Day 577

The City of Sunshine was closed to all but a few select outsiders. Its walls made of the thickest iron and blackened with tar on a daily basis to ensnare and immolate intruders before they could set foot anywhere near the sanctum that was Sunshine City.

Reports and rumours floated about the rest of the continent, all speculations and sensationalisms. The sort of writing that was lapped up by the public and gave hope to the thousands of unwanted, unclean and undesirable that were forced to lurk at societies' outermost points.

They said Sunshine City was so well protected so that the rest of the world wouldn't corrupt its purity and ruin the utopia within those impenetrable walls. The streets were spotless and everyone had a huge house to live in with a garden and everything. Even the gutters had the most beautiful fish swimming in them.

The few who came in and out of Sunshine City did so by a large steel elevator, heavily guarded and moving too fast for anyone to just hop onto without getting themselves hurt or worse. It didn't stop people from trying of course, especially when their heads were filled with thoughts of paradise.

Nobody who'd been to the city ever spoke about it beyond the usual "It's such a unique culture" or "The people are so reserved and polite". They said what they could without putting themselves in danger.

If the truth ever got out they knew they would all suffer for it, disregarding any culprit in favour of sending a message to the rest of the world...or so they'd been told as the elevator ascended past countless bones and fresher corpses.

The City itself is far larger than the walls make it out to be as the denizens have dug down to make skyscrapers that barely reach past ground level. The criss-crossing pathways make the place look like some kind of spider's web with countless ants running along its strands.

Everyone wore the same uniform in neon red with that cartoonish Sunshine mascot emblazoned on both the back and the front pocket. What so few people realised was that the name wasn't a reference to any kind of warm joyish feeling but to enormous floodlights that provided the deep-dwellers with their much needed Ultraviolet light.

Every other part of the City was just as you'd expect for a subterranean "paradise". The food was a combination of nutritious fungal sludge and some pinkish meat that they called beef but tasted more akin to pork.

Strange cuisine aside the City was still utterly spectacular, combining a rustic mountainous kind of architecture with modern furnishings. Somehow the duality of stone-carved towers with lichen-based terraces scattered like frogspawn against the monochrome interiors meshed together to make Sunshine a truly unique place.

Newcomers that were trusted enough to be invited to stay weren't told the full extent of Sunshine's laws until they'd signed their allegiance away to the council. There was no freedom inside of the walls, only fast paced labour.

The slow were taken to the processing plants and their families were sent a notice congratulating them on knowing such a successful business person who was now in the safe hands of a team of food production workers and would serve their City well.

It was sick if you think about it. They never made any attempts to hide what they were doing to their people, they just worded it in a plausibly deniable way as they sent the "unproductive" to be slaughtered.

From time to time there were especially difficult people who were sent to the Department of Concerns instead of processing plants. Their deaths happened in secrecy with their families only being notified when they received three parcels - two dripping with blood and one that rattled.