Atul N. Rao

In the 27th Century the Earth is dominated by the global city known as the “Urbosphere”, where the only livable environments are artificially created indoors. The ruling force is an artificially intelligent entity known as Corgo. The entity is slowly being taken over by an influencer (Kozlow), merging with the machine.

Young Dray Bartos (12) life would never be the same again after he witnesses an official from Corgo murder his parents. Just before his mother dies she tells him to join the resistance in the jungle - a mutant eco-system in a state of unstable hyper-evolution, quarantined by a bio-barrier force-field. For the rest of his childhood, Dray is raised by robotic versions of his parents, forced to grow up pretending everything is just fine, while trying to discover a way to the jungle – always unsuccessful. Years later, endowed with nano-technology, Dray Bartos (age 28) becomes a “Shadow Guardsman”, with a particularly vicious edge.

In his attempt to cross the barrier into the jungle, Dray is branded a traitor and banished to the Alleyways – a chaotic world of violence, cannibalism and treachery. Recovering from near-death, Dray successfully escapes to the vast jungle above the Urbosphere. Dray discovers a primitive tribe – the descendants of the resistance who know nothing about the world below. Dray falls in love with the Priestess, Neuma, only to discover that she's married to a powerful, self-proclaimed “god”. It turns out that the “god” (Prak) was once a Corgo bio-weapon scientist. Thought to be dead, he now lives as a grotesque torso with unlimited powers through telekinetic command of microbes and bacteria. The tribe worships him as their protector.

Despite their differences, the three of them team up to stop a corrupted Corgo, prevent a genocide, fight cyborg armies, alleyway terrorists, flesh-eating bacteria, nano-weapons and ultimately each other.