A man was not defined by how he was born, no matter how strongly people wished to argue for just that. People were not good from the second that the light could touch their skin. Nor were they evil. Those small creatures sat in the grey zone of life, likely to remain there for decades to come.

That didn't mean that kids could not do terrible things, actions which could be seen as being done by the devil himself. Children under the age of ten were perfectly able to perform acts of terrorism, murder, arson, torture, and day-light robbery. It was not as if nature stopped those actions by default or anything. Any human with a knife was more dangerous than one unarmed. Troy had seen many kids in that age-group holding an automatic rifle each. Those had been rusted over, impossible to use for anything but blunt weapons. Didn't mean that those kiddos didn't try to bluff as if they could have.

Back in the old days, when Troy was still living with his mother, things had been… hard. Not for himself. No, he had more than he should have had in that situation, their stamps bringing more than enough food on the table, and the rent having been paid for years to come. Those who lived close by did not have the same conditions on their hands. Most were without money, without food, the only thing stopping the owners from kicking the entire neighbourhood population out of the rented homes being laws put in place to stop homelessness. Each day that passed by just increased the debts of those that lived there.

Shop-owners did not give a glance to those in debt. If a person had baggage attached, no job would want to hire them. If people had debt, it meant that they had something holding them down. And they certainly had, any cash earned instantly being taken away by those who had the quickest hands. People were not even allowed to beg for food, being given stern warnings if they even said so much as 'please`.

Those people that lived next to Troy were likely to never grow from the place that they were. They weren't allowed any real entertainment. That stuff costed money. Money which they weren't allowed to have long enough for them to even notice they had it in the first place.

There was no social mobility for anybody in that situation, nothing to make their days go by. The debt being accumulated was traded between those in power like regular cash, them knowing it would remain forever. Any children owned by the people would only end up in similar situations. Debt fell down the generations, as the old ones fell a few feet beneath the ground.

The group that Troy had grown up with were forever doomed, made to suffer for the crimes of people that they would never meet. Was this fair, in any way whatsoever? These people didn't ask to be born into a world where their parents were in debt, they didn't make any humble requests about being shot down by any business possible, and they certainly didn't consent to that torture that was called living. Suicide wasn't a possible way to escape. They would just get revived soon enough, the medical bills being sent out soon after.

Not having kids to take the burden after them wasn't an option either. The debt collectors needed somebody to jab the finger at, and the law had that part sorted. There would always be a child by the adults' side. Forced adoption, it could be called. Troy wasn't doubting that people had found a more elegant name for it, one that nearly excused just how cruel it was.

The system that surrounded them all was forcing this to happen, nothing ever defeating it. Troy’s case was unique, his family being purged of all debts by pure chance. His father had been at the wrong place at the wrong time, yet people had seen it as an accident for an innocent man. The donations had certainly shut up his mother about telling anybody the truth. They had been allowed to live safely, but anybody else they knew didn't have that comfort.

Adults forced to be parents, deprived of any distractions other than a blank wall, and expected to be functioning members of a society that hated them. Was it so hard to figure out why they had all turned onto constant drug-abuse? They wanted out, wanted a dose so high that nothing could let them go back. They wanted insanity to hit them so that it could possibly let them live out a delusion less depressing than the one that they were in now. These people were treated like garbage, thrown around like garbage, and they acted like garbage because of it.

Troy could remember hating every one of them, hating how they treated their so-called kids, and hating just how they grimaced every time they saw him. Trash had been thrown at him, words had been shouted, lies created on the spur of the moment. Each time he thought he had gained a new friend, he had been told by others his age that they weren't allowed to be around him anymore. Finn had been the only one not to be told that by his parents. Though, that might have been because the two adults never got to realise that the little boy had been hanging around Troy, to begin with.

That abduction hadn't done anything to improve his perceptions of those people, their image only seeming worse because of it. As it turned out, with Finn being out of their lives, those, in particular, had been able to make a small profit through the years. They had been able to get themselves to pay off a massive amount of debt through their concentrated efforts, letting one of them hold a job for a few months. It had possibly been the happiest times in their lives, only ruined by some debt collectors getting wind of them having a stable source of income. They had been set in place quickly enough, two suicide attempts being more than enough to double their previous debt.

These were what anybody would look down on. Even when he had been part of the community, Troy couldn't help but feel as if some of those people were in there because it was their own fault. They had just not worked hard enough, of course. Their position in life was based fully on their own actions!

…

It really didn't work. Nobody wanted it, but some still got it, born into a life that no person would ever want to have. Troy still remembered all those visits by the authorities, after the first large wave of newcomers had come around. It had been after new legislation came around, it being the result of some fancy numbers published. Keeping people in prison was apparently bad for the economy, and releasing them with monetary measures was far cheaper for the state.

Those that had lived normal lives, only to end up in jail for a fault not their own, and to just be dumped inside a small house with a debt large enough to crush their necks had not taken it easy at all. It had been two full days before the first attempt was made, a surprisingly long time in the eye of a child. After the first had tried to lose a little blood, copy-cats began to spring up all around. Some tried to be a little creative, breaking their necks in some way, trying to instigate a fight, or just plain old trying to drink cleaning materials. Each was not close to fatal, whatever damage made being fixed within minutes. A station was even put on the street for a few weeks, just to make sure nobody was successful. The government had known what they were doing, understood how many lives they were running.

And those bastards did it all with a smile on their face. The general population had not understood just what had happened when the prisons were emptied. The smiles on the prisoners had only been brief, only appearing on their faces before they understood that they were not actually being released fully. The bars keeping them in had just gotten a new name.

The people that made up the average, the mass that consisted of nearly the entire working force, saw it all as something to be happy about, something that needed immediate celebration. That group were so deep into their own couches that they couldn't understand how bad it was for others. Any objections made were slathered in criticism. How could outside life be worse than prison? It didn't make sense. Freedom was better than anything else. Restriction of it was worse than death itself.

The government was just that good when it came to making themselves look good. Authority had to look as positive as possible, and the people behind the facade were masters at keeping it up. They looked flawless, every step they took making flowers grow in the dirt. Birds would sing them welcome, the people would shout praises, and the business owners would distribute their wealth to the politicians at the top.

Some said that the world ran on marbles. Troy thought that it was closer to corruption. The local representatives may have been without a flawed moral, but those that were further up the ladder had different circumstances. One could not climb this particular ladder. A politician could only be pulled up or they could be kicked off. The companies paid those on top to promote those that wanted to lessen restrictions on the businesses, and those with anything else were made to fill the missing bottom placements.

Everything that mattered to them was the profit, how much money they could earn from it. There were no thoughts on the pain caused, on the lives that it would ruin. All that mattered was the monetary gain, and the abolishment of small prison-sentences was the most profitable thing that could be done.

This led back to the original point. The adults left in the situation of debt, full of self-hatred, and wanting to escape their lives were not to be blamed for the lives they lived, for they could not do anything to ever escape it. They might have changed as people if they ever were bad, to begin with, but that would not change a single thing in their lives.

Who was to blame for this inability to move on in life? There weren't any names that Troy could drop, no people that he could point out, and definitively say made it all happen. The people behind it all were in the shadows, never having any reason to publicly announce themselves. It was only those that represented those people that could be seen, and that were the politicians who acted like they made the decisions.

It was as deep as Troy could get with his pointing, the only legitimate target that his primitive mind could hone in on. It was the people in the authority that was to blame for all the terrible things, them encouraging a system that only made things worse for those at the bottom. It might have been a system that benefitted many, but why did a few have to be in constant pain to preserve it? There were better ways to structure a society.

Better ways that those in the top had no interest for. They just took orders from those in the sky and acted like it was the greatest purpose in the world. Troy doubted that they really were blinded by their greed, being closer to them knowing exactly what they were doing, and just not caring about it at all.

That way to look at the situation, just seeing the people as numbers on a piece of paper. Troy couldn't understand how they could live with themselves, how they hadn't had some first-hand experience with just how good medical services were.

Since the time where he finally began to understand, his respect for any authority figure fell dramatically. Any of it made him clench his jaw, containing himself from what was clear abuse. People in power were not good, and they shouldn't have been there, to begin with. It was not always the truth, but it was nearly law for those in the higher echelons.

It had made keeping a job steady nearly impossible, yet the young man had not wanted to keep this mentality under the wraps. Living a lie for the sake of being successful was not anything anybody should have ever been forced to do.

And there certainly wasn't anything making Troy act so respectively now. It was his own choice, not wanting to fall back into the hell-hole that he shouldn't have gotten out of. If he was out of a job for too long, his debt would grow too high, and he would go back to a house that would remind him of his childhood.

“Walk faster. You are slowing down,” Dr Hale commanded.

“Of course, madam,” Troy answered as he quickened his pace. They would reach the cafeteria soon. That was his choice, in the end. To follow the one who seemed to have figured more out than him.