"Wonderful! Stellar! Spectacular!" exclaimed a rather irate person. "You have got to be kitting me?!"
"A-are you all right?" a rather small voice squeaked towards the concerned individual.
Climbing to his feet, having been blasted just moments before, Jynx checked for any signs of wounds or damage. His lab coat was rather disconcertingly clean and clear of anything denoting what he suffered moments before.
"I'm not sure..." he mentioned more calmly than before.
"What happened?" the small female near him asked in concern.
Her name was... Gina Addams, if he remembered correctly. She too wore a similar lab coat to himself, though her tail wasn't accounted for in the making of hers. Then again, she was a fennec fox-girl, much smaller than he was as a wolf hybrid.
Technically, everyone around was of a human origin, but an event changed all of that for humans nearly a hundred years before, with the current year being 2167. It wasn't entirely clear whether it was the work of a disease, a supernatural phenomena, or some other strange event that couldn't be imagined, but the fact remained that all of humanity was imbued with something that changed humans over the course of a year or so.
DNA was changed and whatever it was stopped upon completing it's work. By the time the event, commonly called "The Regression", stopped, nearly 97 percent of humanity was irreparably changed into an animal form of themselves. It only changed humans into a mammalian form, so no one changed into fish, avian, or reptile hybrids. As such, the intensity of the change gave most a layer of fur reminiscent of the animal they emulated, but with the upright posture of a human. Some became more bestial, with digitigrade legs and stature, while the range did go towards a more furless plantigrade position too.
While a few were quite happy, many were displaced or thrown into a psychological quandary, with many becoming violent or potentially suicidal due to it. Even those left as full humans were in a 'threatening' position. It started a whole new slew of wars and such that ended up reducing the population of Earth greatly. Civilization as a whole was set back quite a bit, taking decades to recover.
By then, some nations got it together well enough to make accomodations for the new status quo. Much of Europe, Africa, and Western Asia was decimated by the conflicts, though that still continued to this day. Africa and Southeast Asia had quite the cooling off period, with views equally split on the predicament. The United States was one of the more brutal conflicts, though also one of the quickest. Many chalked it up to the estranged ability of Americans to adapt to the oddest circumstances after freaking out.
Jynx Okam was an Arctic Wolf anthro digitigrade hybrid, a scientist for a breakthrough technological endeavor, and currently reeling from the problematic event. Gina was his co-worker and colleague, a Fennec fox hybrid with fur covering her whole body as much as he.
"I was doing work on the line when someone decided to run said line!" the wolf male vented.
Looking over at the aforementioned line, Gina could see the warning signs all over it.
Warning: High Voltage. Warning: Biohazard. Warning: Radioactive.
"Uh... what's in that line?" she dared to ask. Jynx might have shouted at her, but he put a paw to his muzzle, remembering her expertise was along another specialized field he couldn't remember.
"It's a particle accelerator, to be simplistic about it," he detailed. "The more confusing answer is that it is a line used to funnel what we have deemed 'space folding particles and energy'."
He worked in a facility on the border of the United States and Canada, in what used to be Michigan. There was a waterway separating them, but current construction technology allowed for a community to be built over the water, like a suspended cityscape.
Under the supervision of a new government between both nations, active since the Regression, this facility was conducting tests on a new piece of tech that would make space travel much easier. It was a common occurence now, with travel to Mars or moons of Jupiter and Saturn being relatively simple, but the cost was still high.
The Star Seed facility had a goal to induct a new engine that could potential fold space upon itself. Most might think of wormholes or instantaneous travel, but the reality of the concept was just as strange, though incorrect.
By using a space folding engine on a space vessel, one could create a much smaller craft with the storage space of a much large vessel inside. It supposedly only used a lot of energy upon activation but required little to no energy to sustain the effect once space was folded within the equipped craft.
To put it in simple terms that they would tell the public, a craft could be built the size of a delivery truck and house a folded space within that would emulate anything from the size of a warehouse to a small city. In such a space, one could store all the food and supplies it would take to transit to a new planet. Equally important, it would be so easy to launch such a small craft and quick to travel through space.
The problem he now faced was that he had the line opened and was performing maintenance when some genius decided to flood the line with the space folding energy in an unwarranted test. For several seconds, Jynx was saturated in the energy, unsure how it would affect him and to what severity.
He didn't feel different though.
Seeing he hadn't addressed the fox girl's concern, he quickly replied, "It's something very unstable. I'm just glad it didn't vaporize me..."
"Do you need the medical staff on call?" she inquired.
He shook his head in the negative and waved her off.
"I'll let anyone know if I happen to feel anything odd, but all that happened was I got pushed back by the outflow."
Her concerned looked began to annoy him, but he rode with it and let her walk away slowly,
Taking a moment to seal the line once more, Jynx ended up feeling a strange rush to his head.
His mind was swirling with thoughts and predictions of what could happen to him.
There were no recorded cases of this energy's effects on biological matter. It had only been tested on inanimate objects and prototype crafts. The results were lackluster thus far, but evidence proved the concept was usable with needed tweaks.
Would space within him fold on itself? What would that mean? He couldn't begin to wonder. Would he be able to eat infinitely. Would his body implode upon itself?
The wolf male sighed heavily. There wasn't much he could do about it.
