[ WP ] The richest 1 % possess 99 % of the world 's wealth , they live separately in a grand city . Unheard of , an orphaned youth is invited to a meeting of wealthy leaders ...

Falling out of favor was the baroque sense of pleasure for pleasure's sake and coming into fashion was realism. 
 
 And so it was time for some gravity, and the committee for the public arts commissioned that an orphaned youth from earth be brought to the self-sustained and perfect habitat of Mars and its Grand City for the purposes of civic education and aesthetic enrichment. 
 
 There was no shortage of candidates. 
 
 The goal was to steep the senses in the pertinent depravity felt by billions in order to expand the capacity for empathy and thus augment the already-fine feeling cultivated faithfully by the community. 
 
 After some winnowing, and the committee's resignation that it could not discern from the approximately 4.3 million candidates of boys age 9 with a penchant for being articulate but who bore an inclination towards being taciturn, it selected at random a boy from the province of Genjden named Heath. 
 
 Heath was to tour the Grand City under the major theaters under a format of simple question-and-answer configuration that was undertaken by three specially-selected residents and moderated by an experienced interviewer. 
 
 But the tour did not extend beyond the first show, which left the audience adequately satisfied in its first intentionally free-form performance. 
 
 A gentlemen of esteem cleared his throat with stateliness, leaned in and quizzed the boy: `` Why do you think people in the Grand City have brought you from the teeming billions of individuals who suffer far more than we do for purposes of enhancing our art rather than to make us act from compassion? ” 
 
 The boy ’ s eyes darted, trying to find a hint of something in the crowd shaded in the theater ’ s darkened seating. But slowly, his body resigned, and became indifferent to the blackness. 
 
 Still dressed in his rags from earth, he said: 
 
 `` I do n't know. I do n't know. I remember when grandma died. She was 42. She was caught in the machinery for the district's quota doing repairs in the middle of the turbine, which is the size of an a acre. The gears were too loud to hear her scream. And she was too far and it was too dangerous to help her. So we just stood there, we just stood there and watched! My, how we fretted! I could n't believe our callousness. I miss grandma so much. Eventually though, we watched her die. Out of love we sat there and watched her be churned by the revolutions.'' 
 
 The audience broke out in applause, congratulating themselves on their new awareness. 
 
 

