From: mattm@apple.com (Matthew Melmon)
Subject: Jungle Man
Date: 6 Oct 92 22:40:44 GMT


The burning skies hid behind a wall of decay.  Condemned buildings,
fifty stories high.  Between them, a narrow strip of florescent fire.
The only light.  But Alistaire Niles didn't need light.  Ghostly
silhouettes danced before his radiant eyes.  Phantom pools of red in the
blackness of his form.  Alistaire's steps were careful.  Calculated.
Beneath him, the old urban growth extended as far down as it did up.
Through gaping holes in the surface, the unsuspecting could plummet
hundreds of feet into a spider's web of rusted iron and broken glass.

And spiders.  Real spiders.

Not a pleasant death.

But even the suspecting had to be wary.  The surface was not always as
solid as it seemed.  Pitfalls beneath every potential step.  The gangs
knew where to walk.  Where to run.  The safe paths were committed to
memory.  To live here and not know where to step was not to live here
very long.

A plume of burning gas burst up from the depths.  For a moment,
challenging the flaming clouds.  Then gone.

This was but one Hell among many on what has become of God's earth,
thought Alistaire.  But he was not afraid.  Alistaire was a demon.  And
he served the Queen of Demons.

A cat.  Alistaire stopped.  No house cat.  A real cat.  A mountain lion
adapted to life in this burned out jungle.  Dogs couldn't live here.
This was not a land for stray packs of wolves, not like The Valley.
This was the Core.  Only cats had the balance to prowl these steel
trees.  Dark, black, sinewy.  These cats were beasts to fear. The gangs
feared them.  Stray travelers certainly feared them.  Even Alistaire had
cause to fear.  He felt the little hairs on the back of his neck itch.

The beast snarled.  A silent hiss.  Alistaire didn't move.  The cat
would know the ground, too.  Know when and where to jump.  And it would
jump, as soon as Alistaire moved.  He tried to make out it's entire
form.

Very difficult.  Its grease-slicked coat nearly matched the temperature
of the air.  Thermal prints were impossible.  Not enough spare UV rained
down from above to pierce the gloom.  Alistaire could see the fangs and
hear the breath.

But that was more than most could do.  The cat was puzzled.  The strange
deer on two legs didn't usually notice the silent hunter. The cat didn't
move.

Frozen.  Staring.  Waiting.

Alistaire knew the cat would pounce if he reached for his gun. He was
fast, very fast, with a gun.  Among the best on the Force.  But these
cats were faster.  Every bunched muscle was ready to pounce.  Alistaire
knew he could nail the beast in the air.  Maybe twice.  But that might
not kill it.  The damn things were often infested with nanites.  From
their victims.  Their tissues had been bound and strengthened.  Their
blood vessels toughened.  Their wounds would be immediately attendended.
A remarkable natural development.  No one ever though about what would
happen if you ate a 'Punk loaded up with nanites.

Very expensive nanites.

But that's what these cats had done, back when such technology was
common.  Now, much less common.  But Nature was working still at work.
The cats had kittens.  The kittens had nanites.  The kittens had grown
up even stronger than their parents.  They were now what the cats of
old were:  lords of the jungle.  Only the jungle had changed.

Alistaire jumped.  The cat jumped.  Alistaire crashed through a gaping
hole and plummeted into the Earth.  The cat landed nimbly where he had
been standing.  It hissed ferociously, but could not pursue.  Almost
instantly, the great beast leapt back into the inter-woven steel beams.
Back into the shadows.  There would be other two-legged deer.

Alistaire hung from a rusting pipe.  He had seen it through the gloom,
but could not gage its strength.  It was not very strong.  Once the
cat's hisses had stopped, Alistaire could hear the groans of the pipe.
Very clearly.

He heard something else.  Footsteps.  Soft.  Almost imperceptible.  Only
someone who could have sensed the cat could have heard them.  Out of the
pan, into the fire thought Alistaire silently.  He looked down.  The
glint of water.  Perhaps fifteen feet away.

Or something like water.

He looked in the direction of the footsteps.  After a short while, a boy
stepped into a pool of light raining in from above.  Naked and pale.
With a tuft of blonde hair.  Wiry.  Faceted.  Like a cat.

He was a Cat.  The smallest of the major gangs.  The least seen.  The
best armed.  The Cats were believed to report to none other than
Prometheus himself.  Even now.  With Prometheus gone north.  He had
never been clear about what would become of the Cats.  The Queen of Hell
didn't like that, but not even she could demand anything of Prometheus
Mage.  The Cats remained a mystery.

The boy hopped up and down in place.  Alistaire thought that strange.
Again, the boy hopped.  And again.  Alistaire looked down, then up.  The
boy hopped.  Furiously, Alistaire tried to pierce the gloom with his
eyes, but the light was too poor.  Only the glint of water.  Or some
liquid.

The boy leaped.  His path through the air was graceful and sure.
Avoiding all beams, he landed beneath Alistaire with a slight splash.
Only a thin film of water.  Covering a solid surface.  Alistaire
dropped.  His landing was not so smooth as the boy's, but neither was it
clumsy.  Augmented legs absorbed the strain without difficulty.

The boy had moved away, hidden in the shadows.  And then, with a
backwards flip, he was gone.  Alistaire stood alone in the darkness.
Though he wanted to, he did not draw his gun.  He knew he was being
watched and that the gun would be an unwelcome sight.

Alistaire took a couple of steps and vanished.  Crashing through the
roof, he cursed himself for being so stupid.  He felt some strange tugs
as he fell into the structure.  He slammed into something.  Solid and
hard.  And not too far down.  It could have been a hell of a lot worse.

And then, he noticed the rat spinning in a web.

He slapped himself.  His skin crawled.  The rat kept spinning.  The gun
came out.  Spiders.  Alistaire hated spiders.  And they got very big
here in the Core.  Black widows the size of your fist.  Bloated and
slow.  With strong, very strong, webs.  He remembered the tugs.  One bite
would kill a normal man, very painfully.  Alistaire wouldn't die, not
even from several.  But it would hurt like hell.  And he'd have spider
guts all over him.

His skin still burning, he looked around the room.  Typical tenement.
Burned out and abandoned.  Overpopulation wasn't much of a problem
anymore.  Fifty, sixty thousand people once lived beneath the Core in
rooms like this.  Now they were dead.  Most weren't buried.  And the
world above didn't care. Had its own hells.

The room was full of rusted furniture - what people above would consider
cheap lawn fluff.  A mattress covered with mold.  Broken wooden table.
Rats.  Rat carcasses.  Alistaire looked around for the spiders, but
couldn't find them.

"This is not fun," he mumbled.

Something heavy landed on the roof.  There was the sound of bending
steel.  A snap.  Alistaire watched the hole he had made, his gun
back in it's holster.  A rusted metal pole descended.

"Grab on," grunted a deep voice from above.

Alistaire did so.  He was lifted up.


Matthew Melmon



From: mattm@apple.com (Matthew Melmon)
Subject: Jungle Man
Date: 14 Oct 92 22:54:39 GMT

Many creatures lived in the dark.  Beneath 'The Street.'  Far
beneath the flying chariots of steel and glass that served the
lords of technology.  Some of the creatures had been human.  Or
perhaps they were still, only the race above had moved beyond
them, leaving them lost and forgotten.  But many never were.  The
mountain lions that had come down from the hills to which they had
been banished by the humans hiding in the dark.  The insects that
had always been here, and probably always would.  The spiders,
often larger than they had ever grown before the Decay.

This was The Core.  Many cities had Cores.  But this was The Core.
What had been downtown Los Angeles.  Other cities, ones that
lacked the sheer size of the Greater Metropolitan Area of the city
of Angels, were not able to ignore their Cores, and so they had
been largely tamed.  Reclaimed.

Not so Los Angeles.  The Wilshire Corridor.  That was now now the
great Metropolis.  There was no pressing need for the towers of
the Core.  They were never reclaimed.  Not even with the passing
of the Metal Plagues.

At first, The Core had housed the masses without privilege,
fleeing from the outer fringes with the collapse of law.  The
skyscrappers were largely abanoned anyway.  Cheap space, built at
extra-ordinary cost.  The Tectonic Engineer Limited prototypes for
what the Wilshire Corridor was to be built on are found in the
Core.  Some maintain that the technology, in spots, is even more
finely applied in the dead zone.

Vast struts extending into the Earth.  Using the very forces that
churn the continents to squeeze power from crystal and artificial
muscle.  Though the Core is now dark, it's veins flow with enough
power to light all of California, even near the end of this, the
twenty-first century.

It is only the bulbs which have died.

And the tenants.

Most of the tenants.

The Core had been abandoned not long after it was built.  When the
Metal Plague hit.  The human body did not take kindly to losing
flesh and replacing it with steel.  A toxic shock built up.
Slowly.  But it struck with lethal force.  Very quick.  Very
deadly.  Sometimes, the doomed felt it behooved them to take a few
down with them.

It was the end of one civilization and the beginning of another.
And the Core was lost.  Few could afford cybernetic enhancements,
so few were lost to the Plague.  But as society withdrew into
itself, and they were left largely alone, they discovered that
they could kill each other.  And the cyborg gangs discovered that
the Core was fun.

And so people started dying.  And buildings started to crumble.
And power - though in plentiful supply - was cut as cables were
slashed and could not be repaired for lack of knowledge.  There
were no schools.  No learning.  No remembering of past lessons.

The rats grew fat.  The spiders grew fat.

And the rains came.  Science had pressed on, and the science was
determined to turn the wasteland of Southern California into a
verdant paradise.  And to do that required water.  Only there was
no water.

But there was the ocean.

And the rusting oil platforms.

The seas were boiled in huge pipes.  The steam shot into the
atmosphere with great force - aimed towards the land.  When the
wind was right, it would be carried above the city.  Above the
vast Inland Empire - trapped ultimately by the mountains.  It
would condense.

And it would rain.

Only slightly at first, but science pressed on.  The rains did
come.  Hard and fast.  To the desert.  To the Hill Cities and the
Valley.  To the Wilshire Corridor.

And to the Core.  The forgotten Core, that had been dug as deep
into the Earth as the towers had been built above.  Vast caverns
had become burrows of humanity.  Burrows in a monsoon had become a
watery grave.

But from water, and from decay, comes new life.  And so it was in
the Core.  Dirt washed down from the mountains, washed off the
streets, washed from the air.  It settled.  Fungus grew and
decayed.  Animals moved in and died.  Concrete crumbled and was
reduced.  Vines grew wild along exposed skeletons of steel and
ceramic.  Like the cybernetic humans, the Core became a cybernetic
jungle.  And the jungle had eyes.

And there were many eyes watching Alistaire Niles - from that
world above - as he was lifted into the air.

Matthew Melmon



From: mattm@apple.com (Matthew Melmon)
Subject: Jungle Man
Date: 16 Oct 92 23:34:15 GMT

A flood of information spilled through Alistaire's field of
vision.  He stood very still, not moving, as the young boy - the
young Cat - he had seen crawled over him.  Alistaire turned it
off.  The red glow of letters would be visible to the two Cats.
The boy probably wouldn't understand.  But the larger one - the
one that pulled him out - he would understand.  And Alistaire did
not want to make that one uncomfortable.

A cougar.  A silent hunter and scout.  Alistaire was on the border
of a Pride's territory.  But he new that.  The Pride's lived along
the Core's edge.  They did not care for the decay at it's very
center.

The center.  That's where Alistaire was headed.

The boy bit him.  Not very hard.  Alistaire did not flinch.  He
had very thick skin.  Very strong.  The boy probably could not
harm Alistaire, however hard he tried.

But the cougar could rip his head off.

"Hello," said Alistaire.

"Hello," replied the cougar.

Still a young man.  Very muscular, very handsome.  Very naked, but
covered with a strange, glossy black hair.  Starting bellow the
neck.  Very short hair.  Very strong.

The Cat's were descended from gangs of affluent youth, common at
the turn of the century.  They could afford the genetic
engineering and the bio-chemical treatments.  They did not suffer
from the Metal Plague, which decimated the much larger gangs.

And, of course, they were strongly connected to Prometheus Mage -
the Prometheus Mage.  Permanent Secretary of Defense for the
American armed forces.  Chairman and Chief Executive of
Salamander.  Many of the Cats were children of Salamander
employees.  They were an extension of Prometheus into the
underworld.  Bosses have risen and fallen throughout American
history, and Prometheus Mage was the wealthiest, deadliest boss
who ever lived - and anyone that told him so died.

No questions asked.

Prometheus no longer lived in Los Angeles, if he lived at all.  He
hadn't been seen in two decades.  Salamander had moved north to
Portland.  The vast ziggurat of it's former headquarters no
belonged to Baalphegor and the Los Angeles Security Forces.

His boss.  And one of Salamander's greatest creations.  A fully
functional biorg - one of only four known to exist.  The biorgs
were not cybernetically enhanced humans.  Mechanical life.  The
only way to describe them.

Prometheus Mage.  Mordred Heath.  Nagasaki Gorgon.  Baalphegor.

Mechanical life.  Flesh and steel merged so perfectly that the
Metal Plague meant nothing to them.  Perhaps even time itself
meant nothing.  In more ways then one, they were dinosaurs.
Obscenely powerful monsters of another era.

But while Prometheus had withdrawn, his science had not.  The
genetic engineers flourished.  Humanity was not what it once was.
Elements of the cybernetic era remained.  Alistaire himself was
proof.  The Cats were proof.  Science had found ways around the
use of metal.

But metal was hard and strong.  And many wanted that strength.
Many of those didn't believe the Metal Plague was real - and often
didn't live long enough to find out.  Many others knew it was
real, but knew death was certain anyway.  And the Metal Plague
wasn't an ugly death.  The body just wakes up some day and
realizes all's not quite right, and it stops.

Just like that.

Toxic shock.  Takes a minute, maybe two for all vital signs to
vanish.  But the brain shuts down almost immediately.  There's no
pain.

But Alistaire wouldn't suffer from the Metal Plague.  And neither
would this cougar.  And neither would the boy, arms fastened about
Alistaire's neck, legs fasted about his waist, teeth occasional
biting a shoulder or arm.

"This is not a good place," said the cougar.

"No," Alistaire replied.

"Follow me," said the cougar.

Alistaire looked at the boy.  The cougar reached out a hand,
faster than Alistaire would have expected - even knowing the speed
possessed by these Cats - and swatted the young one.  The child
hissed, and was swated again.

The child bared his teeth and growled.

Alistaire knew the polymers woven through his skin would resist
the child's claws or bite, but he tensed anyway.  Reflexively.
Another swat and the child dropped to the floor, hissing but
subdued.

The cougar moved silently into the shadows.  Alistaire followed.


Matthew Melmon