The Wild Lands: Legend of the Wild Man

by Joe Darris

  Kao roars and lunges at the hermit. Every piece of his body burns with pain, the stone in his brain screams at him to stop, but he fights on. He has battled this energy for nearly half a moon. Pain is but an inconvenience.

  The monkeys lunge at Kao. He easily throws off the first one. It flies across the room hooting in a wide arch. Kao can feel the lightning in his brain increase, but there is more to it than that. Its telling him what to do. More specifically his body what to do. He can hear it say things simpler than words. GROUND. Or something to that effect. His body wants to obey to avoid the pain. Before his mind understands the game his body is already trading pain for submission. But he is not his body. He knows his essence, his mind, his soul even, reside somewhere else. So he resists. The monkeys watch, frozen, neither them nor the Hidden behind their eyes wish to challenge Kao.

  “Subdue him!” the hermit yells, but the monkeys are conflicted. The hermit's stench is already driving them mad, they are close to throwing off their mind control, but they cannot. Kao barely can. It is a struggle to lift his body from the floor. His heart is going too fast, it is hard to breath.

  With his last breath he fills his lungs and roars. Loud and guttural, vicious and powerful. It is a challenge to the monkeys. A dare to fight off their masters. He expects them to run scared but they do not. Instead the hoot and holler back at him. A show of brotherhood, of solidarity.

  Except the one he threw off. That monkey bounds across the room, seizes one of Kao's prongs, and snaps it off.

  Kao wishes it was that easy. The monkey has to leverage it against his bone to break it. Muscles have grown around the prong and they scream in protest. Kao has endured great pain, a little more is but a little more. Finally the prong does break.

  Kao screams in pain, an impossible feat given his lack of oxygen.

  “Fool,” Baucis says with the hermit's ragged voice, “did you really think you'd overpower us?”

  The monkey yanks the broken prong out of Kao's arm and climbs atop his back. Its little fingered feet grab at Kao's black hair. He feels more pressure as it raises the prong high, then drives it down into the back of his neck.

  “Stop him!” Baucis orders, his false voice cracks.

  Too late. The monkey reaches into the back of Kao's neck with its prehensile toes and tears the stone out of his body. Immediately the pain stops. Kao can think again. He leaps to his feet, and the monkey jumps clear.

  “Catch them you idiots!” the hermit bellows. His voice quivers. He is losing control. The other three monkeys opt to chase their former ally around the room. None make a move for Kao, but the smaller target is not easy prey.

  The free monkey is a hundred times more agile than the enslaved. He does flips and cartwheels, scales walls and lands behind his pursuers. The others try to keep up. Kao watches the whole spectacle from the center of the room. One comes close, and he reaches out and snatches it. He deftly bashes the chip on the back of its brain and this monkey, perhaps anticipating its freedom immediately starts tearing around the room. Now the tables have turned. The free monkeys, with their increased agility and intense motivation scramble after the others. Kao turns to the hermit.

  “Y-You are f-foolish, ape. You th-think I w-w-would come in here without a plan? Observe.” he points to the two monkeys with the stones still in. Their eyes go wide with terror, then glow bright blue and they crumples to the floor. The other monkeys stop chasing and scratch their heads. One tries to shake them awake. Kao understands. Baucis killed them.

  He growls and steps towards the hermit.

  “Your b-body is your own. But is thhh-this one so l-lucky?” Electricity surges through the hermit's body. He falls to his knees but cackles the entire time. “Do you think this h-hurts?” he says, then writhes in pain. “S-Sometimes I can't r-really tell. Here's what we're going t-to do...”

  Before he can continue one of the monkeys leaps through the air and kicks the hermit squarely in the back of the head. The one that freed Kao grabs his hand. He hoots excitedly and points towards the open door. The hermit will have to survive a bit longer. Kao squeezes the little monkey's hand and runs.

  Chapter 37

  The Scourge will come for us as soon as the Spire fails- this Nature has made clear to me. The Wild Man is another story. Cursed with an intellect, we can try to win him over, but what use is argument when faced with righteousness?

  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.r />
  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 t
he 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.

  After the vultus Baucis implemented what he had deemed the next step in his evolutionary symphony. He had managed to capture a pregnant panthera, no easy task. The animals weighed nearly as much as the 2 ton biselk. They were bigger than horses, stealthy, powerful and intelligent. The Council had argued that the beasts were dangerous and unnecessary. Granted, the Garden occasionally lost a biselk to wild predators, but that hardly seemed to justify bringing one up into Spire City for research. Baucis agreed, and had howluchins fashion a cage on the surface. An idea Tennay was embarrassed that he hadn't thought of nor been able to argue against. Baucis fed the pregnant mother meat exclusively from the Garden, something never before attempted. The chemical therapy had killed her, but the baby managed to survive. A steady diet of biselk meat and generous helpings of the their bones made the cat into something previously nonexistent.

  Tennay paid little heed to Ntelo's Naturalist religion, but he, like almost every other person in the Spire, viewed the twins and the Evanimals they piloted as living, breathing miracles. Ntelo's title of Nature’s Angels seemed apt. They controlled their Evanimals with grace and fluidity. Many could control biselk with a VRC, fewer could handle the howluchins, but no one save Skup and Urea could do anything with either the vultus flock or the panthera.