September 10, 2001
[Part One]
The piercing howl of steam whistles sounded the
end of one shift and the beginning of another.Although
the jarring alarms ceased in a matter of seconds, the hot vapors emitted
lingered in that damp, sooty underworld as swirls of hot gasses, streaming
across high ceilings and skeletal supports -- the ancient ironworks upon
which the heavenly city of Metropolis had been built.The
foul air was at best arid, resonating the slightest ticking of the infernal
machines.At worst it was a smog
so thick, so brackish that only the strongest could survive -- for long.Often
-- and that ‘day’ was no exception -- the pollutants would form violent
clouds along the vaulted tops of the main chambers and rain dark, rancid
filth of sweat and ash and fungal grime.
Motion.Everything,
everywhere was in motion.Slow or
steady.Even the noxious air was
kept in constant circulation by the fans that cooled the rapid, timeworn
wheels, gears and cogs.The machines
ran nonstop, except for those few days out of the year when their parts
were checked, oiled or replaced.The
workers, too, the throwbacks rejected by the elite of the city above, were
slaves to an eternal flux, as untold thousands labored in ten-hour shifts,
day after day after day.
The imperfect Thunderians toiled to their deaths
in deep, dark shafts that few in Metropolis knew or even dreamed about.And
when they were not wasting away their lives in perpetual, societal bondage,
they would 'relax' up on the surface of Third Earth, a land once covered
by lakes and forests, wide, living rivers and snowcapped mountains, a planet
once beautified by untamed oceans and bright, blue skies but that a never-ending
line of industrial machination had reduced to a wasteland replete with
foundations of bulk steel and titanium frames, jetting pipes, turning blades,
teeming cesspools andgapping holes
dug straight through the core.And
darkness, perpetual darkness but for those few spots here and there where
the city had yet to reach.
That abhorrent hell of moonless, starless night
teemed with the humming of machines vibrating.Power
generators, steam turbines and pistons -- it was an awesome feat of engineering,
a spinning, whirling fervor that went no where.Progress
had transformed the planet into an artificial entity and all the processes
that nature had once taken care of now had to be synthesized.Machines
that cleaned air, machines that purified water, machines that decomposed
wastes into more useful compounds.All
of that and more required unyielding attention.No,
the metallic heart of the city could not be allowed to stop, not for a
moment.
Up from the hives of the bowels of the earth came
the leery workers of the past shift.Time
had long ago drained their emotions and so without expression they gathered
onto the rolling sidewalks from all directions in absolute chaos.From
lions to cheetahs, saber-tooths or not, the masses came together in a mindless
unity borne of necessity.Their
uniforms, like their exposed fur, were dirtied black with soot and clung
onto their bodies like a permanent, second skin.Their
masters issued them only one pair of garments their whole adult lives and
if or when those linens disintegrated, outside of the charity of others,
they were gone forever -- many of the men were naked but because of the
darkness and the filth few ever, really noticed or cared.
Inch by inch the walkways merged and the lowly cats
were brought into freight elevators that lifted them up to the surface
levels while others were dropped down to replenish the hives with refreshed
blood.Up and down, down and up,
the air echoed the trampling of heavy feet that evolved in step to an eerie
and silent funeral march.
In the ‘upper’ levels, foremen herded their sluggish,
weakened counterparts into cubicles, hardly ever the same one twice.Within
the males bred with the resident females.The
interactions were timed and monitored to make sure that the act was done
quickly, that there was no frivolity, no stalling -- not even for what
could pass for polite conversation.
Afterwards the adults were grouped with boys to
instruct them on the working and maintaining of the machines that they
would one day soon service for the rest of their lives.Girls,
at an even earlier age, were put aside into nurseries then placed into
cubicles where they were to bide their time in sporadic isolation, conceiving
or birthing young in an endless chain that stretched unto their own gruesome,
putrid ends.
What little free time the men had was spent loitering
in immense, gothic-like rooms.There
they fraternized in pools, ate, drank or slunked into stacked, horizontal
shelves one, two or three at a time for a different sort of relaxation.Yet,
even there, they were kept in motion, never allowed to stay in the same
spot for longer than an hour.
Such was the world that the Thundercats had created, but how could it be that the descendants of Liono and his allies, the Warrior humans, would find themselves in such a precarious situation, such an uneasy balance?After one million years of bliss few knew, less cared and for the most part the people were content.Little had changed and so it seemed, after ages of complacency, that little needed changing.The first, few steps into that brave, new world were tiny, unnoticeable.Many of the ideas were already there, so artfully, cleverly disguised.The snobbery of the Thunderian nobles, the prejudices of the humans, only the slightest push was required for those ancient, ignorant tendencies to spiral out of control.It was, in brief, only a matter of time.
Continued...
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