Challenge #02409-F219: Escape From a Hell-Planet

It's also worth pointing out that [Name] and Considering Long Term Consequences have a distant, if cordial, pen-pal relationship. -- RecklessPrudence

It's hard to think long-term when your long-term is what other people call 'tomorrow'. Living through the day was challenge enough on the world I used to call home. Planning a week ahead was madness. If you had asked me, there and then, what my plans would be for the weekend, on the day before it... I would have stared for a handful of seconds and eventually answered, "survive".

It was a brutal world. You could say life was cheap, there, but the opposite was true. Death, you got for free. Living was the expensive part. Like most people, I went to a working school where five hours' unskilled work earned an hours' lessons in essential skills that might have me on a higher level of earning sometime. I learned just enough to bumble my way through reading the signs on the roadways and doing enough math to figure out what I could afford to buy.

Make no mistake, I'm glad I got out. Captured by pirates on the way to a debtor's prison world, and then set loose on a kinder, gentler station. The thing is... even though I don't miss: being there, the price of medicine, the risk of mass shootings, the cheap and disgusting food that always made me sick, the lack of sleep, or the constant terror... I fit there. I knew how to be a person there.

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