Alcohol Minnows (p.25)

Also known as “alkie sardines,” these tiny silver fish were seeded throughout the City when the Company arrived—dropping them in a torrent from helicopters via the polluted river. At first, this was seen as a friendly gesture, but in the ensuing decades it has become clear that this was the opening salvo in an effort to keep the population docile. These weird fish have survived and thrived ever since in the sand and dust. Because their fish genes are fused with the genes of succulents, alcohol minnows can burrow into very dry places for many years, living in a kind of suspended animation.

At times of sudden rain, they will appear in more abundance, but their reproductive cycle remains a closely guarded secret. The moisture that mimics liquor is actually a kind of resin or sap that serves the same purpose as blood in human beings. Some claim that the eating of an alcohol minnow changes the experience of shoving a memory beetle in your ear—that the two experiences exist in a symbiotic relationship—but there is no way to prove or disprove this theory. The taste of an alcohol minnow, however, is said to mimic the recipient’s own best memory of having been drunk, and thus is different for every person. (See also Memory Beetle)

Anonymous Meat, Packets Of (p.5)

Due to the Company’s decline, eyewitness reports of “packets of anonymous meat” are all we have to confirm the possible continued production of food items from the seemingly derelict Company building. Most later iterations seem inconsistent at best. One week, for example, people still remember that the “anonymous meat” writhed and bleated within its biodegradable packaging, and at other times the “anonymous meat” was actually tiny organisms made to resemble lions, tigers, bears, and other extinct creatures found in a product called Animal Crackers, which some of the older scavengers remember their parents recalling with nostalgia. Since the civil war with the Magician, the Company has fallen further into disrepair, with sightings of new food packets rare. (See also Autonomous Meat)

Autonomous Meat (p. 59)

Origins unknown, but definitely autonomous, with concern from some quarters that instances of such meat are not lab-grown, yet somehow authentic human and more mobile than one might wish. Nothing is more alarming than a sudden accumulation of autonomous meat, quivering in a semi-circle like a fleshy siege. As a defense mechanism, some autonomous meat will explode under threat. Speculation that it is “slab meat” refers to off-loaded meat from other biotech; in other words, synthetic animals that can grow edibles off of their bodies, but have done so too fast, creating anomalies and sometimes meat that burbles; also termed “sweat meat,” as in “the newness sweated off the meat.” (See also Anonymous Meat, Packets of)

Company Lichen (p.154)

Although described as a “moss,” Company moss is yet another animal-plant hybrid, with protein strands that resemble beef and an infusion of nutrients more commonly found in potatoes and beans. Company moss contains neurons in simple synaptic relationships, which means it can think in a very limited way. Company moss is edible, a dull but constant staple for many in the City. To further indoctrinate the population with the alcohol minnow, Company moss tastes better if you have eaten a minnow first. (See also Company Moss and Lichen, Not the Good Kind)

Company Moss (p.95)

Although described as a “moss,” Company Moss is yet another animalplant hybrid, with protein strands that resemble beef and an infusion of nutrients more commonly found in potatoes and beans. Company Moss contains neurons in simple synaptic relationships, which means it can think in a very limited way. Company Moss is edible, a dull but constant staple for many in the City. To further indoctrinate the population with the Alcohol Minnow, Company Moss tastes better if you have eaten a minnow first. (See also: Company Lichen and Lichen, Not the Good Kind)

Compost Worms

Coyotes

Damselfly

Digging Gap-Jawed Leviathan

Duck With Broken Wing (p. 264)

Often sighted and also often misunderstood, the duck with a broken wing reported as living alone on the approaches to the Company building is in fact not a duck at all. But none who have approached it have ever lived long enough to report as to its true nature. As a result, ducks have flourished as a species in the City due to a general suspicion and caution. (See also Elongated Elastic Creatures)

Earthworms (p. 152)

Good old-fashioned, durable non-biotech echinoderms who have adapted to the City’s sandy soil and arid conditions. The salt of the Earth, but please do not salt their earth. The earthworm’s ability to regenerate tissue and its rudimentary yet three-tiered nervous system make it ideal raw material for biotech, simple enough even for amateurs to adapt. It is said, “Do not trust a bioengineer who cannot tell the difference between an earthworm and a compost worm any more than you would trust a plumber who doesn’t know their ass from a hole in the ground.” (See also Compost Worms)

Eel-like Things (p. 54)

Mysterious and often difficult to catch, the tough and hardy eels that inhabit the river and vestiges of underground reservoirs of the City may remain hidden for months before emerging into view. Unlike eels in the natural world, these “eellike things” are not just elusive but also very clever and go about their business with an intensity that makes it noteworthy when they do pop up. Rumor has it that the biotech signature on these creatures is three initials: “MCD.” Who MCD is or what MCD’s agenda is, not even the most astute scavenger can say. If few have seen the eels, then none have seen MCD or even know if MCD yet lives. Conjecture that MCD is Company-related or among the hidden masters who pull the levers of the world cannot be confirmed, for the obvious reasons. (See also Elongated Elastic Creatures)

Elongated, Elastic Creatures (p. 316)

These being a new thing, and having popped out of the sand near the end of the world’s story, they do not register in the normal way, and are often like shadow or mist to the naked eye, as if even their atoms laugh at the scavengers who hunt them. These elusive creatures like to come out at dawn or dusk, when it is hard to look upon them directly. For they slink and slide past the senses, and are seen or experienced at the corner of vision. “There is no way,” say wise women in the City, “for the past to truly see the future.” (See also Duck with Broken Wing)

Fiddler Crabs (p. 239)

Displaced persons from coasts of continents and from islands lost to rising seas displaced with them fiddler crabs, which they brought along as pets and as reminders of home. Fiddler crabs can live for three years, or longer under protected conditions. At one time, a handful of mud flats along the polluted river in the City became colonized by fiddler crabs released as an intended act of mercy by refugees who had come to the City. The crabs breed rapidly and practice extreme caution in popping back into their holes. However, although used to the brackish water of estuaries, they are not a freshwater species and cannot survive forever in freshwater. Such colonies inevitably failed, and the only fiddler crabs still extant in the City are those that have not been released into the wild. (See also Mudskippers / Mudpuppies)

Fire Slug (p. 215)

The terrestrial version of a sea slug, a repurposed Company invention, one meant to be sold instead of wood for fireplaces. But the fire slug loved fire too intensely and devotedly, and accidents occurred at an untoward rate. What is not understood is how the dance of foxes also seems to be mimicked by the handful of fire slugs that remain in the City—or why. Fire slugs can live to be over a century old, if left to their own devices. Made to flame and flame again by their oppressors, they will instead fade and desiccate within three to four years. But if even just an ember of their life remains within the gray dull remains, a fire slug can rise again in even greater splendor. Other kinds of slug include a fat, luminous variety (p. 244) that serves as a water filter, surgical slugs (p. 32) that cover and heal large wound areas in skin, and azure slugs (p. 19) that rejuvenate the soil through excretion of ground cover.

Fireflies (p. 21)

Any fireflies in the City are artificial, the work of amateur bioengineers. Fashioned from gene splices between fireflies and bees, the City’s fireflies are social creatures that like to congregate together and pull sustenance from dew spots and by eating the lice and mites that accumulate inside City buildings. In this respect, their predatory habits resemble certain types of wolf spiders. When encountered en masse of an evening, firefly swarms turn the dark to gold and in their pointillism rival the greatest of firework displays, suggest that beauty can be inexhaustible. Most people in the City take pride in fireflies, as their particular contribution to the field of “made beasts.” But as important, they love the social aspect of the fireflies, congregations and concentrations more possible than any human community in the dangerous City.

Flounder Creature

Flying Creature, With Many Wings

Fox, Blue

Leviathan (p. 158)

Although some speculate that the leviathan that erupted from the holding ponds to fight Mord could be a version of the “fish project” that the bioengineer Wick would, when drunk, ramble on about to his clients or to some scavenger he hardly even knew . . . it was more likely some relic of the Company defenses. That some who witnessed the appearance of this leviathan reported that it “resembled an iguana more than a fish” would indicate it could not be Wick’s “fish project.” How long the leviathan had hidden in those murky waters and what it had eaten to survive cannot be determined.

Nor should we take the word of the old woman who lately likes to throw rocks at passersby outside the Balcony Cliffs, when she told one of her victims, “The leviathan was my brother! He was my brother from another mother and he cooked himself and tore off his own limbs to feed us and I miss him because that leviathan was not Company-made but had always lived there as I lived there until I assumed human form. Here, have a rock. And another.” (See also Flounder Creature and Mudskippers / Mudpuppies)

Lichen, Not The Good Kind (p. 59)

A catchall term for vaguely hostile lichens that cannot be categorized as either Company lichen or Company moss yet are hard to tell apart due to similar patterns or colors (such as green and red). Long-term scavengers in the City use this term for vegetative matter that seems aggressive in either growth or locomotion—i.e., to identify a plant-animal hybrid that may be an unintentional mutation or a targeted enraged vector. The color blind are much more likely to be poisoned by hostile lichens, often serving as dispersal systems during certain disruptive lichen species’ rather proactive breeding season. (See also Company Lichen and Company Moss)

Memory Beetle (p. 6)

One of the Company’s more ingenious creations—both used to placate the local population and sold elsewhere—the memory beetle allows extraction of memory from one host to another or for a host to better access their own memories. This is a tactic used by unhappy residents of the City to forget their problems by existing in the past. Memory beetles have also reportedly been created by rogue bioengineers, although the quality of these beetles may be poor and the memories thus thin or unsatisfying or unexpectedly banal.

Most “hacking” of Company biotech creates a mere echo of the original. But beetles function as excellent delivery systems for many different experiences, as their exoskeletons make them durable, while their soft insides are ideal for housing certain kinds of genetic material. Their ability to fly increases their range, and it is easy to adjust beetle mating cycles to, in some cases, naturally create next-gen biotech. Other variants include the golden beetle (immediate obliteration of senses, good for escaping trauma, p. 12), the spy beetle (surveillance, p. 27), diagnostic beetle (otherwise known as the medic beetle, p. 32), defense beetle (creating mist-screen and vectored noxious spray, p. 179), and the battle beetle (p. 180). This last variety was used by the Company as a solution to the problem of security. It functions as a kind of living bullet, as it tunnels into the flesh, seeking the heart or brain. (See also Alcohol Minnows)

Mice, Solemn (139)

As distinguished from ordinary mice found in the City, a “solemn-looking mouse” is slang in certain neighborhoods for mouse-based diagnostics and medical repair. Some species are small enough to live within the human throat, exuding a liquid through their paw pads that numbs the scratch. Such mice provide triage services. Developed as “in-house” medics for soldiers in foreign wars, a strain of “solemn-looking mouse” clings to a precarious existence in the City. Most scavengers revile these mice, consider them unclean or cursed, and recycle their parts for other biotech projects. A few revere the mice and actively participate in their use and trade these mice amongst their various throats to create the best medical combinations. But because these mice have regressive genetic markers, they often lose out to “real” mice for food and other resources when they fend for themselves sans human cohabitation. Thus, their range is limited to the boundaries of an unpredictable territory: the unnamed countries formed by the bodies of their hosts. (See also Coyotes)

Mudskipper

Predator Cockroach

Red Salamander

Silverfish (p. 205)

An ancient insect that existed on Earth before the dinosaur, the silverfish has thrived in the City, much as it has thrived everywhere for more than four hundred million years. Wingless, the silverfish depends on extreme speed and a nocturnal existence to pursue an advantage. The versions found in the City are much larger than the norm, live for decades, have become adroit at moisture extraction even in the driest conditions—sometimes existing on the bodily fluids found within its prey—and have been observed to be more social than their predecessors.

Silverfish will eat anything and, given the immense inventory of papers and books that housed the City’s history, could be said by their devouring to have absorbed that history and made it their own to the extent that it now belongs to them. Inasmuch as an insect rules the City, it is the silverfish, as silverfish females produce up to one hundred eggs per day. A relative of the silverfish, the firebrat, has not fared as well in the City, for reasons too esoteric to relate here.

Impervious to pollution and poisons, the silverfish also tastes terrible, discouraging scavengers from harvesting it, and has a nasty bite that often becomes infected. Their molted scales, however, resembling the scales of a fish, are much prized by biotechs—or, at least, the properties of those scales when ground into glitter and reapplied to beetle carapaces.

The rantings of the old man named Ted-Ned, who stood outside the City’s ruined observatory in better days, alluded to an empire of silverfish beyond the desert, where they have created their own complex society, with their own customs and their own ways of governance. Their cities are tiny but plentiful, forming sandy towers burrowing into the sky and extending far beneath the surface. Within these citadels, the silverfish have developed their own arts, based on speed and toughness, expressed in signs and symbols cut into the sand floor and flourishes cutting the air that fade as soon as made so that ever some members of the empire must replicate what will always disappear. The silverfish king sits upon a throne made from the cracked exoskeletons of a thousand locusts and holds a staff fashioned from the hardened horns of a dozen lashed-together rhinoceros beetle horns.

If you, a human, approach one of these silverfish cities, the melodious music from within will cease and they will appear ghostly and empty and you will think them merely the whims of some desert children, even as you marvel at the craftsmanship. Soon enough, though, you will not even notice this as you will have fallen into one of the main quicksand traps of the silverfish and you will be served up as a fine meal for two or maybe even three generations of young silverfish, contributing in your way to the culture of the silverfish empire.

The old man is crazy, of course, but there are children daft enough from staring into the flames of the fire slug all night to listen and repeat these things, and thus they perpetuate this nonsense, and thus silverfish have come to be revered in more ways than one. (See also Damselfly and Memory Beetle)

Strange Bird (p. 169)

Almost certainly apocryphal; no evidence of this bird exists in the City. For this reason, many believe the strange bird is a myth of freedom or imprisonment used as propaganda by the Magician. Possibly this bird was unique biotech blown in from the desert by a storm and unable to find its way out, but if so the creature led a short and miserable existence in the City until scavengers tore it apart. Every sort of description has been given for the strange bird and every sort of story has been told about her, and this will continue until there is no City at all to speak of. (See also Flying Creature with Many Wings and Vultures)

Tick, White Engorged (p. 26)

Misunderstood by some as a real creature. In fact, simply a metaphor for the Company.

Unrecognizable Animal (p. 5)

On occasion, scavengers find animals whose skulls seem “burst from internal pressure, eyes bright and bulging.” Are these residual high-altitude experiments by the Company? The paranoid within the City speculate that there is another Company building hovering “above the sky,” from which such things inevitably must fall. At times, this other Company building is conflated with the empire cities of the silverfish, especially among drunk storytellers late at night who should know better. (See also Elongated Elastic Creatures and Silverfish)

Vultures (p. 233)

This kind of bird can be tricky and cunning, for some are actually automated cyborg drones, or “dark wings,” programmed centuries ago to surveil or drop seed loads from now empty cargo bellies. The stomachs of real vultures can be strange enough, containing acids that dissolve anthrax, botulism, and cholera bacteria. They use their own vomit as a defensive mechanism and the wizened boy down by the corner near the courtyard of dead astronauts swears that vultures in the air together are known as a “venue,” while those congregated on the ground are a “kettle.”

Alas, vultures tend to be shooed away and go distinctly undervalued in the City because in eating carcasses they clean up bits of biotech that might be valuable. Some vultures are colonized by the “dead” biotech they eat and thus become the eyes and ears of another organism entirely.

So you never really know what is hovering above you or who it reports to. But ever this was the way in the City and, really, the wider world as well . . . (See also Flying Creature with Many Wings and Strange Bird)

Wayward Crayfish (p. 239)

Although usually considered a nostalgic reference to a bygone time before the destruction of most of the world, the crayfish has adapted to desert conditions, aided by a high resistance to pollution and heavy metals. For this reason, the blotched crayfish, as it is sometimes called, has managed to survive in the City’s harsh conditions. The crayfish can immerse itself even in the polluted river for brief periods of time without harm and retain moisture for up to a week. Adaptations that include pollutant-targeting echolocation and the ability to eat Company moss have helped its chances. This species is called “blotched” due to the unique pattern across its carapace, which helps in camouflage but also functions as a two-fold screening system for certain types of pollutants. When the blotched crayfish was more common, some scavengers would use changes in its coloration as a guide to the level of contaminants in any given part of the city. (See also Fiddler Crabs and Mudskippers / Mudpuppies)