It's always night in the Lower Warrens, no matter what the
time above the surface.  Almost no sunlight gets in, and what
illumination is there comes from the floodlamps installed on
almost every level.  And sometimes even those don't work that
well.
    Perhaps you've never been to the Lower Warrens.  Let me
describe 'em to you.
    You take a skyscraper--No, scratch that.  Take a parking
garage of mammoth proportions, only make it maybe a mile in
diameter, and perhaps fifty feet from floor to ceiling.  As for
how tall it is--well, the exact number of floors in it is
anyone's guess.  Nobody really knows any more; you get down too
low, you don't come back.  Anyway, you take that and you sink it
into the ground, all the way.  Then you build a city in it.
Houses, apartment 'plexes, stores, even a shopping mall or two
(I'm NOT joking here, okay?).  Put a bunch of people into it,
construction workers.  Then leave 'em there for a few years, take
'em out of it, and let the lower-class, in search of low-cost
housing, move in.  Wait fifty years and let percolate.  Guess
what you got?
    Okay, so let's start with the basic premise.  We've got these
underground levels, a mile in diameter.  Mostly they started out
as suburbs, 'cept for the top four; they were the commercial
center.  There you had your shopping malls, your quick-stop
eateries, your mechie shops, anything you could ever need.  Sort 
of a Complex in minature.  I wonder why they put all that stuff 
down there.  Maybe they didn't want the construction workers out 
wandering around the Surface?  Or maybe there weren't many shops 
above-ground at the time.  The Complex was pretty young back 
then.  Heck, I'll let those guys over at The Village write 
research papers on it; I won't waste any more space with my 
speculation.
    These levels are about a mile in diameter, though the top
four are a little larger, maybe a mile and a half.  The first one
is about fifty feet underground.  'Tween that and the surface is
kind of a half-level, the sewer systems and the like.  Actually,
they aren't supposed to be connected directly to the Warrens, but
the gangs, yeah, they soon fixed that.  There's even some gangs
that live in the sewers--the Tunnel Rats, I think the main one 
is.  They don't show up in the Warrens too much, which is just as 
well.  I mean, I don't think any of those guys has any sense of 
smell left at all.
    Anyway, the sewers.  Yeah, they're okay to go through, they 
lead all over the Complex--like what place doesn't have a toilet, 
right?--and who goes where in 'em is all nice and secret--except 
to the Tunnel Rats, you gotta be careful of them. Though most 
times they won't jump you 'less you look like a chump, there's 
safety in numbers.  And of course, if you want to know what 
someone does up there, you just pay a Tunnel Rat to help you.  
Private eyes and sec guards and the like have this nasty habit of 
disappearing in there, see.
    Okay, let me lay out for you what a level is like.  First,
you got the center shaft, with the main 'vators in it.  They're
actually four big drop shafts, go all the way to the bottom or so
they say...not many people go down that far...down 'bout the
thirtieth level the shaft lights fade out.  Those who go beyond
don't often come back.
     There are other 'vators too, smaller ones scattered out
around, maybe twenty or thirty of 'em.  Some of 'em work, many
don't.  Some of the ones what don't, they have ropes up and down
'em for gangers to climb through.  There are even a few
mechanical maint'vators that some gangers claim as their
property.
    The other way's the ramps.  There are 10 or 20 of 'em on a
level, mostly, and they let you go down or up.  There are utility
crawlspaces and walkways, too, but they aren't well-known and
they only fit people anyway.  For the most part, the ramps are
free, but the territory they lead into may not be.
    There's also the utility shafts, but they really don't
count.  Oh, you insist?  Okay.  They're like manholes, with metal
ladders in them.  They go way down, too, but all the ones on the
lowest level have been capped off and sealed tight.  None of the
lower-dwellers will say why.  They just look all shifty-eyed at
you and don't say nothin'.  It's like they don't think you're
gonna 'cept what they're saying so they won't say it at all.
Just adds to the mystery.
    Oh, and I don't wanna forget the air tubes.  As deep down as
the levels go, there's gotta be some way to keep the air from
getting stale, or that's all she wrote.  So they've got these big
fans at the top that blow air down.  Whoosh.  There's ladders
down the sides of the tubes, as if anyone would wanna climb down
'em.  I think it's the shafts that cause the lower-dwellers the
most worry.  Never know if somethin's gonna come crawlin' out to
get ya, and there's just no way to cap them off 'cept weld stuff
over the air vents.  So far, the steel bar thing's worked.  So
far.
    Anyway, each level is just a bunch of blacktop roads, with
ramps and buildings all around.
     First level's got some sunlight.  It's the one directly
under the ground, so the sunshafts still work.  Food grown there.
     The third level down, yeah, that's the old Mallplex.  Or so
it's called.  Not much of a mall anymore, really.  More of a
meeting place.  Leaders of most gangs come 'round there, talk
'bout things.  It's neutral territory.
    Farther on down, there's no light.  Reason is, originally
there were big cables, that fiber-optic stuff, s'posed to bring
the sunlight down to the lower levels.  But the gangs what moved
in, they found they could use the fiber-optics to make their
bikes and stuff look neat.  So the cables sorta vanished, and the
halogen lighting that was s'posed to be used for nighttime only
started being used the whole day 'round.  In a few years, they'll
prob'ly start going out--some have already.
    Did I mention the power?  We got power for the lights.
Generators on every level, and some feed stolen from up above,
too.  Yeah, we steal power.  Tap the main lines different places.
They find our taps and remove 'em from time to time, but we just
tap 'em other places.  It's no big thing to them or us, really.
    But the lower levels...well, no one knows about then.  They
may have power, they may not.  Thing is, no one's ever been down
there to check.  No one WANTS to.
    But lately, there's been strange things happening.  People
on the bottom been disappearing, not leaving much behind.  And
some of the others--
    Okay, okay, my gangspeak is slipping.  You noticed, guess
you must be smarter than you look.  Reason is, cause I'm one of
the lucky ones.  Got me an education, I did.  No, don't look at
me like that, I'm not kidding.  Got the best education anyone
could hope for, and NOT from those public school or the Village
neither.  Nah, I figure who needs to meet other kids, maybe get
mugged by 'em in a schoolyard where there's nowhere to run?  Do
that all the time, on the streets here.  No, I chipped it.
    Started with Gomez.  Gomez, he was one sub-zero chummer.
Decker, him.  He was like my bro, but really not related.  I
lived with him since I can remember.  He took care of me.  But
then he was iced, big rumble goin' down 'tween the local biker
gang he was attached to and a shaft group.  Woulda got me, if
they'd seen me, but I was watching from a vent shaft lead-in and
got away.
    I was really broken up about it, you know how it is.  But I
couldn't spend the time right then.  It's a rule in the
Warrens...when someone dies, his spot gets taken.  So I had to
get what I could and get gone.  But I'd lived with Gomez long
'nuff to know what was worth jack in his place.  His tools, the
cyberdeck he'd cobbled together, the EPRAM chips with his
programs on 'em, all the stuff like that.  And the old .44
AutoMag that he'd been drillin' me with.  (Not literally,
y'understand, or I wouldn't be here now.  But--oh, nevermind...)
Got out just in time, too.
    So what did I do next?  What could I do?  I had NOTHING back
then, nothing but what I got from Gomez's place.  Now, when you
live on the street, you know you got prerek--prerek--certain
things you gotta do.  And thing #1 was find somewhere outta the
rain.  Not that it really RAINS in the Warrens, but sometimes
they do turn the fire sprinklers (them what WORKS) on to hose the
streets down...
    But I found a place.  If I hadn't had Gomez's tools, I
couldn't've, but I did.  I had to use his screwdriver to remove
the screws over a ventilation grating, then I could just sorta go
on in there, and then put the screws back in from the other side.
Reason no one had found it yet was that no one with tools cared
to go all crawling around in tubes when they could be out racing
'round on their bikes or gravpacks.
    I spent a lot of time exploring those tunnels with the
rechargable flashlight I found in Gomez's tool kit.  Yeah, I
know, it was dangerous, but I had the .44 AutoMag, and a spool of
twine to find my way back.  And I did find something interesting
that made it all worthwhile.
    All right, all right, I'll tell you 'bout it.  What I found
was one o'the main trunk lines.  Fiber-optic, coaxial, and
regular cable carrying power supplies and other stuff like that.
Gomez'd taught me 'bout these cables.  I was able to connect a
fiber-optic tap onto the commline cables.
    Now, even then I wasn't illit--illit--not able to read.
Gomez had taught me some stuff, reading, writing, some math
(deckers need to know math, Gomez had said, so even though
numbers make me dizzy, I learned).  So I could work the commnet.
And hack just a little.  Yeah, I was okay at it even back then,
with just the 'trodes (Gomez didn't think I was old enough to
have jacks yet).  But there wasn't much that I could do.  Hack
into SereNet?  Oh, yeah, right.
    But then my luck changed.  I was on the Surface one day, and
wandering around, when I saw this new bodyshop.  They were havin'
this contest...some sorta thing where if you guessed the lucky
number, you won a prize.  Now, I was no math genius, but I did
know this--they were randomizing the numbers by computer.  Big
mistake.
    So, I sorta stepped up, eyeballed the merchandise, guessed a
few numbers, and then left.  And went 'round back to plug the
deck in and take a crack at the shop's mainframe.  Hey, it was no
big hassle to get in there and change the numbers.
    I was just putting my numbers into the grand prize slot, win
the new grav-car and ten grand creds, when I realized something.
Gomez didn't raise a stupid kid, see.  And I saw for dead-on
certain that if some little street kid's numbers came up in the
top slot, someone would get suspicious.  So I went on down the
list, to one of the lower prizes.  Something that no one would
care 'bout me winning, them bein' too busy gawking at the
winners of the bigger prizes.  And this prize, well, it would
suit me just fine.
    It was two free jack implants, and ten years' free
basic-level SereNet access.  Gomez had once hacked a SereNet
account, let me play around on it.  I liked it, so what the hell?
Next thing I knew, I had a socket in each wrist and a SereNet
account.
    Now, the first week or so, I was full into VR games and all
that stuff.  But I realized something.  I couldn't do very well
at the games, 'cuz I didn't know much stuff.  I mean, it's like
playing that old game, Triangle Pursuit or some such.  You gotta
KNOW things, even to guess.  So I just sorta fizzled.  Wasn't
much fun after a while.
    But then I found another option on SereNet.  The educational
sections.  Yeah, it's like all the best learnchips you can find
all brought together.  Yeah, it cost, but I could just do a
datasteal or two to get me the money, and it was WAY less than
public schools or the Village'll run you.  And you don't have to
worry about the schoolyard gangs beating you up for your lunch
creds--I get enough of that in the Warrens.
    Problem is, as I learned stuff, I started talking better in
spite of myself.  And that is not a good thing down below...you
can't be different there, you can't AFFORD to be different.  At
least, not 'less you've got some heavy protection and/or
firepower at your disposal.  So I've gotta try to disguise my
talk when I'm down there.
    I guess that's about it.  So you want me to be your guide or
don't you?  What?  Oh, I didn't tell you my name?  Sorry,
chummer, guess I forgot.  Jeff Renrick, but call me Keys 'cuz
that's what I do.