They didn't have parenting licenses, didn't care. They raised these orphaned children to the best of their ability and made sure the children were safe, knew love, were educated, and given the best lives they had the ability to give them. -- The New Guy
[AN: Honestly, the parenting licenses are there to ensure that guardians don't harm the kids they raise. Pretty much the same philosophy as your statistical outlier there]
My name is Taro. Yes, like the food. And I'm a criminal.
You Galactics have a soft approach to what the former administration considers crime. Some crimes aren't crimes at all to you lot. But I need assurances. All the kids in the warren? I want your guarantee that they're going to full care. The whole soft Alliance treatment. Give it to me in writing.
Okay. That's... that's good. I know I'm a criminal. I've broken a whole bunch of laws, and not just mine. I took in trash babies, and I've been caregiving without one of your licenses. And I've been doing it for years.
You want a full confession, right? Right.
I was a teen when I found the first one. Still alive in a dumpster. It's illegal to prevent a birth, here. Was. Illegal. When a girl gets her bloods, she's a woman, and... women have to have babies. And it's a life-ruining event when someone who's eighteen, thirteen... even eight[1]... gives birth. It's more devastating when they're younger than that.
But my polity has only talked a big game about preserving life. If you die horribly, and then it's because you were evil. It's because you deserved it.
Bubba was my first act of rebellion. I picked them up out of the dumpster and tried to hussle for some kind of milk for them. I had no idea that baby formula was a controlled substance. So for my second criminal act was knocking over a formula depository for all the stuff I could carry.
I was already a criminal for saving a trash baby and owning a still. This was nothing very different. Maybe they were right. Crime just leads to more crime.
And no, I wasn't making bootleg booze. I was distilling out 'healthy and fortified' city water for the allegedly poisonous clear stuff. We're used to being lied to in the tumbledowns. We know that people who drink the 'poison' live longer, but we're not allowed to know why.
Some of us figured it out, but if we talk about it... we disappear.
I already lived in the tumbledowns, but I couldn't stay there with a whole baby and all the stolen formula I could carry. For one, I'd be straight up murdered for the merchandise. The kid would die too and I was deep into the sunk cost there.
So I took the kid and the loot deeper than the tumbledowns. Literally underground. Well. Under common street level. I fed the kid with the help of my day's water, and left them in a nest I made out of some of my clothes. Then I moved my still down there.
You learn a lot in the tumbledowns. How you can make filters out of sand and charcoal and fluff. But not the fluff they put in diapers. That just soaks up moisture and doesn't stop. Like ever. I mean, there is a way to get liquid out of it? But it's intense. Too many hours.
It stinks a lot in the warren. And I knew that bad air made bad health. Another thing we couldn't talk about. So for the space I claimed? I made filters for all the incoming air. I appropriated a fan or two for that.
I did a lot more later. This was just the start.
So. Clean air. Clean water. I mostly cleaned the space because it was gross and I wanted something nice to sleep in. A literal lifetime of scrounging teaches you to make do with whatever you can grab. It teaches you to manage time to the second.
I hung around until Bubba wasn't so sick. Day and night, I nursed them back to a state where they could be left sleeping while I went out on missions. A quick break and enter. A scouting for another, better place.
I found more trash babies. Newborns just... abandoned by their mothers. Birthing parents. Whatever. Sometimes, they were kids thrown out of their houses.
It's illegal to help disabled people, and I was already a criminal, so...
Yeah. I took them in. I picked them up. I gave them a place to stay, a place to sleep, and I stole food for them to eat. In later years, we even set up some farms to grow actual food. That's super illegal too. You'd be surprised what you can do with wire racks and lights stolen from the swankier neighbourhoods.
By first real breakthrough was Bitty. Her parents called her 'bitch' but I won't. She was thrown out for being pregnant and I'm sure she was sure I'd take another advantage. I'm not into that sort of thing.
After she had the baby, she nursed the other babies. She didn't care they were trash babies. She just cared about caring. A lot of the little ones call her 'mom' and I don't blame them. Having her around helped a lot more live to five.
Another bonus - she can read. She taught the rest of us, or tried to. It just... won't take with me. I can't tell the letters apart so easy. They jump around. Never held me back, all the same.
Things kind'a got out of hand. Kids on the street, young people with nowhere to go, and of course trash babies. They all came into my little hide-away. More and more as the babies grew into kids and the kids got strong enough to save more trash babies.
They don't leave. Didn't leave. They had nowhere else to go and... nothing better to do. We were all criminals anyway. You call them broken people, right? Disabled? Oh. Right. That, then.
We were all rejects. Criminals. Sinners. We had nobody else but each other and... one little space under everyone else's notice became a whole warren. I know the officials noticed because they sent cops down to raid it from time to time.
It's not just called a warren. The whole place is a maze and all us misfits know to scatter when anyone in armour turns up.
It's why I wanted your guarantee. If I know you're safe, they'll believe me when I tell them. You set them up with the best they can get from you, and I'll take whatever sentence you got.
...what do you mean I'm getting a reward?
[1] The youngest mother on record was six years old when she was forced to carry a pregnancy to term. She was much younger when she got her menses. That's messed up and so is that policy mentioned above.
[Photo by Andy Li on Unsplash]
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