Mutant City by Steve Feasey

spotted the stark white animal bones scattered around the stony shoreline: bones of the same animals that had made the tracks in the passageway. Bones of the last creatures to visit that place.

Zander
    Zander Melk stood looking down on to the world below from his top-floor office at the ridiculously high Bio-Gen Tower complex his father had had built. The place was a symbol of power and wealth, and loomed over the buildings around it. ‘Look at me,’ it said. ‘I can do anything.’ Zander reflected that it was precisely this attitude his father had adopted throughout his life. As CEO of the biggest and most powerful genetic-modification and robotic-enhancement corporation in City Four, his father had achieved an almost god-like status among the city dwellers whom he helped achieve ‘perfection’, and the man had delighted in the adoration and adulation. But the old man’s time had come to an end. It was Zander’s turn now, and he was determined to do things differently; his father’s harsh policies regarding the Mutes were no longer what the Citizens needed. Zander could sense the winds of change, and he should have been the man to funnel them in the right direction. Now that was at risk.
    The younger Melk’s elevation to president should have been a shoo-in. His father’s power and influence should have meant there was little standing between Zander and power. Each city elected ten principals to represent them, and these in turn elected one of their number to head the Principia, the body governing the Six Cities, as its president. There was only one man in the election against him, and the maverick media tycoon Towsin Cowper was hardly the most popular member of the assembly. If his father considered Zander to be liberal, he saw Cowper as someone who wanted to open the doors to each of the Six Cities and invite the freak hordes to come in and make themselves at home. But his father’s revelations had thrown an enormous spanner into the works, threatening to destroy Zander’s political aspir­ations for good. What had the old fool been thinking? There were strict rules governing the interaction of Pures and Mutes. Anyone wishing to visit the mutant slums outside the Six Cities’ walls had to apply for a day pass, and no mutant could set foot within any of the cities. And yet his father had deliberately created a number of . . . he struggled to find a suitable word . . . hybrids! If news of his father’s deeds escaped, the consequences didn’t bear thinking about.
    Now it was left to Zander to clean up the mess. Just as it was up to him to try to find a new way to deal with the ‘mutant problem’.
    The tower that these offices topped was one of only a handful of buildings tall enough to give a view over the city wall at the sprawling squalor beyond them. Even though the ghetto slums where the freaks lived were on the other side of immense steel bulwarks, the mere thought of the teeming masses out there was enough to make Zander’s skin crawl.
    The Principia, under the control of his father, had secretly hoped that deprivation and disease would be enough to see an end to their irksome neighbours. They should have known better. The Mutes had survived the apocalypse, and survived it ‘topside’. They were resilient; he had to give them that. And they bred, oh boy, did they breed! He grimaced at this last thought, unable to imagine a city dweller’s child being produced in that manner. Extracorporeal pregnancy had been the norm for many years now – children were grown in the laboratories of facilities such as Bio-Gen, in synthetic wombs to ensure they were exactly what their parents wanted, with no defects of any kind. Defects and deformities had no place inside the cities’ walls. Outside, it seemed that little but abnormality prevailed.
    They bred like rats, and their numbers grew and grew, and as this accretion went on unchecked, so the sizes of the slums expanded, creeping ever nearer to the cities