ADVENTURES IN TIME, SPACE AND TRANSDIMENSIONALITY

[Maharg67]

CITY OF CYBORGS

INFILTRATION

 

Water dripped from the ceiling of the tunnel from the latest big rainstorm that had struck the area. Puddles of grimy water with mossy stuff at the edges, dotted the flat floor of the tunnels that curved upwards to the walls at the edges. His boots trod with surprising lightness through some of the puddles but somehow he avoided doing harm to tiny mutated tadpoles that swam in some of them.

 

Graharg he was, child of the Australian Wastelands, as he made his way through the ruined city of Melbourne and knew generally of the area he went through. It was night but the area he moved through was a series of underground utility tunnels designed and built by AusTek, an offshoot of the USA based TekCorporations. Which was ironic for AusTek had been the monster corporation that had created the cyborgs that now controlled much of the city with a brutal oppression and well judged greed.

 

They, the cyborgs, were hunting him. Not just cyborg-humans or cybhumans, but cyborg-dogs being cybdogs and cyborg-machines of various kinds, cybbots. There were also chopshots out there, expendable human and ghoul mercenaries who served the Cyborgia. Chopshots with controlling brain implants, basic body-armour plus longknives and basic guns. Chopshots he tried to avoid harming. Cyborgia cyborgs he had less qualms in killing.

 

Graharg was out scouting a city reeking of death and destruction but also with a strong scent of regrowth, of hope, that Cyborgia stood in the way of. He was seeking resources to aid the weak rebel forces with and to boost their morale with. In light power armour, multiple purpose equipment reclaimed from government storage, he looked as if he belonged in the tunnels below the broken city. The only light came from weak glowing emergency fluroflats fused to the ceiling of the utility tunnel.

 

Radroaches scuttled along the tunnel but avoided him as he avoided doing any harm to them. Despite a bad reputation, mostly radroaches just wanted to survive and preferred avoiding conflict, especially with much more deadly foes like well armed humans.

 

Light grew brighter, warmer but neither too bright or too hot for it was the end of summer and going into spring. The scent of tiger-vines struck him along with those of other mutated plants that engulfed large parts of the city. Skeletal remains of animals and humans lay before him in a gathered heap. On the top of the heap was an empty jar of Vegemite, the famous Australian bread spreadable black stuff that legend said was made from black oil taken deep from the earth. Graharg was not sure that this particular PreDoomsday legend was true thought he had once tasted the stuff and thought there might be some truth to the idea.

 

Then he sensed the threat, went low and moved out of the partly concealed tunnel exit, a small mound of rubble complete with the wreck an atomic motorized sedan car. Such machines had been in Australia but in far fewer numbers, even relatively speaking, than had been in the USA where they were manufactured in Detroit City. He slipped up along the side of the mound of the rubble, concealing himself as much as possible, as three cybdogs moved around in the distance. He hated to kill dogs whose minds had been enslaved since early puppy hood and who had gone through brutal training and painful cyborging processes. Yet he would have course do so to survive and to stop them from harming other rebels or innocents. Or at least people who were more innocent than the Cyborgia.

 

But then the massive cybdogs caught the scent of another, turned and shot away with monstrous speed and power. Cybdogs were bred for the role and were always hulking powerful. From the distance came the muffled sound of gunshots and it was apparent that somebody was fighting the cyborgs.

 

With out thinking too much about it, he did not want to come up with a good reason for not getting involved, Graharg started after the animals. He darted over the wreckage of the clumsy looking car, to his way of thinking, and ran across a fairly open area. The cybdogs were gone and he sensed no immediate danger but he moved with great care anyway. Even as he ran he picked up a piece of something that looked interesting, even useful, and put it into an empty pouch. Survival was not just about fighting.

 

Copyrighted 2011: Cyborgia, cybdogs, cybbot, cybhuman, Graharg, chopshots

If interested in using such terms, please just contact me.

Edited June 20, 2011 by Maharg67

[Maharg67]

CITY OF CYBORGS

SEARCH AND RESCUE

 

Sadness came when every he found the dead skeletal remains of a baby in a pram. High overhead the skydome of the central city glittered just a little, cracks and holes showing in its surface but it still stood strong. He ran smooth across the area whose former purpose was hard to define thanks to all the destruction that had taken place. Graharg leaped over a toppled statue and then darted up the stairs to the great big low hulking Museum of Melbourne, City of the People.

 

He had been there before. He unclipped his 15.5mmCS autocarbine from his back, slightly adjusted its computer settings and dived right through the opening left by one big door and then darted across the big lobby chamber. There were more skeletal remains and a big ring shaped reception counter with a transparent security dome over it. A protectron robot stood to one side, long gone semiactive to preserve energy, next to an overturned flat-couch. More skeletal remains. He shot past a couple of plastic bushes that, apart from a light layer of dust, looked surprisingly real and fresh.

 

Display cabinets were mostly intact except opened for items had been long looted from them. Destroyed cabinets and items had been ignored, of course.

 

From there it was a matter of choosing the right hallway.

 

They came rushing out of a doorway from his right, three cybkeys, nasty dangerous cloned cyborg monkeys. Nothing cute or adorable about them at all. He reacted with amazing speed and agility, diving down and one side to have two cybkeys leap through the air where he had been, blades slashing through the air. His noise suppressed autocarbine fired quietly but one monkey beasty exploded messily as the special caseless slimshot bullets struck into the living weapon.

 

No sense of satisfaction came to Graharg at killing such poor exploited creatures but sadness and anger. It seemed with every such death he became more determined to discover the truth about Cyborgia and to destroy it once and for all. If miracles were allowed, perhaps he could free the enslaved cyborgs into a new and better life.

 

He could more than just fight for himself. Graharg had been forced to undertake a drastic transformation as a prototype super cyborg soldier by an old enemy of his. He of nine candidates in the first bunch but the only one to survive physically and mentally from the SCS process, he had been officially dead five times during the incredibly painful transformation process. The others had been children, something he had never forgiven the monstrous man behind the experiment for.

 

It was good material for horrific nightmares, as Graharg had come to know.

 

He activated his left boot-laser and burned a hole through the brain and brain-comp of a second cybkey. He did this even as he tumbled with purposeful chaos. Then he was blasting away the other cybkey. Normally he would have stopped to loot them of valuable hardware and supplies such as rechargeable batterypacks but he again ran towards where the sound was coming from. The firing and the howling of cyborg dogs. There was again the sound of guns firing and he noted the use of old fashioned kinds of cased cartridges and shotgun shells.

 

Then he was turning to run along a diagonal hallway, pelting past more looted display cases, past a drinking fountain dripping water that overflowed from the bowl down across the floor. First window offered nothing promising. Neither did the second window on the outward side of the hallway. Then the third was lucky. He crouched to peer through a crack and saw the defenders, a group of strangers for sure, who were in a trapped position fighting for their lives. There was a black man in a fancy jacket now stained and dirty, a white woman soldier handling an old fashioned M16A3 assault-rifle with fine expertise, a white fairly plump older man trying to be tough, a white young man inspecting a gadget in his hands, a black woman in what could be a hospital doctor's gear, yet another white man and an oriental woman. They all looked like they had suffered hard times and yet they had a good set of equipment and supplies with them though nothing as advanced as the PreDoomsday technologies of that world.

 

They were being attacked by six cybdogs, five cybkeys and two cybhumans. Graharg was impressed. Cyborgia units were tough to take down and yet one cybhuman lay dead along with four cybkeys and yet one white woman was lightly wounded, having been cut by a cybkey retractable blade.

 

First thing he did was hurl a couple of blinder hand-grenades that exploded foggy gas every where designed to blind Cyborgia in more than one way. Then he was shouting out to the strangers for them to cease fire in a variety of languages. Seemingly they understood one of them at least and ceased shooting. Which was when the real fun began.

Edited June 20, 2011 by Maharg67

[Maharg67]

CITY OF CYBORGS

LEADING THE SLIDERS TO SAFETY

 

After quickly looting what he could from the dead cyborgs he stuffed it all into a fold out duffel bag, a heavily reinforced one, and carried it. The sliders wanted to ask questions but he asked them to be quiet for the moment. Upon learning they were sliders he was quite annoyed. The local situation was bad enough with out sliders showing up to complicate matters, especially sliders with primitive technologies that threatened to cause transdimensional instabilities.

 

The sliders were amazed at the city around them, at the signs of advanced technologies that were there, ruined or just abandoned as they were. They were frightened also, though, but dealt with it in various ways. Maggie the soldier was quite impressive in her survival and combat training, along with being experienced. The others dealt with it at least fairly well because experience had gained them some toughness and versatility.

 

Graharg soon took the group out of the open and through a series of public transit corridors. At one stage some big radroaches scuttled past and he had to stop Maggie from shooting at them because none of these newcomers were used to really big cockroaches. They looked more horrified of the more harmless radroaches than they had been with the more dangerous cyborgs.

 

Once a Skynet SkyHK, or sky hunter-killer, passed high overhead and Graharg glimpsed it briefly through a hole in the city dome. It was of monstrous size but was, in the far distance, little more than a dot. Word had come to Melbourne that Skynet was busy fighting other forces around the world and in space but the information tended to be patchy, scrambled and even contradictory at times. Even Cyborgia seemed to know enough to be frightened of Skynet.

 

He noted a sign left by ghouls, scavengers most likely, staying away from the sunshine and dwelling mostly down underground. It was cleverly disguised as just a mark on the wall but he knew well what to look for. Ghouls were no threat to him, far from it for he got on with most of them quite well and the others were wisely frightened of him.

 

They came down into a subway station and made their way through turnstiles, past autovendors for tickets and past more skeletal remains. Emergency lights were still active as were the soft humming of other machines. A 3Dflat flickered on one wall with the changing loop of a 3Dvideo advertisement for mint flavored chewing gum that supposedly turned the world into minty wonderfulness with every chew.

 

Bullet holes in one wall indicated fighting had taken place there bit it was some time ago as even the casings had been looted for reuse or recycling. Also the holes were closing up as the smart-concrete ‘healed’ itself.

 

The others were amazing by a silver and black metallic worm of a subway train on its monorail that sat in the station. Perhaps they saw it as a wonder; Graharg saw it as a store house of horror. They moved down a slowly moving power-ramp and then along the lower platform past the monotrain. When they heard the muffled pounding on a door, the woman doctor demanded to know why Graharg made no efforts to free the people trapped inside.

 

He turned and frowned at her hard. “Inside that monotrain is something that has been there since Doomsday took place centuries year ago and it hasn’t been ‘people’ since Doomsday. Enough said. Have more respect from now on.”

 

Doctor Diana Davis backed down but she seemed doubtful of what he was saying. Graharg did not care much what she thought. The monotrains were long ago melded closed so that the horrors inside could not escape and that was all that mattered until those horrors could be dealt with. Even Cyborgia did not mess with those things.

Edited June 20, 2011 by Maharg67

[Maharg67]

CITY OF CYBORGS

LEADING THE SLIDERS TO SAFETY

 

They came to rest in an large, largely dark and partly ruined chamber that had served many purposes. A couple of autovendors were still functioning, vending-machines with a special extra ability. He went to one and took from it, using old coinage, bottles of water and a variety of snack-bars to pass around to the others. Flat-couches dotted the floor, bolted to the smart-concrete so that none had moved during Doomsday. Dried wombola, mutated wombat, scat lay on the floor in one corner. Wombola were bigger, tougher than wombats still to be found in the Outback Wastelands, but they were normally only aggressive if cornered or protecting their warrens.

 

As they sat around there, Rembrandt , the black man entertainer, pointed to the autovendors and he spoke with a distinctive North American accent. “Who keeps putting refilling them?”

 

Graharg responded. “The machines themselves are linked directly to a hidden mattercator, a machine that generates goods. Mattercated food and drink is okay to help survival but there is a slight toxic effect that needs flushing out so such can only be part of one’s diet.”

 

The woman doctor did not seem impressed. “Slight toxic effect? What happens if the toxins build up too far?”

 

Graharg shrugged. “In such as myself, not much. In most who have built up resistance, sickness, but in such as yourself, I suspect, great sickness and even possible death. From here we can go to a hidden Resistance outpost but they will not like me bringing strangers there. Another option is Hubtown but one has to keep an open mind, a sharp eye and a sharper mind at Hubtown. Cyborgia has uses for places like Hubtown and not only allows them to operate, but it guards them. Cyborgia does not automatically attack in all parts of the city but this area is a Red Zone, forbidden and the cyborgs are not the only threat here.”

 

The older man, Professor Madman Artu, was frowning. “Then this world suffered from a nuclear war?”

 

“Weapons of mass destruction but Z-bombs mostly with only some H-warheads used in missiles. The Z-bombs came down from low orbit from satellites there, guided glider-bombs coming in fast and in zigzag patterns.” Graharg paused to take another gulp of water. “Skynet turned against the world, against humanity and other intelligent organics. In theory the Z-bombs were supposed to destroy organic matter and keep inorganic matter intact but the results were not so straight forward. Did Skynet operate by itself or was it secretly taken over? I do not know.”

 

The young man, Quin, who had been tinkering with his slider device, looked up at Graharg. “We should be sliding to the next Alternate Earth soon.”

 

But Graharg shook his head. “No, your slide jump sequences have become messy. The primitive slide timer you are using has become very unreliable, perhaps dangerous, to rely on.”

 

Quin looked surprised and then offended. “But you never took a look at the timer?”

 

“I scanned it from a distance.” Graharg changed subjects. “Normally I travel much quicker but you un-altered humans have been slowing me down, no offense meant. I have a mission to carry out that I will not speak of.”

 

It was Wade, the tech tinker of a young woman, who spoke. “There are some interesting machines here in the chamber. The autovendors you used, that one that speaks of ‘Bliss Time’, that one that speaks of ‘super virtual reality’ and that other, the ‘emergency preservation booth’.”

 

Graharg spoke with reluctance. “Stay away from them. In the Golden Age the world gained too many wonder technologies, went through too many changes at once. After Doomsday most of these wonder devices became more tricky to use.”

 

He sighed as he relented a little. “I will show you the technologies behind at least some of these devices if I am given a chance to do so. I have a strong idea that you will be here for a long time to come despite your desire to move on.”

 

His words did not please the sliders but Graharg was just telling the truth as he could see it.

Edited June 20, 2011 by Maharg67

[Maharg67]

CITY OF CYBORGS

TRUE BLUE OCKER MUTANTS

 

They had a surprise meeting in a public transit tunnel designed for small electric govehicles be they gocars, gotrams, gobuses or others. It happened where there was rubble and some overturned gocars that had long been stripped of valuable parts and items like rechargeable batterypacks.

 

They came out of the rubble in fleximetallic body-armour and holding a variety of weapons, being mostly basic, reliable and powerful heavy autorifles and single shot cannon-rifles. All thirteen had big oversized, extra powerful revolver handguns, knives and also broadswords. They were noticeably taller and broader than standard humans that their ancestors had once been before they had been treated to combination mutagenic gel and FEV experiments.

 

They had blue skin and red hair, if they had any hair at all on their heads at all, and they were both men and women but also sexless nhulls being four nhulls, three women of standard rank, three men and one woman leader.

 

As a joke they called themselves TBOMs but they were a deadly joke and a deadly enemy to Cyborgia and many others. Their main populations were hidden elsewhere but they did send mercenaries to work and to gain goods for their services. At times they also freely served certain good causes as they defined them.

 

The True Blue Ocker Mutants trusted Graharg very well for an outsider but the sliders were unknown to them. They came quietly for their size and half surround Graharg and the off-worlders.

 

Graharg spoke in Esperanto, the common language forced upon most of the world’s population during the Golden Age of the 1954 to 2000 when Doomsday had occurred at the stroke of midnight on New Years Eve. It was the most when the insane World President James Patriot Jackson had pressed the big red button that had activated Skynet. Since then many jokes had been made about ‘big red buttons’.

 

“These are sliders I rescued from Cyborgia.”

 

OkSandorth, matriarch commander, spoke in a thick guttural accent. “Trouble makers come to upset an already unstable world. We do not need them. Still, I suppose they did not intend to come here by the look of their technologies. Ten thirteens of us have been hired to protect Hubtown since Cyborgia withdrew all of its protection from that settlement. The Hubtown Council and Guilds paid us what they would be mostly we did this because of our own concerns. We want to know why Cyborgia has done what it has done.”

 

Then thirteens meant, in practical terms, not only the teams but those who commanded and serve-supported them. It was a big commitment for the TBOMs to make or so Graharg supposed for he really did not know much about them. Then again, they did not really know much about him.

 

Graharg nodded. “Decision made then, we go to Hubtown. I was in the area following up clues on the position of a secret Cyborgian instillation, perhaps a breeding-cloning station or a programming-training station or even a research and development station.”

 

OkSandorth arched her eyebrows. “Such a find would be most valuable and its destruction could be a major blow to Cyborgia.” But then she lowered her eyebrows. “But such stations are heavily protected and blowing them up in the past has not seemed to slow down Cyborgia much.”

 

That was too true as Cyborgia had been slowly but steadily expanding its territories in Melbourne, including below in the insane tangle of the Undercity. Whispers had come recently of big fights in the Undercity between Cyborgia and unknown forces. Graharg hoped that the unknown forces might be friendly to the Free Union of People, the FUP, but he feared that this would not be so.

 

The TBOMs decided to escort Graharg and the sliders to Hubtown both because it was part of their contract to do such duties and partly because the platoon was due for a break.

Edited June 20, 2011 by Maharg67

[Maharg67]

BACKGROUND

THE EIGHT SLIDERS

 

FROM THE ORIGINAL ALTERNATE EARTH

 

QUIN MALLORY: Science Student (Scientist) Alt Earth

 

WADE WELLS: Tinkerer and knower of many small facts; avid Girl Scout training

 

PROFESSOR MAXMAN ARTU: Mathematician

 

REMBRANDT ‘CRYING MAN’ BROWN: Musician and former soldier

 

FROM ANOTHER ALTERNATE EARTH

 

CAPTAIN MAGGIE BROWN: Soldier

 

FROM ANOTHER ALTERNATE EARTH

 

COLIN MALLORY: ‘Transdimensional cousin’ to Quin Mallory.

 

DOCTOR DIANA DAVIS: GP with some specialist knowledge and experience

 

WEN: Female Ninja, Kunoichi, Actually came originally from yet another Alternative Earth

Edited June 20, 2011 by Maharg67

[Maharg67]

CITY OF CYBORGS

HUNTED

TROUBLE IN THE ENGLISH UNDERGROUND GARDENS

 

Trouble soon came again as Graharg sensed they were being tracked not just by Cyborgia units in the form of fast moving, small cyborg rats or cybrats, but something else that he could not identify.

 

Known threats in the area were Cyborgia units, loosely organized wandering bandits, tightly organized territorial gangers, ghoulers, zhouls, biovires (living vampires), sometimes trogs of various levels of degeneration, some radcritters, sometimes Warlord Mercenaries, sometimes slavers and a few others.

 

This ‘felt’ like none of these but a new threat, perhaps the one that others had reported Cyborgia units fighting.

 

The ceased to follow the subway tunnels for they were too easy a target for ambushes. Instead they began to thread through the mad labyrinth of robotic constructed secondary way. Utility tunnels, emergency transit tunnels, courier-mail minimonorail tunnels, sewerage tunnels at the upper level and many areas that seemed to have little point to them. In the years following Doomsday, out of control robotic construction teams had continued to construct the Undercity and other areas. Mostly they were fairly drab and standard but at times they could be both amazing and even more amazing because they were out of place.

 

So they came to a great underground Victorian England Garden long turned to mutated semiwilderness as robots and roboremotes bravely kept on serving and supporting it. As long as they kept to the wide flagstone pathways kept clear by the robotica, they were not considered a security risk by the AI-supercomputers.

 

Marble statues and seats were common, though many were at least partly buried in greenery. There were some marble pagodas and even some relatively small areas of lawn. Birds were common but were on the smaller side as were mammals, lizards, insects and other creatures.

 

Above there were great sunlamps and flurotubes that brought sunshine down from the surface but which seemed dimmed, perhaps because the surface part of the system was partly covered.

 

Graharg had heard of this place but had never actually been there before but that was not surprising considering the great size and sheer complexity of the Undercity.

 

Colin got into trouble when he went to pick a big juicy red looking apple, with a grin, only to be warned that these apples were not to be touched. That is not if the group was not to be shot at by roboremote turrets.

 

They heard the sound of pulselaser guns firing and then that of autoguns as roboremote turrets opened up on some threat to the gardens. Then they came into view, soldiers in assault power armour that made them look like hairless metallic gorillas, lighter than battle powered armour but heavier than Graharg’s power armour. They bore the colouration and symbols of GuardTek, the Mercenary TekCorp.

 

GuardTek, even back before Doomsday this military servant of the TekCorps had a bad reputation but it had grown worse. Back then WorldTek had been the mother or ‘grandmother’ corporation for all other TekCorps but after Doomsday there was also talk of a series of heavily fortified TekEnclaves and even at least three big TekRepublics; they were all part of the new TekOrder as ruled by the TekGovernment.

 

TekEnclaves were not to be mistaken for the Enclaves of the twisted Enclaven, the other big survivor of the PreDoomsday World Government and New World Order. Tekkers and Enclavers had long ago become staunch enemies.

 

There were too many smaller but still dangerous other fragment leftovers of the WG and NWO; Graharg was one of them, as were others like him and his secret people.

 

There was no attempt at talk; the GuardTek Troopers attacked at once even as Graharg and the TBOMs crouched and fired back with impressive skill and speed. Luckily a few of the sliders were fast enough to do the same and the others were dragged down to safety.

 

The GuardTek fighters were forced to retreat by the shooting of both Graharg’s group and the defenses of the gardens. One fell and was dragged to safety for the GuardTek soldiers were loyal to their own. Graharg realized that some of the enemy troopers were actually robots melded with assault armour known as Robotroopers. They were slower than human power armour troopers but harder to destroy.

 

It was then that the ‘voices’ in the garden began to speak to Graharg’s mind and to his surprise he found he knew those behind the empathic-telepathic communications.

Edited June 20, 2011 by Maharg67

[Maharg67]

CITY OF CYBORGS

EMPATHIC-TELEPATHY IN THE ENGLISH UNDERGROUND GARDENS

 

The sliders were sleeping peacefully now, spread out in a loose cluster on a lawn area, while the True Blue Ocker Mutants waited patiently. They cleaned weapons, ate rations and did other useful things.

 

Graharg was sitting cross legged on the lawn but away from the others. He spoke quietly but with his mind and into his mind came what seemed like many voices, not all human, mingled almost as one.

 

Graharg: “You hired the TBOMs to bring us here?”

 

UnityMentality: “We created the TBOMs. They serve UnityFree. Yes, we create more of them and other forms of those who serve us. We do what we must as carefully as we can and make no apologies though sometimes we are forced to make amends.”

 

Graharg: “Your playing with words means little to me. Why now do you wish to speak to me after over five hundred years of hostility?”

 

UnityMentality: “We feel that you have paid for your crimes against us and against others. We also admit to needing you and your special nature, your special abilities. We are threatened by multiple forces. Cyborgia, the Tekkers, the Enclavers and others are being drawn to this sector of this poor ruined city and we do not know why. We would like you to investigate.”

 

Graharg: “I am already on a mission.”

 

UnityMentality: “To learn more about Cyborgia? Cyborgia is a distorted offshoot of Earthnet. It came from an experimental network-system that went rogue thanks to the forces unleashed by Doomsday. Cyborgia controls its cyborg units through the ‘carrot and the stick’. Cyborgia seems to care well as it can for its units and when the units are not out in battle, they are given good relaxation and rest resources. We suspect that there is more to Cyborgia than many have been assuming. You have taken a few Cyborgia units. We feared you had been experimenting on them but impressions we gained have strongly hinted otherwise.”

 

Graharg: “They are free and happy. I have no intention of hurting Cyborgia. I suspect that Cyborgia is driven by fear to attack when it does not need to do so. The big question is, fear of what? Actually that is but one of many big questions? There always seems to be big questions to answer. I do not suppose you are going to show yourselves?”

 

UnityMentality: “Not yet! Maybe not ever! You have to earn more of our trust first. We would like to take samples of genetic material from these slider humans. Their genetic inheritance has not been sullied by the FEV or mutagenic experimentation of any sorts or by Doomsday side effects.”

 

Graharg: “That is up to them.”

 

UnityMentality: “Then we will ask them. Have you told them the truth of their real nature?”

 

Graharg: “I have yet to fully work out their true nature but I suspect that they are excellent quality clones, which begs the questions of where the real sliders are and how the clones came to be here or why they were sent here. What have you found in your psychic probing?”

 

UnityMentality: “Only deep buried instructions to observe, to question, to record data and to be open to receiving further instructions in future by means unknown as yet to the clones themselves. We do have one important clue: the very sophisticated cloning process used was one that was perfected by yourself before Doomsday.”

 

Graharg nodded: “Back when I was World President James Patriot Jackson.”

 

UnityMentality: “Yes, back when you were a great fool.”

 

Graharg tried not to be offended and in a real sense, deep down, he knew that the UnityMentality was right. He had been a great brilliant, powerful, wealthy fool.

Edited June 20, 2011 by Maharg67

[Maharg67]

BACKGROUND

FIVE FACTIONS OF MELBOURNE OF ALTERNATE EARTH #0123456789

 

FUP: FREE UNION OF PEOPLES

Relative democratic, large and loose alliance of settlements and groups in the Central Melbourne Zone, including the upper layers of the Undercity there.

 

PUP: PEOPLES UNION OF PEOPLES

Relatively oppressive, small and tight alliance of smaller power factions dominating settlements and areas.

 

GANGS; BASED ON PREDOOMSDAY GANGS; MOST KNOWN

PUNKNIGHTS: savage punk rockers?

SKINRANES: shrewd mixture of traders and robbers?

MELBANORS: large but loose alliance of gangs all with ‘Melbanors’ as part of their name.

 

GHOULBANOR: ghoul alliance of settlements and territories, some more friendly to humans and other non-ghouls than others.

 

UNITYFREE: A hidden network of secret bases, settlements and areas along with secret enclaves in other societies.

TBOMs: The True Blue Ocker Mutants openly exist but are secretly created by and serve UnityFree. Though most peoples know about the TBOM humans of red hair and blue skin, there are secretly other types of TBOMs including standard human types, animals and biomechs.

Edited June 20, 2011 by Maharg67

[Maharg67]

CITY OF CYBORGS

WHAT NOW GRAHARG?

 

The attack by the GuardTek mercenaries indicated grim problems ahead. The TBOMs were in the area in large numbers not only openly as red haired, blue skinned soldiers but disguised in various other shapeforms such as humans, dogs and even large birds. Yet not only the GuardTek managed to attack those gardens, supposedly well hidden and well secured, but it had been a surprise attack.

 

Graharg went through all the mission data that he had, sharing it with the sliders, the TBOMs and with UnityFree. Why? Because the mission data was fairly useless now and sharing it was of no problem and he wanted to see what reaction it might cause with the slider clones? The slider clones went on acting as if they were the real sliders.

 

UnityFree provided Graharg with data that he shared with nobody else. He was surprised to learn that Cyborgia had a secret, loose agreement with UnityFree. Cyborgia units and TBOMs avoided conflict with each other as much as possible and also trespassing onto each others' prime territories.

 

Graharg worked with the TBOM commander and her second in command to work out some better strategies for TBOM patrols and outposts in the area. He rapidly improved what seemed to be an almost flawless set of plans. The TBOMs were amazed but UnityFree was far from so; they knew that Graharg had over five hundred years of military experience at many different levels and in many different ways. Even when much younger, before Doomsday, he had been a brilliant strategist and tactician though not so great at logistics or personal combat.

 

It was a lucky break that helped Graharg to work out how the GuardTek Troopers had managed to do a stealth attack on the gardens. Robotic constructions tended to be large scale in many ways; often, for economic reasons, areas used during construction were simply sealed up. The GuardTek forces had obtained data to areas that UnityFree had somehow failed to learn about. The areas were a series of construction utility chambers, tunnels and more basic spaces that had been sealed away behind internal bulkheads and walls.

 

The sliders decided to stay in the gardens but in truth the decision was made for them thanks to the subtle influence of UnityFree. They would be treated well and carefully studied by a group of fake settlers who would emerge to pretend that they always had secretly controlled and lived in the underground gardens. Word would go out that the garden settlement, known simply as Gardenville, was creating a trading outpost on its edges to buy and sell goods; it would be selling mostly food and other organic resources from its garden and would be buying a wide range of items in exchange.

 

Graharg would go with three True Blue Ocker Mutant scouts, all disguised as typical Melbournites, to seek more data on Cyborgia and what was drawing various powerful, dangerous forces into the Central Melbourne District. In truth he was just seeking to find out what he could of use as quickly and efficiently as he could.

Edited June 20, 2011 by Maharg67