The planet is a wasteland.  What remains of the once prosperous human
culture is now limited to small nomadic tribes and the fortunate few
stationary villages.  Oh, and NeoMetropolis.

	On the edge of the new Eastern Asian coastline lies a rather large and
civilized city of approximately one million citizens, give or take a few
thousand since no one has taken a census since the shield went up over
twenty years ago.  It was created by the multibillionaire industrialist
named Lex Luthor a few years before the space borne asteroid named
'Ragnarok' fell to the earth, devastating the surface.  Although once in
his life he was considered ruthless and inhumane, he stove to protect the
people of his city up until his death, twenty years after the fall of
Ragnarok, due to sheer system burnout.

	Now, under the Unified Corporate Government headed by Mizuno Ami,
NeoMetropolis survives as the last remaining city on the planet Earth,
striving to last until the Great Ice breaks and the world outside the
gleaming energy shield that protects the city, is once again livable.

	But even with humanity on the brink of extinction, they have enemies...

***

	"NeoMetropolis base, this is Stingray unit seven requesting departure."

	"This is NeoMetro base," Nene's voice came through Sylia's small ear
piece.  "You're clear to go Sylia, you'll be exiting through hatchway two. 
Good luck!"

	Sylia nodded absentmindedly and placed the hand-held receiver on top of
one of the crates stacked up beside her causing them to rock slightly.  The
large containers were actually empty, stacked up seven tall in the back of
the ATV Sylia was taking outside of the city.  She hoped to be able to fill
the crates with the sixteen information backups in the lower memory bay of
her once advanced facility now buried beneath snow and rubble after the
unexplained attack a few months ago.  She'd left the facility that previous
morning hoping to retrieve her missing officers from beneath the massive
tunnel complex under the Russian glacier, not knowing that she would never
get to see the place the same way again.  The strange spider-like droids
attacked the facility a mere day after she left, and would have moved onto
NeoMetropolis if it hadn't been for HARDAC, the artificially intelligent
computer that sacrificed itself to destroy the incoming fleet.

	Strangely, however, no sign of the droids or their owners ever appeared
again.  With no explanation as to why they attacked or where they came
from, Sylia decided to be prepared in case they appeared again which is why
she was going armed, and why she wasn't going alone.

	The door to the cockpit of Sylia's modified ATV slid open and Rei Hino,
Sylia's mystic friend who turned out to be a Sailor Senshi and one of her
father's trusted companions, stuck her head in.  "Ready to go?" she asked.

	"Just about," replied the young Stingray, opening one of the larger crates
in the hold revealing her newly upgraded and stylized hardsuit.  While the
rest of the survivors from her facility were getting accustomed to life in
NeoMetropolis, Sylia was busy adapting her surviving technology to what was
available in the city.  In the twenty years since the start of the Great
Ice, the available technology hadn't changed too much, so most of the work
Sylia did on her vastly advanced hardsuit, at least compared to
NeoMetropolis standards, she had to do a custom job by hand.  It was
tedious work but at least the storage bunkers beneath the LexCorp building
were full to the brim with raw materials, unlike at her facility where she
was always scrounging for spare parts.

	"You aren't going to wear that the whole way, are you?" asked Rei.

	"No," replied Sylia. "I was just making sure that I had it, I don't feel
safe with those spiders out there."  She closed the crate and swiped up her
receiver from the crate next to it.  "Are you sure you don't want a sabre
of your own?"

	"Nah," Rei shook her head.  "I can defend myself, that'll just slow me
down."

	"If you say so," Sylia said and moved into the cockpit taking her seat as
driver.  Flipping a few switches, the tank-like ATV came to life and
generated a low humming noise.  Before the treads were two yellow lit lines
directing the vehicle towards the second hatchway which would let out just
beyond the western side of energy field that surrounded the city.  Easing
the craft forward, the autopilot took over and towed them along the yellow
lines.

	"You don't think we'll really encounter anything, do you?" Rei asked a bit
hesitantly.

	"I hope not," Sylia replied as the second hatchway opened momentarily
blinding her from the bright light that came from the surface.


--------------------------

A World Without A Future:

Scavenger Hunt

By Adam Christopher Leigh

Incorporating characters and themes created
by Naoko Takeuchi and Suzuki Toshimichi.

--------------------------

	In the four months that had passed since the last human to leave the
Stingray facility, the entire surface structure had been covered in a
delicate coat of virgin snow.  Sylia could only sigh as she padded through
the knee deep snow searching for the emergency entrance hatch to the
turbolift tubes.  The short range scanners on her hardsuit weren't picking
up the usual low bandwidth signal that emanated from the doorway which
ether meant it was buried too deep or the auxiliary battery that powered
the signal died.  Either way, it meant a lot of meaningless searching in
the cold.

	"Anything yet?" Rei called out to Sylia on the radio inside the ATV. 
"You've been walking around out there for an hour now, you should come in
before you freeze."

	Sylia looked back to the ATV as she replied thanking that the horrendous
storm that had covered the area had passed and full visibility had
returned.  "The thermal regulators in the joint complexes shouldn't freeze,
they've been tested at much lower temperatures, as for myself, internal
temperature regulation is at one hundred percent efficiency."

	"What you're saying then, is that you can't freeze."

	"Exactly."

	"Oh," Rei mused.  "Do you need any help out there?" she offered.

	"I didn't bring an extra suit," Sylia said returning to walking around in
circles in the snow.  "I did offer you one before we left, but you said you
didn't need it."

	"I don't need it," Rei replied. "I have my own means of keeping warm."

	"That may be, but you don't have the appropriate sensor pack to pick up
the signal.  Not unless you've gotten an 'upgrade' since we've been in
NeoMetropolis."

	"I like my own organs thank you very much.  Anyway, I was thinking of
clearing the snow for you to make the search easier."

	"How?" Sylia asked, perplexed.  Rei didn't respond.  "Hey, Rei, how do you
intend on clearing the snow?"  Again, silence from the radio unit, however
her suit picked up an auditory change and she turned back to the ATV in
time to see Rei jump out of the vehicle dressed in some short skirt and a
white top with a red bow in the front.  As she landed in the snow, it
seemed to melt just a tiny bit around her legs.

	"Aren't you ... cold?" asked Sylia, her voice sounding slightly metallic
through her helmet's vocal amplifier.

	"Not really," Mars admitted with a shrug.  "As Sailor Mars I really can't
get cold, at least not by natural means."  She shivered once.  "Well, at
least not immediately.  Now, which way do you think the installation is?"

	Sylia thought for a second about the information she'd just been handed
then shook it off, storing it away for later pondering.  "Judging by the
metallic content of the earth, I say somewhere..." she pointed towards one
of the large hills of snow. "That way."

	Rei nodded and turned toward the hill.  Closing her eyes she began
chanting some mantra as Sylia's sensors picked up a major increase in the
temperature of the air around her.  Finishing her chant, she opened her
eyes, that almost seemed to glow a fiery red, and slammed her fist into the
snow.

	For a moment nothing happened, and Sylia began to think her companion
slightly crazy, then suddenly, the snow before Rei's fist in a conic shape
began to glow a light red.  The snow sizzled for a second before
instantaneously turning into water that exploded outward and rained around
them.

	As the last drops fell, Rei straightened and stood beside Sylia who was
staring at the exposed chunk of the surface hangar that was now exposed by
Rei's fiery attack.  As Sylia regained her composure, her computer scanned
the facility and located a possible point of entrance, coincidentally
marking it red on her display.

	"Neat trick, huh?" Rei said.

	"Uh-huh," Sylia murmured pointing where her display was red.  "We should
be able to get in through there."

***

	The hangar computer was heavily damaged and had actually been severed from
the main core, so Sylia was unable to activate what remaining, if any,
auxiliary power remained.  Ripping open the crumpled turbolift doors, she
and Rei descended into the underground tunnels where the bulk of the
facility was located.

	As they were lowering themselves down the tubes, Sylia hoped that the
hangar wasn't an indication of the rest of the labs and corridors
underground, that the thin turbolift tubes were too small for the spiders
or the more deeper areas took far to explore.  When the first door opened,
Sylia knew that she wouldn't be so fortunate.  The entire corridor had
collapsed and filled in with snow and rock creating a tightly packed wall
with the impression of the turbolift doors on it.  Rei had offered to try
to burn through, but Sylia figured that if the snow were removed, more
would simply fall from above and take it's place, besides it was too
dangerous to move through it with the risk of a cave-in.

	They moved to lower areas of the facility, where things looked a little
better.  Eventually, as they neared the lowered floors, they came to
virtually untouched areas of the installation and faced the next problem of
their trek: those who didn't make it to the escape pods.

	Bodies were lying everywhere, showing the various stages of asphyxiation
as the life support in the area slowly failed, the sealed doors which were
to protect them from cave ins protecting them from the precious air they
needed to survive.  It was a terrible sight, but Rei had seen it before in
the days after the Ragnarok strike, and Sylia had been hardened to death a
long time ago.  They pressed on.

	Eventually Sylia came across one of the backup rooms where the computer
core hourly dumped its information.  A few of the backups had been damaged,
probably by power surges as the core was shutting down after the
evacuation, but at least ten of them were salvageable.  Marking the area in
her automap, Sylia began removing the modular backups for transport as Rei
wandered off to other areas of the installation.

***

	"Rei," Sylia said over the radio in the ATV, her helmet lying on the seat
next to her.  "Rei, come in."

	"Yes, what is it Sylia?" Rei's voice finally responded.

	"I'm just about finished loading all the memory backups here, we should be
leaving soon to get back to NeoMetropolis by tonight."  Sylia checked her
watch, if they left now it would be cutting it close but they should make
it before it gets too dark and the cold begins interfering with the ATV's
treads.  "Finish up whatever you're doing, we can always come back."

	"I've gotten everything I need, but I think you should come down here and
look at this."

	"Look at what?" said Sylia, brushing some of her damp hair out of her
face.

	"Well, I found a room down here that apparently was ruptured open during
the attack.  I don't recall it ever being open because I think your father
sealed it up just after you were born."

	<A secret room,> Sylia thought.  <Sealed by my father?>  "What did you
find inside?"

	"It looks like there's an awful lot of hard records down here and a bunch
of stuff with GENOM's stamp on it."

	"GENOM?" Sylia said while reaching for her helmet.  "Stay there, Rei, I'll
be down shortly."  She affixed the helmet to the rest of her suit and
stepped back out into the cold.  She quickly moved back into the facility
and down to the bottom level where the locator in Rei's communicator was
indicating she was.  When she met up with Mars, she was standing beside a
large, fallen section of the wall that was at least a foot thick, leading
into a darkened room.

	Rei stood outside as Sylia stepped into the room, shining her wrist light
onto all the walls.  The room was not very large, probably eight by ten
feet, but it had full wall shelves on three of the walls filled with books,
papers, and cardboard crates with large 'GENOM' markings on them full with
numbered records.  She moved over to one of the shelves and pulled down a
large manila folder, briefly leafing through it with her clumsy mechanized
hands.

	"Memos," Sylia mused.  "Interoffice memos.  Some between my father and a
man named Mason, some with a man named Masada, and a few between Mason and
Masada."

	"What do they say?" Rei asked.

	Sylia paged through a few more memos, picking up speed as she moved,
eventually grabbing a large group and checking the final page.  "I don't
know," she said rather flustered.  "The body of all the memos have been
encrypted somehow, I can't read it."

	"Encrypted memos?" said Rei.  "Sounds rather paranoid."

	Sylia replaced the folder and pulled down a handwritten book that seemed
hastily bound and scanned through it.  "This too, it's all in some sort of
code."

	"Think you can decode it?"

	"I'm not sure, it looks rather complex," Sylia said.  "I certainly can't
do it now."  She closed the book as a tinny alarm rung in her ear.  A clock
enlarged itself over the display in her helmet, reminding her of the time. 
She'd set the alarm to tell her when she would have to leave or risk being
stuck out in the cold.  "Well, we've run out of time.  Grab what you can
and lets get out of here, we can always come back."  She stuffed the book
into a thin chamber on the side of her hardsuit and reached up to grab the
box marked with the GENOM name.

***

	The personal door chime rung in Sylia's room on the eighteenth floor of
the LexCorp building.

	After her help in the retrieval of the Infinite Drive Matrix and the
attack of her own facility, the UCG graciously relocated Sylia and the
survivors from the Stingray facility to prime housing inside the LexCorp
building and offered the wayward group positions in the new government. 
With no where else to go, Sylia, on behalf of all the survivors, accepted
the proposition.

	It wasn't bad, actually it was quite advantageous for the scientists who
now had access to much better surplus than before.  So what if they had to
recreate all their equipment from scratch, at least they were alive to do
so.  NeoMetropolis seemed a much stable environment despite the somewhat
decaying city below, with a much more powerful defensive system.  The
shield generated by the IDM was off the scale in terms of power and seemed
ready to protect the city from nearly anything.  Feeling safe and eager to
return to their work, the scientists eagerly returned to their daily
routines.

	Well at least they tried to, Sylia certainly found it difficult being on
call all the time to discuss hardsuit design.

	Looking up from the hand written book she'd retrieved from the secret room
at the facility, Sylia closed the encrypted tome and moved to the door. 
Sliding open the door, she expected to see one of the technicians that
worked in R&D or maybe Linna with some update about the armed forces she
was in charge of creating, instead she saw Mizuno.

	"Good evening, Sylia," Ami said with a smile.  She was dressed in a long
gown of a silvery-bluish color that seemed to shimmer as she moved.

	"Ami," Sylia said rather startled.  "Come in."  She motioned inside and
Ami flowed into the room taking a seat by the large window that looked over
city lit by the light of thousands of windows.  "You look nice," Sylia
said, turning the chair at her desk around to face Ami.

	"Thank you," Ami said.  "I was just at a dinner conference with the rest
of the UCG consul.  The 'Spideroids', as those spider-like creatures that
attacked your facility are now officially called, came up again in
discussion.  More work is being put into trying to find out where they came
from.  It's the same topics every time we meet."  She sighed.  "But, I
didn't come here to talk about that."

	"Oh?" Sylia said.  "What you want to talk about."

	Ami raised her hand revealing the large object she'd been inconspicuously
holding.  It was a rather large datatape with the number 01 imprinted on
the top.

	"Oh," muses Sylia.

	"I've done all I can," Ami said, getting up and placing the datatape on 
Sylia's desk, next to the small book.  "But I haven't found out much.  The
tape gets as far as single text message before shutting down.  Nothing has
been found that can run it beyond that point, however, I don't think it's
the player that's the problem, considering the message."

	"What's that?"

	"'For Sylia's Eyes Only.'"

	"So you think that I'm the only one who will be able to view it?" Sylia
hesitantly said.

	"Somehow, someway, your father has insured that you're the only one."

	Sylia frowned and looked at the datatape, then at the novel beside it. 
Two pieces of information left by her father, both unable to be normally
viewed.  "Thank you for looking into this for me Ami," she said after a few
seconds.

	"No problem, these managerial businesses get boring after a while, I'm
just sorry I couldn't be any more help."

	"I guess if I want to know, I'll have to take the risk of learning.  It's
just that Rei seems to think it isn't worth it for me to activate it."

	"Rei can be overprotective at times," Ami said, nodding.  "But she means
well.  Maybe she's right, there maybe things you simply don't want to know
about your father.  Sometimes the truth can hurt a lot more than any
physical pain."  She looked down into her hands for a moment. "I've had a
little experience with that."

	"There just so much I don't know about him, he died when I was so young." 
Sylia lowered her head. "I did my best to carry on in his footsteps,
operating the facility as he would have wanted, it made he feel close to
him even though he was gone.  But now that the facility's destroyed, I feel
as though he's grown distant again."  She looked back up at Ami.  "I want
to know what he had to say to me."

	"You're going to do it?" Ami asked.

	"Yes," Sylia said softly.  "The more I think about it, the more I have to
know."

	"Do you want anyone to be around?"

	"No, I'd rather do it alone, he did say it was for my eyes only."

	"All right," Ami said with a nod and moved towards the door.  "Be sure to
tell me," she said just before opening the door, "all about it when it's
over."

	Sylia smiled. "I will."

	Ami slid open the door and stepped into the hall, closing it behind her
leaving Sylia alone with the datatape.

***

	When it was all over, Sylia looked up at the monitor, sweat beading on her
forehead and dropping to soak her blouse.  In white letters, it said, as if
to push the point home:

		[ R E V E N G E ]

	Sylia couldn't agree more.

***

	Somewhere else in NeoMetropolis, Rei Hino shivered.


= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
A World Without A Future was created by Adam Christopher Leigh
and is distributed through Tempest Creations.  The series'
involved are used without permission and are held under copy-
right.  This work is not to be sold or traded for any value.
Visit the web page at: http://dogbert.simplenet.com/awwaf