Japanese Neko

by on March 16, 2018 at 12:01 am
Posted In: The Races of Humanity

Neko culture in New Japan could almost be described as something out of cyberpunk stories. Los Angeles was a far more utopian setting that most of them, but the Neko embraced everything else. Cybernetic intelligence, cybernetic augmentation, and a mixing of the cybernetic and physical worlds in ways most people never saw. A person walking through downtown Los Angeles before The War would have seen only half of the world around him. But augmentations, or glasses logged into the local networks, showed you the virtual world of glowing, hovering billboards overlaid over everything else. Dragons flew in the skies, advertisements flashed for your attention, and Neko wearing artificial eyes or manipulator arms designed to be noticed moved through the hybrid worlds like they were born to them. They lived in amazing places and times.

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Japanese Neko

by on March 15, 2018 at 12:01 am
Posted In: The Races of Humanity

The Neko of New Japan are unique in many ways. The physical features that resemble cats are merely one of them. Another is their naming conventions. America has spent centuries absorbing some names and modifying or abandoning others. A man named Anders in his home country might change his name to Andrew to blend in with the sounds that American speakers can best understand. Place names, foods, and basic concepts have met similar modifications when coming to America. But the Neko take pride in choosing Japanese, or Nihonese as they call it, names for everything. One can easily hear a Neko walking down the street in conversation with a friend, effortlessly moving from American to Nihonese so smoothly that they baffle most listeners. They proclaim their differences in ways that most people do not dare, and that daring is part of what made them so effective when they went to War.

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Reina Ono

by on March 14, 2018 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Art, Character Profiles

Reina Ono lived in Los Angeles back before The War. She was a fully gengineered Neko, only lacking the tail that some Neko had. I remember her saying that was a plus. She had a cybernetic tail for the times she wanted to show off, but she related stories of what happened when fellow Nekos sat on their real tails by accident. She was happy to avoid that particular sensation, though was also happy to inform me that she felt every other sensation from it just fine when it was attached. She’d had other cybernetic attachments when she was younger, but either lost them when Yosemite fell on Los Angeles, or outgrew them in the chaotic years that followed. By the time she was old enough to volunteer for military service, all she had left of her previous life was her subdermal personal computer and her tail. She was pretty proud of both, let me tell you.

High rez version available for free on Patreon

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Japanese Neko

by on March 13, 2018 at 12:01 am
Posted In: The Races of Humanity

The Neko of New Japan have long pursued a degree of augmentation avoided by most other people. Whether it’s the oldest of attachable tails or the newest of cybernetic and gengineered eyes and ears, the Neko have gleefully taken experiments of technology and genetics into their very bodies. They’re constantly looking to enhance their physical appearance or abilities with new technology, and everything from embedded phones to IDs are common. They can be walking down the street in nothing but their fur, talking to someone on the other side of the Earth via a phone no one can see, and purchase something to eat with a wave of their hand. Many of them have never used a physical key to unlock anything, or find the idea of handling physical paper money that someone else had touched disgusting. They’re on the forefront of adopting cybernetic and genetic technologies into their lifestyles, and they can seem a little alien to many others on Earth.

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Jack of Harts

by on March 12, 2018 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Diaries

One of the defining traits of my Jack of Harts universe is that the aliens are human too. Aliens that are not human are obviously genetically engineered from Earth animals of the present or the past. The Albion were busy little gengineers in their time, and our own Western Alliance gengineers were similarly busy with the uplift process once they figured it out.

There are no alien aliens in Jack of Harts at this time. It is not that they do not exist. It is that the story I am telling does not require them. They may appear in the future, but Jack of Harts is a purely human story. Humanity and those we create in our image. Those we play god with. Does that make us gods? Or simply children that do not understand the dangers we play with while thinking we have the knowledge of gods?

Jack of Harts is a coming of age story for humanity, and for the titular character, with all the Races of Humanity playing front and center as they argue and fight over what stories their descendents will tell in the age that follows. Perhaps I will write a story with aliens in the future. If I should, I will have fun writing it. But for now, as we all know looking upon each other on Earth, humans can be plenty alien enough to each other for just about all the stories I could hope to write.

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