50 Strikes

Prologue... I guess

Everything was perfect, no one could get hurt unless of course, they got fifty strikes. I live in a society where safety is ranked above living. Now you may think, what? That doesn't make any sense! How can someone be safe while being dead? I don't mean literal life and death, I mean the experience of life. Children aren't allowed to use scissors, no one is actually we have machines for that, the same goes for anything with a pointed edge anywhere on it. Every month every man, woman and child is required to take a test at the doctors office, it would be horrid if anyone developed a new allergy without knowing about it, or what if someone had a virus! All children and adults as a matter of fact are sheltered, kept safe from the horrors of the world, I was too but that didn't last long I went to visit my parents at the hospital at the wrong time. They told us they had a minor virus, they would be fine... they weren't fine. My brother was at his friends house that day I was going to go look at my parents through the glass meant for visitors, no one was allowed into the rooms of sick patients, they had extremely sterilized machines for that. Their chests weren't moving. I was fourteen, old enough to have learned that breathing was quite necessary for living.
That was four years ago, I can still remember my mothers sweet laugh, how my father would stare deep into space and play with his ring while he thought. They were the kindest people, they would greet everyone with a smile, as if there wasn't a care in the world and back then, I didn't think there was.
Since then I haven't gotten a single strike, neither has Hugo, most people don't, not for their entire lives. The only way to get a strike is to hurt someone, simple pain is one strike, a bruise that's two, fracture 5, break someone's bone 10, if you wound someone for life that's 20... the way to get 50 in one shot? Murder. 50 strikes you're out. Like I said most people don't get any strikes, the percentage of people who get 50 well that's 0.0000001% of everyone alive per year. Most people just live long lives eventually moving on from life because of old age. Not everything works in the picture perfect way we want it to though.