The Unpunished

Maya watched the crowd absorb the news—Jonah had been reading over her shoulder and the information was spreading in whispers, the knowledge that the original operator had refused but a replacement was coming—and she felt the vigil's atmosphere shift from cautious hope into something harder and more determined, because now they understood that breaking one person's willingness to kill wasn't enough, that the machine had been designed to route around exactly this kind of human hesitation, and as people began to stand and stretch and redistribute blankets with a new sense of purpose, she realized that the next fourteen hours and thirty-two minutes would require them to become not just witnesses to her potential survival but a wall that every replacement operator would have to navigate, each one walking past faces that would ask without words whether they were brave enough to be the second person who refused, whether they could look at ninety-three strangers and one woman with a countdown and decide that their job wasn't worth becoming the person who clicked confirm when someone else had already proven that walking away was possible, and Maya understood with a clarity that felt like ice in her veins that the vigil had just become a test not of whether witness could stop the machine but of how many operators the system would have to burn through before it found someone broken enough or distant enough or just tired enough to stop seeing her face and start seeing only the name on their screen that needed to be processed before dawn.