The Commodity Trade Convention Center was a place of grim business, hidden behind the facade of a sterile and orderly environment. Neatly dressed in standard commodity t-shirts and shorts, children from various Vocational Education Programs filed in, their faces marked with a blend of apprehension and resignation. Their outfits were uniform, but their individual stories were far from it.
A stern State Processor stood at the entrance, verifying each child’s legitimate working tag number with a practiced eye. Categorized by age and reliability rating, the children were placed in viewing cells like commodities on display, ready to be traded and sold to the highest bidder.
The convention center’s doors opened at 8 am for private viewing, where potential buyers and certified businesses could assess the goods. Public access, where anyone with an interest could enter, began at 10 am. It was a chilling marketplace where children were reduced to mere assets to be assessed and bartered.
Posters on the walls carried a stark disclosure: the commodity tag button on each child should glow green, not yellow. Yellow indicated that the commodity was within six months of turning 18, making them ineligible for sale or trade status. The system had a cold and merciless way of categorizing these young lives.
Amid this dehumanizing atmosphere, the Dock Foreman was a man who had accepted a thankless role to be closer to his own family and ailing mother. Married with a wife and three children, he knew that the job required him to push his emotions aside and maintain a stiff jaw.
With clipboard in hand, he counted the children as they were brought in, verifying tag numbers against the shipping order. His job was to ensure that the transaction went smoothly, to oversee the transition of these young lives from one form of captivity to another.
Meanwhile, the smelly truck driver, who had delivered the children to this place, smiled with a hint of satisfaction. Holding his hand out for payment, he reveled in the profits that would soon come his way. It was a world where morality had been sacrificed for financial gain, a world that viewed children not as dreams to be nurtured but as commodities to be traded.