealed that he knew all about Shankar's history, and if Shankar did not fix this mess, Vaghela would finish what Himmat Singh had started.

Male Hypertoxic Syndrome

No sooner had the Broken Pot controversy died down, that boy babies began being born with a terrifying new illness.

Theories of the Relationship between MHS and Humane Choice

The Broken Pot cases showed that Shankar's method was doing something very odd to human reproduction.