The Last Lions

The Zoo Wars were not the end. Even after the Video Music Awards that year, some animals survived. Some were kept alive in High Density Urban Nature Reserves. These were typically failed high concept eco-condos and high-rises where squatters and anarcho-greens, neo-neo primitivists and other members of the Burning Man diaspora had basically taken over.

Some of these, such as Paradise Now II had been designed by eco-techs and conservationists. Others, like the Towers of Yff, simply resulted from squatters and tenants husbanding animals in common on floors cleared for this purpose. Paradise Now II is the most famous example of late eco-techture. It was designed as a self-sustaining independent post-arcology. In reality, it functioned like a giant glassed in terrarium. Water was supplied from the rooftop and reclaimed through several floors of marshland.

Unfortunately, during the Great Canker outbreak, Paradise Now II became quite isolationist. Their n-generation power plants (induction arbers, or "electric trees") remained uninfected, but the leadership was completely taken over by Neo-Nazi Primitivists, or “Reichstones.” Life inside the “Cave Reich” seemed to be styled after a bizarre fashion magazine spread, with pelted Teutonic cave-warriors in gelled hair posing with m-generation Heckler and Koch rifles, on a grassy plain with gazelles that overlooked a burning city landscape. Swastikas were carved on “ancient dolmen” (in reality looted from the ruins of Crate & Barrel's Japanese Garden Center) to form Speer-esque ruins of Neolithic civilization.

The Federales of the Free American States became alarmed when rumors began to spread that the citizens of Bed-Reich were retasking the bacilli in their bacfacs to make and stockpile more nitrates than necessary for fertilization. This and their already excess hydrogen reserves pointed to a weapons program. Also, it was revealed that the towers had not been paying their Child Pornography Tax.

The retaking of the Paradise Now II towers is remembered as the worst urban jungle combat operation ever recorded. The intense floor to floor biome to biome fighting was extremely costly, in terms of human life and animal species. Though Animal Rescue Commando teams were famously able to escort out bison, meerkats, a bald eagle and several kinds of fish, this episode is remembered as by conservationists as the extinction of the last remaining lions, shot in the head with a luger by Vice Chancellor Bam-Bam.