The Future Is Japanese by Unknown Page A

people, and that’s how they could go around killing people without blinking—that’s what the captain told me. And I found his logic pretty convincing.
    “Hurts, does it? Of course it doesn’t, right, you little Hoa fuck!” I shouted, driving the point of the pencil down further.
    The classroom erupted in a melee, and a number of my friends rallied to my side. I pierced the Hoa’s body over and over with my knifelike pencil, stabbing him with deadly accuracy, opening up more and more holes in his body. Not to be outdone by us the Hoa started flocking round, but without AKs this couldn’t truly be called a real battle. We pushed, we shoved, we shouted at each other. When the dust was settled, though, not a single one of the happy inhabitants of the House of Smiles had died. Our little war just petered out.
    I guess I’ll be kicked out of this place now, I thought to myself.
    I wondered where I was supposed to go next. Heaven City was already bursting at the seams with beggared children. I’d seen desiccated little corpses left lying there where they died in the street, unable to find any sustenance for themselves. Some were Xema children, others were Hoa, and sooner or later I would be joining their ranks. The people at the House of Smiles talked grandly of the day we would “graduate,” but they couldn’t keep us from knowing about the harsh reality of what was waiting on the outside.
    If I’d still been a soldier I would have been able to obtain food by raiding Hoa villages, but the problem was we’d had our AK-47s taken away from us. Even though the war was now over—or rather, because the war was now over—we’d been plunged into a world of misery and hunger.
    Surprisingly enough, I wasn’t turfed out of the institute.
    White men came. No—there had already been a few whites in the school. More accurate to say a new contingent arrived. They looked like doctors. A number of expensive-looking shiny black vans pulled up inside the grounds, and men in bright t-shirts and sunglasses poured out of them. The black vans had a large logo—a pretty cool design, if truth be told—plastered on their sides: “CMI.”
    I’d forgotten the name of the doctor who I found standing right in front of me at that moment, but I remember he said that he’d come to heal our hearts. So he must’ve been a doctor.
    “What’s CMI?” I asked, not even attempting to hide my wariness. “Are you anything to do with the SLF?”
    “No, nothing to do with the SLF, son. Having said that, we’re not related to the SDA either,” the doctor answered calmly. “You used to be a soldier with the SDA, didn’t you?”
    “What’s CMI?” I asked again. I didn’t want any more of his sympathy or pity. I was tired of talking about my life as a soldier. And I was sick of this casual, meaningless sympathy, given so freely and worth so little, from these people who never once in their life had had to worry about where their next meal was coming from.
    “CMI stands for ‘Combat Medical Instruments.’ It’s English. If you translated it into your language, it would mean something like an organization for helping people with the problems they suffer from after battle.”
    “Yeah, I speak English. Not difficult words, though.”
    “Of course you do, son, forgive me. I see from your file you wanted to be a doctor? Your grades at school were top of the class too—you’re quite the bright young man, I can see.”
    This blatant attempt at buttering me up pissed me off. “So what is it exactly that this CMI does?” I asked.
    “Well, as I said, we try and help soldiers who have been hurt, in body and in mind. We also inoculate soldiers against anxiety and depression by giving them a little shot to the heart.”
    “A shot to the heart …”
    “That’s right. A jab, a shot. With the technology we have these days, we’re not just limited to administering our injections intravenously. We can also give a little shot straight to the