Eden

The Beginning

“Eden was founded in 2090 by Dean Fourier, and here we stand celebrating the success of his perfect, civilized society half a century later. Class, please rise and place your right hand over your heart and recite the perfect prayer.”

This was always the way things started. Back a few centuries, we would stand here reciting the anthem praising the men who fought for and died for our country -- the national anthem-- but after overwhelming corruption, famine, revolts and wars, and the deterioration of a moral society, the rope binding the nation together emaciated just like the people living within it and eventually snapped, sending the anvil plummeting downward, and soon the rest of the globe following pursuit. After that, there was a decade of hell on Earth, just like they portrayed in the movies: theft is legal because law is dead, kindness died out with the ones being slaughtered, the streets grew empty as the fear grew infinitely, everything around was broken just like the human race’s souls, and the white house turned black as it was devoured by flames and deteriorated to ashes.

  Eventually, some people decided to lock their fear away long enough to try to fix what went wrong. Dean Fourier, an entrepreneur from Oxford, England, gathered a few of his peers from his graduating class from Oxford University, which he was miraculously able to track down ten years after the crumble of the campus, and worked on an electronic system that could harbor the data of all 8 billion people in the world and analyze everything about them based on their hobbies, interests, education, and life to date, and it sets a life path for the person; that way, everyone is useful in society and everyone gets employed based on what the system thinks as best for the person. Later, it was perfected so that the system can also keep transnational surveillance of everyone by a chip that was stitched into everyone’s chest. It depicts the person’s heartbeat, feelings, stress level, mindset, and overall well being, so that if the person were to ever fall astray from the way of the common good such as it has occurred for centuries before, the person can be administered help before it’s too late to set them back on track. 

  It wasn’t easy for the system to get initiated, though. Once a consensus was reached with 51% of the world, an official accord was written and anyone who went against it were executed; so it was more like “Merry Christmas, get this chip sewn into your skin close to your heart, or it’s lights out and hopefully you’ll reincarnate as a suitable human being, or whatever it is you believe in”. The latter’s a bit of a joke, though, neither Christmas nor religion exist in Eden since it was decided that religion is a heresy within itself and causes irrational and radical actions, which will only taint the purified new system that cost thousands of lives and hogsheads of bloodshed.

This is what we’ve caused, and this is what we’ve become. Survival is what we fight for, but not every battle is won. 

“I pledge allegiance 

   to the system

  which created and gave me my freedom.

      and to the community

  for which it exists,

  no worries,

  under Eden,

  for hope and future for all.”

This is Eden.