Mry-An did not weep, she would not spare a single tear for the god-forsaken hell-hole she was leaving. Overhead the sun blazed white hot and to the horizons, desert stretched out endlessly. She cast one last look behind her, at the dark entrance in the sand and array of pipes, vents and sun trackers jutting haphazardly above the dunes.

From inside the darkness of the entrance, Jabnar watched his daughter leaving. He sought to fix every last detail firmly in his mind; from the way she defiantly strode away, her thin hips and gangling body, her long sun-bleached dread-locked hair that twitched angrily like a lion's tail of old. The way she pursed her bottom lip and squinted her hazel brown eyes when concentrating or upset. Jabnar knew that it was a distinct possibility that he would never see his daughter again. So he watched until the very last glimpse of her vanished behind a dune, and with a low slow sigh and heavy shoulders he turned to palm the airlock door.

Damn them all to Hell! Mry-An swore silently to the blinding sky beating down on her like an unruly elder brother. The hammer of rejection beat together with the sky to crush and meld her into something new. She let the rage burn white hot until it felt as if she would turn into a new sun, but the rage let loose guttered and died leaving her calm and cool as ice. Her thoughts crisp and ordered laid out the next few days, first order of survival was getting to the sanctuary and informal market of the Al-Wabe caves, some two days eastwards.


The cave, if one could call the slight overhang a cave, only fit Mry-An’s body if she curled into a tight foetal position. But, it was at least fifty meter’s above the desert floor and hard to reach so it would have to do for the night. She wished right then she was travelling in a normal convoy, one that rested by day and travelled by night. Fine if you had the lighters and beaters to scare away the mainly nocturnal omnivorous wildlife, not as fine, a lone soul, scarce on resources and substantial fire-power.

Wildlife… isn’t that the truth, she mused and gazed upward into the night sky. It was said in their oral histories that some of the horrors that stalked this desert night were once, human. She shuddered at the thought a cold needle of fear spiking down her painfully contorted backbone, and nervously re-checked the readout on her armband console. The radar lines swept clean their radii, nothing moved in the 1km circumnavigation of each of the eight sensors, she had placed strategically before climbing the rock face.

It did not take long for her thoughts to drift into darker territory, and the spectre of Elder Haml’s grim wrinkled face looming above, as he passed judgement. She knew she had gone too far, the moment the words first came out her mouth; that fateful day many turns ago. She knew from that instant the possible consequences, which did in fact lead to the worst possible outcome. She knew then and she still knew now, given the chance she would have done again the exact same way. It was this fervent belief in the end, which had pulled taut the noose of her expulsion and made it a certain outcome in her trial.

In the blood red moon just rising over the wind swept desert, Mry-An twisted her face into a demon’s mask and screamed silently into the night. Damn them all! She cried again and again, a murderous lullaby that echoed mercilessly around her mind and then changed and intoned those fateful words, “But I don’t believe in the God Chris” over and over.


Point zero five negative, was all it took for Dexis to fail his intercalating DNA mutation percentage test. Point zero five, the figure echoed mercilessly around his mind while its meaning ripped apart the fabric of his life. All his hopes and dreams forever cast into an abyss from which there was no return.

In a calm delirium he watched them etch away his wrist band ID tattoo with a laser. Saw them deny access to the city router as thousands of warning messages popped up, and flooded his temporal lobe tapped virtual desktop. Well at least he got to keep his personal databanks; there was something to having them. It wasn't as if he was a criminal, just not good enough for Tadwan anymore or any other prime arcology for that matter. So unlike a convicted criminal he at least could keep what he had on him, which included his latest implants and all his data.

At last count, he had over three lifetimes of assorted media, waiting in his bodily embedded, electron-spin data-storage pods. This brought some relief to what he envisioned would be a few months of life, if he was lucky, on the outside.

Next, they surgically removed his city ID package from his forearm. As they cut into the numb flesh, Dexis selected Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 14, and cranked up the virtual volume. To him each piano key strike was so loud he thought his ears should be bleeding. However, like the virtual desktop, his virtual sound was orgnano-wired directly into his temporal lobe.

For a moment the tender lonely notes distracted him from reality and for that he was extremely grateful. Though he still wasn't convinced the new e-mote cue layering had been the New York Philharmonic's best work. It was that damn new conductor Philbad Rokser's fault he was sure. Dexis had mourned his predecessor, Jes Jarr the world's all time best ever as far as he was concerned. Rokser way over-played the e-mote sense of isolation in the first movement.

As a spirited intellectual anti-intellectual Dexis caught himself typing a response note to the NYP's message board; saying exactly what he had just thought. He had of course not disabled his thought search keyword functions yet. This small futile action, broke the cracked damn he had been trying to hold together with pure willpower. Dexis faced the truth, gone was his umbilical cord to the virtual world at large for the very first time in thirty seven years. Very real tears began to stream down and over his golden sculptured high cheekbones, caught and shining like diamonds in his dread-locked beard.

The medical staff around him did not break their rhythm of work, but did heave a collective sigh of relief when they saw his tears. It was so much easier for them if the patient accepted their status, without violence or denial. The masked policemen strung around behind the medical staff stirred slightly lessening the grips on their drawn weapons. Yes, he realized through what had become heart-rending sobs. It was better for all involved if he just accepted his fate and disappeared from the city. With not a trace left behind to say he had even been born or lived there at all. Yes, better for all those concerned with Ragul Dexis former citizen in the jewel of Africa, Tadwan City.


A single faint ping, jerked Mry-An from a fitful slumber laden with the roar of disapproving voices. She wrestled a numb arm from between her legs and as she looked at the armband console, it gave another ping. Out on the edge of the seventh sensor radius a blob briefly lit up and disappeared. With sleep banished Mry-An watched the consul avidly, nothing more appeared. Judging by that first half-seen blob Mry-An estimated a creature around 100-150 kg’s in body mass. A hunter of some type she was certain; given the hour and speed with which it had moved. Had it taken to her trail the previous day? She had seen spore on the way here too indistinct to see what though exactly.

This time Mry-An saw it before the consul pinged and turned off the audible alarm before it could. Bigger than she had thought, faster too, and it definitely had her trail. As she watched the blob wind along the paths she had taken to place the sensors. She slowly released the leather guard from her trusty sawn-off Igutar77 recoilless pulse-beam shotgun, strapped to her right thigh. At this point utter stillness was her biggest asset in surviving this inevitable encounter. Reciting the attack-type mantras her heart and breathing slowed, and her body primed itself for rapid movement. On the console the blob had picked up its pace and was aimed directly for her position like an arrow. Yet still the night was supernaturally quiet. Nothing betrayed the massive creature apparently bounding towards her.

The cliff resounded with the impact of its leaping up the rock face from edge to crumbling edge. Halfway up she judged, it began to pound her cave with high frequency sonic blasts. Only heard as a high soft whistle, yet her whole body felt like a million small hammers were pounding it from all directions, and the loose stones around her began to vibrate madly. With her hand tight on the grip and finger loose on the trigger, she grimaced and clenched her teeth to withstand the sonic barrage. At last and almost as a relief, the creature went silent and shot past her cave in a massive mid-air blur, and with a terrible slowness came to the peak of its leap, and began to descend towards her.

It was a moment she would never forget; and even had the time to think that so slow it seemed. The creature was a Shindaen, old, scarred and in its pig-like little pink eyes it was already sucking the marrow from her bones. Only the eyes gave clue to its feral intelligence, the rest was pure brute death from above on four legs. Each well-muscled limb clad in a scaly rough hide sported extended claws like sabres of deadly moonlight. The tree trunk of its barrel chest supported a massive neck that mainly held a gaping maw lined with multiple rows of needle sharp teeth. It stank, a deep stench of death and disease, and she noticed suppurating sores lined the surface of its inner limbs. Mry-An guessed that she was probably the last chance of a meal it had before dying from whatever it was dying from. Too bad.

Timed to the perfect angle and distance of the creature, Mry-An swung the Igutar77 up and fired. The night was wrenched asunder as a sun-bright beam erupted from the shotgun, and one beam coned into a thousand. The Shindaen did not just cease its downward plunge. It was hauled backwards and blown apart. In the time it took for her sight to return Mry-An listened to the pieces of the Shindaen hitting the desert floor below at odd intervals.


It took Dexis some time to really grasp what had just happened to him, and how he came to be hanging upside down about to be eaten by a pair of Shindaen. Looking into their open pulsating mouths he instead wondered how long it would take them to devour him, and for how much of that he would be conscious for.

He knew what they wanted, the people standing by the edge of the pit, if that’s what they could be called. Mutation and foreign species integration seemed to be the norm on the outside of the arcology, as much as purity of human form was on the inside. They wanted the key codes to his internal data storage devices; seems like they were the most valuable thing he had on him more so than his life. But to give those up and share the data, seemed to him like giving up on his life anyway. Giving away pieces of himself that he had painstakingly taken decades to find and collect.

So here he was, being now buffeted by the Shindaen’s soft sonic roars as he was slowly lowered closer. God Chris truth they were ugly brutes he thought, yet still admired the creature’s they were. Built for hunting and devouring no doubt some bad gene experiment back in the early days that had survived despite all. Probably some misguided ecological gene scientist. They stopped lowering him and let him dangle, just above the reach of the highest of the Shindaen’s leaps. So he wondered some more about which precise ecological niche the Shindaen were meant to have filled after the collapse.

Far above Dexis there was much argument going on, for those involved in his possible demise had never encountered so willing a victim. It was plain to see that Dexis cared not he was going to die, nor that it would be in such a gruesome fashion. But it was when he started singing they knew for sure he was like no other. Gradulk, a mean tempered brute of a man whose genetic perchance was for that of a porcupine. So he stood an eight foot giant naked but for the black and white quills that clothed him entirely in differing lengths and when he spoke people tended to listen.

“The guy is or has just become insane, or he is someone worth keeping alive if only to feed the night watch numbers.” Gradulk stated, whistled softly, and shook his great head before he continued, “And that kind of bravery the night watch needs right about now, with Insect Season coming up”.

The others mostly murmured in agreement, and those who didn’t knew better than to say, not right now anyway.

As he sang Puccini’s Nessun Dorma to the Shindaen below him, Dexis was wholly unaware his fate had just been decided, and was somewhat surprised when he saw the now highly frustrated Shindaen dropping away as he was pulled upwards.


Al-Wabe was a safe haven spring paradise that through all the Earth's human troubles had never run dry. Though the spring was small and could only support a few who lived there all year round. So for the most part it served as a brief respite from the long and hazardous journey between the Kinamora and Shefungu city arcologies. By the time Mry-An spotted the surrounding balancing granite boulders standing high above the dunes, she was pushing her bodily limits past recovery.

There had been no sleep last night for her, not while trying to outrun a pack of very hungry Meercadles. Only by dawn’s final grace did they begin to falter and drop away. Their rat and cat like dog sized bodies, pale almost translucent skins did not weather direct sunlight well. Nearly all three of them persisted. Their thin long snouts streaked with blood tinged slaver had come far too close by far, to sneering open and ripping apart her Achilles tendons with their serrated broken-glass sharp teeth. They ran across the dunes together with her wheezing and cursing the limited charge of her Igutar77, and them screaming like human babies at Mry-An’s so close yet so far proximity. Desperation and hunger drove them all onward in frenzy until at last the sun rose true. How she had revelled in its furnace fury as she heard them give one last volley of those bone chilling baby screams. When she looked back they were gone no doubt still burrowing deeper into the dunes just as she still ran onwards.

So as she saw the great balancing boulders of Al-Wabe, her body near its end gave one last surge to break the distance between them. She could not stop, not even when the sun had risen, for to stop then or now without medical assistance was suicide pure and simple. To far had she pushed her limits, but enough to survive the Meercadles and fervently she hoped enough to survive now. The balancing boulders loomed above her. Their cool shadows reached out and enfolded her. She never even felt the ground smacking her face as she collapsed into their embrace.


Mry-An smelt her self into consciousness again from a cloud of fire-grilled steak-smoke that assaulted her nose.

“I know you are awake,” a low rough voice grumbled somewhere to her left.

Mry-An opened her eyes to find herself staring up at a canvas tent top heavily painted with a profusion of alchemical symbols. At the Doc’s then she thought and tried to turn her head but found she could not move a muscle anywhere beyond her eyes.

“You can’t move because you were in total organ failure by the time you arrived, and right about now, you have perhaps a one in five chance at a full recovery… If you remain completely immobile for the next two weeks, that is.”

Two weeks! Mry-An wanted to protest vehemently but could only blink more furiously. Then she remembered how close it had really been. How she had felt her ancestors yearning for her to join them. After that two weeks seemed a small price to pay for the rest of her life...



Copyright Ivor W. Hartmann 2009.
All Rights Reserved.