The male silk moth can detect a single pheromone molecule from a female moth who is miles away. The molecule lands on one of his antenna’s receptors. He swerves left, banks right, finds another molecule. He guesses at a flight path; another molecule hits. He triangulates and pursues the concentration gradient.
Equally, I think, weaving through the throng of pedestrians, cart drivers, motorcyclists, and street vendors, the moth could, if he chose, use his detection system to steer clear.
I squeeze through a logjam near a melon stand, sidestep a bicycle wheel. I imagine my hunters radiating chemicals, tiny blobs assembled into signature structures I can sense with my naked eye.
The crowd loosens near the bazaar’s outskirts. I pick up my pace, slipping by like the moth in zips and veers.
I conjure up places to hide: cubbyholes in cracked stucco houses, narrow stairwells into dank basements, the open window of an empty room.
I spy a shallow alcove and duck in, press my back to the cool wall, exhale. Lean my head against the peeling bricks and close my eyes.
Had I done the thing the AccuTrial App had found me guilty of?
Its algorithms had determined I’d shot the victim at his residence.
True.
They said I’d chucked the weapon and fled.
Okay.
But then they concluded I’d committed murder. And this, the more I think about it…this can’t be right.
Because for one thing, murder is unjustifiable killing.
But this was the official who’d directed the Keep Society Clean and Safe pod to ferry me—just as he had with so many of our fellow citizens!—to Re-education Compound. Someone had falsely accused me of expressing disbelief in Deities Almighty and reservations about Great Country Leader, on top of engaging in unconventional sexual activities, no less.
I can’t even comprehend doing such things. Nor do I want to. But Re-ed Comp is where undesirable but legally unassassinatable people die by “accident” or “natural causes,” in ways rumored to be gruesome and prolonged.
I shake at the thought…and at what I had done.
It must have been self-defense! I do the right thing, I follow orders. The law acknowledges justifiable homicide…
Anyway, doesn’t murder require an understanding of right and wrong? Someone who can choose whether to follow through?
But I’m like the bee stinging an attacker, the rabbit fleeing a predator: I act automatically, following instilled norms I wouldn’t know how to question. Roles drummed into me from birth, strict behavioral codes, dress and grooming requirements. Beliefs to profess and words to avoid. Media to consume and media to eschew. Judgments, values, matters of right and wrong: outside my purview. No need to reason or reflect. No impetus to imagine other possibilities. A pure, transactional instrument for profit and power. (HailPeace Unto the Amazing Free Society of Incredible People!)
So what understanding? What choice? What responsibility?
I inhale, push off the dusty wall, sprint to who knows where.
The reality is, there aren’t any places to hide.
Scent Seekers are smaller than the resplendent silk moths from which they are engineered. Their bullet-shaped bodies are drab, light brown. They supplement their energy reserves with solar nanocells. Where their bio-counterparts sport a feeding proboscis, lab-grown glands eject barbiturates through a titanium lancet.
They travel any distance to reach their mark. Vector algorithms map the target’s path. A smart probability array predicts the target’s future movement.
And unlike silk moths, which home in on a pheromone all females emit, this crew is currently programmed to track one particular odortype: mine.
Thing is, when the kill notice had gone out—reverberating through the district square, caroming off walls, pinballing through the alleys—a strange impulse surged in my gut, exploding into my chest and flaring to the ends of my limbs. And I was racing on fraying, Freedom Approved sneakers with a primal drive to run! that had found shape in a newly realized human will, sparking my imagination, coalescing into a kind of logical reasoning: If I had to escape, there must be somewhere to go. And if it was me I had to protect, I must be worth protecting.
The thrilling absurdity of these thoughts rockets me through the packed streets, around clusters of hot, hectic bodies, huts and apartments strung with clotheslines and electrical wires, past businesses and schools and faith centers and beyond, my lung capacity limitless, muscles humming with more vitality than any well-oiled machine. And it occurs to me, like a giddy-inducing smack on the face, that my death warrant has granted me what nothing else has in all my twenty-six years: Life, agency, meaning.
The Seekers are taking longer than I expected. Have I eluded them after all?
Panting, stumbling with laughter, all my heart’s inner tensions unraveling from questions of how to serve the social order, exploring instead what the person within me might think and feel. Reaching for some self-governing, unstunted entity, I slow down and step just outside the city limits.
My back prickles. Behind me, the incarceropolis: where whole other worlds of latent drives and longings, intelligence and potential are born, smiling and expectant, and are then harnessed and broken in, left to splutter, fizzle and grow cold.
A brown insectoid lands on my forearm. It is camouflaged nearly perfectly: only a flash of light reflecting off its silvery lancet gives it away. The drone swiftly delivers its payload with a hair-thin stab.
I collapse onto my knees, buffeted by a sudden chill wind. The sun is hot on my scalp. I fall backward under an azure sky, wide and bright with everything that is real, possible, and gone.
Becky Neher is published in So Fi Zine, Friday Flash Fiction, 365tomorrows, Idle Ink, Microfiction Monday Magazine and Scribes*MICRO*Fiction. She lives in Georgia.
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