Interlude: The Orphanage
The Sub-Mets that dotted the barren surface of our earth were, in a way, giant orphanages, the caretakers of those whose relatives had been wiped out in the holocaust of radiation. Those lucky enough to have survived gave a grief-filled pat on the back to each other. We were the survivors. The ones chosen, by fate, or God, or the stars above, to represent the earth as it moved into its next, final phase. We were the ones who considered those vaporized in the bombings lucky. Most of us had said goodbye to parents as they succumbed to radiation-caused cancer, or any number of other diseases that plagued our despondent civilization.
In the Sub-Mets, any injury was fatal. We found that out the hard way. A simple scratch? On the surface, before the war, a quick dab of bactine and you were good to go, ready to go play back out on the swing set father had constructed for your birthday all those summers ago. A cough? Grab some antibiotics from your local pharmacy and, like magic, the ailment vanished. But, with virtually all medical supplies being taken by the military, no such luxury existed in the squalid wastes of the Sub-Mets. One cut, a single sniffle, or even a slight itch could condemn someone to a slow and painful death. Even the slightest fear of any sickness would cause alienation in the community. As most of us didn't have families, living arrangements were temporary at best, and any number of sick kids would be thrown out onto the streets daily, in order to protect the other occupants of that particular flat from their supposed disease.
The bodies began to show up after around the third week after Sub-Kyoto was opened to the public. At the time, I was on the regular graveyard shift patrol in the meatpacking district (long since burnt down because of radiation poisoning), enforcing curfews and keeping watch over municipal structures. The new city gleaned in the artificial night, sparkling white concrete giving way to high-rises jammed full with the despondent cries of those suffering from radiation sickness. Sure, we had seen the kids out on the streets before, marked with black circles on their left palms to distinguish them as diseased. But we had never expected them to die so quickly. Of course, many of the ones we saw ventured into the darkness surrounding our town, hoping to find solace in a quick and brutal death. But more and more had simply ceased living, either starving or succumbing to whatever ailment troubled them.
I begged my superiors to help fund a resource officer to get the kids off the streets and into medical facilities, just to at least make them comfortable in their final hours, but I was denied fourteen times. The grounds, the letters told me, lay in simple economics. As resources were drawn thin across the entire world, leaders reasoned that military personnel and those who tested out on the Civilian Skills Examination took precedence over the needs of the general population. After all, with no manufacturing going on, those whose primary skills lay in unskilled labor were "unnecessary to the war effort" and were basically doomed to die. Every last one of us had lost our Mother Earth to cancer, but for us unlucky orphans, searching for any place to take us in, the Sub-Mets were merely gas chambers for those not wanted by society's upper crust. After I got my last response, I gave up, knowing that the actions that I didn't take condemned innocent souls to death.
But what really scared me was that, despite the astounding causality figures, the bodies of those children were never collected, even though the streets remained spotless.