Triptych

In a Chicago of the future, gated communities at the edge of Lake Michigan and in the city's former suburban sprawl house the elite while the city itself is surrounded by steel-mesh fences and cinderblock walls. The lake front and the downtown streets of the old city beyond those walls are pockmarked with craters, marred by falling-down buildings, rife with the general destruction caused by years of riot and near-civil-war. This is an area known as Outside. It is there that city residents without work permits are exiled. There, the refuse of the city struggle to live, while in the city many residents exist in a shadow world, a vast "underground," where they live off-the-grid, avoiding detection by municipal police and bounty hunters, and eviction. Juxtaposed to this shadow existence are the wide open plazas offering diverse entertainment, restaurants, and quiet parks, along with skyscraper office buildings where private industry and municipal departments exert their control, and hordes of service robots labor at mundane jobs.