Bioengineered humans
- Lynda
- 3d
- 3 min read
A colleague recently told me about an SF series featuring lines of bioengineered humans designed to go and build out habitat on worlds to be colonized. Always a frustrating moment when you wrote a ten novel series about such people, known as Sevolites in the Okal Rel Universe, a few decades ago. One of the drawbacks to being the obscure Canadian Tolkien is the obscure part, but there are good things about that, too. Oh well. It isn't as if other people wouldn't think along the same lines, or the author might even have read an Okal Rel book in their teens for all I know. Such is life.
But the moment did rouse me to make this post.
Sevolites, by the time of the Okal Rel Saga, are running a neo-feudal empire spanning multiple reaches and although they know they came from Earth, they certainly don't believe (except for the scholarly science types) that they were created by "commoners" aka natural humans.
The major divisions among them are: Lorel, Demish and Vrellish. The Lorels came first (read The Lorel Experiment or listen to Michelle Milburn's reading of it, free, on Youtube) and created the other two categories.
The Demish (DMs) were the ones designed to go out and build colonies. They came in both sexes, even from the start, as DM females were needed to bring Sevolite products to term cost effectively, even if the babies were cooked up by the Lorels without the need for anyone to have sex. Demish of the empire still like rules and are predisposed to follow them and make other people do so, too. They constitute the neo-Victorian type cultures in the empire of the 10-novel Saga. Golden Demish are a variant from the corrupt, decadent period on Earth in which female-only companions, beautiful, sexy, forgiving and compassionate were sold as products by Self-Evolved Limited. Male Golden Demish were created, later, by sympathetic Lorel Sevolites who ditched Earth along with the Sevolites they'd played a role in making more human and capable of rebellion. But that's another story.
The Vrellish (VRs) were specialized to be super pilots, and originally male only, or rather a kind of neuter-gender, obedient product line programmed to die before they acquired too much experience and gestated by DM females. The corrupt variant were VR gladiators / bodyguard / militia who included the lines "spiked" with human traits by sympathetic Lorels who evolved into the Saga-era Vrellish after female VRs were made available.
Hybrid lines, whether they choose to consider themselves such or not, resulted from cross breeding over the centuries. Empire Sevolites of all kinds can also produce offspring with natural humans.
A subtle point, perhaps, but Saga-era Reetions, from the egalitarian non-Sevolite arbiter administration, aren't really entirely natural humans since they've improved lifespan and corrected genetic defects, etc. over the centuries under the umbrella of medical practices. Sevolites still consider them "commoners", naturally.
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Lore posts feature aspects of the in-world Okal Rel Universe such as settings, in-world history, characters, cultures, technology, etc. For a concise (and free!) overview check out The Official Guide to the Okal Rel Universe on Wattpad.