Pradip Shankar

Pradip Shankar (1979-c. 2068) is best known for creating the Humane Choice vaccine that led to the rise of the hanyos.

Early Life
Not much is known about Pradip Shankar's early life, but he appears to have been a native of Chandigarh. He graduated from Chandigarh Medical College in 2004, specialising in gynecology and genetics and married his classmate Priya Bishnoi, a pediatrician. With the dowry he got from her wealthy father, he set up the Shankar clinic, renamed in 2007 the Humane Choice Maternity and Baby Clinic. He does not appear to have had a child with his wife, and very little is known about her. It is known that she supported him when he was unable to practice and that he had access to her patients. Certainly she never appeared on his many TV appearances after 2019.

Shankar was unlucky in meeting Himmat Singh shortly after he began practicing. Himmat Singh was a small time real estate shark who was impressed with the yougn Shankar and his wife, whom he met at a wedding. He urged Shankar to take his pregnant wife on as a patient. This was something of a coup for the young, idealistic doctor. However, during a routine ultrasound, Shankar let slip that he 'couldn't see the genitalia'. In a terrible panic, Mrs Singh urged him to confirm the child's gender, but her refused to do an amniocentesis or any other test. She then went to an inferior doctor and had the child aborted. lab tests on the evacuated matter showed the child had been male. Incensed, Himmat Singh stormed into the clinic, threatened everyone and promised to break Shankar's legs if he ever practiced again.

Humane Choice
Left without a means of support, and dependent now on his wife's practice. Shankar began to brood. His earlier studies beckoned him again, and he began work on what was to become the Humane Choice vaccine. Later, when questioned on why he did this, he said, 'No doctor should have to go through what I went through.' He began to study a class of viruses called dependoviruses, retro viruses which could not reproduce without the presence of other viruses. He decided ot use one of these to 'supercharge' the Y-bearing sperm, causing them to vastly outdistance the heavier X-bearing sperm. To try out his vaccine, he persuaded those among his wife's patients who were desperate from sons to bring their men in for 'flu jabs'. In the first year he is rumoured to have treated over seven thousand men. He quickly opened branch clinics all over north India.

Soon overwhelmed by the demand, he struck a deal with Ramdhun whereby they bankrolled the Humane Choice operation while he had the run of their labs. The idea was that he would come up with new antisense medicines, but in fact the rise of the hanyos gave him something else to do.

The Hanyo Epidemic
As a result of Humane Choice, a small minority, about ten percent, of new XY fetuses were born female because their Y chromosomes failed to switch them down the male developmental path. These were the Broken Pots. The remainder were born hanyo, with life-threateningallergies and hypersensitive skin. The number of hanyo children at this time far exceeded the offspring of those treated with Humane Choice, and there is a theory that globetrotter flu was responsible. Pradip Shankar's research career was now diverted to the problem of caring for these boys, many of whome were dying within days of birth. Under tremendous pressure, not least from the always-present guilt of having brought these children into the world, he came up with the Low Sensory Load System of bringing them up. This technical innovation was followed by the establishment of the Ramdhun Institute for Boys, a school exclusively for hanyos where Pradip Shankar and his team researched hanyo sleep patterns, diet, social behaviour and psychology.

Although initially there was tremendous hostility to and criticism of the hanyos, Shankar always stood by them, becoming something of an advocate. He worked tirelessly to bring in delinquent hanyos and treat them. No one understood their psychology better than him, which led to speculation that he was a 'hanyo under the skin'. His actions are not entirely explainable by guilt.

Fount of LIfe
One result of the flipflop in the sex ratio thanks to the very high mortality rate among early hanyos, was that women started to come into their own in the lower echelons of society. This must have been a huge relief to many poor women who had been abused and tortured by their husbands: their husbands now left them for better jobs and prettier women. Of course, the new women continued to be treated badly, but the wives, beign mercifully middle aged, were left alone. Jobs in low ranking cohorts opened up for women, making the streets look like a feminist paradise, but in actual fact power was concentrating in the hands of men. A side effect of the demographic shift was a rise in the price of sperm. men could now 'jackpot' their way through college, and many did.

Pradip Shankar did not approve of this, for a simple reason. Most of the women buying the sperm were having boys, as was teh rest of the world, but these single women had no idea how to bring up a hanyo child. In any case, the Protection of At-Risk Boys Act of 2024 made it illegal to birth a baby boy outside a hospital, and also stated that the boy must be put into treatment at Ramdhun Medicare, since they had patented their hanyo-saving system. A flurry of acts followed: the Needful Motherhood Act of 2028, the Protection of Family Act of 2049, and the Conservation of Human Resources Act of 2056. Shankar wanted women to put their hanyo sons into the Ramdhun system till the age of eighteen, in other words in his school. To make that a contractual obligation for a receiver of sperm, he needed to corner the market. Hence he set up Fount of LIfe. His reasoning here was: most sperm banks treat men like performing animals, like walking gene-dispensers. Donating sperm should be fun, with lapdances, porn shows and bordello cheer. Fount of Life delivered exactly that. Fronted by Babelion, probably the most famous collector ever, Fount of Life offered men every sexual experience they could want, all perfectly hygineic and safe, thanks to the moneymaker, another of Shankar's brilliant inventions. He was correct: Fount of LIfe became the premier gene holder in the Asia Pax region in a stunning three years.

The Marriage Bargain
By now, the corporates lived in walled cities of sybaritic luxury, with the labour camps around the city walls. The women there were lawyers, doctors, models, TV anchors and collectors of Human Resources. They could not be expected to bear children, so Shankar came up with yet another brilliant idea: outsource marriage. He deluged the labour camps with advertising showing ordinary women being romanced in beautiful holiday Those who signed up paid a year's salary in advance. They were then allotted a husband (fitted with a loophead so he could not get them pregnant) who was in fact a corporate employee. His job (Public Relations) was to prime the woman hormonally for pregnancy by having lots of romantic sex with her. When the three months were up, the couple relcoated to a corporate villa, and the woman would be implanted with a preassembled embryo, usually of a high ranking hanyo and a well qualified service woman. Once the pregnancy took, she would be put in a MAKER for the nine months of gestation, after which she'd be delivered by Caesarian section followed by hysterectomy. If the child was a girl she got to keep it, if a boy, she got her money back and a box of complimentary chocolates from her 'husband'.

The SAAFS
The last invention we can definitely credit to Pradip Shankar is the SAAFS, or Steroidally Augmented Androform Soldier. These were women who had had every bit of female tissue surgically removed, and an artificial pineal gland installed in their heads called a Sergeant-on-Duty. This released massive amounts of testosterone, and they would be shown violent porn at the same time. On the streets, they were known as BullyBoys. They made up for the shortage of male footsoldiers, beat cops, corpsecs and hirelings.

Last Years
The last news we get of Pradip Shankar is a video clip fo him, very old, being shows the Factory Shell technology. He appears to be upset at the sight of it, but clearly has no authority over Salman Vaghela, Swastik's son. This is the last sighting in the records.