I was born Terrence Christopher Weaselman on October 16th, 2074, at the assisted reproduction center in Santa Barbara, California. My generation was probably the last to use those facilities... I know they were shut down before I left for good. The assorted 'differently human' species are now officially stable, and unassisted reproduction is legal. It's still illegal to cross species lines -- although it works, since 90% of us have human chromosomes as the framework -- and while my father was a crossbreed he was ferret enough that if I'd been born ten years later I might not have gotten stuck with a west-coast biorhythm growing up in Ohio.

I didn't have many friends growing up. Family friends were nonexistant -- my father's family was... sparse. Half of it was literally nonexistant, the other half nearly wiped out in the European purges. And my mother managed to piss off her family by marrying him, and converting us all to, of all things, Judaism. My father's religeon, from both sides.

We were probably the only jewish ferrets in town, aside from my uncle, which didn't make us many friends. You'd think, after centuries of posturing, we'd be past prejudice and intolerance, but there's always something new to bring it up. The jews were among the first to recognize recombinatory species as having basic human rights -- probably because they'd force-converted so much of their population for military service. It's hard to argue that *this* tiger is human and *this* tiger is an animal when they can't be told apart in blind taste tests.

So aside from the pope saying we were demons, and the megacorps saying we were property, we had the nuts saying we were pawns of ZOG.

This is actually a dodge, and had no effect whatsoever on our lives. America isn't hate-free, but by the time it makes it to Toledo, Ohio it's fairly innocuous. But I used to angst on this a lot, as a kid, and that *did* affect my life. I spent a lot of time alone.

It didn't help that we went to a private school. My class had nine other students, all human (big surprise). Including Terry Wittenburg, who was a friend, but 'Weaselman' turned into an insult too quickly. The rabbi intervened and they called us Terry A and Terry C, in public. A lot of them asked me what the C stood for, and for some stupid reason I wouldn't tell them, so one of them (probably Ryan, everything bad in my life can be traced back to Ryan) decided it stood for 'cloth'. And they all started calling me 'Terrycloth', and I guess I let them.

I'm sort of used to it, now. I tell people it's my given name. I tell them my sister's named 'Satin', instead of 'Hannah'. I hate the name 'Hannah' almost as much as I hate 'Terrence'.

Now that that's out of the way, let me see if I can explain the horror that was grade school. Kids, human or otherwise, are evil. I was evil. But I was usually the victim. I was the class victim, but I wouldn't stand for it. I'd fight back. I had sharp claws, and sharp teeth, and faster reflexes than anyone else in the class. That meant that if two of them held my while Ryan pulled down my pants during naptime, and I tried to free myself by biting a grasping hand positioned too close to my mouth, there'd be a kid in the hospital and I'd be in the principal's office, listening to the lecture about how my wild instincts couldn't be allowed in human society, and how I'd end up in prison or dead if I couldn't get them under control.

Let me clear something up. I'm mostly North American ferret. We aren't like the combat breeds, the tigers and wolves and rats. We were bred off domestic ferrets as status symbols and self-cleaning housepets. We have dangerous instincts to chase after socks, shred tissue paper, run away from loud noises and crawl into small dark spaces. And maybe bite if we're angry, but not hard enough to do any damage. I've seen humans do worse.

Try explaining that to a principal that cleans his freaking shotgun while explaining how he was going to give you *one* more chance.

I had two real friends in grade school, Steven and later Ethan. This is using the rigorous standard of real friendship, that I could ask them over and they might actually come. Which is how my friendship with Steven ended -- I said 'no' once. I didn't realize it was important at the time, I was just sick of seeing human faces.

I got like that a lot. Spent a lot of time in my room building virtual universes that no one would ever see, where everyone was, of all things, a flying squirrel. Or trying to write up a 'better' simulation algorithm in a standard script. Wanna be game designer. But who wasn't, as a kid?

If Grade School was a friendless beaurocratic hell, Junior High was... indescribable. So I'll call it the friendless hell, instead. I had a friend in Junior High, one person I could talk to, who'd call me 'Terrycloth' instead of 'Stinky' or whatever the insult was that week. Not a *real* friend, of course... more of an ally. I honestly don't remember his name, which is probably for the best. We didn't part on the best terms, what with his stabbing me in the back the last week of eighth grade.

I got picked on a *lot* in junior high. It was... I didn't want to get up in the morning, it was so bad. But I never really got beaten up. There were, in fact, only four incidents that involved physical violence at all. In one I got slapped around for sitting in the back of the bus. That might count as 'beaten up', although they didn't hit very hard. Maybe it would have hurt more if I was human. Number two someone thought it was funny to cut off the tip of my tail with a pair of scissors. They only got fur, which I rubbed in their face until they pushed me away and started swinging. But I had a longer reach (they were really teeny, particularly for a wolf) and held them at arm's length, and they never actually scored. Number three, in band class, after I broke my arm walking to school through some freezing rain, while I was sitting there with a cast on in pain from trying to play an instrument anyway, a bunch of them came up behind me and *soaked* me in perfume. I must have given some terribly frightening growl, because by the time I'd picked up the music stand with my one good arm they were all clustered across the room, perfect targets. But I missed and put the stand through the window instead. Got suspended for a week, only time I really got in trouble. Number four was... confusing. Someone played 'keepaway' with one of my pencils, and I tried to strangle him to death, so his friend jumped on me and the two of us strangled each other instead, until the principle came. I lied and whimpered, and looked really cute until he let me off. Ferrets are good at looking cute -- it's never let me down. We were bred for it, after all.

High school was better. We lived too close to the ghetto and ended up in the city school where all the recoms went. Recom stands for recombitant DNA manipulation, I think. It was actually taken out of some scifi book or other. Not out of Swann... the real classic. He called us 'Moreys' off of an even *earlier* scifi book, 'The Island of Dr. Moreau'. I've read it. It sucked.

Anyway, Finkbeiner High was about 75% recom, which didn't mean 'ferrets', of course. It was 75% wolves and cats and rats and other combat critters. I managed to get into the honors program, which was mostly human, and didn't have much contact with the school at large. God, I grew to hate wolves and cats, though, just from passing in the hallway and physical education. PE was terrible -- they had separate 'recom' and 'human' numbers to grade against, so I was judged in running speed against the cheetahs and wolves. I think I got a 'C' in the 100 meter dash -- my best PE grade of the semester except in quasi-sports like badminton and basketball.

Between sophomore and junior years the school was shut down due to a low student population. Toledo is always dying, it seems like, but it's still hanging on. And still claiming to be the 'glass capitol of the world' even though the last glass mill closed hundreds of years ago.

After Finkbeiner shut down, I was shipped to Start High along with the rest of the 'good' kids, and the last couple years were probably the best I had in Toledo. High school in general was pretty good, though. I hung out with a coven of witches/punk rock band/lesbian commune/whatever they decided to be that week, and to a lesser extent with some grungy rodents, at least until they tried to slip me some lucies. I had a straight-A average and didn't want to do anything that'd screw that up. And I didn't. Really exciting, huh?

We did take a couple trips to the Former Russian Confederation, the city-state of Volga. Formerly known as Volgograd, formerly known as Stalingrad. God, 150 years later the WWII memorial is still moving. Even for me. Only thing the old soviets could do right, I guess... the museum of the independence war was pretty crappy. Or maybe I'm biased because my great grandmother was one of the 'demon hordes' the Volgaskies repelled.

I spent most of my time there in a small apartment playing audio-visual microdisks with the visual disabled over one eye, trying to copy down the lyrics and sketch out a storyboard. Waste of several thousand dollars -- I was supposed to be exploring the exciting foreign country. But foreign countries -- even foreign countries whose economy has been shit for the past century -- are too much like home. Just muddier. With more beets. So I did it twice. I still don't know much russian.

I applied to four colleges on the very last day for eligibility, two good schools and two 'safe' schools. I was accepted to a good school -- the *best* school in the field I wanted to go into -- but instead I took the crap school that gave me a big scholarship. And isn't *that* the choice that shaped the rest of my life. Or maybe it was just the choice that fit my shape. But you know, shoving a square peg into a round hole is the only way it's ever going to change.

With the scholarships, and some help from my grandmother (on my father's side), I didn't have to work through college. Oh, my mother got on me about it, and the summer of my junior year I actually got a job. Doing telemarketing. For three days, until I was fired for working overtime. *I* don't think it counts.

School was easy... once I switched to Computer Engineering. Easy for me, at least -- some of the other people were struggling. But I already knew how to code, so I was able to absorb the concepts and standard practices quickly. Straight As with nothing more serious than a few all nighters in the computer lab.

Plenty of time left over for some dabbling on the internet -- mostly in legacy.usenet.alt.devilbunnies, an *ancient* SIG. I mean, yeah, it was mostly a chat space, but IC, and sometimes we'd write stories together, in text form, no less! About a conspiracy of squirrels, bunnies, alien amoebas and foxes, all secretly working for the Salusians, and the crack team of humans charged by the government with hunting them down. I played a -- get this -- *raccoon*. Oooh. Made up a whole city of raccoons, vaguely on the human side, with super tech and -- eventually I got better. But I never managed to play anything but a raccoon there. Oh, and these were normal, non-anthropomorphic raccoons. Recom characters were forbidden on the group by a clause in some ancient charter document.

I also did some gaming in person. We had a game club, played a lot of board games, card games, that sort of thing. Geeky stuff, though, not 'Monopoly'. Eventually it died, wiped out along with everything else by Technology: the Assembly. I did manage to keep one friend out of it, though, even though he didn't play Tech much. I'll go into more detail because there's an amusing and 'typical' story to tell with him in it.

His name was Rik. Rik 'Coon. Actually Richard Fong. And, like all the raccoon recoms, he was really a tanuki -- they're basically the Japanese version of the wolf combat morph. Japan used 'raccoons' and foxes and weasels where the west used wolves and cats and rats. Sony marketed the tanuki-recoms as 'raccoons' abroad... and the foxes as 'kitsune'. Go figure. The Raccoon and Kitsune models were really succesful in the export market, which is part of why you see so many around all over the world.

Rik 'Coon was the president of the gaming club the year it died. I was the vice president. Collectively, it was our fault, but we were friends, and no one cared -- we were all playing Tech anyway.

For my birthday, the last year of college, he invited me out on a drinking binge to celebrate finally being of age. He picked me up, we drove down to the Flats, went into a bar... and I discovered I'd forgotten my ID. And they served me drinks anyway, when I told my story and looked cute. Then we wandered around, and did nothing, and went home.

And since then, that's what's happened whenever I try to go do something with someone I've become friends with through some common activity. We meet, something goes horribly wrong, nothing interesting happens, and we go home. At least *that* time I wasn't injured.

As for how I made it to this godforsaken outpost on the edge of chaos, well, that's another story, that's also up on this page somewhere.

But that's my life in a nutshell, and if it doesn't seem like much, it's because there's not much there. I'm normal, or was. I never changed species or sex or size or even fur color before I got here... I woke up every day knowing exactly who I was and what I'd do, and I could have lived my life that way. And sometimes, when I wake up and can't remember what I used to be (I'm a FERRET, damn it! Terrycloth. Weaselman. North American Ferret. SSN 964-33-8984-F.), or when I go half the day not realizing that I'm a female raccoon or a table or something, I'm not sure if that wouldn't have been for the best.

Damn, and there I *almost* got through it without existential angst.