It's the 42nd century CE but nobody calls it that anymore. Most of known space uses IC, the Imperial Calendar, and by that it is the 8th. The Empire's been mostly gone for the last two but the Calendar has stuck around. For most of those centuries, humanity has been alone. No sapient aliens were ever discovered and early attempts at uplifting animals failed horribly. Anthros are a very new development, and their appearance is closely tied to the collapse of the Empire.
Humanity has been FTL-capable for two millennia. It started with a few tentative outposts within the Sol system but soon enough nearby systems started being colonized. Some of these first-wave colonies foundered, some just never amounted to much. But some became wealthy and powerful in their own right and that inevitably led to problems with Earth. The resulting conflicts were waged on a scale and with a brutality unheard of in human history and by the end of them most of the first-wave colonies as well as the cradle of humanity itself were uninhabitable irradiated wastelands. Nobody actually won the Colony Wars...the fighting just gradually died down as all parties involved ran out of ships, missiles and people to fight with.
The survivors wanted nothing more to do with that mess and headed outwards from the small bubble of space that had been explored in the First Wave. The Second Wave of colonization reached out a lot further, beyond contact range of one another. And for a while, the second-wave colonies developed on their own, in relative peace.
It couldn't last. One second-wave colony mission, mostly staffed by colonists of turkish descent, had struck the jackpot. Cennet was immediately habitable, resource-rich and close to a number of other systems with promising candidates for settlement. They began to grow faster than any of the other second-wave colonies and by the time they re-established contact with the rest of the human diaspora they were already an unstoppable juggernaut of an empire.
The Empire's expansion and eventual absorption of all other human settlements was followed by a golden age of peace and prosperity. Sure, the imperial Core Worlds close to Cennet were profiting more than the outlying provinces but there was enough wealth to go around to keep everyone happy.
Once again...it couldn't last. The Empire hit a point where its infrastructure and bureaucracy simply could not sustain further expansion, and without fresh wealth flowing in from newly-settled worlds the economy began to stagnate. The Core worlds maintained their vast wealth by taking from the provinces and the wealth disparity grew and grew. Soon, impoverished provinces were in open revolt, the imperial military stretched thin trying to deal with thousands of little brushfire wars at once before any of them could develop into a true crisis. They did their best but it was a hopeless battle.
In the midst of this age of decline and growing chaos, new powers arose to fill the vacuum left behind by the Empire. One of them...was VWY.
Vorden-Wellesley-Yang is a megacorporation of particularly shady origins. Rumored to have been founded by a band of ruthless pirates and slavers, they found their niche in the field of human genetic modification, something long suppressed by the Empire on philosophical and purely pragmatic grounds (because even the most decadent Core-World aristocrats could see that the genegineers were playing with fire). But far from creating Supermen...VWY went down a far darker road than anyone had anticipated.
Slavery had been illegal in the Empire and technically still was in most of known space. But those laws only applied to humans. Transgenic beings, far enough removed from baseline humanity to be patented, could be bought and sold without drawing too much attention from what authorities remained to enforce the law. And the decadent wealthy had an insatiable appetite for fresh playthings that couldn't say no.
VWY's genegineers created and sold line after line of "products". The first were still noticeably human, if modified. Altered biochemistry and neurobiology were mostly what distinguished these Category-I products from baseline humanity. They sold well but buyers in more...civilized areas (or at least still bothering to keep up the appearance of civilization) balked at accepting the purchase or sale of beings that looked perfectly human on the outside.
New lines of products were developed to break into those markets. Unnatural skin and hair colours, features like pointed ears or inhuman proportions marked these Category-II transgenics as different from mankind.
But VWY weren't done yet. Soon, Category III burst onto the market...the merging of human and animal features. Even the most self-righteous among the Core Worlds were willing to accept the enslavement and exploitation of such creatures.
By the time these stories take place, Category III has been largely supplanted by Category IV. Where Cat-IIIs were still modified humans "under the hood", so to speak, and had to be produced from human genetic material in VWY's growth tanks, Cat-IVs were truly new species of sophonts, created from the ground up to serve as toys to the rich and depraved.
Today, VWY remains the largest producer of transgenic slaves in known space. But other groups have begun to muscle into that lucrative market and the price of their products is in freefall. A market flooded with transgenic slaves has paradoxically led to more and more of them gaining their freedom. Some escaped, others were freed by their masters or simply left to fend for themselves after their owners died (or simply grew bored of them). Not quite accepted among baseline humanity they form a more or less oppressed underclass on many human worlds. Their numbers are growing, and so is their confidence. They are beginning to demand fairer treatment and laws against the slave trade, and some planetary governments are starting to listen. Meanwhile, VWY has decided to branch out into different fields, marketing tank-bred transgenic soldiers to governments, other megacorps and criminal organizations alike.
Tessa and Ceru, both type-1162 Cat-IV models, began life in VWY growth tanks on the wholly-owned corporate world of Neraka Secundus. They were decanted into, shall we say...interesting times.
