She despised all Welfare Centres as a general rule, but most especially this one.

She’d waited three hours in an uncomfortable metal chair, watching the news channel on the muted viewscreen, night-vision images of gunfire, bombs and airstrikes. Eventually, the display light at the service desk buzzed garish red neon with her name: “Frankie Simkins”.

With a struggle, using her crutch to get up, she hobbled across the wipe-clean flooring. While she’d been sitting waiting, the floor had been sheened over by KleenBots twice; first when a thin, sickly-looking child puked all over himself and the floor, and second when an old man had urinated on it, shouting something threatening in a foreign language. Security had arrived and took him away, then the KleenBots had buzzed in.

Frankie got to the appointed desk without slipping over and sat down.

The Welfare Officer was a woman, bland-looking, severe.

“Mrs Simkins?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

“How can Welfare help you today, Mrs Simkins?”

“I, erm…I need a crisis loan.”

“I see.” The WO prodded buttons on her computer, and scanned the screen.

“Mrs Simkins, you’ve had three Crisis Loans from us in the past four years, one of them still outstanding. You don’t qualify for another.” The WO was closing the file on the computer; that was it, it was not negotiable.

“But I can’t afford it any more. Everything’s gone up. I can’t pay my bills. Please, make an exception, I’m begging you.”

“Mrs Simkins, you’re aware of the current state of the economy? And the war, too is very expensive. You don’t qualify for another loan.”

“But I’ve got a family to feed. Please… look…do you have any children? You must know what it’s like?”

“My status is of no concern here,” said the WO plainly.

“Please help me.” Frankie was close to tears now, but trying to sniff the emotion back into her nose. “I need help.”

“You know the procedure, Mrs Simkins. There can be no loan,” She swiped at her computer screen; “Do you still have three children, Mrs Simkins?”

“Yes, three. Jilly’s just a baby, I can’t afford her milk formula.”

“Are you telling me you’d like me to open a Social Care Order?”

“What’s that?”

“We would redistribute your baby. It would ease your financial situa-”

“No! No-one’s taking my baby!” Frankie nearly screamed, between tears now too numerous to dam.

“Then perhaps you would like a token to take to your clinic. The State would meet the cost of your womb being biologically dessicated.”

“I can’t do that! I’m only 28. Look, it’s just my budget’s really squeezed. I can’t feed-” She nearly said, ‘I can’t feed my kids’, but stopped herself; they would probably be taken away if she said that. “Me and my husband barely eat. The kids get it all. Please, I just need a few hundred.”

“I see your husband works in the Uranium Plant. A labourer. Are you still looking for work, Mrs Simkins?”

Frankie’s tears stopped with astonishment. She stood up on her crutch and took a couple of hops away from the desk. “Haven’t you seen my problem? How am I supposed to keep a family together and clean and fed, and then go out to work and labour somewhere. Who would employ me?” She aimed her plastic stump at the Welfare Officer. “I’ve only got one bloody leg, for Christs sake!”

“OK, Mrs Simkins, please sit down. There’s no need for hysterics.” She swiped more screen, ruffled more papers. Frankie sat back down.

“Clearly you know all the benefits of the system,” the WO said,
“Therefore you know that there will be no crisis loan today, or in fact, any other day until you’ve repaid what is outstanding.”

Frankie was about to get up and leave; she was considering urinating on the floor on her way out.

“All we can offer is to further lighten your load…if you were willing to make a Contribution to the War Effort. I’m obligated by my employers to inform you that a single Contribution to the State will lessen your nutritional needs and therefore your personal food intake by up to nine percent. With a hungry family to feed, this could make your life just that tiny bit easier. And, of course, you’d also receive all the appropriate benefits for your Contribution, which now include the new Severance Allowance for six months.”

Frankie was dabbing her eyes; the tears had gone, but reality remained.

“Just one more loan,” she said. “That’s all I’m asking. I’m desperate.”

“Desperate times require desperate measures, Mrs Simkins.”

Frankie sighed, defeated. “But…it’s hard now. How would I manage?”

“You seem to be a strong woman…but something in your family has to give. The baby is still an option.”

“No. God, no,” said Frankie. She sat for a moment, head bowed, weighing up the devil and the deep blue sea.

“Alright,” she said, finally, “if there’s no other way… I suppose I’ll have to…”

The WO reached into a drawer for the correct papers, and began to put the process in motion.

“…before I change my mind.” Frankie said under her breath.

Applications were filled, papers signed, and financial support determined in a little under twenty minutes. Frankie had remained mostly quiet; she was deflated, beaten.

“Ok, Mrs Simkins, that’s all correct,” said the WO and pointed to the far end of the office. “Booth number six has just become free. You can go straight in. Your new benefit package will begin immediately. Thank you once again for your worthy sacrifice to our great country. Goodbye, Mrs Simkins.”

Frankie hauled herself up, massaged her palms on her forehead, and hobbled over to Booth Six. The door was standing open, and she went in, forcing herself not to hop like hell away from the place.
In the room was a man in a white plastic coat. He closed the door behind her, and slipped on the ‘engaged’ sign.

“Hello again, Mrs Simkins,” he said, quite cheerily, as he changed his white rubber surgeons gloves, “What did you have in mind, this time?”

Frankie was crying again, and shaking her head.

“Oh, don’t you fret,” said the doctor, as he handed her a surgical gown. “They graft them on really quickly these days, and they’re so much more versatile than the prosthetics. Six months or so, and our boys and girls are back on the front line. If you could just get changed into the gown please.”

Frankie began to cross the room, heading for the changing area.

“What do you think, then?” the doctor said, as he readied the anaesthetic mask. “Perhaps an arm this time? Those robotic ones are so fiddly; our soldiers like nothing better than real fingers.”

I saw him on a walk after Learning. I don’t usually interact with long people, but when I saw him brush his shining black hair from his eyes, I was transfixed. I waited around the pool until he came off the stand.

“My name’s Cali,” I said. He towered over me. I hadn’t been able to see how tall he was from a distance. My whole body tingled. I shouldn’t be doing this.

“Can I help you?” His voice was soft, with a hint of an accent. Maybe Thai? I’d query it in Learning tomorrow. “I’m off shift right now, but I suppose I could answer a quick question.”

“Oh, I’m not a pool patron,” I said too quickly, trying not to let my face grow hot. “I’m new in town,” I said. I regretted the lie instantly. “But I thought you looked about my age…” far from it. He was teenaged and I was three.

“My name’s Kusa. I was about to go join my friends at the park. Do you want to come?”

I smiled and nodded.

Warren fell into the backseat of the taxi and let the stillness settle over him.

“The wind will tear the clothes off your bloody back,” the cab driver said.

“Yeah, well, at least it’s dry today.”

The cabby pulled away and switched on the radio. A sombre female reporter announced: It’s official, we can now add the Butterflyfish to the list of marine species extinct in the wild. Numbers of coral fish have dropped dramatically since the unexplained death of large parts of coral in the Indian and Pacific oceans.

“Is that for real, another one?” Warren said. He leaned forward. “Turn it up please?”

But it was too late; the reporter had moved on to the next horror story, yet another fatal air crash over the city. The Air Accidents Investigation Branch had cancelled all flights over central London until they carried out a full investigation into the multiple, seemingly unrelated accidents.

“Bloody madness,” the cabby mumbled. “People are wondering why this stuff is happening, ain’t they? Well, if they read the Bible they’d understand…”

Warren nodded politely and closed his mind to the cabby’s melodramatic reckonings. He was late visiting his mother and would have to put in another all-nighter at his lab tonight. The thought made his head throb.

The nursing home looked like the other neighbouring Victorian town houses. There was no shortage of profit in converting large houses into homes for the rising number of mentally ill. The only things that identified their purpose were subtle signs set back into the wide driveways. Warren’s mother, Joyce, had never outright said she liked it here, but Warren knew she enjoyed walking the grounds and listening to the residents natter.

Joyce was in her room. The walls were cream, the carpet a slightly darker wheatgrass. The cleaner had made the bed up with white linen to exact standards. Joyce’s only piece of personal furniture was her pale wooden chair with white floral cushions. A far-side window overlooked well-tended gardens, and the TV hanging from the wall angled down towards the chair, switched off. But Joyce stared up at it as if enthralled by an epic romance.

“Hi, Mum. What’s happening?”

She stiffened slightly, but didn’t face him.

Warren pulled up a stool from under a desk and lightly touched Joyce’s arm. Perhaps there was a hint of a smile, perhaps not.

“Are you okay, Mum?”

It was a standard question. He didn’t expect an answer, not when she was like this. He’d be lucky to get a coherent sentence out of her today.

“Work’s busy. The project deadline is this Friday and I haven’t even tested my scanning system yet.”
Joyce jolted like she’d just woken up. Her lips curled up into a sharp smile. “You better get it finished or they won’t pay you,” she said.

“Well, yeah. I know that, Mum. I was just… Never mind.”

“Your grandfather used to spend most of his money hot from the pay envelope, you know? The landlord of the Dog’s Inn did well, mind. I bet his daughters didn’t go hungry.”

Joyce’s breathing quickened, and her eyes glinted with tears.

“It’s okay.” Warren took her hand and looked her in the eye. “It’s my turn to look after you now, me and the nurses here.”

Joyce relaxed. Her frightened expression dissipated through an emerging smile, a breath-taking glimpse of the strong woman she had been. “Warren, I know you look out for me. You’re a good boy.” She giggled, then leant forward, her face darkened to a knowing frown. Warren braced himself.

“I see them every day now, the hidden people. They fly in the clouds and spit their germs down on us. They make us crazy.”

Warren choked back sorrow. “Things will get better. The work we’re doing is taking us closer to mapping the brain. We’ll soon understand why so many people are falling ill like you. Maybe, one day soon, we will find a cure.”

Joyce’s expression glazed over. Her gaze stared through her son. He waited a minute, still and silent, then leant forward and kissed her.

“See you tomorrow, Mum.”