Runners, Chapter 3

[03.The.City.]

The city was large. Specifically how large wasn't something anyone particularly cared about, so if the information existed there was most likely no one who actually knew.

This was because it was the last city on Earth. And if there wasn't anywhere else then just how little was left wasn't something anyone was particularly interested in.

The city was surrounded by a wall that kept it safe from the elements and, one would hope, the apocalypse. There were Generators, large obelisks spaced throughout the city that kept the air clean and emitted a thick white cloud that engulfed the city, controlling the temperature and generating light as needed. The cloud was, perhaps, the only thing that all Sectors shared in common.

The Sectors themselves were established to keep the turbulence of a city surrounded by nothing stable. It allowed for the people with wealth to maintain a high quality of living without being reminded about anything that wasn't particularly pleasant; those in the third and fourth Sectors had to worry about surviving, and didn't have time to question a system whose purpose was essentially to keep them out of the hair of the parts of society that mattered. Most people lived and died in the city without ever seeing much more than the area they were born in.

Sector 1 was the best possible place for a human being to live, a fact the residents of the Sector took quite seriously. Only the elitest of the elite lived there; every facet of their lives was bathed in extravagance. The latest technologies assured any resident of the first Sector did little that was needless or uncomfortable. The streets were immaculate, the buildings sterile. Scientific advances allowed for genetic specification and cosmetic modification that gave the young and wealthy an unprecedented level of aesthetic expression and health. The Sector was essentially the aristocracy in the city, with a vast majority of the families that inhabited it having been permanent residents. While one could hope to gain money and settle into Sector 2, Sector 1 was unattainable. It was heaven.

Sector 2 was not, all things considered, a half-bad place to live. Comfortable without being posh, enjoyable without the pinnacle of technology to support it, it was as good a place as anyone in the city could normally hope to live. People in the second Sector most often worked for people in the first; the wall that divided the two was built around factories and businesses that linked the two. Although it was always made quite clear which side the people of Sector 2 were on, in general they tended to be content. Sector 2 was security: face-scans, DNA recognition, and GPS navigators made sure that the people were safe. Crime existed but was not all that common. The farther from the wall leading to Sector 1, of course, the more likely bad things got. The City Police operated almost exclusively in this Sector, and their power knew essentially no bounds.

The third Sector was where the lower classes lived. It was dirty and significantly less modern than the other Sectors, but most of its people would never know how much. Its people viewed the people that lived in the first two Sectors with a mix of awe and disdain, but the Government would barely acknowledge its existence at all besides keeping peace in extreme situations. It essentially ran itself, which left the City to look after the parts of itself that were important.

The thing that made the third Sector livable was the knowledge of what Sector 4 was like. Primitive and volatile, it was essentially a warzone for gangs. It was a death sentence for anyone who had reached rock bottom; the buildings were in such horrid condition that it was barely different than living on the street, and it was at times more safe anyway. The fourth Sector was a topic that was never discussed by anyone with any power in the City, and most of the residents of the first two Sectors didn't even know it existed.

Thus the Last City on Earth was a sectioned half-globe in the blackness in which everything had its place, and in which there was little that stirred. As for that End itself, the thing that left the city as the last on the planet, it was a subject that was completely and utterly taboo. It wasn't so much that people avoided it; rather, it had been collectively decided long ago that it should be ignored and forgotten, and thus not only did no one know what had happened, it never even occurred to anyone to ask. Years of living in the wake of the End had created an atmosphere in which the people were too afraid to operate outside the parameters they were given. It wasn't long before this became a completely unconscious state of being. It was a psychological phenomenon that explained why Eve was so crazy.

No one thought about anything outside of the city. No one even considered the possibility that there was anything aside from the city, or that there ever had been.

Eve's desire to leave was, then, a tiny, barely noticeable crack in an otherwise perfect glass enclosure that kept the people of the city free of the burden of being the only humans left on Earth. Eve's idea, her desire by itself was enough to shatter the carefully crafted order of the City, but to actually act on it threatened all of reality within the wall that separated it from the nothingness outside.

You couldn't leave. There was nowhere to go. But Eve was going to do it. And, for reasons he could never hope to explain, Colin was going to do it too.