Sasuke Yamada
Tokyo Japan 2011 May 3rd
I worked at a factory during the day, a lot of people did. I sighed as I looked out of the train, I felt tired. My father worked at a factory, his father worked at a factory and my children will probably also work at a factory, but I was somehow at peace with that now. The sky was dark with smog, as the war dragged on our economy started to recover from the bodyblow that Leviathan had done to it. I stared at the giant tree that stood in Tokyo bay, a skyscraper poking out of the sea. A gift, our greatest treasure or a way for us to heal. Our World tree to Ganymede, to the colonies, to my home.
Ganymede had several continents, we got one of the two largest, the one in the north. The Koreans got the other one in the south, various other countries in East Asia split up the rest of the land. The Tree got closer, I was heading to Masaru and onwards to Neo Tokyo. When the Tree first went up we held it as an object of wonder, and then someone realized that land in Japan was expensive and that land on Masaru was cheap. Then they figured out that you could have a large western style house that you owned or live in, instead of a cramped apartment that you rented.
The fact that giant monsters were destroying entire cities and that millions of our people had been slaughtered insured that every housewife nagged their husbands into dutifully moving, or in my case my mother. The train went dark as we went down into the roots, I got off the train and walked around the World tree. As I got out I noticed a poster of a smiling girl, a moe girl with green hair, a sunflower was planted firmly in her hair, she was holding hands with another girl who looked shy, she also had green hair. They were the mascots for the World tree and its' sister on Ganymede. It was something some Otaku had cooked up and then became the standard bearer for our current method of interplanetary travel.
An older woman was selling T-shirts with their picture on them, I went over to her stand and put some money on the table.
"The usual, Sasuke?"
"Yeah, just reading up on the news."
"I wish you would buy manga, it's less depressing."
I shrugged.
"It isn't all bad, sometimes we win, right?"
She took a sip of tea.
"You should really settle down with a nice girl."
I picked up my paper.
"I get enough of that from mom already."
"Well she's my friend so I'm going to help her, I know some good girls maybe I can get you to talk to them? I mean you have a house you make ok money, you're ready for children."
I felt the beginnings of a migraine.
"I still have to pay off that house, maybe when I'm more secure."
"Don't wait too long, your mother talked to me about how she deserves grandchildren."
"I have to go home, sorry."
That earned me a roll of her eyes. We bowed, said our good byes and I went to the next train. The news was filled with bad news, some fluff pieces about celebrities that I didn't care about and other things. When I looked up the doors opened and I walked into the wide open streets of Neo Tokyo. I saw row after row of generic cookie cutter houses. Neo Tokyo wasn't so much a city as a suburb of Tokyo proper. A place where people went to sleep, the shopping was terrible, the restaurants were rare, but it had two major advantages, space and privacy. I walked to my prefrabricated house and opened it. Two stories tall, a basement of my own, five bedrooms all for the low price of three years of my wages.
It was a big ugly block but by the Kami it was my big ugly block and I loved it. I opened the door and smiled at the couch. I went down and sat down. I turned on my television, power was provided by the World tree. It turns out they doubled as power plants, which was convenient for the growing off world community. I turned on the TV and watched a cartoon about masked heroes fighting a villain. I didn't want to think to hard and this was good enough for now.
I tried to think about what life would be without the colonies, probably worse, a lot worse. Japan was too crowded, we were going crazy losing it and breaking under the pressure, especially in Tokyo, add in the fact that we had no idea what to do with the refugees from Kyushu, or handle the people who couldn't make it in the cutthroat corporate world, and then add to that our lack of resources. We were heading towards a bad end, the colonies acted as a kind of release valve. A way to calm, to release pent up nerves of a people who felt trapped, or maybe that's just me. There was a feeling in the air that we lived in an important time, a feeling of destiny, of importance.
Was it arrogance? I don't know but the mood of the country had changed, the feeling of helplessness was gone, we were a hero generation, it all felt slightly ridiculous somehow. The show ended and I ate dinner, soon I would go to sleep, wake up take the train back to Earth and go back to the factory. I hoped all the the missiles we made would help.