Forgotten Dreams of Eternity: Lost Odyssey: Thousand Years of Dreams

(Short Story -XXX.) *Lottery of Life*

Forgotten Dreams of Eternity: Lost Odyssey: Thousand Years of Dreams

Copyright © 2011 Sky_Knight

(Short Story -XXX.)

*Lottery of Life*

Having kids is like playing the lottery.

That was how the police commissioner put it, with a grim smile and a sigh. He was the man in charge of domestic security.

"Sometimes you pick a winner, and sometimes you pick a loser.

Life is like that. You can't control it."

Kaim responded with a silent nod.

Not that he was convinced that you could divide people into "winners" and "losers."

But that was how they did it here in this country that was the size of a city. He had no choice but to recognize it as reality because the man who kept the peace here believed it, and this nation was known for having the best public safety of all the countries in the region.

"Every kid in there is a loser," he spat out, jerking his chin toward the juvenile prison visible from his office window.

Built to hold young criminals, this was the largest -and the most strictly run and most closely guarded -prison to be seen in any of the neighboring countries.

Its treatment of its young inmates was also the harshest.

"You're a foreigner, Kaim, so you may not approve, but we have our own way of doing things."

"I see," Kaim said.

"Losers are losers. There's nothing you can do to make losers into winners. It's never going to happen. Far from it. If you coddle losers, they just turn into bigger losers and give the decent people a lot of trouble. See what I mean?"

"That's one way of looking at things."

Kaim's deliberate irony was lost on the police commissioner.

"No. It's the only way -if you're going to have a safe, peaceful country," he declared. "And we'll expect you to abide by this view, too."

Kaim had nothing more to say to him.

If he were to insist on confronting the police commissioner, he might be seen as questioning the authorities, which could land him in the adults' prison. This would be easy enough to bring about for the police commissioner -and indeed for anyone in the city-state who stood on the side of the powers that be.

The commissioner glanced again toward the juvenile prison.

"They built that place eighty years ago," he said. "Which is to say, the very first building they made when the present political system came into being was a prison to throw young offenders into."

Kaim knew this.

For Kaim, whose life went on forever, events of eighty years before could well have happened yesterday.

Eighty years earlier, this country had experienced a coup d'etat. The revolutionary government ruled the people under a military dictatorship and jailed every last person suspected of disturbing the peace and order.

The government was especially wary of younger criminals.

"There's a limit to how serious a kid's crimes can be.

But let them get away with those, and the next thing you know they're doing really bad stuff. They might be satisfied with shoplifting at first, but soon they're into burglary, muggings, they start using weapons, and in the end they think nothing of killing people.