Imagine, if you can, a world thousands of years ahead of your own in every way, populated by beautiful, hale, healthful people, a golden city with elevators that move like lightning, and windows in the tall towers that glint like stars. And then imagine the corruption necessary in such a place, the nepotism, the ridiculousness of warrior ideals in an age where war is long past. The prejudice against those who fail to meet its exacting standards of quality. The state, run by a monarchy always on the edge of faltering, always at the whim, until recently, of a man grown too old to be fit to rule.