The Hourglass and the Tunnel

The sand slowly pours down...its grains one by one separate from each other, but then connect once again. Step by step, breath by breath, heartbeat after heartbeat, the man gets closer to the middle of the tunnel, and there is the sand, half empty; the man keeps on going and the grains keep on falling. Right before the end of the tunnel, just before the last grain falls, the man looks back; what does he see?PrologueThe future--it promised a lot. Technology beyond imagination,...
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The sand slowly pours down...its grains one by one separate from each other, but then connect once again. Step by step, breath by breath, heartbeat after heartbeat, the man gets closer to the middle of the tunnel, and there is the sand, half empty; the man keeps on going and the grains keep on falling. Right before the end of the tunnel, just before the last grain falls, the man looks back; what does he see?PrologueThe future--it promised a lot. Technology beyond imagination, unbelievable innovations, clean energy, a complete absence of crime, a notable rise in human IQ levels...all of this, thanks to a great Leader who brought humanity out of darkness after the greatest of all wars. His standard was continued by his children, and their children. But like most humans, the great Leader had had some madness within, though with his charisma and what he had done for humanity, none dared question the things he proposed. So the great Leader had chosen to create a society where there was only beauty. Beauty in every aspect of life, including how humans looked, and he had very precisely set the rules of what it meant to be a physically beautiful human being.After he had finished directing the building of a great city, a giant Metropolis, the Leader died, but his children continued his goals. He had taught that nothing could be truly solved with violence, therefore, the non-beautiful humans were not killed, but merely separated from the beautiful. The beautiful were to live in the great Metropolis, which was surrounded by immense walls and state-of-the-art security, and the non-beautiful--the ugly--had to live in the giant net of villages, with fewer advances, outside the Metropolis.Theirs was not a horrible life, but it surely was not as good as the city life. At least, that's the way everyone saw it. Each newborn was examined, and if deemed ugly, the parents had a choice. Either they could go with the child and raise it in one of the villages with the ugly people, or the child was sent away alone to a villager who was willing to raise it. These newborns were given an inoculation which made it impossible for them to reproduce.The only time village people were allowed inside the city was when they were delivering goods and products made in their territory, and this was done under supervision. Plastic surgery was illegal and punishable by complete isolation from the rest of society.This was the great Leader's vision: a world of only complete beauty.