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New York City: 2600 AD

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The entire Terra Metropolis Project can be viewed at Speculative Evolution Forums
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Central Park, New York City.

~~~

It is mid-June, and summer has begun to come full swing in the green metropolis of New York City. The forested walls of enormous integrated structures containing thousands of offices, indoor farms, and countless other industry have become verdant and green after a long bare winter season, almost completely covering the walls and turning entire indoor towns into rolling mountains. An enormous suspending arch between two massive districts that lean over imposingly upon on either side of the historic Central Park becomes a green bridge for the migration of deer and elk and a high vantage point for hunting bald eagles to scan the park below for prey. The towering skyline of the nearest city center shines brightly on the distant horizon, while a variety of isolated apartment complexes rise high into the air within the park. Upon them, window boxes and rooftop garden have burst into magnificent bloom in the summer air, providing food for hummingbirds and butterflies and nest sites for millions of birds. The return of warmth and sunlight to this temperate super-city signals one thing and one thing alone to the biosphere: it is time to reproduce. Colorful pied street pigeons gather in flocks of thousands on every ledge and park pathway, the colorful males strutting and bowing, showing their vigor to potential partners. They strive to continue the cycle of life as they have since the first of their ancestors were brought from the old world to the new on the ships of the pilgrims, an intended food supply gone wild. In just days, they will have made their picks and pairs begun preparing nests together in the bountiful ledges of the urban jungle, as life goes on.

Even a normally nocturnal Whillawhisper cat emerges to hunt in the height of the summer, forced by the mewing hunger of a litter of kittens, now several weeks old, hidden in a hollow den high on a landscaped skyscraper. Though normally a creature of the dark night, she must hunt around the clock at this trying time to ensure her young are always supplied with food. She pursues a squirrel up a rooftop tree only for her intended prey to make a leap of faith downwards, falling several stories downwards to land on a lower ledge. For any other cat, this would mark the end of the hunt - but the whillawhisper is anything but any other cat. She follows her quarry over the edge of the building without a moment's pause in an apparent act of suicidal impulse. Her death seems imminent, for she misses the nearest ledge - the only one she could ever have hoped to reach by her leap alone - and begin to plummet down towards the squirrel. But she knows exactly what she has done; in typical cat fashion she simply splays her legs and in an instant, what separates her from the other cats is immediately apparent. Large, billowing skin membranes, covered in sleek sound-absorbent fur, stretch between her legs on either side of her body, supported by cartilaginous rods in her outer wrists. Her silhouette becomes a nearly complete oval as she lifts her front paws high over her head, aided by a free monkey-like shoulder socket, and she stops her descent almost at once, turning in the air and speeding along the side of the skyscraper towards the squirrel that flees for its life along the ledges, unable to climb up the slick walls. Still dazed by its high fall, it scrambles and trips repeatedly as it tries to flee for the nearest clump of trees far ahead, but the shadow comes over it before it gets the chance. It turns to face its attacker and trips, squeals as the cat lands alongside it and pins it to the window with her unsheathed claws before lunging to bite the rodent's neck and sever its spine. Her canines are huge for her size, nearly an inch long, even though she weighs just a few ounces more than her victim. When its body goes still, she quickly turns behind her to ensure the coast is clear.

Seeing nothing about to threaten her, she grabs the squirrel by the scruff of its neck and proceeds to drag it the several hundred meters back towards her den, making use of the convenient series of horizontal window ledges that leads back towards her home building. She is remarkably strong for her size, pulling the body with ease at a rapid clip backwards over the flower boxes and past screen windows containing mortified children, barking dogs - and a little orange fox, an ornamental breed with its hair in tight wiry curls and a fine mustache of twisted whiskers on its lip, which watches her with intense interest. Is she friend or foe?

The trickiest part will be carrying it upwards when she reaches her building, but she will manage, grabbing firm hold of the body and pulling herself up the lattice of ivy that conceals her sky-high den. By the time she arrives, six tiny silver kittens will have gathered to peer out and call for her in little chirps, ready for breakfast - and entirely unaware of the incredible journey her mother has taken, and must take every time, she goes for the groceries to feed her family. She's only doing what comes to her by her nature - but unlike most animals, her instincts came out of a computer. Her adaptations to her lifestyle were drawn out as blueprints, as if she were a car or a toaster oven. Though her lineage has lived out in the wild for several centuries, and adapted on a local level, and though she certainly has no idea herself, her fundamental biology has not come from the evolutionary process Darwin would find familiar. Felisciuridus volans ferox, the "fierce flying squirrel cat" - the naturalized subspecies of the Silver Whillawhisper, is - like all of her species - a man-made animal, a living product of advanced genetic engineering.

~~~

It Began With a (Whilla) Whisper

How best should we use our world when suddenly man has for himself the powers before limited to God?

~~~



The wild morph of the Silver Whillawhisper, F. v. ferox, illustrated with membranes partially spread.

~~~

Left to nature's own devices, it would probably take millions of years to have turned the house cat into the Whillawhisper. Five million at minimum, perhaps ten. The inflexible carnivoran shoulder system would probably be the biggest hurdle, and to restructure it sufficiently to allow the Whillawhisper her gliding posture might well take even longer. Yet the Terra Metropolitan city is filled with these little cats - no bigger than the squirrels they hunt - going about their lives, leaping like hang gliders from one ledge to another, because the Whillawhisper is one of the first wild animals to have an origin independent of natural selection; it is an animal engineered by human interference, to fill a niche for which there was no time to wait millions of years.

The ethics of the Whillawhisper were surely unsure, but by the 22nd century, genetic engineering was hardly a new idea. It had already become a fact of life, producing much of the food we ate. The day and age had come where anything could theoretically be engineered, any sort of organism that looked or acted in any way. The potential was enormous. Private companies had already re-engineered extinct animals, both genuinely and via convincing copies - living reconstructions of dinosaurs and similar animals that made billions of dollars in revenue at high-end amusement parks - and had begun expanding their markets to novelty pets, too - tame, cuddly foxes that came when called and loved to snuggle! Tiny rats with the brains of collies, able to learn thousands of tricks - and house train, too! And, yes, not too long after an adorable genetic hybrid of a housecat and a sugar glider, a tiny and playful little thing that combined the best attributes of a kitten which would never grow up with the aerial antics of a bird without the mess - they used a litter box. The Whillawhisper saw its origin as nothing more than the latest novelty pet, highly domestic, docile, and not any more likely to survive in any wild environment than any other small pet - but something was different about this creature. It was the first pet of its kind to be noticeably different on a physical level from its ancestor, being genuinely unlike anything that had ever evolved on Earth. A gliding cat was cute - but what if it could be useful, too?

~~~

Though many animals adapted well to the spread of urbanization which had already begun by the time of the Whillawhisper's genesis, the resulting ecosystem had always been generally quite unstable. Only a few species ever thrived, and of them, prey greatly outnumbered predators, with rats and pigeons in particular having insufficient natural agents of population control and tending at all times to overrun their environments. House cats and the odd fox took some rats, and falcons thrived on pigeons, but neither predator was specialized to hunt in the urban ecosystem; in particular, there was no predator able to infiltrate the nests of either, the pigeons building theirs tens of stories above the ground, and the sly rat rearing its young in the smallest and tightest of spaces in the concrete jungle where no cat could ever reach.

But if that cat was tiny, and if that cat could move through the air... it could fill that niche.

And so, though originally engineered as a pet, the naturalized variation of this diminutive arboreal descendant of the domestic house cat was commissioned by the city of New York in the late 22rd century as a specialist predator of urban rodents and pest birds; roof rats, grey squirrels, and feral pigeons in particular. The wild breed was considerably different from its predecessor; it was fearful of man, aggressively predatory. It was engineered not to hunt like a cat, by ambush, but like a ferret, running its prey down through whatever means necessary, be it through the widest open space or the smallest crack - prey that was proportionately huge in comparison to the normal prey of the ancestral house cat. Though Whillawhispers will hunt mice, they were bred to prefer bigger game: the rat, the squirrel, the pigeon. Their clavicle would collapse to fit them through any gap big enough for their heads, like the rats they would pursue, while their shoulder blades could rotate fully in their socket to carry the little cat on the wind to the defenseless nests of the feral pigeons. Their jaws were enlarged to handle bigger prey, and their teeth followed suit. Their wing membrane was tweaked to a maximum airfoil, for the most efficient glide, while the skin was fitted with contracting collagen fibers to tightly fold away when out of use so as not to snag. The Whillawhisper was crafted into the perfect urban micro-predator, a creature suited as the apex predator of a brand new ecosystem the world had never before seen. They spread on their out from New York throughout North America, and soon the rest of the world wanted them for their own cities. They were freed in London and Mumbai, The United Nations of Africa, and even to Sounder, Antarctica. Australia refused them, fearing for the safety of their many endemics, which thrived in new green cities. But New Zealand took them to combat their invasive possums, and the little cats did their job remarkably well, drastically cutting the pests' numbers.

Since its introduction, the tiny felines have thrived and served their purpose well - though they do sometimes prey on non-target species. But as the first notable introductions of life intentionally designed to thrive in the modern city environment, their success set a precedent; many more organisms would follow, but not all would succeed. Of those that would, not all would do so in the ways intended. A new era had begun, where man could take an active and immediate role in designing the biology of his world - the final conquest, some called it. In many respects it was a positive thing - animals that would otherwise be destined to die out in a changing world could, with just a few slight tweaks, be engineered to thrive. But for all its wonders, when man took the role of God and began to build his own life from scratch, a Pandora's box had been opened; just how much could something be changed and remain the same? Perhaps the release of the Whillawhisper wasn't too harmful. Perhaps all of the GaianAdvance dinosaurs weren't causing any trouble - they were not real animals after all, and they provided enormous convervation funding. But then some escaped - sure, they didn't seem to dramatically damage the environment... but they were definitely not supposed to exist on this Earth any longer and had been restored anyway. Then there was the restoration of the mammoth steppe biome in the frozen north - it probably wasn't too harmful - after all, those animals died out because of humans, it was assumed, so we were just undoing our wrong. And then we figured "hey, it couldn't hurt to genetically engineer a panda which breed freely in captivity, could it? Then they'd never die out!" So we did that, too. But soon, pandas were everywhere - nobody cared about pandas anymore. The panda lost its uniqueness when it wasn't rare. Many think we did the panda, and nature itself, a disservice - even though it surely owed its survival to genetic engineering; but then again, was it really saved - or was it replaced with a new, better panda, the original lost forever? What about the Australian savannah? Numerous popular megafaunal animals may have found solace, but at what cost to countless tiny plants and animals without so much public support? Nature wouldn't have given the elephant and the lion any greater support in the game of life than any other animal, but human influence brought them to a new continent and rather dramatically altered the ecosystem there forever at who knows what cost to the smaller creatures we might not find as interesting or worth protecting. Conversely; we stood by and allowed the hybrid coyote to completely take over the North American continent from its three endemic wolves, two of these species found nowhere else on Earth and now extinct. They have all been replaced with a generalist single species - should we have tried to keep the environment as it evolved before humans came along? These are the issues that trouble the world today.

Not everyone thinks man should have this much power. A divide had already grown in the days of Eden Paleo-Zoological Park between the modern artists - the "new-agers", who thought man should be free to rebuild and reshape the living aspect of his world as much as he had the inanimate, to skip away entirely with waiting on evolution to get the job done and to solve what they perceived as problems, to improve upon nature, instantaneously - and the traditionalists, who agreed with none of this and preferred a world kept primordial, as nature intended - modifying mankind's behavior to accommodate it, and not the other way around. A new rise in popularity grew in selective breeding and old-fashioned agricultural practices - the widespread modern practice in urban farming, which has developed again only in the last 60 years, can be observed as a direct result of this trend, which has in that time been the dominant mindset after many centuries of new-ager dominance that resulted in such things as the Whillawhisper and countless other genetically-engineered organisms - but it is already tainted, for there is almost no domestic organism around today that has not in some way been genetically modified, be it a tomato growing in a garden - which can now photosynthesize in very low light levels thanks to its modified photosynthetic processes - or the dog that fetches your shoes, who almost certainly has an ancestor somewhere down his family tree given the rabies immunity gene that helped to finally eradicate the disease on a global scale.

A lot has already been lost - or, as others would say, perfected. Neither mindset is fundamentally wrong; it's simply a difference in personal opinion, the modern analogue of the politics of years' past. The world has long since discarded the dangers of capitalism - its supporters lost a lost of their wind in a world without oil - and of the trivial differences in opinion politicians once milked to their extreme to fear-monger and divide the people for so long, to stay in power. The people now run the government, the government doesn't run the people. Politics worldwide are more homogeneous than at any other time in history. We are no longer divided factions fighting one another over the most trivial differences in ideology - there hasn't been a major war in 270 years and world peace has never been closer. In a connected new world, Islam, Judaism and Christianity - and countless other religions - find their similarities outweigh their differences. The world isn't secular, but the large gap between secular and religious views has lessened more and more through the years as we, as a species, concentrate more on our similarities than what divides us. But on this one issue, how we should make use of our planet, many still stand divided.

Terra Metropolis exists as the very embodiment of this divide, a meshed world equal parts primordial and man-made.

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