Reptiles and birds and monkeys, oh my!

[Alex F. Vance]

With the display of Phantastus' awesome designs for the tribal lizard people, I figure I might expand on the species diversity in HC a bit. 

It's kept intentionally vague, as I'd rather deliver information like this through inference than narration in the books. I prefer to let the obvious speak for itself and trust the readers are smart enough, and have enough faith in the quality of writing, to understand the difference between a fuckup and intentional inconsistency.

Ruy Ortega, born in Cuba, is a tiger. The still-living Caulfields are cougars, and they're English. The late Troy Caulfield was a lion, but his son was fully cougar like his mother. Malloy is a Dobermann, a domestic breed created in 1890 by one Karl Friedrich Dobermann. Julia Miles is an ermine and her kids are a rat and a cat respectively, and it's suggested, though not confirmed, that they're her biological offspring.

The dispersal of the anthropoid species in HC bears no correlation to the distribution of animal species in our world. The reason for this is... undisclosed, and possibly unknowable.

However, there are some conclusions that can be drawn from this, which are quite fascinating. For instance, it's likely that the distribution of animal species in HC is by and large identical to that in our world, so before global travel was commonplace it was possible for anthropoid species to inhabit places where they had no animal counterpart, which undoubtedly had some sort of impact on their social status, for better or worse. 

Species can interbreed quite freely, apparently, with the offspring receiving the dominant species template from either one parent or the other. It seems possible, however, that they receive two full species-specific templates, with only one being expressed. It's therefore possible, though rare, for a child to resemble neither of its parents, but instead one of their ancestors, whose species passed recessively down the line. From some of Declan's lines in HC2, that might be something that's strangely common in the Miles family tree.

Some species are incompatible with others, though. Egg-laying and cold-blooded anthropoids are particularly disadvantaged, as they can't procreate with mammals. A reptilian reproductive system couldn't sustain a viable mammal offspring no matter how much the parents loved each other; the mother would lack the ability to support the fetus' placenta, and likewise a mammalian womb couldn't support (or endure) the growth of an egg. Reptiles and birds can only reproduce with other reptiles and birds, so their populations are much, much lower. 

Although PHantastus' illustrations suggest that this was, perhaps, not always so :)

Racism must also take other forms. In our world, the peoples of different continents look different. When the Europeans landed in Africa they could dehumanize the native inhabitants because of their physical dissimilarity, but could a boatload of European invaders consisting of bunnies and bears and bats and bulls so easily dehumanize the natives if they were also bunnies and bears and bats and bulls? If a Native American lion could pass for English if he simply wore the right clothes and didn't speak?

- Alex

[Joseph Asdust]

I love this line of introspection. Fascinating from both a sociological and biological standpoint. It's implied in other works featuring differing species that it's easy to pass off for different heritage. The main character in Maus, a (presumably) hereditary Jew (and mouse) passed for a Pole at one point by merely wearing a pig mask. 

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[Alex Vance]

Recognition is a tricky subject! Consider the racial slur 'they all look alike' and that, no matter how culturally inappropriate, it's sometimes true. If you haven't enough experience with a particular race's geotype, it's very difficult to distinguish them. I have Indonesian family so I'm fairly adept with East-Asian and Pacific Rim facial structures, and while I can tell a Filipino from a Korean, I have a harder time distinguishing a Vietnamese dude from a Thai, or an Igbo from a Yoruba -- let alone reliably recognizing an individual from an unfamiliar racial group that I only met briefly, or only saw on a photograph.

I'm notoriously bad with faces, though. In secondary school the class organized a bonding game where all the students brought in baby photos of themselves, tossed 'em in a bucket, and you had to match the baby photo with the modern-day pimply-faced teen -- I scored the absolute lowest. I've had many, many embarrassing failures to recognize people and have built a bit of a reputation to that effect at my workplace.

Imagine a world with even greater anatomical diversity. Recognizing an individual from a species with which you're not very experienced is a terribly difficult job, and this is one area in which I feel it's only natural for the HC-verse's technology to diverge from ours. If people can't do something reliably, they invent a tool to help them do it. Therefore, it's wholly plausible that their facial recognition is significantly more advanced than ours.

In the Maranatha story series I included a scene that alluded to this possibility. The police were looking for a suspect and were identifying all witnesses at the scene of a crime, but rather than eyeballing them or even using a shape-detecting computer camera, they used a more penetrative tool. 

After all, when fur patterns are such an obvious, glaring representation of an individual and familiarity is potentially so low, one might plausibly pass for another. In our world we can usually and reliably tell when the Soul King is actually a pasty-faced Irish-American from the Bronx wearing shoe polish on his face and an afro wig on his head, but a yellow-colored leopard over there could possibly get away with covering his ears, sucking in his gut and drawing tear-marks down his muzzle so that, at a glance, he could pass for a cheetah. 

So the cops used a terahertz wave camera to image the skull beneath. Millimeter and terahertz wave technology exists in our world and is used for body scans at airports, as it's a passive way to roughly image the interior of a body. They use a form of radiation whose wavelength sits between the infrared and microwave spectrum, naturally generated by the sun, which has a unique penetrative capacity. It's able to pass through substances normally opaque to other frequencies on the EM spectrum so a camera capable of detecting these wavelengths can be tuned to different frequencies to image different substances more reliably. 

One imaginary scenario, when this technology was in its growth spurt, was to outfit airport lobbies with a mesh of hi-def wave cameras to image everyone in the plaza in 3D and use shape and material recognition to identify weapons and common drugs. Further development of the tech might allow such detailed imaging that the size of an individual's internal organs, bones and other unique anatomical features could be reliably detected for purposes of biometry, so that you could literally walk into an airport and head straight to your plane without ever having to so much as show someone your ticket, because you'd be innocent until proven guilty. If you happened to be carrying a knife or some dope, a strapping man with a gun would be dispatched to talk to you.

Of course, the imaging station would have to be manned and whoever viewed the screens would be able to see ghostly images of tits and willies, which violates personal privacy laws, so that didn't happen. Instead we get to take off our shoes and belts and subject our laptops to X-Ray machines and get patted down by intimidating women with poor bodily hygiene. 

However, in the HC-verse such technology would be too useful to be marginalized, so wave cameras would be ubiquitous at least in law enforcement. They're used for mugshots; road cops have mobile units that can match a suspect's skull to an offender database with a minimum of 80% accuracy within 60 seconds. 

Accuracy would be modest at best since analysis would need to occur off-site, so as not to have mobile cops carrying around a massive database of offender biometrics for ne'er-do-wells to steal. The portable unit performs the scan, crunches for key points (the teeth and jaw indicate carnivore/herbivore/omnivore, for instance) and send the general conclusions to the server along with  identifying information. The absolute dimensions of the skull, for instance, but also unique features such as the surfaces of teeth, to be matched with dental records, for instance.

So yeeeeah, wearing a pig mask wouldn't cut it under those circumstances :)

- Alex

[Joseph Asdust]

I think half the fun of imagining a world full of security measures specifically tailored for determining who exactly someone is under all that fur would just lead to even more people in the niche market and hobby of finding ways to evade, confuse or distort said systems. Much like how corporations and governments spend billions each year to secure their data only to have both incidents of people losing disks, and high profile hackers accessing it on an almost mercenary like basis.

Tell ya, all the 'no you CAN'T do that' sentiments really do little more than get the old brain juices flowing until you can think up a suitable rebuttal.