So here’s an experiment! This branch is less so a proper narrative as it is a setting description wherein proper narratives can be told. It also serves as a history lesson. With me so far, everyone?
Now, you’ve likely read the title of this branch and made your own general assumptions. It’s the far future, and most in not everyone on Earth lost their limbs somehow. This assumption is accurate, but how we got to this point is a bit complicated. Some might even say it feels like a blatantly contrived excuse to justify such a setting. If you were to say that, I wouldn’t say you were incorrect, but I would request that you at least hear it out.
So, it all started sometime in the early… let’s say 2100’s. A new airborne virus starts infecting thousands, and eventually billions. What the virus does is force your body to absorb your arms and legs up to the shoulders and thighs respectively, essentially leaving you a quadriplegic amputee. The mass from your absorbed limbs is redistributed and extra fat for your buttocks, a bigger cock and balls for dudes, and bigger boobs for girls. It even takes into account whether you’re trans, and redistributes mass accordingly. It also makes your sex drive stronger, to the point you get so horny that it hampers your higher brain functions until you can relieve yourself. You have trouble talking that’s how horny you get! You sound like the verbal equivalent of keyboard smashing, if that makes sense!
So medical science started collaborating to find a way to return people to normal. The pharmaceutical side of science started working on a vaccine for the virus that would return the body to normal. It took a few tries to get a suitable retrovirus developed that would make your limbs grow back completely, and even more to develop one that lowered your sexual urges. They still haven’t developed a vaccine that permanently regrows your limbs, due to the nature of viruses constantly mutating in response to vaccines! The regrown limbs stick around for two years and then get reabsorbed again, requiring another shot biannually for the rest of your life.
The other solution was developed by engineers and cybernetics experts. The development of lifelike prosthetic arms and legs boomed and became widely available to the public before the first vaccine was finished and quickly became the most popular option among kids, teenagers, and young adults. Not long after these hyper advanced prosthetics hit the market, a gigantic modding scene rapidly took shape, allowing one to augment their limbs with all kinds of extra superfluous options like a built-in smartphone, floating detached hands, wrist-mounted dart gun, animal inspired shapes… or a vibrator function because remember, they’re still horny on main. The sex toy industry took advantage of this and began developing stronger products that could satisfy even the randiest of folks.
Are you feeling the spaghetti now? Are you feeling the spaghetti now! So let’s cut forward a few more years. At this point, people are born limbless, and parents basically have two options. Either vaccinate their baby so that they develop limbs and re-administer biannually every time the body reabsorbs them, or install some prosthetics and replace them as the child grows up. Every family approaches it differently, but you basically have two types of middle class people: the Vaccinates and the Cyborgs. Most of the 1% have decided to reject their limbs altogether and instead are waited on hand and foot (so to speak) for all of their body’s needs as a demonstration of their deep pockets. The rich believe that only laborers need limbs, and this has caused a huge social divide. (Quick note: rich people use the word “laborer” as a slur towards people who have limbs, while the term “nugget” is used as a slur towards the limbless rich. Make your own “Eat the Rich” style jokes at your own discretion because the more things change, the more they stay the same.)