The Messengers were at one and the same time the elite and the outcasts of society. Chosen for qualifications that were theirs only by the genetic accident of birth. Yet, for a selected few among the teeming millions of under-life of the twenty-first century, to become a messenger for the Hulm instiution was to escape the prison that was life, that was Earth. They were the chosen, the apostles of a new religion, the forerunners of a happier, healthier time in which fear and want would be banished and the world would be purified.