I still look back at the Hadron collider accident a decade ago and realize how lucky I was, and honestly how lucky humanity was. That thing could have destroyed the world, and instead, through the sheer randomness, the roll of the dice in the universe..we came out BETTER. We were, for all intents and purposes, immortal. Sure, I suppose we could nuke each other, but in the immediate aftermath of the accident, world governments were too concerned with what happened and how it affected their own countries to make threats. Once we'd all realized what we had become, the concept of nuclear war was horrific. New instincts asserted themselves; the idea of destroying the planet was terrifying and (hilariously enough) unnatural. And racism? That went away almost instantly, because race no longer mattered. We were all the same. We were all werewolves. Skin color was no different than fur color. It showed your heritage or your parentage, and nothing more.
Sure, people had preferences, but it was no longer a superiority/inferiority situation.
Our senses stayed heightened, even in our human forms, which had led to complications early on, when we discovered the volume of the music at concerts hurt our ears, and that the feedback from microphones hurt even worse. We discovered that some of us didn't like the high spice levels on food, like super hot peppers, even though we'd loved them previously. We also discovered that we could smell the scent of others on our wives, girlfriends, husbands, boyfriends and lovers. But more importantly, we could tell WHAT those scents meant. Cheating was essentially impossible, because we could smell the remnants of sex in their pheromones, even if they'd showered and made every effort to eradicate the smells on their bodies. It led to more openness and trust in relationships, because it was impossible to lie about it. An incredible amount of bisexual and gay/lesbian people came out of the closet, due to a combination of necessity and the impossibility of staying closeted. There really was no closet to stay in any longer, and even better, IT WASN'T NEEDED. Nobody cared. We were all werewolves.
It didn't hurt that the change felt amazing. We could shift pretty much at will, into both a bipedal "anthro" form, as well as a four legged dire wolf form. Of course, when the full moon was in the sky, we didn't have a choice, and it felt somehow even more amazing, which, early on, led to a significant amount of shapeshifter orgies as we found out that in the moonlight, all you cared about was changing and getting off, and less about who was touching what.
As the weeks and months passed early on, we realized our concepts of family units and whatnot were somewhat changing as well. Just as race, gender, and sexuality had disappeared in importance, the concept of "pack" had become the real defining way we looked at the world. There was the core pack, those who you lived with and felt closest to. There was the inner pack, a slightly larger circle of people who you changed with and hunted with (and often were sexually active with, though not always). There was the outer pack, which often would essentially be your neighborhood; if you could identify their scent, but didn't necessarily associate with them closely, they would be your outer pack. Everyone else on the planet earth was just "pack". Because we'd all been transformed simultaneously, our minds refused to accept the concept of "other". Someone in China would think of someone else in Canada as "pack". Because there now was only one true species, one real race-that of the werewolf.
Other things had changed as well, once we'd all become our superior selves. We aged more slowly once reaching adulthood, and in some cases in the initial aftermath, we appeared younger than we had. Elderly people tended to look more like they had in late middle age, and middle aged folks looked more like they had in their late twenties. Our changed metabolisms didn't do away with people being fat or overweight, but the fat became more muscled, or caused curvier body types now. They were still thick, but not so seemingly unhealthy. In fact, due to lycanthropy being just as good as advertised, even people with chronic health problems no longer had them. While in the short term, doctors still existed, people no longer went to school for medical degrees, since our natural regenerative powers fixed any damage, beyond the most severe sort of wound inflicted by another werewolf. And if someone had been hurt that badly, they probably wouldn't have survived anyway.
Our children seemed to age a bit more quickly, maturing toward very developed bodies faster, and for whatever reason, most countries reported their children were seeming to learn more quickly and do better in school as well. My own theory was that it was due to the world coming together as one. Children weren't stressed about wars or conflict- there were none. Now that we were all one large pack that spanned the globe, the governments of nations ran to aid the less fortunate. War-torn regions in the middle east and Africa had literally billions of dollars of aid and thousands of specialists from all over the world coming to help them nearly overnight, because pack helped pack.
Religion was now less of a divisive thing and more of a cultural note. Middle Eastern folks were generally Muslim, and Americans still were primarily split between Christianity and atheism, but even that age-old conflict had waned to the point of near-nonexistence. Israel's infamous West Bank, the sight of so much violence between themselves and the Palestinians, now held a monument to the day that Israel had granted Palestine legitimate freedom, ceding a third of their territory to create a new country for those who wanted it.
Yes, there were many denominations of a variety of religions who chose to believe that the Hadron incident was the work of their god, but none felt the need to fight with another over it. This was not a disagreement worthy of fighting with your pack brother or sister over. People still attended religious ceremonies and regular worship, but it had morphed into more of a way to be closer to your outer packmates.
The only troubling thing for many folks was the sudden and drastic reduction in the birth rate. By year two, the pregnancy rate was only 1%, and by year five, it was .09. Less than one percent of the population was even getting pregnant, and barely any of those were multiple births. Granted, since our death rate was even lower, this was for the best. We realized very quickly that this was some sort of natural safeguard against impossible levels of overpopulation, and we accepted it. Still, for some couples and some single people, this was heartbreaking. Try as they might, our best scientists couldn't find a way to increase fertility, beyond a nominal boost.
Of course, this led to one large taboo finally falling away. We no longer cared about our children being sexually active. It was natural for them to want to experiment with each other, and to bond sexually with their boyfriends or girlfriends. Now that the spectre of teen pregnancy was a non-factor, and sexually transmitted diseases didn't exist, there was no reason to forbid our children from learning about sex in the most practical (and fun) ways with each other. Particularly as the full moon and the overwhelmingly pleasurable transformations it brought only seemed to encourage such things.
Our wolfish instincts and blinding pleasure combined however, to make one thing a bit more prevalent-incest. First cousin incest was probably the most common, though sibling incest wasn't unheard of. Parent-child incest was almost nonexistent however, simply due to the nature of the family unit.
Incest wasn't my thing- I was happily married when the great changing happened. Now I'm part of a triad. My wife had always shown a hard bisexual streak, and once the great changing had occurred, a single female friend of ours had started coming over on the full moon. We'd been close with her prior to the great changing, but now, we were practically inseparable, and within six months, she'd moved in with us.
And so, I would have to say that over the ten years since the great changing, the earth is now steadily becoming a literal utopia. Without the burdens of religion and race to keep us at each others' throats, we could devote our time to better pursuits. With the newfound emergence of our lycanthropic sides, everyone finally seemed to understand why saving the planet was so important, and why it WAS a problem if your next door neighbor was starving. While we hadn't completely stopped global warming, scientists gleefully announced that we'd stopped its increase, and projections were showing that we would in fact see a slight reverse of the damage over the next two decades. We had completely solved global hunger, thanks to well-funded labs across the globe, both in the private and public sectors.
We began to look to the stars, as that same science then turned itself to the concept of colonizing our solar system and beyond. That had presented its own issues, as we had to invent suits that could withstand the rigors of a werewolf transforming inside of them without rupturing, while still being snug enough to not be a burden to an astronaut or traveller in their human shape. (We had a near miss with that situation on the international space station in the early days after the great change.)
While we still hadn't solved the travel conundrum fully, we were getting close. SETI had been re-funded massively, and had widened its scope in the search for alien life. Aliens no longer seemed silly to even the most skeptical of us, now that we'd seen just how strange the universe could be. If our entire planet could be given the great gift of lycanthropy in an instant, aliens could certainly exist.
We hadn't found aliens yet, or they were actively avoiding us. I'm honestly not sure. Perhaps we were alone in the universe, a singular experiment by a bored creator, or maybe the lone lucky roll of the dice in a cosmic soup of randomness.
But then...