Taro had been working for Tanaka for more than two years, and try as he might have, it was inevitable that their reputation would eventually prove to be a myth, or a horrible truth. As a young slummie youth growing up in a sector one schoolhouse, policing was a terrible thing. He'd seen people die in the streets when he was six, pushed under the treads of an Autocop and summarily sentenced for not having proper identification. The Yakuza didn't hand out ID; you had to pay for it. His Citcard was something Taro had held dear to himself as long as he could remember. It was the only thing standing between him and capital punishment. It was his bank now, his employee ID, and his proof that your average thug might regret cutting him down if they worked for Tanaka money.
Taro had spent two years training, learning everything he could about nanotechnology. It was a strange revolutionary science that had helped put Tanaka in every major city in the UFS. Tanaka nanites were the lifeblood of medical tech in the trade federation, keeping citizens healthy in the face of constant radiation exposure by nuclear technology, which had become essential for everything from cars and computers, to lights in homes.
Tanaka controlled everything in New Dallas. Every sector was their territory. Even the police had their pockets lined with Tanaka credits, with officers who were more often Yakuza gangsters than not.
But Taro had seen the hospitals, so clean and tolerable. People doing the work of caring for patients, giving them replacement limbs, saving their lives and letting them know everything would be fine. The people never understood what the cost was, the charges for medical procedures, cost of nanites, food and board, transport, blood tests, and everything they could manage to justify to help keep you informed about your health. Not until after the fact, at least.
Some people came back with debt they never could pay off. Tanaka medical never turned down a costumer - it was another corporate slogan, a nice catch-phrase before you saved someone's life.
Machines wandered the streets, lost, wandering around the outside of the hospital in Zero. His mentor told Taro to ignore them, a thousand people they couldn't help because they only took organics as patients. Taro often wondered why they were always there, despite being driven off by Autopcops regularly.
It was as if there were more of them every day.
Eventually, Taro noticed he had patients that were wheeled away unconscious, taken somewhere whenever the costs were too high for them to pay. Tanaka knew their net worth, where they worked, how much they made, and their repor with the company. Sometimes, he never saw them again. He'd asked about a man he'd known from childhood, an old classmate who had never trusted Tanaka butchers. But so long as Taro worked on him, he was happy to come in and get some help.
"Don't worry, he's gone."
One of the machines stared at him in the street. It was a sad look he'd first seen in school all those years ago, the same look that lonely kid who didn't know anybody had. No friends, no family - an orphan kid, who Taro had befriended. When he approached the plastishell unit, a thin, obviously robotic humanoid that would ruin standing around in the rain as it was, it ran from him. He watched security mercilessly beat machines that got too close, breaking limbs off before they escaped and ran into the ruins of the city ghettos.
Taro tried to find his old school friend the next day. He went to his house and found his mother, wondering where her son was. He had never come home from Tanaka's hospital.
So Taro decided that it was time to leave Tanaka. He'd told them that he was going part-time, and hoped that this new job might turn out to be less horrible, and maybe even less dangerous than working for Tanaka.
