A walk through history

Isabelle was rarely permitted to leave the house, so her little illicit excursions with Sam had always been equal parts exhilarating and terrifying. On the whole, there was little wonder to be found in the neighborhood around where she'd grown up. The carbon-copied homes, the extravagant yards, the fleet of garage bound cars were all props to recreate a fantasy, a suburban fantasy of decades past that'd been destroyed by the impoverishment and the sprawl. In her readings, Isabelle had learned that there had once been this thing called the middle class: people of college educated backgrounds who had access to the most comfortable, well-paid jobs who could afford the luxuries of a home, two cars, appliances, kids. But the market, the economy, the will of the systems of the world needed more. Learning became so easy, anyone could do their jobs. Why hire a graduated worker $100K a year when you could pay the high school keener a fraction of the cost.

While easy education ate the middle, machines came for the working class. Those that could afford to augmented themselves: replaced limbs, eyes, even parts of their brain. To compete with machines they became machines, and those that couldn't were driven deeper and deeper. The Undercity.

Being unaugmented, "natural," became a symbol, a brand, to show how little you'd fallen, how much money your family had to keep you pure. While some families sold their daughters into sex, others brandished their purity as a sign of wealth. The desire for the pure, the unadulterated, bloomed, and such a rare woman, made of flesh and never having sullied herself for cash, could marry just a little bit higher, to a man who could afford to keep her that way.

And an upper class daughter was held strictly to those standards. They made wonderful gifts in mergers and deals their capitalists fathers would make. Capitalists like her father, Henry Albright, CEO of the largest wetware corporation in the world.

Until then, they were kept under heavy guard, sequestered in the empty, manicured suburbs, learning just enough to be sold as distinguished and educated, but not enough to get into trouble.

But Isabelle and Sam had learned too much. Security around The Suburbs was not designed to look for people like them, people who belonged, and they knew just enough to sneak past its defenses. So the two snuck off to a party of what remained of the middle: part augment, but still pure enough, who clamored and competed for one of the few well paying jobs left: coding.