* The Day The Earth Went Furry *

Time: 8:02 PM GMT +/-12, the 20th of February, 2002.

Location: the midpoint average of the international date line.

In years to come many theories will be advanced about the source of the; well, it will have a thousand thousand terms for it but the one which shall gain widespread acceptance in the international scientific community is "The Human/Animal Hybridization Energy Wave", or 'THAHEW' for short, but that term will not be commonly accepted for almost half a decade; but none of them will prove stable enough using the mathematical models of the universe as it was presently understood to gain general support among scientists. However, no one could argue that this seminal event hadn't occurred. All one had to do to prove it was a real phenomenon was compare any photograph of a large group of human beings from before that day with any taken thereafter.

T.H.A.H.E.W. rolled over the earth in sync with its rotation, passing through solids, liquids, and gasses with equal ease. It stretched all the way to the north pole but for reasons, no one has been able to explain didn't pass below the 110th southern parallel. Everyone it touched transformed into a half-human/half-animal "furry". Bodies, arms, and hands resemble those of a human being, but with the tail and head of an animal. (Except that their whole bodies were covered in fur, feathers, or scales as appropriate to their animal side, and everyone has binocular vision like a human and all their parts are sized for a human frame.) Legs, feet, and genitals were a crapshoot, there was no predicting if a person's lower body would remain largely human, except growing a tail and animal type skin coverings, or would change to match their animal side in whole or in part. People always still had legs and genitals if they had them before though, and if they had lost them they regrew during the change...

The transformation was agonizing in the , the more so the older you were, and took anywhere from about a minute to just under an hour, again being more difficult the older you were. Interestingly, pregnant women took only about a minute to transform, the same as newborn babies: and no one has come up with a fully satisfactory reason why. Another aspect that no one has been able to explain is that people who were "Transgender", (in mind or body), took twice as long to transform as normal, but when it was over their Bodies matched their Gender Identity on the genetic level. (Even if that made them hermaphrodites, and in such cases, they were fully functional...)

There are a few fully human people left in the world. Mostly scientists from bases in Antarctica below the 110th parallel, but also the staff and passengers of planes which made breakneck flights around the globe racing the wave. When T.H.A.H.E.W. reached its starting point again twenty-four hours after it began it vanished just as mysteriously as it started, the only evidence of its passing the changed human beings all over the world, and the aftermath of those changes.

As has been said, the transformation was agonizing, and many people died from heart-attacks brought on by the pain, or from accidents caused by their muscles locking up in agony.

I, however, was one of the lucky ones: I survived the change and was able to try to chart a course through this new world of 'furry' human beings, with all the political upheaval and chaos that accompanied it...