The 20th century closed optimistically enough for western society but the seeds of future disaster were evident to any who cared to look.  The rest of the world floundered in economic catastrophe and fascist forces were growing in that midst.  Even the despotic nations that grew from those troubles dared not engage in open warfare with the west though.  The weapons of the old cold war were still well maintained and kept the lid on the pressure cooker.  Soon enough however, the world started to crack.

Radicals of all stripes gathered followings.  Some were peaceful, many were not.  Often their unrest was kept within the limits of civil disobedience but more and more, terrorist tactics came to be the norm.  One of the consequences of the end of the cold war being followed by severe economic hardship for most of the world was the proliferation of weapons and the science that created them.  Terrorist groups and doomsday cults were able to procure more and more destructive capabilities, and as time went on, they used them more and more.

The people of the time feared mostly nuclear weapons and their efforts were devoted to curbing their proliferation.  In hindsight it is easy to judge them foolish.  Nuclear weapons were indeed used on a few occasions and made great spectacle for the television of the time, but the death tolls from the relatively small yield devices was each time only in the tens of thousands.  The true killers, the ones that spelled the end of the world as they knew it were the biologicals.  The death tolls from those were in the billions.

The first plagues were small and contained.  They were diseases that while virulent, were known to medicine and the procedures for dealing with them understood.  As the time went on though, new diseases were discovered that no one had seen before.  It is still not clear how many of these were man made and how many, the result of encroachment of rain forest, but in any case the world was woefully unprepared to deal with them.

It didn't take long for the worlds population to be significantly reduced.  The hardest hit were the parts of the world without a high level of medical infrastructure, but the developed world was not much spared.  For all that their medical technology was able to help them, their transportation infrastructure sped the spread.  The social structure of many parts of the world broke down completely and anarchic barbarism was the rule for the survivors there.  This is when the first instances of widespread cannibalism were reported.

The scientists of the west were given every resource.  The whole of the attention of the surviving west was brought to bear on getting a grip on the diseases that threatened to finish the human race and for the most part, they succeeded.  It took long, terrible years to do it but in the end the medical science of the day was able to enhance the human immune system to the point where it could deal with most of the biologicals.  A period of respite was granted.

The plagues had a consequence beyond death and destruction.  They gave rise to doomsday cults that saw the first plagues as portents of the future.  Most of these cults of course were the inane ramblings of the ignorant, but a few of them were very scientifically astute.  They not only preached the end of the world and looked forward to it but they had the ability to take action to hasten it.

It has never been clearly determined just who it was that waged war upon the survival of the human species with gene tailored superviruses.  All we know is that they were very insidious.  We can only presume that they wanted to give the human race time to digest their imminent extinction.  They did not attack the humans first.  First went the dogs and cats.

They were perhaps experimenting, or perhaps they just wanted to torture.  The worlds pets all got a flu, then they got better.  People hardly gave it a thought.  Only afterwards was the association made between that flu and their subsequent infertility.  A decade later, there were no cats or dogs left.  During the previous ten years however, other species were hit.  The worlds domestic animals, the food animals, and beasts of burden, all were swiftly felled, followed by any other large beast that could conceivably be turned to human domestication and consumption.  For many of the countries that had not yet fallen into anarchy, this was the final straw.  Cannibalism and slavery were now the norm in many parts of the world.

The final stroke came when the human race went infertile.  We tried to prevent it, being prepared to stop a flu epidemic with the harshest of methods, but the attackers had been clever.  The gene altering virus infection they unleashed was a very slowly replicating one.  It had no identifiable symptoms.  By the time anyone realized there was a virus loose, it had spread everywhere.  The human race was permanently modified.

The social fabric of the surviving nations fell apart.  Barely enough semblance of national infrastructure was left to support the efforts of the scientific community.  Chaos reigned, the technological infrastructure disintegrated.  The post apocalyptic visions of the 20th century's science fiction writers came to pass.  Cannibalism became normal and accepted. The most organized semblance of civilization left in much of the world, were the survivalist movements enclaves.

A war was then being fought in the laboratories of the surviving world, buried in underground bunkers.  On the one side were the unleashers of doom who continued to loose more gene altering viruses.  On the other were the scientists who tried to grapple with the problem  Try as they might though, there was no attacking of the viruses directly.  By the time they detected a virus, the damage was already done.  They soon realized that all they could do was to create gene altering viruses of their own with which to infect the worlds population and hopefully, restore fertility.

It was no easy task and the time frame for it was very limited.  Many of the worlds scientists were fervently committed to restoring the human genome to it's original state, even if it was an impossible task and even if failure ment the extinction of the species.  They argued that the survival of the species mattered only if the species that survived 'was' human.  Others were more expedient, arguing that it wasn't the purity of the race whose survival was at stake but rather the survival of sentience.  To that end their modifications were oft times extreme and expedient.

No one is certain just why or even exactly when the attacks on the human species ended.  It is surmised that the attacks were largely the result of a single deranged genius and that that person simply died.  Their damage had been done though and all that was left now was to repair it as well as was able.  In the end, the human race did survive, but it was fundamentally and permanently altered.

The human species as we know it now is quite different from what it once was.  Males exist much as they once did, except for now being extremely rare.  Only one in ten thousand births is male.  It is the women who have been most changed, they are almost a different species.  It would appear that the scientists tried to create a version of woman that could repopulate the world quickly.  Women now give birth to small litters of babies.  Females mature to full adult physique in the space of one year.  They have an instinctual memory that enables them to learn spoken language and basic skills within that first year.  Finally, their life span measures not more than ten years.

The society that the survivalists built out of the ruin of the old world is as different from what was as is the change in the species.  Women still had only two breasts and usually gave birth to three or four babies.  It was necessary to form crèches where women would share the feeding of the babies.  It was also the most expedient way to raise the females for that first year to adulthood.  Large compounds were formed where the breeding stock would live and train their offspring.  These of necessity evolved into self sufficient communes that farmed and fed themselves.

Males were few and precious.  They also had the luxury of a normal human life span which had enabled only them to master the higher skills of the sciences.  They therefore held a most privileged position.  Their position was not merely fortuitous circumstance (for them).  It was a rather inevitable byproduct of inadvertent selection in breeding.  With a female generation reaching childbearing age within a year of birth, the eugenics of animal husbandry had as much effect on the resulting females as did the original modifications of the gene wars.  Males would inevitably choose to seed the females whom they found most pleasing physically.  More though, they impregnated those women whose behaviour they found most conducive to their libidos.

Females are now instinctually submissive to men.  More, they have totally and instinctually accepted their lot in life as being food.  They have little instinct for self preservation, beyond not wishing to displease their masters by an undesired demise.  Indeed, most females now derive their most extreme erotic pleasure from their contemplation of their final use.

Males typically will keep one or more slaves in their personal households and there is a considerable turnover in slaves.  (The economics of crèche rearing being such that the purchase cost of a new slave is actually far less than a typical weeks salary for a male.)  That said, it is not only a pleasurable pass time for them to visit the crèches to impregnate the breeding stock, it is considered a duty.

The plethora of ultra cheap, relatively unskilled labor has created an agrarian society in which the males live lives of extreme privilege and luxury.  Female flesh is consumed every day as routine.  The household slaves of the males are often killed for amusement then sent off to the kitchen.  This is common place and accepted as perfectly normal.  Most females do not survive their second year.

The only exception to the status of the females is for those very few women who have ever given birth to a male.  Those women are conferred every privilege given males, with the single exception that they must remain pregnant.  So far very few women have ever given birth to more than one male in their short lifetimes and thus far, the ability to birth males has not bred to subsequent generations.

Various entertainment's have sprung up that previous societies would be most amazed and shocked by.  Female gladiatorial death sports are a much favored entertainment.  So too for instance is the 'Carnival of Torturous Delights' wherein can be found attractions such as 'bellybutt' shooting galleries and the like.

All is not totally idyllic in our world nowadays however.  Recently war has broken out in Britain when the population of a hitherto unknown underground survival complex egressed back into the world.  They had been watching the course of world events and for the longest time elected to stay hidden.  This because the inhabitants of that complex had taken refuge there prior to the infections of the gene altering virus.  It would appear that the virus itself is now extinct as they have left the safety of their bunkers.

Apparently there has been some sort of revolution within the society of that huge complex in Britain.  They are unaltered human stock all right, but they have slaughtered their males in apparent outrage against the way outside civilization has granted them such privilege.  Reports indicate that they artificially inseminate themselves using two ovum, injecting the nucleus of one woman's ovum into the egg of another to create a growing zygote.  They are now a race of militant amazons bent on the destruction of the civilization of the world outside of their own and the killing of all males.

Fortunately they have a religious ban on anything that might alter the human genome else they might well have launched the world into another round of biological warfare.  They instead wage a conventional war of infantry type combat.  We have in response levied large numbers of our females and equipped them with firearms, but so far we have done little more than contain the British amazons.  Apparently the lack of survival instinct in our females added to their erotic death wish results in large numbers of them simply charging the amazons, often having removed all their clothing to accentuate their eroticism.  They are mowed down in droves to little effect.  None the less, they do occasionally meet with some success and given that we can feed virtually infinite numbers into the grinder, we are not greatly concerned.  We expect that this war will likely go on indeterminately but remain confined to the British Isles, and in any event, it makes for great television.

There have also been unconfirmed reports of space-time disturbances.  It is theorized that the first of the nuclear devices that was detonated prior to the gene wars resulted in this.  That first device was used against a major research facility that was engaged in antimatter production and zero point energy research for space drive propulsion purposes.  The nuclear device was detonated disrupting a particularly energetic experiment that in fact resulted in documented space-time distortions that for the longest time seemed to occur in random places in the world.  People were known to disappear..  The theory is that gates in space-time may well be resulting in some people from the previous era now finding themselves in our present time.  This bears further investigation.