Elysian Fields

Elysian Fields Prelude

Elysian Fields Prelude

Elysian Fields deserved its name. It was an island of beauty, at least for the dominant Elite class; a place considered a blessing from God because it kept them alive, even after the great cataclysm of half a century ago. The city was built after the Great Quakes on the western outskirts of a once great city, bordered by a lake at the east, its skyscrapers still visible. It rested behind a tall forest they had planted using accelerated growth hormones, eager to be rid of the ugliness of the ruined buildings.

The one hundred and twenty thousand Elysians, though a mere fraction of the former inhabitants, would have expanded the city further, but they were blocked by the fog. The entire city was surrounded by it. The forest obscured the heavy mist, but it was there, a mile or so into the lake, and it looked like a large, milky wall reaching up to the sky around both the old and the new city. Impenetrable and always present, it had terrified them. Venturing too far into the fog resulted in psychological panic and thus all who tried were forced to return. After decades, they got used to it and their children did not even know a life without the ring of fog.

The people of Elysian Fields liked to keep order in the city, so that everybody knew their place in the society. Four distinct classes provided that order.

The Elites formed the upper class. Less than a thousand, they owned businesses and lived in guarded, exclusive communities, in large mansions based on the English architecture, enjoying fresh foods supplied by their own gardens and livestock. They showed great interest in prolonging their life and health through technological enhancements. They benefited from advancements in nano-technology and genetic engineering. Embryonic cell manipulation provided them with their own clones, kept in stasis, and ready to be harvested or, in extreme cases, to replace the originals too deteriorated to survive transplants.

Around twenty thousand Professionals comprised the middle class. They maintained and operated the autonomous factories, and performed research in various high-tech fields including biomedical sciences, nano-technology, genetic engineering, gaming, and virtual reality entertainment. Professionals also developed the intra-city network, which they called the hypernet. They lived in fashionable neighbourhoods, and were able to afford some of the benefits the Elites were enjoying, such as medical care, good education, particularly in the technical and medical fields, and occasionally fresh produce.

The Servers constituted the lower class, a large mass of people with the role to serve both the Elites and the Professionals. They lived either in their own compound, in rows of low apartment buildings, or with the Elites or Professionals employing them. Their children took online classes due to their various places of residence. Their favorite pastime was entering the world of entertainment, a welcome escape from the confines of their small world, and their otherwise dull existence. Food, processed in the autonomous factories, was inexpensive and they could have almost as much as they wanted while watching their shows and games.

And then there were the Scrappies, very hard to quantify, though not past a few hundred. They lived on the fringe of society and were not officially acknowledged as a class, rather tolerated. Occasionally, a Scrappie would be caught stealing something or becoming annoying one way or another, and would be taken to the Happy Endings clinic to be terminated in a humane way. Anyone who ran away from one of the classes, for various reasons, became a Scrappie. It was unheard of for a Scrappie to rise to another class, but occasionally some of them would go back home. Clones lived with them as well; some were unwanted experiments left alive due to a nurse's pity, while others were discarded doubles of deceased people whose relatives did not want them around anymore but could not bring themselves to have them disposed of. They were allowed to live on the other side of the forest, close to the center of the former city of skyscrapers, but occasionally they would venture into the city, scavenging for food.

After fifty years of isolation, the Elysians could not even imagine a life outside their beloved city.