The Child is SCP-231
At some point, the SCP Foundation realized that not only could the torture be used to stop 231 from destroying the world, it could be used to improve the world if the torture was intensified enough. Eventually, they managed to create the perfect paradise of Omelas. By the time of this story, all the other hostile SCPS have died (even 682) and the benign ones have integrated into the society of Omelas. However, they found the torture too unconscionable to fix the whole world, and in the end, they restricted it to a single city. Those who can't tolerate the Foundation's treatment of 231 walk away into the rest of the world, which has not been approved by 231. The people of Omelas made a Deal with the Devil
The terms of the deal were that the demons would satisfy their hearts’ every desire and even stop tempting them into sin, allowing the Omelans to create a utopian society, at the cost of torturing one child forever. This is why the child’s torture is necessary for the city’s prosperity—the demons would withdraw their boons and Omelas would disintegrate if its people ever stopped torturing a child. But because the people tolerate this system, they are committing a grave sin, so they will go to hell when they die, which is the only reason the demons are allowing this when their nature is to hurt people. Only those who walk away refuse to participate in this sin and may be spared. Eventually, God will righteously smite Omelas, the citizens who tolerated evil will be damned, the child will go to Heaven, and only those who walked away will be spared. There is no child being tortured. Omelas really is a utopia.
The narrator doesn't bring up the tortured child until the person he is speaking to starts goading him with questions about what kind of problems there could possibly be in a utopia. That person is presumably a stand-in for the audience, who— no doubt due to having consumed so many dystopian works— cannot believe that a real utopia could ever exist without some horrible flaw. So the narrator makes up the story about the tortured child to appease their curiosity, and to make their society seem more "real" than a society with no flaws at all. And he had to do that because you didn't believe him when he told the truth. You Bastard!, indeed. The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas are meant to be those who believe that a true utopia is possible.
- The narrator starts out by describing Omelas as the perfect utopia: free of guilt, free of suffering, with enough for all and with nature fully subdued to man. But when he suspect that we finds them unbelievable, that we cannot believe in a community of true and spotless joy, he postulates the existence of the tortured child and says "Now do you believe them? Are they not more credible?" But he doesn't stop there. He postulates that there are those who walk away from Omelas, who are seeking something else. And what they are seeking can only be the same spotless utopia that Omelas was supposed to be, before we ruined it by our inability to believe in joy without a cost. So those who leave Omelas are the people who the narrator wished for at the beginning, people who could accept a true utopia as possible.
