The Unpunished

Maya pulled out her phone to check for any update from the system about who the replacement operator would be and found instead a notification that made her breath stop—a message from the Federal Building's administrative office, timestamped 1:47 AM, sent to what appeared to be a mass distribution list that included her own number: "Due to unprecedented circumstances and pursuant to Protocol 7-J regarding operator availability, processing for Case #2847-MO has been temporarily suspended pending review by the Deputy Director of Operations, expected resolution by 0600 hours," and she read the words three times before their meaning fully penetrated, understanding that the machine had just blinked again, harder this time, that somewhere in the building's administrative hierarchy someone had made the calculation that burning through operators one after another while ninety-three witnesses watched and documented each refusal was more expensive than simply delaying her death for a few hours, and as she held up the phone so Lena and her mother could see, as the notification spread through the crowd in a wave of confused relief, she understood with fourteen hours and thirty minutes remaining that the vigil had just forced the system into a corner where every option—finding another operator, delaying the confirmation, or letting her window expire entirely—would require the machine to show its work in ways it had never had to before, and that whether this suspension was a genuine crack in the protocol or just the system buying time to find an operator hardened enough to click through ninety-three faces, the next six hours until dawn would determine whether the Right could survive having its violence made this visible, this witnessed, this impossibly hard to perform without everyone involved understanding exactly what they were choosing to do and who they were choosing to become.