The Wild Lands: Legend of the Wild Man (37 page)

Tennay marched up from the reclamation level.
He had made up his mind, and now only had to carry out the
monumental, treasonous task.

Tennay often sat amidst the humming machines
and lost himself in thought. The bottom floor was Spire City's
godsend. There were a dozen reclamation machines housed there.
Without them, the Spire would be nothing. It was the only place in
the Spire that reminded him of earth, and tragically, one of the
few places he could safely assume no one would be.

Originally designed as a luxury ecological
resort and casino, The Spire had all but forgotten the reclamation
machines. In its glory days as a casino, the Spire boasted lush
beds, Virtual Recreation Chambers, every game of chance ever
imagined, tons of telescopes, cameras and view screens to observe
the herds of animals below. Even before the Scourge, residents of
the Spire had pointed their eyes down towards the surface instead
of up towards the stars. Spire Casino boasted a five star rating, a
carbon-neutral footprint, a menagerie of endangered primates
(indigenous to the area no less) and, though not in the brochure,
in house reclamation toilets. Someone saw fit to turn human waste
into an organic feedback system. Tennay thanked the anonymous
engineer every day. They wouldn't have made it a year past the
Scourge without it.

The system did everything with human waste.
It fertilized the gardens on the sixth floor, was filtered for
showers, and infamously served as a protein rich food ingredient.
Not that anyone had ever actually eaten the stuff when the Spire
was still a casino. Dressed up in technology, pumped full of the
best smells and flavors money could buy, it was still shit.

That changed after the Scourge.

Hunger has a way of changing one's palate.
Reclamation (the preferred euphemism) became the way of life. The
rooftop garden simply wasn't big enough to support thousands. The
reclamation system carried the Spire's population until The Garden
was established below.

The Spire was a powerful electric conductor
built to fuel a society addicted to energy. Though lightning struck
it constantly, its energy came from differences in temperature from
the top, more than a kilometer in the sky, and its bottom, nestled
nearly the same distance beneath the surface to generate a constant
flow of heat, and an enormous electromagnetic field. Several such
Spires could power a nation, a few dozen, a globe. There was more
than enough energy to power everything in the Spire: computer
databanks, view-screens, telescopic cameras, the Virtual Reality
Rooms and the Implants that controlled the Evanimals. Prior to the
Scourge it powered the surrounding city and manufacturing plants,
flying craft, even the containment facilities. Though those were
long broken, their contents released upon the world humanity had
built.

Tennay's key purpose aboard the top of the
spindly tower was to keep the energy flowing. He accepted this,
embraced it, he alone had the knowledge to keep the Spire
functioning, and he carried that knowledge like the badge that it
was. Everyone in the Spire understood it was built of a type of
carbon tubules, a massive superconducting piece of nanotechnology,
but only Tennay began to understand the slew of conductive alloys
that made the structure a modern miracle. Hundreds of people had
engineered it to be efficient and structurally stable. Carbon
nanotubes had been cheap to manufacture in the last years before
the Scourge and humanity had done wonders with them. The Spire was
the largest structure ever built, and the nanotubes made it
possible. Carbon nanotubes were practically indestructible. Only an
excess of heat (near the temperatures of the sun's corona) could
damage them, and they were designed specifically to accommodate
such heat. They were aligned in neat rows that served as wicks for
energy. There were no power build ups, no chinks in the flow of
energy.

Well, almost none. Decades of inadequate
maintenance took its toll on any structure. The Spire held out
gallantly, but it was not impervious to age. The nanotubes that
made up the Spire were designed never to rust but The Scourge
didn't make things easier. A point Ntelo emphasized zealously.

The Scourge: Tennay hardly blamed the High
Priestess for cursing it as much as she did. Even as a young man,
blessed with the sense of indestructibility only the young possess,
Tennay had been shocked to learn that people designed a bacteria
specifically to destroy the nanotubes. Environmentalists had voiced
concerns over creating materials that would not biodegrade. If the
nanotubes become as prevalent as plastic, they had argued, the
earth would be drowned in the things.

“At least plastic can be destroyed by
bacteria, nanotubes don't biodegrade,” had been the news blurb
everyone had heard a hundred times over. Never did they mention
that those plastic-eating bacteria had been engineered
by
man
and made plastic no more useful than paper. That would've
complicated the debate, something those in power always sought to
avoid, modern times not withstanding, the engineer thought with a
weary sigh.

Tennay half wondered if the nanotube
manufacturers had planted that argument, for once it entered the
public discourse, people were practically begging the industry to
make organisms that could recycle the technology. Tennay had seen
Rufus Aurelius pull the same trick on the Spire. The Hegelian
dialectic, it was called, though those in power surely called it by
a nobler name its pieces were simple: perceived problem, reaction
guided by media, then finally the premeditated solution.

With the Scourge it had been easy to do.
Bioengineering firms had already made bacteria and fungus that
could eat plastics, radioactive compounds, cancerous mutagens, all
engineered, patentable responses to complex problems. They probably
had the next piece already engineered and ready to go, just as soon
as the nanotubes had saturated the market, they'd make them
obsolete and release the next miracle substance.

Tennay cursed those scientific pioneers
daily. By designing the bacteria, the scientists effectively
removed the nanotubes unique traits. Not that they'd planned on the
bacteria getting released and becoming mankind's final Scourge, but
wasn't that inevitable? How could humanity hope to contain
something that was designed to return everything back to its
elemental parts? Meditating on the Scourge made Tennay feel bitter
and cynical towards mankind. History kept repeating itself. Those
that engineered the Scourge were no different than the
bioengineering pioneers: those who claimed that their genetically
modified crops wouldn't effect standard varieties when all along
they had been banking on it happening.

How it happened didn't really matter, the
Scourge was released, either by chance or fate, god's hand or
man's, and the release of the Scourge meant the nanotubes were
susceptible to decay now, like everything else. Tennay suspected
that some of Ntelo's sermons were correct. Incessant meddling
probably gave Nature the strength it needed to shake off humans
once and for all. Or nearly for all, for they still teetered high
above the earth, scared of the fall.

At least they had the Spire. The power plant
turned tourist destination turned ark of humanity held up
admirably. The tectonic heat that surged through it kept the
Scourge off and
homo sapiens
alive, thank Nature. Tennay had
to be thankful for something, and lately it seemed machines were
his only solace. The twins were imprisoned, the Council
corrupt...

Tennay walked on trying not to think of what
he was going to do, what he
had
to do, if he wanted to hold
on to the vestige of self respect he had.

The engineer was the oldest human inside all
of Spire City. He had been alive for more than 100 years, an
ancient measurement of time based on the planet’s tilt in reference
to the sun. The youth thought it irrelevant and nonsensical. The
Spire had no seasons, no weather, no hot season or cold season.
Time was an eternal river to all but the pilots and those lucky
enough to possess Virtual Reality Chips. They could experience
Nature through the pilot's exploits. Everyone else was trapped in
an ageless decaying city hidden in the clouds.

After all his years Tennay measured time in
the changes that he saw. Change was the only element that seemed
tangible. Time was just a measurement meted out by clocks and
embraced by the human mind. Change was real. Like most Citizens of
Spire city, His favorite changes to watch were the plant and animal
adaptations of the garden.

Tennay felt he understood more than the
Council, or even Baucis did. He wasn't suffering from the same
health issues as the rest of Council. He didn't eat from the
Garden, but instead patronized his reclamation meals religiously.
He knew what made the plants and animals grow so vigorously. Life
used what was available, and the Scourge had turned humanity's
forsaken machines into a buffet. Atoms, molecules, and compounds
that had no business supporting life filled the Garden in the guise
of a deceptively organic looking organism. The Scourge had fooled
the plants, the animals, even the people up in Spire City, though
of course most of them knew nothing of what it all actually looked
like. Few view screens had lasted this long, and those people
without VRCs were blind to how Nature really worked.

The engineer hadn't always resented the
ecological program. Tennay applauded Baucis’s predecessor, Trea,
who had taken the risk of dumping precious seeds from the
ecological research station onto the irrigated land below. The
powerful digiscopes aboard the decadent casino cut through the
cloud bank that hid the earth from Spire city and revealed that the
domesticated plants thrived even more than the wild ones in the new
environment. But there they remained, tomatoes, corn, melons and a
hundred others, a mere kilometer away yet totally inaccessible.

Tennay remembered when
Baucis confided in him that seeing the vegetables and fruits, far
below and out of reach inspired him to find a way to the surface.
The monkeys had been his first attempt at using biological tools.
They were very successful, though definitely imperfect. They often
rebelled, overriding their VRC in the early days. Years of careful
breeding had solved the problem, or so Tennay had thought until
the
Wild Man
arrived. Suddenly it was like the fledgling days of the
Evanimal program. Monkeys attacked each other, people, and Nature
knew what else. Could the genius ecologist, the great natural
composer, be so blind to what was happening?

Baucis was the first to
realize that the
biselk
that stayed below the Spire grew larger and
stronger than their feral counterparts. Their antlers were thicker,
denser, more structurally stable, and had the characteristic
rainbow-black sheen of the Scourge. Baucis had affixed the VRCs to
the evolved
biselk
's brain stems before anyone even understood what he was
doing.

It had worked flawlessly.
Their conductive bones and antlers served as receivers and natural
amplifiers. Some of the monkeys had occasional behavior problems,
hence the exquisite care that went into their eugenics, but the
improved
biselk
did not share the rebellious streak. Their brains were too
small, their bones and antlers conducted the Spire's
electromagnetic field too well. They were essentially biological
puppets once the amplification chambers were turned on. Tennay had
originally doubted their worth, thinking the monkeys were a more
versatile tool, a more practical form of organic technology, but
Baucis had quickly demonstrated the
biselk
’s ability to not only defend
the immaculate garden from the hordes of wild animals who sought to
feed on it, but also as effective plows. Why couldn't he believe in
Baucis now like he did then?
This is
different
he thought ruefully, and marched
on.

When the ecologist
exploited the novel molecular structure's move up the tropic
pyramid, Tennay had been dumbstruck. The
vultus
flock made the Garden a truly
viable enterprise.
vultus
were useful in so many ways. They provided
surveillance, protection, and were faster than anything stuck on
the earth. Best of all a
vultus
was large enough to carry a ton of food. Before
them, monkeys had to shuttle food up the Spire one basket at a
time, a risky endeavor. It was a pity so few pilots could
synchronize with them. It took a specific kind of mind to
understand the mind of a scavenger turned top of the food
chain.

Then again, it took a
specific kind of animal to survive the Scourge. When the
first
howluchin
monkey made its way up the cliff face to the
vultus
nesting grounds,
bodies littered the way. Most of the birds had died from the toxic
food source, but the few that survived incorporated the compounds
into their own bodies and flourished. The Scourge's byproducts were
stronger and lighter than anything that organic life was accustomed
to. The
vultus
,
more than any other Evanimal, grew enormous, their once hollow,
brittle bones no longer kept their size in check. If it hadn't been
for the decimation of their population, it would have been
impossible to take control of the flock. Miracles stacked upon
miracles, and Tennay wanted more.

It would be a miracle to
see
Urea and her magnificent
panthera
ride out and save the
Spire
.