Machine's Last Testament

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Evening, verging on nightfall. In the sterile cleanness of Suzhen’s office there is the smell of war, familiar and earthy: soot and sweat, dried gore, sickness. Candidates are sent as is—a phrase that’s always struck her as faintly mercantile, not for people at all—to give them no time to prepare, and therefore no time to dissemble. She gazes across her desk at a man from one of the asteroid colonies, bent and parched, looking a decade older than he is. Frail from starvation, scarred from combat or abuse: no telling which. In the halfway houses and centers that accommodate refugees there is little order, and the wardens who run them aren’t known for gentleness. There are beatings, sometimes more. It is against regulation but it is nevertheless an open secret; everyone knows what goes on. There is nearly no point curbing or protesting it. Beyond her purview in any case.

She continues to study the man, his blanched skin, the dark circles under his eyes. The nose that broke and did not heal well, the colorless clothes given to all arrivals that hang on him loose and shapeless. Once she thought, entering this field, that she would be crippled by sympathy. That to all who enter she would say yes, yes, yes, you too deserve Samsara’s grace, we have so much, welcome to Anatta. But the process dehumanizes. Each person becomes a dossier, a collection of risk factors and potential to contribute, to be weighed against one another and then weighed against Bureau guidelines. And always at the back of her mind there is the quota. An agent can accept just so many in a month; any excess she would have to personally sponsor, become responsible for. Excess, even that is a measure which reduces personhood to quantity.

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