Prologue

The city was beautiful.
Portia watched the tall towers of the city glide by in a golden apricot haze against the blue of the morning sky. The windows, cleaned nightly by an army of unseen workers, gleamed in the light. The Elevated Public Transit was fast and efficient. Pollution was nil. Congestion during rush hour was non-existent. The city was a paradise on Earth.
Portia’s music pod was turned down low enough to provide a pleasant soundtrack to the morning commute.
The Elevated carriage gave a slight decrease in speed; it was pulling into another station. Portia tightened her grip on the handle, her other arm cradling her bag to her chest.
The glass carriage slide by Stationers, lined up on the platform, all dressed in similar blue uniforms. They carried metal containers: maintenance workers, most likely returning from a night of working in the forest of offices in the city’s heart. The Stationers disappeared from sight and were replaced by folk similar dressed to herself, business casual. They carried leather satchels and cases. Portia’s hand instinct griped around her satchel, the powdery blue Superpower Kung-Fu Koalas satchel she purchased the night before. These were her people, Shareholders, and now of them carried satchels with Technicolor animated superheroes characters.
Executives did not use Transport. They had company vehicles. If an Executive was productive enough, important enough, to merit a private vehicle, a private driver was usually included.
Everyone aspired to be an Executive. Work hard enough, long enough, make the right investments, buy the right clothes, dress nattily enough, and it was possible to one day be chauffeured to your office, and pass by the fishbowl like carriages of the Transport, filled with workers vying for your position.
A man entered the carriage. Dark blue uniform and denim cap. He took off his hat when he realized his mistake. Muttering an apology, her tucked his head down and quickly made his way to the rear of the carriage.
He squeezed through the commuters. As he passed Portia, the metal lunch box banged into her elbow.
“Ow!” An involuntary cry.
“Sorry, Miss. Sorry.”
Doing the impossible, he pushed his way through the crowd even fast.
As the glass down slide shut, an anonymous voice said, “Honestly, you’d think he’d know his station on the platform by now. I can’t even believe they make us share the same carriage. Bad enough we have to see them.”
“Why don’t they all colonize,” another voice added.
There was a muttering of consensus in the carriage.
“Carrying a bag that color to work…”
“They think they’re going to strike.”
“Let ‘em. Plenty more where that one came from to fill the job.”
The door was glass. Portia could see through it to the man on the other side, the man who forgot his place on the platform. She wondered how they looked to the Stationers through the glass carriage, cocooned in a thin pod and whisking high above the traffic, if the city had traffic.
A finger flicked to the slender silver pendant handing around Portia’s neck and turned the volume up on her music pod, drowning out the conversation in the Elevated.
The city was beautiful.