It was illegal for a human to practice organic medicine in Neo Arcadia. Inorganic medicine, treating reploids, was fine, but humans could not treat the illnesses of other humans.
Health classes and preventative medicine were allowed, in fact they were compulsory. The vast majority of doctors that studied and operated on reploids were human, because since humans had all those latent years before they could really be put to work they should spend it studying something, but humans were not permitted to attend the school that taught the medicine of their own species. Everyone in Neo Arcadia had to work, hold a registered job and medical doctor or nurse were not allowable careers for humans.
Humans would not be licensed and treating patients without a license? The Zan'ei did not take kindly to snake oil salesmen. Swindling people desperate for a cure was a death penalty offense in the early days, just like hoarding food to extort money, possessions or other coin out of hungry citizens, and those the Zan'ei caught were often the lucky ones. The government made it quick: lynch mobs were generally in no mood to be merciful.
Very soon after the founding of Neo Arcadia X had gathered up every single surviving doctor, nurse, field medic: anyone who knew anything about human medicine other than the most basic field surgery. A good portion of the armies knew how to stitch someone up, after giving them alcohol and something to bite down on, because sometimes there weren't enough elves. And without them, humans were so fragile, and yet they fought anyway.
Most of them had died of that bravery.
Weil, like the mavericks before him, had targeted officers. Had targeted everyone competent, especially X and his children. Had killed every captured human over the age of thirty. Reploids weren't given the option of surrender: if they were overrun it was a matter of hoping it wasn't by a baby elf, who might need to replace whatever puppets she'd lost in the assault. Reploid bodies, mechanaloids, ride armors with rotting human bodies still in them: the baby elves were an effective terror weapon, and Weil knew it.
He also knew to kill the doctors and medics first.
In the aftermath, X knew that although he'd learned quite a lot about human medicine, when he had the chance, for the sake of keeping people alive, he wouldn't have the chance to teach anyone. Neo Arcadia was a hastily thrown-together shelter at the start. Too many people crammed too close together, water for washing in short supply and as for heating it! Maybe in five years, ten.
There were barely any people left, except X himself, who knew that those conditions were asking for plagues. When it was easy for disease to spread, there was no incentive for it to adapt to keep the host alive and somewhat healthy so that the host would spread the disease while going about their daily life. Hygiene bred nuisance diseases, but when they spread so easily that a host could get hit with three, six at the same time? One of them would kill him, so strains that relied on functioning carriers for transmission would be selected against. The evolutionary winners would be the ones that bred as fast as possible, exhausting the host's body in the process.
Killing them.
An environment like Neo Arcadia bred plagues. All the pre-industrial, pre-hygiene cities had been death sinks, with more humans dying there than being born. To make matters worse, thanks to Weil Neo Arcadia did not have a very large gene pool. More genetic diversity meant a wider variety of immune systems and strategies.
When a city with poor hygiene and low genetic diversity met a disease it was unprepared for? For over a century the human population had been relatively free from disease. It was the reploids that had to worry about that. In the beginning, the Maverick Hunters had studied how plagues operated in order to try to halt the spread of the maverick virus. That was why every Hunter had a single room, and all the halls and rooms in Headquarters had been large, so reploids weren't packed together.
That wasn't an option in Neo Arcadia. Larger rooms took more energy to heat and cool. Installing UV lights in the air ducts would help keep the environmental control system from spreading disease, but X would have to get the lights made, and schedule the installation by trained electricians…
X had a good knowledge of history before he even woke up: the ethical simulations Dr. Light set the capsule to generate had been based on reality since they were meant to prepare him for it.
Aside from the fact that they did have the germ theory of disease, and did know what would help, the best historical counterparts to Neo Arcadia were the city-states of Central and South America. When new diseases reached them, mostly traveling far faster than the explorers? The best estimate of the death toll was nine out of ten dead, over two continents. The inhabitants of the city-states had a slightly better survival rate, but that was because the cities had started to breed up stronger diseases, so their immune systems had been stronger than their more spread-out neighbors.
So in that respect, Neo Arcadia was worse off than those examples. For over a century, since the mavericks didn't think in terms of bioweapons targeted at humans, medical science and preventative measures like hand-washing had protected them from everything but nuisance diseases. The killer their immune systems constantly fought was cancer.
After the Cataclysm, much of Earth's surface had become at least lightly irradiated, as the fallout from blown fission plants and a few detonations spread. Nowhere near as much as a nuclear war would have caused, thank goodness. The survivors had gathered and rebuilt in the safer areas. Fortunately, the people of 20XX had decided to get rid of their excess nuclear weapons and waste. The original means of disposal had been a deposit on the far side of the moon. Fortunately for the people of 21XX, at some point after X had gone into hibernation they'd sent them into the sun in case of alien invasion, because it would be stupid to leave nukes somewhere an enemy could get to them and use them as kinetic weapons. X didn't know about aliens, but he was certainly glad they hadn't been there for the mavericks to get their hands on.
Still, for over a century humanity had been training and breeding immune systems to attack not outside invaders, but their own bodies. Most cancers didn't get very far before being identified and destroyed by the immune system. It was those that weren't detected by the immune system in time that killed. Allergies, overactive immune responses to relatively harmless substances, were already a problem. An immune system like that going after an invading virus or bacteria in the heart? Or, heaven forbid, the brain?
The children were the safest, despite their lack of diversity. Their immune systems were still learning and adapting: the more disease they were exposed to now, especially before those diseases evolved into killers, the safer they'd be. The adults?
Plague would come to Neo Arcadia, and it could finish what Weil had started.
The surviving doctors and nurses would die. They'd be flooded with patients, worked into exhaustion, and each mistake, each slip, could be fatal. It would only be a matter of time.
There were no surviving reploid doctors of medicine; unless one counted Childre's programmed knowledge of pediatrics, obstetrics and the unfortunately obvious. Most of his practice was with the latter two.
A reploid, train to treat humans, during the Maverick Wars? A few had decided to attend medical school after the end of the wars, for the sake of bridging the gap and learning about how humans operated, but that kind of forward-thinking, brave, inquisitive spirit? They were all dead. Oh, there were reploid combat medics, but they couldn't really diagnose anything but the obvious. 'Oh, there's your problem: your leg's been blown off.' Telling one disease from another without tests that took time, trained hands and expensive equipment?
Medicine was a craft: it required knowledge, instruction and experience. It took accumulation of data to make an expert, to look at a human body and see where something was wrong and what it was. Especially for reploids, who weren't used to seeing the human body in a mirror, who hadn't grown up with one and its quirks, parents telling them what was normal and what wasn't.
The children Weil had… caused generally didn't have parents, at least parents that wanted anything to do with them. A lot of nurses were needed, to keep alive those children that looked like both one of X's dearest lost friends and one of his most hated enemies. No one was going to like X assigning Childre to that, and he didn't quite like it himself, not this soon, but Childre was the only one with the knowledge, it needed doing, he could remind Phantom to keep an eye on him and only a fool would argue with 'Master X.' He did not have time for fools: there already weren't enough hours in the day.
The surviving doctors knew what to tell students to look for. Had memories, however dim, of their own school days and what techniques had been used to teach them. If their knowledge was lost, how long would it take for it to be rediscovered? For reploids to notice things and think to pass them on the way rudimentary trauma medicine had been passed around? How many would die before Neo Arcadia once again had competent medical practitioners?
X's solution was brutal, but it only tore at him for a moment. He was too numb. He'd been making too many of these decisions for decades now, and it felt like Neo Arcadia was being built out of them. Heated water or air circulation. Quick, cheap concrete to get everything out of the weather or walls that wouldn't blow down like they were made of straw in the first attack. Reploids with decent battery life or emergency backups for life support. Fields that could easily be destroyed, hydroponics, or a transition from one to the other? How rapid?
Everyone brought these choices to him, and he had to act, because the rainy season was closing in on them. The cold and wet would exhaust what reserves of stamina the humans had, as well as forcing them indoors.
So the field hospital that was one of the first things built was stripped of everyone who had learned medicine before the war, and every person they'd trained during it. They were put into a heavily defensible building, a few kilometers away from any other buildings and with the military barracks between them and the developing residential area, given two hundred newbuilt reploids and told to teach half of them to be doctors and half nurses, no matter how long it took. Oh, and they would not be allowed outside (except on the roof, for sunlight), until they had. Patients, samples and dead bodies would be brought to them.
It didn't take them long to figure it out, looking around at the other puzzled faces and seeing how few there were. No doctor had survived Weil without having very good survival instincts. Without others dying so they could live. The only complaint they would have made if they'd been able to question Master X was why newbuilts? Why not experienced reploids, who had done what they could to help people during the war and at least knew what a liver looked like? Why cheaply-constructed newbuilts with no armor or weapons? Not to mention barely any more servo motor strength than humans had arm and leg strength.
They figured that out when the White Plague hit, and they weren't allowed to leave, even to help the suffering. Especially to help the suffering. The weaker, untrained newbuilts, unlike armed veterans, couldn't be used to break out. Not past the units deployed to guard the building against those trying to break in.
X didn't even try to keep them from finding out what was happening outside. It was incentive to work quickly, after all. To wrack their brains for every technique that might help those brought to them, which could be passed on to those trying to help the patients lying in rows in the field hospital.
Reploids, unlike humans, couldn't get sick. Their bodies couldn't become carriers, and there were sterilization methods reploids could use that humans couldn't without, for example, burning all the skin off their hands. The risk of secondary infections was far smaller at a hospital with an all-reploid staff.
Training took time, and instructors. It took brainpower, which took energy. Why give those valuable classroom slots to people who were likely to be incapacitated or die just when they were needed most?
So reploids treated humans, and humans treated reploids, each species relying on the other to provide one's strengths and cover the other's weaknesses, and that thought might have made X happy, might have made him think that perhaps Elysium could rise from the ashes of a thrice-burned world, that the races could work together, if he wasn't thinking of all the people who would die before it reached that point. Because of the decision he'd made. Cursing him and this wretched place as their children, parents, lovers breathed their last, dying themselves as they attacked the guards.
At that point, he could still care about them. And they prayed to him, or some of them did. Even the ones who cursed him. Even as they cursed him, invoked his name.
Their savior. Oh, it had taken Zero in the end to bring victory, but X? It was X that had been there from the beginning, fought to hold Weil back, rescue them from his clutches. X was the one building this place of refuge. The Father of all Reploids, the root from which they had sprung. The Child of Light.
If he ever found out who was responsible for him being called 'Master' in a non-ironic way… He should fight that, he knew. They were not slaves. Weil had meant to reduce them to that, and he hadn't succeeded.
Right?
Weil had made, had truly made them believe beyond any doubt that there was a devil. Weil was truly, horribly real. There was no denying that. Didn't the existence of a devil imply the existence of God? Evil imply good?
X used to think that the existence of good didn't necessarily imply the existence of evil. He didn't know what he thought anymore.
That should have worried him more, but he had almost gone numb, and thinking was a painful pastime. There was too much to think about, all of it horrible.
Just… Let them believe in whatever gave them comfort. Let them believe in him, despite all the times he had failed. Let them do what they wanted, when Weil had tried to take that freedom away from them. There had been plenty of odd people since he woke up, like all that fuss about how X had been immaculately conceived (of), although really X doubted a human as old as Dr. Light had been a virgin. Not that he'd ever asked, of course.
Let them have their rituals, cut cloth too threadbare to warm them into ribbons if it made them happy. Religion was an opiate, and the world had just been through so much pain. If they could use this to make sense of it all, then X almost envied them.
Let them have what they needed to survive, no matter the cost, to X or anyone or anything else. For the sake of these children, so they wouldn't be cursed by the sins of their father, for the sake of this scarred world, he would give them anything he could.
But sometimes, to be generous now meant that later there would be no more to give. Clearly he knew that. Knew that people could be used up, just like anything else.
He just didn't apply that to himself.
This is what happened the first time I tried to write the Alouette chapter, because it was right after I'd written the chapter where X explained that he was leaving with Zero & I wanted to show some of why ruling Neo Arcadia, making the decisions necessary for survival while dealing with the broken ones and the consequences of the cold equations was what finally broke him after both the Maverick Wars and Weil.
It's one thing to fight people who are brainwashed and crazy. It's another to fight the evil/insane plus those who want to die. Even Repliforce legally deserved what happened to them, due to negligence, desertion in the face of the enemy and plain too dumb to life.
How does a father, and a son who was protected by his own father's love and gifts for so long, deal with having to kill those who are just trying to save their own children's lives?