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I guess I might as well begin with my name. For the sake of simplicity, I go by Blue. You wouldn’t be able to pronounce the whistles and clicks that make up my real name. Hell, with the [[Morphs#Splicers|splicer]] morph I wear nowadays, neither can I.
I began life as an uplifted common dolphin, but it’s been many years since I’ve been that—at least on the outside. (Of course, I’m still an uplift on the inside. You can take the transhuman out of the dolphin, but you can’t take the dolphin out of the transhuman.) I escaped the Fall as an [[Morphs#Infomorphs|infomorph]] and ended up as an indent—at least until I found a way to indulge my more, ah, entrepreneurial impulses. I have no moral qualms about smuggling—my current line of work. Maybe it’s because my species was engineered into existence or how I spent decades of my life as a good corporate servant, but I’ve developed a strong aversion to following the rules. Turns out it’s a lot more fun ripping off the hypercorps than being their plaything.
I like my life, but there are still times late at night when I can’t sleep.
Times when I remember the sea.
I miss the freedom. The speed. Racing the waves, leaping, the sun warm on my slick back, plunging into the cool water, the ocean going on forever, the bodies of my pod pressing against me …
Anyway, I’ve been hired to put together a short overview of uplift culture. Hired by whom, you might ask? That’s an excellent question. They tell me they’re a think tank.
Right.
If I think anything about think tanks, it’s that none of them are smart enough to hire the likes of me. The type of information I have to provide is somewhat more pragmatic and reality-based than the slurry stuffed inside your average academic paper. Since this so-called “think tank” was clever enough to get the story of uplifts straight from the dolphin’s mouth (don’t even get me started on horses), I ﬁgure I will be polite enough not to ask too many questions, despite the weird vibes. I have an inkling this project is for the greater good. Thank Darwin for intuition.
=What is Uplift?= 
What is uplift? In the simplest sense it’s the process of elevating an animal species to sapience. Take a biological creature shaped by millions of years of evolution (the baseline species) and re-engineer it to walk and talk and use tools and think. Just like //Homo sapiens//. It’s the process of going from sentience (the self-awareness that most animals possess, including feeling, perceiving, and suffering) to sapience (actual thinking and acting with intelligence, judgment, and wisdom). It’s artificially accelerated and proactive evolution. It’s a biological upgrade. It’s turning beasts into persons. That’s uplift.
Uplift is not a simple process. It’s not taking a speciﬁc animal and doing something to it to make it intelligent. It’s a generations-long process of genetic manipulation, selective breeding, and transgenic alteration. It’s a litany of experiments, mistakes, and victories, with living beings as the test subjects.
==Playing God== 
The active pursuit of uplift really took hold as a scientific ﬁeld during the great ﬂowering of transhuman culture, an era that also gave us the widespread settlement of space, extensive human genetic modification, nanotech, cognitive science, and the digital emulation of consciousness. It is in fact the convergence of these ﬁelds, and the feedback loops spawned between them, that enabled the uplift project to make so much headway so quickly.
It’s easy to see uplift as a breathtaking cultural and technological revolution, but the truth is the idea at the heart of uplift is as old as Homo sapiens itself. One doesn’t have to look too hard to ﬁnd the seeds of the future being sown in the distant past.
It began in small ways. The ﬁrst men who lured hungry wolves into the circle of ﬁrelight with scraps of meat. The cultivation of wheat and corn, barley and rice. The domestication of cattle and swine, sheep and poultry. The breeding of canines, equines, and other animals into a thousand different shapes for a thousand different chores. And then, as if controlling the sex lives of the world’s ﬂora and fauna wasn’t enough, reaching into the very genetic repository of the planet and re-engineering it for the pleasure of humanity. Plants ﬁrst. Then animals. And ﬁnally, mankind itself.
The history of civilization is merely the history of humanity bending living things to its will. Control. That’s what a human is. Uplift is merely the logical extension of millions of years of “progress.”
So once humanity had the technological tools to investigate and pursue uplifting in earnest, there was no reason to pause. Despite its many achievements, if there is one thing humanity is terrible at, it is foresight. There was relatively little discussion and debate about the consequences or ethics of uplifting animals, at least in the public sphere. The momentum of progress made uplift all but inevitable.
It started innocently enough, as part of the wider project to understand cognition and cognitive development. Obviously, for all but the most unscrupulous of researchers, actual research on human subjects was off limits. But animals, animals were always there to stand in for humans in experiments. As humans sought to make smarter humans, to better understand the mind, and to measure the impact of implants, biological brain enhancements, and nootropic drugs, one of their ﬁrst steps was to make smarter animals. The more similar a brain was to that of a human, the better the effects of experiments on such organs could be correlated to humans, and so animal minds were gengineered and modified to be more like human minds. Likewise, efforts to clone and genetically modify humans were ﬁrst perfected on animals. It was animal test subjects who reaped the beneﬁts of enhanced vision, longevity, and a myriad of other genetic improvements long before humans did—at least until they were vivisected and studied.
As numerous creatures were sent to scout the path of accelerated evolution ahead of humans, it was only natural that some scientists would turn their attention towards improving animals’ minds and bodies specifically. For some, this was just an attempt to solve the next scientific puzzle, to see what could be done for the sake of learning and doing it. For others, it was to breed better companions and servants. For most, however, the glory of creating another intelligent species was an achievement for which they could not avoid striving. The allure of playing god was too strong to avoid.
==An Ethical Imperative?== 
As corporate scientists worked in their labs, sculpting animal genes and animal minds, a ﬁerce debate erupted over the wisdom of uplift. Not whether it could be done, but whether it //should//.
The primates and cetaceans already seemed to stand on the threshold of sapience. Chimpanzees fashioned tools to ﬁsh for termites and passed this skill on to their young. Whales and dolphins communicated using a system of whistles and clicks that approached language in its level of complexity and also seemed to use unique whistle identifiers for themselves, much like names. Gorillas were taught to speak using American Sign Language and demonstrated mental ﬂexibility by creating compound words. Bonobos mastered language using touch screens and voice synthesizers. How much farther would these creatures really need to go before they became fully sapient?
How could humanity not help these creatures take the ﬁnal step towards intelligence, many argued. These scientists made the point that sapience was a gift, that uplift would give animals the capabilities to care for themselves more fully, to be more in control of their own future. They argued that humanity as a species had an ethical duty to improve the lot of the world’s creatures, to improve the quality of their lives and to lessen suffering.
Their opponents sneered. The movement against uplift was an odd coalition of animal rights activists, opposed to the use of animals as test subjects, and religious fundamentalists, who saw this as an attempt to spit in the face of God. Both factions considered it a perversion of nature, an example of technology driving unspeakable atrocities and crimes. The arguments made by scientists that they were acting in the best interests of these animal species was compared to the ugly rationalizations of colonialism, in which millions of indigenous people were slaughtered and forcibly assimilated into a foreign culture, all for “their own good.” The detractors believed that humanity had no right to interfere with another species’ development, to make decisions on their behalf, or to uplift without consent. Others feared the taint that uplifts would spread by mixing their animal ways into human affairs.
How could a creature without the means to comprehend the choice before it offer its consent?
The supporters of uplift argued that the idea of consent was a red herring. No human being walking the face of the planet had ever agreed to be born. Why should uplifted beings be held to a higher moral standard? Ethically, others could make the choice for the soon-to-be-uplift, assuming they had the best interests of the uplifts in mind. And for those not won over by those arguments, consent could be obtained retroactively. The uplifts could be asked after they’d been raised up.
As it turned out, opinions on sapience were as diverse among the early uplifts as they were among the human population. A few were horrified to ﬁnd they’d been kidnapped from the Garden of Eden and stripped of their innocence. Most were grateful to humanity for their sapience or considered it a fait accompli. Then there were those with a more nuanced view, thankful to be uplifted, but disliking that human ethics, culture, and modes of thinking were so strongly imprinted on their kind. These mercurials argued that uplifts should have control over their development and that higher emphasis should be placed on each species’ own non-human path.
Aside from all of these opinions, both pro and con, there was one other major viewpoint. This group regarded Homo sapiens as only one thread in the great tapestry of life. In their view, humanity was not the manor lord, doling out gifts out of some virtuous duty to its intellectual inferiors. Instead, humanity was just one species building friendships and alliances with the creatures with which it shared the Earth. This is the promise of what transhumanity could be, a civilization employing the gifts of its many varied members for the betterment of all. Humans and uplifts were not parents and children, but siblings and companions.
Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your point of view, corporations as institutions are remarkably immune to moral quandaries. While the ethical issues raged through the human zeitgeist, the scientists cheerfully went about their business. So, love us or hate us, it really doesn’t matter. We uplifts are here to stay. If you don’t like that, blame your fellow humans.
==How it Came To Be== 
The ﬁrst dedicated work on uplift began a half century before the Fall. All of the world’s major biotech corporations—Monsanto, Syngenta, Dupont, JingMei, Dow, etc.—had divisions or subsidiaries that competed to make new breakthroughs. But as everyone knows, it was an up-and-coming hypercorp that scored the big prize: [[Somatek]]. Led by a brilliant and ambitious young vice president named Rael Duvalier, their efforts paid off. In 38 BF, the ﬁrst chimpanzee passed the Applied Sapience Test. Jumbles became a household name. Duvalier rode his project’s success all the way to the Somatek boardroom.
Over the next two decades, Somatek and their many competitors uplifted eight new species: bonobos, orangutans, gorillas, bottlenose dolphins, humpback whales, belugas, and the ﬁrst non-mammals, gray parrots and ravens. These developments were not embraced by all of humanity. Anti-uplift groups ramped up their lobbying and protests, with extremists raiding labs to destroy experiments or liberate test subjects. Some governments refused to recognize uplifts as legal persons, while others clamped down on or criminalized uplift research. Aggressive hypercorps that did not wish to see their efforts hindered transferred their projects offworld, outside of Earth-bound jurisdictions and international laws and codes of conduct. Somatek’s R&D facility on Luna, Clever Hands, became a focal point for unrestricted experimentation.
Out in the quiet of space, there was no one to see or object to projects that would have raised even more hackles on Earth. Neo-pigs were created, crossing a line many felt should have been left alone, elevating a former food animal to an intelligent being of equal status. Another company, New Day, brought neanderthals back to life—resurrecting one of humanity’s nearest cousins, long ago driven extinct at human hands. Other experiments were waged in the hidden recesses of the solar system by people who may not have had massive R&D budgets but did possess creativity and networked expertise. In the decades before the Fall, the ﬁrst invertebrate (the octopus) was uplifted to sapience, joined by orcas, porpoises, elephants, and other species of dolphins and whales. Dozens of less intelligent species were raised in cognitive abilities, if not full sapience. There may even have been other successes, but then the TITANs smashed the Earth on their way to the singularity. It is rumored that elephants joined the uplift ranks only to go extinct during the Fall.
Uplifts in general fared poorly during the Fall. Many were not given an option to evacuate Earth, even as infugees—human bodies and minds took preference. Not a single neo-elephant escaped the devastation of Earth, not even as an infomorph. Only a handful of neo-whales survived, joining the dozens of their species raised in the depths of [[Europa]], [[Ceres]], and the [[Sol|solar corona]]. For the most part, uplifts owe their current population ﬁgures to the fact that so much uplift research had been forced offworld before the apocalypse.
After just over half a century of being brought into existence, uplifts have diffused throughout the solar system, becoming a recognizable element of transhuman culture. Many still work as indentures, while others are practically enslaved by the hypercorps that created them, working as contract labor for specialized tasks with open-ended (read: eternal) durations. More recently, there have been several waves of emancipated uplifts leaving the hypercorps behind and emigrating to the moons and habitats of the outer system.
Transhuman civilization harbors incredible diversity. Refugees who ﬂed the Fall as software. Near-immortal minds uploaded into morphs of any shape or size that can be imagined. Creatures that bask in the blazing sun or frolic in the deep icy oceans of Europa. Bouncers that deftly traverse microgravity modules. Brinkers in synthetic shells who eschew habitats to hide in the dark of the deep system.
In this mix, uplifts are mostly just regular folks. We have the same dreams and needs as anyone else. We need food and shelter. We value fulfilling work and creativity. We want a future for our children. We seek to grow and learn as thinking beings. Despite the bigots, we uplifts are just as transhuman, as transbiological, as the rest of you. There’s no place we can’t live, no job we can’t do, no aspect of transhuman civilization we’re not part of.
Except not everyone accepts that we are //people//. In most of the solar system, our rights are limited. We are denied jobs, treated as monsters, pets, or slaves, and not allowed to have children on our own. And even though //Homo sapiens// has reshaped our brains, in the end our minds still aren’t entirely human.
On one end, uplift is viewed as Michelangelo’s Adam reaching out to touch the hand of God. On the other, it is Frankenstein’s Monster, a horribly misguided experiment and a cautionary tale of the horrors scientific genius can produce. The truth, of course, is somewhere gray and fuzzy in between. Uplifts have the best qualities and traits humans do. Humans have imprinted upon them, but uplifts also bring their own strengths and weaknesses to the table. They exist without ever knowing what it would have been like to evolve to sapience on their own, as humans did. Without ever developing their own modes of thinking, their own unique form of intelligence.
Did humans do uplifts a favor? Or did they erase their potential?
===Sidebar: Baby's First Words=== 
**[Begin Transcript]**
//[A wizened, old chimpanzee male sits in a chair, his clear brown eyes staring off into the distance. His once-dark fur is specked with silver, making it look gray. He looks sharp in a gray suit. He sits up straight and there is intelligence in his eyes. Clearly this is a proud creature—but he’s also something else. Sad.]//
“I know that many uplifts consider the name Jumbles an insult. And sure, I get their point. It’s human and it’s demeaning. A circus name—that’s what some mercurials call it. But what else am I supposed to call myself? I could take an African name, but that wouldn’t be any less human than Jumbles, would it? Do the mercurials really want me to call myself Uplift Pan Trog Subject 119? That was my ofﬁcial name during the project. It may not be as whimsical as Jumbles, but I think it’s hard to argue that it’s any less demeaning.”
//[His voice grows softer.//] “Jumbles is what my mother called me. Not my real mother, of course. Not my biological mother, as if the concept of biological means a damn thing any more. Her name was Dr. Katherine Santos and she loved me. She was the one that helped me escape, helped me smuggle out these clips. And she didn’t call me ‘Chimp’ or ‘Subject’ or ‘One-Nineteen.’ She called me ‘Jumbles.’ “That’s good enough for me.”
//[A juvenile chimpanzee sits on a sun-drenched floor, playing with brightly colored blocks. He stacks bright-red rectangles and yellow triangles and blue circles, constructing a building out of primary colors. He is about the size of a human preschooler. He works intently with the blocks. They are obviously his whole universe.]//
An offscreen voice (male) says, “What are we seeing here?” The voice sounds human, but really, who can say?
“Everything at the project was documented. Somatek took no chance that a breakthrough might escape them because they weren’t watching. There’s millions of hours of digital recordings. This is me, age four. On what was almost the last day of my life.”
Another offscreen male voice, different from the ﬁrst, says: “Look, Kathy, he’s still not talking.”
A woman’s voice, now. She’s angry. Furious. But despite that, she’s pleading. “That doesn’t mean he has no value.”
“Of course he has value. The modifications to the language center clearly didn’t work as expected. We have a chance to ﬁnd out why.”
//[The chimp continues to play with his blocks, oblivious to the two humans standing over him.]//
“So that’s it,” she says bitterly. “You vivisect him and poke around in his mind. So you can see where you fucked up?”
“One-Nineteen is a test subject, Dr. Santos,” says the man in a voice that is arctic cold. “Perhaps you have lost your objectivity.”
“One-Nineteen is a living creature easily twice as smart as any baseline,” the woman snaps. “And, by the way, his name isn’t One-Nineteen. It’s Jumbles.”
//[Suddenly the little chimpanzee looks up, peers up at the humans standing over him.]// “I Jumbles, Mamma. I Jumbles.”
“The ﬁrst words spoken aloud by a chimpanzee,” says Jumbles (the here Jumbles, the now Jumbles.) “The ﬁrst words spoken by a chimpanzee—and the words that saved my life.”
**[End Transcript]**
=The Science of Uplift= 
So now you’ve seen how we got to this point and what poor benighted animals humanity decided to gift with its godlike touch, but how was it done? The biology of uplift isn’t as simple as just making the baseline critter more like a human; a lot of the things that work well for Homo saps just don’t translate as well over to other species. Keep in mind the idea is to create a viable dolphin, octopus, or crow that can think like a Homo sap, not just a human that happens to be wearing a different body.
==The Brain== 
The starting place for all of this work is, of course, the human brain. Partly this is because humanity is recasting these creatures in its own image, but also because the human cerebrum is the most thoroughly described higher-order brain available to uplift engineers.
One of the early debates among uplift researchers was whether to steer animal brain enhancement along its likely evolutionary path, thus making them more intelligent without making them quite so distinctly human, or whether to manipulate their brains to emulate humans, and thus produce more human-like intelligence. In the end, it may have been simplicity that won out. Most animal brains were simply not as thoroughly understood as human minds, and it was easier to modify them towards known structures and functions than to try to break ground with distinctly different types of intelligence. (This isn’t to say that research into uplift via non-human brain enhancement was ever discarded—it is most certainly still underway, though decades behind. Given the fear of non-human minds spawned by the TITANs, however, such projects are almost certainly secretive and hidden.)
In the early days of uplift, animal brains were modified surgically and with drugs. Uplift engineers grafted on neural clusters for abstract reasoning and language or attempted to boost cognitive capabilities with complex drug compounds. Some creatures were subjected to dozens, even hundreds of surgeries. The real early advancements, however, were made with genetic engineering, sequencing the animal’s genetic code and then splicing in transgenic alterations to produce proteins and neuroanatomical formations found in human brains. This process was slow and difficult as it required a nearly perfect understanding of the creature’s brain structure, genetic code, physiological behavior, and gestational characteristics, and the full impact of the changes required years of growth to measure. Simply slapping some human neurological traits in was not quite so easy, as those traits had to be assimilated into the animal brain’s architecture in a functional manner. As the human understanding of cognitive science and AI developed, however, scientists were able to create more advanced neurological models, cutting down the the number of failed experiments. Nanotechnology allowed even further inroads, and soon uplift engineers were making their changes much less invasively, neuron by neuron, or rewriting a subject’s genetic code in specially modified research healing vats.
Most modern uplift brains rely heavily on transgenic features copied from humans. These enhancements do more than just increase neural networks for metacognition and creativity, boost the information processing capabilities and executive functions of the prefrontal cortex, and modify the behavioral and reasoning structures of the neocortex, to name just a few of the myriad brain manipulations used to uplift to sapience. They also modify the limbic system and hormone levels to mimic human emotional responses and adapt the brain to any physiological modifications accrued with uplift, such as walking upright or tool manipulation with ﬁne digits.
Despite years of research and many breakthroughs with uplift neuroscience, the fact is that the brains of the various uplifted species among us are still not as well understood as human brains—and that’s saying something. The simple lack of a complete understanding of neuroanatomy and function that makes psychosurgery a risky affair hinders uplift as well. Brains are messy, complex, intricate organs, and it remains difficult to pinpoint exactly what changes may result from certain modifications, especially with an uplift mind. While this means that there are still plenty of opportunities in the ﬁeld of uplift research, it also means that those of us born uplifts are more prone to difficulties when undergoing psychosurgery or pursuing mental augmentations—or even performing routine measures like merging a fork.
That the genetic wiring of our brains has been so tampered with is a fact not lost on many uplifts. While few of us would go so far as to shirk the beneﬁts of intelligence, it does lead one to ponder the motivations of one’s designers. Why were we engineered with some cognitive characteristics but not with others? How much of our behavior is due to environment and upbringing, and how much is specifically engineered? Despite a moratorium on non-beneficial modifications in some enlightened jurisdictions, there is no doubt that many uplifts are raised that either lack certain neurological faculties or are designed to be enthusiastic about dangerous or demeaning types of work. Those who consider uplifts to still be animals or property have no qualms about making them into obedient slaves.
===Non-Mammalian Brains=== 
Uplifting non-mammals (which so far includes parrots, ravens, and octopi) is a much more difficult task than raising up primates, cetaceans, or even pigs. Part of the issue is size. Though sophisticated by the standards of their cousins, the brains of parrots, ravens and octopi are significantly smaller than the human cerebral cortex. This means that significant amounts of neural tissue need to be added to non-mammals. Of course, some neural material must be added for mammals too, but in the case of large or human-sized uplifts it is usually sufficient to slightly thin and enhance the durability of the skull wall to make room for the extra material. In the case of ravens, parrots, and octopi, the creature’s entire body was redesigned and enlarged to accommodate a larger brain.
Brain size is not a single factor, however. What matters more is the brain-to-body mass ratio and the encephalization quotient, meaning the size and weight of the brain in relation to body shape, size, and anatomy. The progression of brain sizes as animals get larger is not linear. This means that smaller uplifts such as ravens, parrots, and octopi (and also chimps and bonobos) can have smaller brains than humans but still have equivalent levels of intelligence. One of the big changes also made to uplift brains is the introduction of folds, ridges, and grooves into those previously smooth brains, providing more space for neurons in cramped quarters.
The biggest challenge for non-mammalian brains wasn’t just size, but structure. Non-mammal brains are simply wired differently, with some parts of the brain taking on different tasks. Among avians, for example, the nidopallium is the source of higher cognitive tasks and executive functions. Restructuring non-mammalian brains to more efficiently emulate human cognition thus required a higher degree of re-engineering and experimentation.
===Behavioral Adjustments=== 
It is important to remember that successful uplift requires more than just gifting a creature with human intelligence, language, and locomotion. There are also behaviors hardwired into creatures by tens of thousands of years of evolution that need to be removed to facilitate acceptance into transhuman culture. Ravens are scavengers and thieves, stealing food from other birds and mammals—even from other ravens. Parrots are mimics, adept at picking up vocalizations and repeating them endlessly. In a social situation these tendencies (and others like them) can range in effect from severely irritating to criminal behavior. Similar traits need to be eliminated—or at the very least reduced so they don’t exceed transhuman norms.
The most difficult behavioral adjustment to manage is that of sexual behavior. Adding human intelligence to an uplifted creature does nothing, by itself, to change behavior implanted in the deepest part of the creature’s nervous system—and what is more important to any organism than the drive to reproduce? This creates potential problems as the sexual practices of certain baseline creatures is radically different than what is commonly accepted in transhuman culture. Wild bonobos, for example, are promiscuous, using sexual contact to build alliances, resolve conﬂicts, reduce stress, and even as a kind of greeting. There seem to be no permanent pair bonds in baseline bonobo culture and communal sexual behavior is common. On the other hand, there are documented cases of male chimpanzees and dolphins using rape to dominate both males and females in their social groups—a behavior clearly unwelcome in transhuman culture.
What makes this issue even more difficult is the unwillingness of most transhumans to try to control private sexual behavior. It seems unreasonable to sculpt uplifts so they ﬁt some imagined “normal” set of sexual mores. In most cases uplift engineers attempt to modify brains to preclude sexual violence and leave most other baseline sexual behavior alone.
Overlying all of this is the problem that the decision of what is and is not desirable behavior was determined, often by committee, by a bunch of hypercorp scientists and suits. Much of the work by [[anarchists|anarchist]] and exhuman geneticists has focused on alterations to the behavioral engineering norms that hypercorp scientists saw as “most desirable.”
Along with brain alterations for behavioral adjustment, the most successful long-term uplift programs combined stringent efforts to socialize young uplifts according to human norms and culture. These programs operated much like the ones to shape AGIs into upstanding transhuman citizens, using similar protocols, though with a stronger emphasis on passing these lessons on to their offspring.
==The Body== 
There’s more to uplift than changing the brain. An uplifted organism is more than just a creature who can think. It’s a creature whose baseline body evolved for an environment that no longer exists: Earth. As a practical matter, uplifts have to get along in a world that is almost entirely designed for the comfort and utility of Homo saps. This means massive overhauls to their bodies as well. Generally, that means achieving three key objectives: talking, manipulating objects, and moving around.
===Speech=== 
Human speech is a key requirement for uplifts if they are to ﬁt within transhuman culture. All of the mammalian and avian uplifts could be taught to understand and respond to the human voice even in their baseline forms, but only the parrot could actually talk. What that means for the primates and pigs is the implantation of a human-style larynx and a modification to the neck bones and musculature to accommodate it. The raven’s vocal structures were reworked to be more like those of the parrot.
The real challenge was giving the attribute of speech to the aquatic uplifts. Early attempts at ﬁtting the uplifted dolphin’s blowhole with a pseudo-larynx led to respiratory problems and interfered with the dolphin’s ability to correctly interpret its own sonar picture. After a bottlenose with the adaptation crashed into the walls of his tank at better than 50 kilometers per hour, the pseudo-larynx was largely dropped. Thanks to advances in this field, most cetaceans today can communicate vocally in air, albeit with a high-pitched voice and the occasional whistle or click. Octopi can similarly talk thanks to a transgenic vocal system, though their wispy-yet-raspy voices are known to creep some people out. It is not uncommon to ﬁnd neo-cetaceans and neo-octopi that avoid speech altogether, instead communicating entirely via the mesh.
Some uplifts, particularly older germlines, are known to have difficulty with language in stressful situations.
===Object Manipulation=== 
The human hand is an extraordinary tool that grants Homo saps the unparalleled ability to manipulate their surroundings. Despite the omnipresence of mesh controls, no sapient being could hope to easily navigate transhuman habitats without the use of hands to push buttons, manipulate levers, or use touch screens. The great apes already possess hands that are very similar to humans, as do the neanderthals who require no modification at all (though //Homo Neanderthalensis//’s pudgy mitts are often modified for aesthetic reasons.) Octopus arms are very different than human hands, but octopi have enough dexterity to easily manipulate their environment. Dolphins and other cetaceans fortunate enough to ﬁnd an aquatic environment rarely need hands and rely on cybernetic arms or remote-controlled bots when they do, though a few heavily customized morphs include transgenic arms. Pig physiology took to transgenic human hands—and the skeletal and musculature changes behind them—quite well.
The birds, however, parrots and ravens, needed hands. This required some trickier engineering. Both species already had their wings restructured with bat genetics, enabling them to fold better. The new wing bone structure was also augmented to add dexterous ﬁnger digits to the peak of the wing. These primitive hands vary between morphs; some neo-avians have two or three digits and no thumbs, others have functional though weak-gripped hands.
===Locomotion=== 
Moving about is not much of a problem for the current crop of uplifts. Neanderthals and primates move around as easily as splicer morphs (or more easily in the case of chimps, bonobos, and orangutans, whose baseline incarnations spent enough time in trees to be comfortable moving around in the third dimension.) The neo-hominids were all gengineered to have an upward stance, with appropriate modifications to their skeletons and musculature. Neo-pigs were also redesigned to be bipedal, with their hooves replaced with standard human-like feet. Octopi can walk just ﬁne on their eight arms (don’t call them legs), especially in low gravity. Neo-avians aren’t suited for walking long distances, but they get around ﬁne and usually have the option to ﬂy. The neo-cetaceans normally ﬁnd themselves in aquatic environments; when they want to get around on land, they berth themselves in cetacean-adapted walker exoskeletons.
Mobility issues quite often aren’t as big of a deal as they were on Earth. Given that our former terrestrial habitats were wiped out and a significant percentage of transhumans now live in low or zero-gravity environments, many uplifts have an even easier time getting around. The neo-hominids climb better than humans and can count on prehensile feet. Neo-avians ﬂy even better in light gravity. Neo-octopi excel at pulling themselves along with their arms or using puffs of air to propel weightlessly across spaces. Just like humans, many uplifts pursue adaptations speciﬁc to their local environment.
==Genefixing and Biomods== 
Like the various clades of genetically modified humans, uplift DNA is scrubbed of genetic ﬂaws, congenital defects, and inherited diseases. Uplifts can be considered the equivalent of human splicers. It might even be said that uplift genetics are held to more exacting scrutiny and standards, given the gengineering effort focused on them. Most hypercorps and other groups developing uplifts have enforced strict breeding controls and banned reproduction unless individuals meet exacting genetic and aptitude test standards. Though decried by mercurials, some free uplift communities have adopted these eugenics practices themselves in an effort to produce the best specimens of their neo-species.
There is more to geneﬁxing than just correcting genetic ﬂaws, however. With the exception of parrots and pigs, which were at least partially domesticated when they were altered, uplift species were engineered from wild animals that lived in environments remote from humans. Even neanderthals were separated from humanity, not by space, but by time—200,000 years. When an organism is exposed to another organism from a different environment, there is the possibility of passing along infectious diseases to which one of the organisms has never developed resistances or immunity. A well-known example of this phenomenon is the disastrous interaction between human beings and the baseline mountain gorilla. Common inﬂuenza is fatal to the gorilla and in pre-Fall days, inadvertent exposure to flu via humans dramatically depressed their numbers. A major part of the geneﬁxing process for uplifts is to confer immunity against the thousands of viruses, bacteria, molds, and spores common in transhuman environments. Even today, uplifts are often the most vulnerable to any new diseases or strains that evolve or are discovered.
Another danger is the creation of novel transgenic diseases moving the other direction—from uplifts to other transhumans. This is not an idle consideration. Two H1N1 ﬂu pandemics swept the world in 1918 and again in 2009. The 1918 pandemic was a monster, killing between three and six percent of the world’s total human population. H1N1 is a traveler, jumping between swine and birds and humans. This was a major concern expressed by anti-uplift groups early on, that modifying animals to be more similar to humans and integrating them into human populations would create an opportunity for quick mutation and transmission of disease. In order to combat the possibility of pandemic, early uplifted avians and pigs were designed to respond to inﬂuenza with purple spots so the disease could be easily diagnosed and treated. Now that basic biomods common among both uplifts and other transhuman morphs avoid the cytokine storm triggered by H1N1 and other viruses (an overreaction of the immune system that is thought to explain the ﬂu’s high mortality rate among young and otherwise healthy people), this is less of a concern.
Like most humans, uplifts now have the genetic modifications that provide longevity, allow their bodies to regenerate, and protect them against most known diseases. Uplifts are also bestowed with upgraded livers and kidneys to better ﬁlter toxins out of their environment. With small body masses, birds are particularly vulnerable to environmental factors. The same can be said of aquatic creatures like cetaceans and octopi, who live in an environment through which toxins can quickly diffuse.
===Sidebar: Uplift Genetic Service Packs=== 
If there’s one thing hypercorps are good at, it’s keeping their customers hooked. The scheme of supplying indentures on Mars and elsewhere with biomorphs suffering from built-in obsolescence, requiring periodic genetic service pack maintenance to stay healthy, was actually pioneered for use with uplifts. By inﬂicting uplift bodies with genetic conditions that required regular specialized healthcare, the uplift hypercorps found a way to bind their progeny even closer and discourage any ideas about eloping. Though not all uplift hypercorps continue to use these methods (Somatek notably discontinued this after Duvalier moved on), many use genetic service packs to keep uplifts under control and within reach.
==Language== 
Many uplift candidate species already possessed some linguistic capabilities or even rudimentary language, “speech patterns,” and syntax rules, beyond that of simple animal communication. The whistles and clicks of the cetaceans and the baseline parrot’s ability to imitate human speech are two of the most obvious examples. Language is not just a cultural phenomenon—there is a strong genetic element as well. Uplift minds have been specifically modified for linguistic functions and, in particular, human language. This was reinforced with carefully designed language courses over each uplift species’ development. There is some controversy among mercurials who believe that uplift researchers did not do enough to promote and develop native languages for particular uplift species. The only uplift language to exist is cetacean, which is notably primitive and limited, despite efforts by neo-dolphins and whales to extend its capabilities.
Despite the ridiculous characterizations of those prejudiced against uplifts, uplifts speak the same common languages as other transhumans. Mandarin, Russian, and English are especially common among uplifts, but many others speak Portuguese, Japanese, Hindi or other tongues. Gengineering and socialization also steer most uplifts towards using the same non-vocal communication kinesics as transhumans, from gestures to microexpressions. Nevertheless, humans sometimes ﬁnd it a bit more difficult to read an uplift's nonverbal cues, especially with less humanoid uplifts such as neo-octopi and neo-avians.
It’s interesting to note that uplifts often unconsciously incorporate elements of their baseline linguistic tendencies into their everyday speech. If reinforced by the presence of others of their kind, this behavior essentially leads to a species-specific uplift dialect of modern human languages.
==Socialization== 
As early AI scientists suggested, the best way to socialize an alien intelligence is to raise it exactly as you would a human child. The same methodology was used for uplifts. In the early stages of uplift (and today still in many research centers), the raising of uplift children was handled in clinically controlled environments. The standard model was to rise them in mixed-sex crèches of a dozen individuals, cared for by an uplifted individual of the same species and/or human minders. It was not uncommon for uplift children to not be raised by their biological parents, if they could be said to even have parents—most were engineered from the genetics of three or more of their predecessors. Most of these children lived lives that any human would recognize. They were educated in similar school systems, exposed to the same media human children were, played the same childhood games, and were taught the same lessons about norms, customs, responsibilities, and social roles. As various uplift projects advanced, some of these were integrated with human children, so that they lived and went to school side by side. The difference for uplift children, however, was that they were subject to a never-ending barrage of aptitude, learning, and intelligence tests, and sometimes served as test subjects for drug regimens, implants, nanosurgical enhancements, or even psychosurgical alterations.
The primary goal of socialization is to infuse uplifts with the same cultural values, ideologies, and ethical standards as the rest of humanity. It would be foolish to think that no hypercorps have experimented with other forms of socialization—or no socialization whatsoever—but these projects and their results are neither publicized nor publicly acknowledged. It is also important to remember that many hypercorps instilled particular noxious notions among their uplift subjects. Many uplifts were raised as second-class citizens, either inferior, less capable, or less important to humans. Many also were repeatedly instructed that they owed a debt to their patrons for having been uplifted, a debt they could only repay by a lifetime of service—in the best interests of their children and their species. Others were instilled with what can only be called slave ideology, raised to be obedient and demure workers, reinforced with repugnant mental alterations.
==Reproduction== 
It’s time for a little talk about the birds and the bees. As with all things uplift, the subject of sex is a little more complicated than it might ﬁrst appear.
During the early days of uplift, these creatures were property. More than that, they were experiments. And when an experiment goes bad, you don’t want it running around, creating other little experiments.
From the very earliest days of uplift, the reproduction of subject creatures was tightly controlled. Only germlines that were deemed significantly positive were allowed to reproduce. And by reproduce, I mean the subject’s genetics were deemed acceptable to keep in the library that particular lab kept on hand to modify further, splice with other genetics, and eventually use to grow a new fetus in vitro. Uplift subjects were almost universally sterilized or otherwise prohibited from sexual procreation. They could have sex, they just couldn’t breed. This philosophy has mostly been carried on to the present day, particularly with uplift research programs, but even sometimes with independent uplift communities. Each uplift’s particular germline is analyzed and measured, with information complemented by various test results. Sometimes even the most carefully gengineered uplift DNA will have errors that take years or even decades to recognize and ﬁx.
Reproductive control is also a grand way to keep money in the pockets of the hypercorps. Like many transhuman morphs, an uplift’s particular genetics are considered intellectual property. Built-in genetic controls prevent sexual reproduction and sometimes even hamper cloning. The genetic code is almost always signed in the actual DNA itself, making it easy to identify who it belongs to.
If you’ve been paying attention so far, you realize that most uplifts have no control over their reproductive prospects.
It’s a beautiful story, really. Dolphin meets dolphin. Dolphin and dolphin fall in love. Dolphin and dolphin try to scrape up enough money to pay Somatek or whatever hypercorp owns their genetics to make them a baby. Shakespeare, it’s not.
The price charged by the hypercorps for genetic rights is not staggering, but it’s far beyond the average Jesse Uplift—especially if they’re also paying off the hypercorp debt for their own uplift, as some patrons require. Most hypercorps will not even consider selling uplift genetics unless a license has been acquired ﬁrst—meaning that the genetic proﬁles of the partners (however many there are) must be approved ﬁrst, both for compatibility and as beneficial to the improvement of that particular uplift species. This requires a significant bit of testing and analysis—also prohibitively expensive. The Consortium and similar authorities back these measures with law.
Even if you get genetic rights and a license, well, that’s just the start. Someone actually has to blend that genetic material together to make a zygote and then grow it in an exowomb (or if you’re particularly old-fashioned, implant it in a surrogate parent, but who outside of the Junta wants to go through that bother anymore?). That includes state-of-the-art genetic engineering and the cost of maintaining a team of technicians and doctors working for the gestation period. That’s another significant cost. If the uplifts actually want to experience the fun part of reproduction, that’s possible too. Believe old Blue, uplifts are quite capable of engaging in sex and enjoying it, but they come from the factory shooting blanks. Fortunately, ﬁxing that problem is an easy hack. It does require buying a licensed genetic service pack that will turn the reproductive cycle back on. That’s right, more money.
If you’re part of an ongoing uplift research project, that many not be the end of it. Your patron hypercorp may demand as part of the licensing that your child be raised in a particular habitat under the conditions of a particular program, so that their growth can be monitored and evaluated. That means your child may be a test subject. Some hypercorps go so far as to raise the child themselves, outside of parental supervision, for the ﬁrst year—and sometimes longer. And they charge you for that too.
For many uplifts in the solar system, this not a system they can afford. So there is a great desire in the uplift community to have children and no practical way to make that aspiration a reality. Needless to say, when there is an unmet need the black market will step in to ﬁnd a way. Various cartels offer services to unlock genetic protections or raise pirated children. While cheaper, these are still expensive options. Uplifts pursuing these routes are advised to tread carefully, as cartels often seek to enhance their proﬁts by cloning the genetics, blackmailing the prospective parents, and similar unsavory methods. There are plenty of coyotes out there preying on transhuman weakness; people like renegade exhuman scientists who’ll promise anything to anyone if they think they can separate you from your coin.
It gets worse. The uplift hypercorps regard uplift genetics as their trade secrets and work hard to protect their IPs, both in the courtroom and the laboratory. One of the tricks they use to deter piracy is to deliberately introduce DNA coding errors that manifest in newborns as random birth defects. If the reproduction is handled properly, through that hypercorp, these errors are methodically removed. It’s easy to do—if you have a road map. These errant base pairs can also be repaired on the ﬂy—if you can ﬁnd (and afford) a trustworthy technician who is an expert in the uplift of your particular species. Or you could go forward without the expert and hope the defects you get are something that can be ﬁxed.
Not all of the hypercorps are so restrictive, of course. Some take an enlightened view towards uplift reproduction, though they are rare and usually found in the [[Morningstar Constellation]] or in [[Extropians|Extropian]] habitats. Thousands of uplifts, of course, exist outside of hypercorp control, particularly in autonomist strongholds or mercurial habitats. These uplifts are free to pursue reproduction as they see ﬁt, on their own terms. Various autonomist, argonaut, and mercurial projects produce uplift germlines with genetics that are public domain and unrestricted. Some of these groups even make efforts to reverse-engineer the DNA of hypercorp-produced uplifts.
==Mistakes, Failures, and Rejects== 
The beginning of uplift was a bloody, terrible business. Humanity just didn’t know enough about baseline animal brains to get it right on the ﬁrst try, or even on the hundredth. It took decades of concentrated study to achieve even passable results and decades more before the techniques were more or less perfected. When dealing with something as complex as brains, there is no such thing as 100% success. Evolution took millions of years to mold the animals of today, ruthlessly culling genetic errors and susceptibility to disease and maladaptation to environment. Killing countless millions of individuals in generation after generation so that those who remained would work better, be more ﬂexible, ﬁt their environment more perfectly. As humanity tried to escalate thousands of years of changes into a few decades, not to mention the transgenic mods, there were bound to be failures and mistakes. The progress of moving from zygote to being is complex and in some ways, still deeply mysterious. It’s not just decoding the DNA molecule, but the interaction of genetic material from parents and other sources, the proper activation of genes, the presence of the correct proteins in the correct ratios at the correct times, the impact of environmental factors, etc. Needless to say, uplift is in many ways more of an art than a science. No matter how smart we transhumans //think// we are, we’ve no doubt introduced thousands of bugs into the software of our uplifts and it will be centuries before we begin to understand them and work them out.
So, what can go wrong, you ask? Well, remember, you did ask.
Minor errors in a single gene can cause internal organ failures or compromise the immune system. Health problems were not uncommon in many early strains. When making many radical changes all at once, it’s possible to have physical deformities. These were far more common in the early decades. I’ve seen bootlegged records of an octopus with a tentacle growing out of its head, of a wingless raven, of a gorilla born without a mouth, just smooth skin where the lower half of her face should have been. If you have the right connections, it’s possible to drown in such images.
As bad as the physical errors are, the ones you can’t see are worse. A damaged brain is much harder to diagnose and, since most of the action in the world of uplift involves redefining the cerebrum, they are also much more likely. There have been reported cases of uplifts suffering from schizophrenia, amnesia, violent psychosis, hallucinations, paranoid delusions, autism, depression, catatonia, and, perhaps most cruelly, aphasia—the inability to use or understand language.
These mistakes and rejects were learning opportunities for the hypercorps. Rarely was an attempt made to heal or repair the subject. It was a far more common procedure to euthanize the unfortunate victims and perform an autopsy so that the scientists could learn from their mistakes. Some were spared, however, left to live with crippling deformities or other defects.
Today, these mistakes are less of an issue. The current state of genetic therapies and nanotech allows us to rewrite an uplift’s genetic code, counteracting the most grievous mistakes and abnormalities. You will rarely see independent uplifts with such noticeable problems or defects. In certain hypercorp research labs, however, genetic repair is considered an unnecessary expense and so entire communities of malformed or impaired uplifts exist, carrying out their indentured tasks with no hopes of seeing a better future.
===Sidebar: Jake=== 
**Source:** Somatek Research Material, Project Orangutan, Interview with Olivia Orangutan [Link]
It was already one of the bad days. My throat still hurt from the surgery and the attendants had given me a ‘jection to change the shape of my throat bones, the hy-oid. Least that’s what Dr. Vitter called it. They kept telling me to talk talk talk, but it just hurt. I don’t know why they wanted me to talk so much anyway, I just sounded scratchy, not pretty like the way Dr. Vitter talks.
All I wanted was for it to stop hurting and to go home and sleep in mamma’s arms. Sleep sleep sleep. Not talk talk talk.
The worst part of it was Jake wasn’t there. Jake’s my brother. He’s orang like me. He has red hair that sticks straight up and big black eyes bulging out of his face and he’s always making funny ‘pressions with his mouth. He’s not beautiful like me. I’m beautiful because I’m a girl, but Jake can’t be beautiful. He’s a boy. Boys are handsome.
Anyway, he wasn’t there.
I asked Dr. Vitter where Jake was and his face kind of froze up like when he was mad, though I didn’t do anything wrong to make him mad, I just asked where was Jake. He got down on one knee so his face was real close to mine and he said, “I’m sorry, Olivia, but Jake didn’t make it through the surgery.”
So I asked, “Why doesn’t Jake have to do the surgery if I have to?” It was a little mean, because I shouldn’t have been trying to get Jake into trouble just because he lucked out, but I was feeling cranky and my throat really, really hurt.
Dr. Vitter just looked at me real sad and he said, “I’m sorry, Olivia.” He stopped like he was choking on something and I felt a little bad for him. Talking is hard. I know. And then he said, so softly I almost couldn’t hear him, “Jake died.”
I just looked at him.
“Jake is dead,” he said.
“That’s not right,” I said.
“Olivia,” he said real soft.
“That’s not right,” I screamed and then I hit him even though I know that’s really, really bad and I ran away screeching in my orang voice even though I’m only supposed to talk English now.
I ran to Mamma and I said, “Jake is dead, Mamma. Dr. Vitter said Jake is dead. It’s not true, Mamma.” And then there were these weird feelings in my throat and my chest, like when you’re choking on a piece of fruit, except it happened over and over again. I couldn’t make it stop. “Tell me Jake’s not dead. Tell me.”
But she just looked at me and she didn’t say anything. It was the ﬁrst time I really understood what Dr. Vitter had been telling me. Mamma couldn’t talk. Not like me. Mamma and I lost our Jake and she never said anything about it.
===Sidebar: Defect Escapes=== 
**From:** [REDACTED], Quality Control Manager
**To:** [REDACTED], External Security Director
**Subject:** Quality Control
Really don’t appreciate this attitude, [REDACTED]. I don’t care what the damn commercials show. Whether Marketing likes it or not, uplift production is a manufacturing process and every manufacturing process has QC issues and, ultimately, escapes. My department has kept quality escape levels well below 100 ppm, which is entirely acceptable for a world-class process of this scope and complexity.
Following is the list you requested of all known escapes. If your department needs assistance in bringing these quality issues to a quick and quiet resolution you will have my full support. But, [REDACTED], let me assure you, if you’re just planning to score political points off me, you’d better score a lot. Because if you make me your enemy and you leave me standing, there’s going to be hell to pay.
Signed, [REDACTED]
* Subjects 123, 126, 127, 142. Chimpanzee. Males. All genetic descendants of Subject 119 (Jumbles). Eloped 6 AF, likely with help. See ﬁle on Santos, K. All four subjects suffer from numerous non-debilitating defects including stuttering, suppressed immune system, depression. Not dangerous. Termination not required. Current location unknown.
* Hector473. Dolphin, Atlantic bottlenose. Male. Eloped 8 AF. Suffered from psychotic episodes and paranoid delusions. Extremely violent. Killed minder and egocast to Mars. Likely has jumped morphs several times. Dangerous. Current location unknown.
* Black32. Bonobo. Female. Eloped 9 AF. Subject is aphasic, totally unable to speak or comprehend spoken language. Subject can understand written language. Psych analysis suggests subject is a brilliant sociopath. Likely using custom-developed muse to overcome handicap. Apprehend at all costs. Extremely dangerous. Current location unknown.
=Notable Habitats= 
Uplifts are found throughout the solar system, many living among transhumans just like everybody else. Some choose to live exclusively with their own kind—which might mean their own species or their own uplift faction. Others choose an even more exotic lifestyle. Some of the primary habitats of interest to uplifts are detailed below.
* [[Atlantica]]
* [[Mahogany]]
* [[Migratory Vermin]]
* [[Treehouse]]
* [[Valley of the Apes]]
==Uplift Diasporas== 
In addition to the above-named habitats that tend to have a majority uplift presence, there are several transhuman habitats that maintain a sizable uplift population despite not being governed by, or in a few cases even sympathetic to, uplifts.
The bright lights and big promises of the entertainment industry in [[Elysium|**Elysium**]], on [[Mars]], serves as a major draw for a lot of younger uplifts who have recently paid off their indenture and have dreams of making it big. Unfortunately, the number of parts available for talented young things is not commensurate with the number of hopefuls and a lot of them end up having to abandon their dreams. The smart ones recognize this before they run completely out of credits, but there are plenty who hang on too long and end up having to sign another indenture contract to get their asses out of debt.
Naturally **[[Extropia]]** attracts a large number of uplifts. Hell, Extropia attracts a large number of just about anything. The boom-town feel and easy-come, easy-go attitude that reigns over the place is often a refreshing change for uplifts from the inner system who are used to being judged not on what they can bring to any given business proposition, but rather on their appearance or ancestry. In Extropia, most people could care less who you are or where you came from as long as you can back up whatever you happen to be selling. But for these reasons it also tends to be avoided by uplifts. A lot of us want to believe that we’re special, that there’s something more to us than other transhumans, and Extropia is not the kind of place that goes out of its way to make you feel welcome.
A place like **[[Locus]]** is appealing to all sorts of freedom-minded folk, and uplifts are no exception. Within its array of linked modules there are concentrations of every known type of uplift. The microgravity environment means that neo-avians and neo-octopi are especially at home on Locus. Both thrive by using their natural abilities to garner gains in reputation.
While the oceans of **[[Europa]]** are nothing like our lost home, the call of any sort of body of water you can get lost in has a certain appeal to some of my fellows. While the Europan seas are hardly similar to those of Earth, they still represent our best bet for happiness. Though some neo-cetaceans prefer to sleeve in a surya and swim around the sun, many of us prefer that feeling of crushing pressure and lightless depths. Plus our natural abilities to navigate such surroundings makes us a hot commodity on Europa.
=Further Reading= 
* [[Uplift Species]]
* [[Smart Animals]]
* [[Uplift Specialists]]
* [[Uplift Social Issues]]
* [[Factions#Uplift%20Factions|Uplift Factions]]
* [[Allies and Enemies]]

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