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Gene Gardens

Published by King Tractor Press
 

Art by Jorge Mongiovi

Gene Gardens is created & written by Shawn Granger.
 

Gene Gardens is a future ruined earth story which isn't afraid to bleed.  Time has almost run out on the small blue planet, and the humans that live there still.  It’s a mixture of global warming, pollution, and over-population.  The polar ice caps have melted and reformed over a much larger land mass, leaving only a strip of inhabitable land around the equator. 

Nations regrouped and reformed, the United Americas and Asia Proper being two of the emerging super powers.  The merging of nations and cultures caused many inner conflicts to grow, races forced to mix in terribly overcrowded cities.  It took hundreds of years to rebuild the infrastructure to be able to accommodate the increased number of people.  A side benefit from all the infighting is that there was a period of about 500 years of no wars between nations.

These changes to the human body have also left people unable to procreate.  Scientists scrambled to find a way to cure the rapid cases of infertility that spread to all parts of the globe.  But they were too late.  And before long, not a single child was born.  Luckily, the process of cloning had been developed to the point where it became feasible to use clones to repopulate the planet.  Clones became a commodity, some countries – like the United Americas treat the clones much like cattle, locked in camps.  In Asia clones are distributed throughout the population to be raised like children, very pampered.  In fact, the clones seem to be able to do no wrong.  But they were not called clones, but Elders.

This spoiling seemed to cause the elders to get bored.  Crime rates, which had be 0, started to rise.  Elders started taking advantage, or so history tells us.  The mutants created a military force and cracked down.  Still not all crime was wiped out, many elder gangs exist.  Especially bold are the traceur gangs, organized after some youth elders found old films on the free runners from the 21^st Century.  Two in particular are big in the capital Alliance, the Le Parkours and Yamakasi.  Le Parkours believe in a rawer, physical free running.  The Yamakasi focus on the dance quality of free running, going so far as to get tattoos, body modifications, and wear flashy clothes.

Asia Proper is what is left of Asia and Russia.  The capital is a beautiful domed city, called Takashi City.  It is dominated, or ruled, by the Asian Alliance government.  Citizens no longer spend too much time electing all the various positions, now they elect the dictator rules the Alliance for four years, and deals with all those nasty details that they don’t have time for.  The dictator’s reign is for only four years, and then a new one is elected.  But during those four years the dictator’s word is law.

The Asian Alliance has a limit to its tolerance for the outlaw elders.  Many citizen elders who disrupt the Alliance’s harmony are sent to relocation camps around the world. At the camps unproductive people are supposed to get new jobs, and new lives.  This gives the homeless, unemployed, and unwanted a new chance at life.  The rich and haves absolutely love this system of moving the have-nots out of their cities.  This gives the homeless, unemployed, and unwanted a new chance at life.  This punishment does not apply to mutants as they are incarcerated or “treated” at local hospitals, only elders are sent to the camps.  The gangs avoid being captured as best they can, but still many are sent to the camps never to be heard from again.  There are plenty of new recruits happy to take their place.

Gene Gardens is a story about people surviving any way they can in a ruined world they didn’t create.  It’s the human experience, cloned.