The Unpunished

Maya felt her phone buzz with a response from Tremaine—she'd been half-expecting silence, half-expecting some carefully crafted justification—but what she found when she opened the message made her breath catch: "You're right, and I was wrong about everything, not just about using your death as evidence but about believing that exposing the system's mechanisms would be enough to break it, because what you've done tonight by refusing to let the killing be invisible is more dangerous to the Right than twenty years of my research ever was, and I need you to know that I've just submitted my resignation from Strategic Initiatives effective immediately, and I'm attaching the internal memo I sent to every operator scheduled for overnight shifts in the next week, and Maya, I don't know if this will save you, I don't know if one architect walking away and telling the operators that they're allowed to let windows expire without consequences will be enough to make the person who arrives at 3:30 hesitate, but I'm done being someone who studies the machine's violence from a safe distance while people like you have to sit in the cold proving that distance was always just another word for cowardice," and as Maya opened the attachment to find a memo titled "On the Right to Refuse Confirmation" that laid out in careful bureaucratic language exactly what the former operator had told her—that letting a window expire was permitted under protocol, that operators were not required to confirm, that the system's appearance of inevitability was a fiction maintained by people who'd never been told they had a choice—she understood with fourteen hours and forty-two minutes remaining that Tremaine had just done something that might actually matter more than her own survival: she'd told every operator in the city that the machine's power was optional, and that the ninety-three people sitting outside the Federal Building were proof that someone, somewhere was finally watching what happened when an operator decided that one person's breathing was worth more than the comfort of clicking confirm.