Elysian
Fields
By Anne Gabriels
Published by ELSE Inc.
Copyright © 2014 by ELSE Inc. on behalf of the author.
All rights reserved. No part of this book shall be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without permission from the publisher. No patent liability is assumed with respect to the use of the information contained herein. Although every precaution has been taken in the preparation of this book, the publisher and author assume no responsibility for errors or omissions. Nor is any liability assumed for damages resulting from the use of the information contained herein. All Characters and occurrences in this book are fictional any resemblance to persons living or dead and events past or present is purely coincidental.
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Dedicated to my children Melanie, Renee, and Alin.
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Banning human cloning reflects our humanity. It is the right thing to do. Creating a child through this new method calls into question our most fundamental beliefs. It has the potential to threaten the sacred family bonds at the very core of our ideals and our society. At its worst, it could lead to misguided and malevolent attempts to select certain traits, even to create certain kind of children -- to make our children objects rather than cherished individuals.
BILL CLINTON, speech, June 9, 1997
Anybody who objects to cloning on principle has to answer to all the identical twins in the world who might be insulted by the thought that there is something offensive about their very existence. Clones are simply identical twins.
RICHARD DAWKINS, BBC interview, Jan. 31, 1999
Editor’s Note
When I was in college, I was reading the university paper while eating lunch one day, when I saw an article on human cloning. Too many years have gone by and I no longer remember what it was about, but I do remember the article struck a serious nerve with me. My mind buzzed as I walked to my chemistry class, where I would spend the next hour furiously scribbling out a response instead of taking notes. Human cloning was wrong and I outlined several reasons why, including a new breed of “racism,” the degradation of the value of human life, the impossibility of cloning the soul, and the difficulties even the possibility of cloning would have on criminal prosecution relying on DNA evidence.
Later that day, after fine tuning my draft, I emailed my response to the newspaper. I felt better having said my piece and went on with school.
I found out later that they published my letter, and it was a moment of pride for me. I’d felt so strongly that cloning humans was wrong that I needed my voice to be heard. It seems an odd twist of fate that over a decade later, I’d meet Anne and become her editor for Elysian Fields, a book that explores many of the same ethical dilemmas I’d taken issue with.
Being a big fan of dystopian literature, there are a lot of fictional worlds out there that can scare and inspire us, but the ones that tie back to our own beliefs are the ones that affect us the most. Anne’s book presents one such situation to me personally. While people such as myself may believe that human cloning is inherently wrong, it doesn’t mean it won’t happen.
Nor does it mean we won’t have to deal with all the effects I outlined in my letter all those years ago. Let’s just hope societies such as that of Elysian Fields remain happily in the realm of fiction for just a bit longer.
Crystal Watanabe
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 to the north, 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 population, 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 everyone 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 large mansions based on English architecture within exclusive guarded communities, 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 maintained 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 numbering more than 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 ce
nter 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.
PART ONE
1
Allan entered the square and hurried towards the Imaginarium building, a geodesic dome placed in the middle of the Elite Plaza, where he was going to meet with his friends, Brad and Brent.
The building hosted three dimensional movie theatres and video arcades equipped with the latest equipment. A lot of Elite youngsters spent considerable amounts of time in the totally immersive experiences the complex had to offer. The main attraction was the new virtual reality game War of Sovereign Nations.
At nineteen, Allan was six-foot two inches tall, fit and healthy, and he was in perfect shape due to regular nanobot treatments. He lived with his father, the head of Secure-IT, originally an information technology company and for as long as Allan could remember, the only security company in the city, employing over five hundred security personnel responsible for keeping order in the city.
“Hey,” Allan announced his presence. “You guys ready for the challenge?”
“You’re late. I thought you’d already thrown in the towel and admitted defeat,” teased Brad, offering a gleaming white smile in contrast to his light brown complexion.
“Let’s go, already,” Brent, a sandy brown haired youth, said impatiently. “Our booked time has already started.” They headed in the direction of the arcades.
They entered a spacious oval-shaped room with various consoles placed in an arc on both sides of the door. The opposite wall was massive and comprised the exterior wall of the Imaginarium building. It served as a screen designed for three dimensional viewing. At least, Allan thought so, because the image he saw was distorted, a clear sign that special viewers were needed to bring the picture into focus.
“What do you want to do, play against each other or against the computer?” Brent asked them.
“Playing against each other is faster and more fun,” Brad suggested.
“Yeah, but we don’t know anything about this game. Let’s test it for a while, see what it can do. We can all play against the computer, like they advertised on the hypernet, each of us on a different front, and see who wins more points.” Allan‘s suggestion sounded good, and the others accepted immediately.
They moved towards different consoles and stood in front of them. Special gloves were placed in supports mounted on both sides of each unit to enable them to manipulate the holographic controls, and hyper-goggles were hanging from a hook nearby to facilitate a complete view of the war zones and the map.
Allan put on the goggles and the gloves and selected the option of playing against the computer on section C, which had been assigned to his console. He saw his friends doing the same on their respective locations.
All of a sudden, the large screen in front of them came to life in a multitude of flashing colors, displaying the overall map of the playing field, and Allan could hear a man’s voice:
“Welcome to the War of Sovereign Nations game. You selected Option 1 – War against the Emperor by individual Warlords. You can go to the Menu at any time to change your options. Each nation is assigned a separate front of action. The winner is the warlord who conquers the most, with the least damage and the greatest profit.
Allan determined that the Emperor must be the computer. Cool, I’m a Warlord. Let’s see what we have here. He started to look at all the various options he had in order to initiate war; he had an arsenal, troops, the cities, and the terrain he had to conquer. He tried to gather as much insight into his enemy’s resources and strongholds as he was allowed via his console’s controls.
In the meantime, Brad and Brent had already started. Wow, these guys are in a hurry to beat me. This did not deter Allan from analyzing the situation in order to come up with a strategy, like his father had taught him. Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win. That was one of the lessons from the Art of War, one of his father’s prized classics, developed by the ancient Chinese general Sun-Tzu. We’ll see who the best is in the end. And Allan continued his analysis.
After he finished his assessment, Allan was still uncertain as to how to proceed. He knew his best bet was to engage people with what they expect; it is what they are able to discern and confirms their projections. It settles them into predictable patterns of response, occupying their minds while you wait for the extraordinary moment — that which they cannot anticipate. What is the Emperor expecting? He wasn’t sure. Probably to be attacked in full force. He had no idea yet as to what surprise attack he could execute without alerting the Emperor. What are Brad and Brent doing? Allan glanced at the overall battlefield to try and understand the way his friends were waging war.
It was easy to anticipate Brad’s strategy. He was a proponent of traditional warfare. He said no to nuclear attacks and just stuck with plain air attacks supported by sea carriers. He maintained control over supplies and sea routes, followed by ground troop attacks.
The reaction from the computer would be predictable: a huge loss of life on both sides, great destruction of human artifacts and an uncertain victory, since the people living there would not give up easily. The three dimensional images had already started to show the utter devastation of the cities, the fireworks of explosions in various locations, and Allan anticipated a total loss of control on both sides of their armies and battle fronts.
There is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged warfare. How well Allan remembered that. His father had told him stories deeply embedded in his mind of episodes in the history of mankind, from before the Great Quakes. So many people had lost their lives in extended wars. One of them was said to have lasted a hundred years. What a waste!
A look at the other war showed Allan what his other friend was doing. Brent had attempted cyber-attacks, similar to what happened in the first part of the century: infecting the web with Trojans that would upload viruses to create havoc in communication, threaten self-destruction of the power plants, plot to bring down the financial system and cause breaches of government sites, mostly for the retrieval of sensitive military information.
The three dimensional representation of that war showed that the disruption was great. Anarchy had already begun to set in as a couple of nuclear plants exploded accidentally. The contamination would be unimaginable, with many areas uninhabitable for generations. Brent’s scenario will end in a stalemate, Allan thought, with an odd feeling of grief. Why would he do that? That’s madness. He shuddered thinking that such a thing could perhaps have happened to the planet, to bring it to the current state.
What am I going to do? What is the best way to conquer a country? Suddenly, Allan remembered the quote: The skillful leader subdues the enemy's troops without any fighting; he captures their cities without laying siege to them; he overthrows their kingdom without lengthy operations in the field.
In the practical art of war, the best thing was to take the enemy's country whole and intact; to shatter and destroy it was not ideal, for what use would it be after? What did he truly want? To take control of that country. Brute force was less effective than deceit. He could attempt to take the country from them while keeping them with their guard down, not expecting what was coming to them, making them feel safe and secure, fed and entertained. While he set things in motion, his own peons in positions of authority in the country would do the job for him.
Allan thought about it and decided that, strange as it seemed, he was going to invest his virtual money into buying and developing entertainment networks, infusing them with irresistible shows and interactive games, and supplying very affordable food to the target country. The people would spend their spare time greatly entertained and well fed. The entertainment would distract them and the food would be laced with addictive chemicals, dulling their senses and causing them to become l
ethargic and less aware of what was truly happening to their country.
It took some programming on Allan’s part to change the behavioral subroutines and though it took longer for the simulation to run, he made quick work of it. The images on the large screen showed life as usual, except for the slow approach of his war carriers, pretending to conduct routine military exercises. At the time his troops landed, they were received with indifference by the local population, who couldn’t care less, one way or the other, as long as their lifestyle went unchanged. But it would change, Allan thought with unexpected bitterness. There were no casualties on his side, even some profit from the economical trades.
The final score was displayed. Allan had won hands down.
“I can’t believe it,” Brad exclaimed, looking at Allan in frustration, while removing his gloves and hyper-googles. “What the heck did you do? I didn’t see any real action taking place. Did you hack into the game?”
“He must have,” Brent intervened. “I saw him writing code. Hey, Allan, is this what you’re trained to do at Secure-IT? Win by changing the rules of the game?”
Allan could understand very well the disappointment of his friends, even their anger. They were not used to losing, especially without understanding how it had happened. Even he felt a slight disappointment at the result. Somehow, he thought the game would be more challenging.
“The only thing I did was trick the enemy into thinking no war was going on. I manipulated the people’s minds, that’s all. I didn’t think it would be so damn easy. But, hey, I won.”
“You won by cheating, that’s what you did. There was no war in your game,” Brad replied, with disappointment in his voice. “We should have established better rules, like playing using similar technologies, and see whose strategy would win the war. Now there’s no fair way to compare our results.”
Elysian Fields Page 1
