To Inoli, it seemed like such a simple answer. Why didn’t other prisoners choose old age? It would be perfect. They would have no choice, but to wait until the end of your days! Oh, she desperately fought back a smile, pleased with her own thoughts. It wouldn’t do to let the guards in on her indifference to the situation. What if they took away her ability to choose then?
Taking another step foreword, the line grew shorter and Inoli did her best to appear resigned to her fate. She slouched, let her hair fall in her face, and listened attentively to the requests before her. Only one left now and then she’ll be ready to knock their socks off with a request they never expected -
“And you, sir? What is your choice?” It was very informal. As if prisoners of war didn’t deserve privacy or more pomp and circumstance. Simple, plastic tables, with bored, entitled workers, sneering as they file your paperwork away, jotting down your choice before you were forced to sign your life away. The man before her stood straight, confident and she could hear the smirk in his voice when he answered.
“Old age.” He said. Inoli froze. So she wasn’t the first to see this loophole? Damn, and so close to her choice too!
The air grew still, eerily so as the workers fell silent, not sparing a glance towards the man before her. Did they even know his name? Did they care? Would they care now? So many questions, but they didn’t deign to answer a single one of them. Would they cancel todays session of sentencing and start anew when new rules were wrote up? Would they hold to their word and give this man what he wanted?
They stamped his sheet without hesitation. “Right, understood. One moment please.”
It all happened so fast. Too fast. The conjurers, supposed scientists, but their technology mystical to those who didn’t understand the inner workings of their inventions, they snatched the sheet and quickly ran it through their strange machine. It looked like a fax machine, but made very little noise as it fed the paper through, scanning its words and signaling the beams above to react.
Like the others before them, those beams clicked and whirred until a snap of light blinded them all, forcing Inoli to cover her eyes. She hissed at the stinging in her pupils, but peering beneath her palms to view what was before her as quick as she was able. What became of the man before her? His tall, straight form and broad shoulders, the shocking blonde of his hair now a sudden grey and-
The man hunched over, groaning as old knees clacked together. He fell to the floor with little issue, crumpling as hips and joints cracked and his skin aged. Right before Inoli’s eyes, she witnessed his sentence and a sudden realization struck her.
She wasn’t a genius. Neither was he. No, these men, these bringers of death, they had heard this response time and time again. She was doomed.
Terror gripped her. If that didn’t work, then what? What else could she say? In her sleep? Like sleeping beauty with a prick to her finger nail? In a gauntlet of fighters where she came out the victor before falling to her wounds? Fantastical ideas, but not practical. War and violence had been her and her people’s entire life before capture. Would she really have to choose more violence just for a satisfying end?
So lost in her panicked thoughts, Inoli missed when the Janitors came, pulling the crumpled heap of an old man away unceremoniously. His body would be incinerated like the others, she knew, but what did that matter?
“Next prisoner!” It was her turn, but suddenly, Inoli’s feet didn’t want to move and her slouched position was no longer a ruse.
What now? What, what now? She bit her lip, winced as it drew blood, and in the quick run of thoughts that assaulted her mind, she found her answer. A guard shoved her forward sending her stumbling into the table in front. With a gasp, she pushed back and hastily apologized before they’d take away the only choice she had left.
“Wait,” She croaked, interrupting the man who withdrew her file and compared the image on paper to the girl standing before him, he didn’t look at it. Inoli’s fists clenched and she swallowed thickly, “Can, erm, can I ask one thing before I make my choice?”
His eyes never left the paper, signing his own name as witness to her demise as his free hand waved her on. “I suppose so. If you must, but only one. We have a lot more to go through.”
One question was all she needed. “Can that, can that machine create any punishment?”
“Anything you can imagine.”
“… even if it’s technology that doesn’t exist yet?”
The pen paused on the paper, but he still did not look at her, “Yes. Even that. Think of it as a… Monkey’s Paw.”
Inoli smiled. A real and true, but sad smile. “Then I know how I want to go.”
The only way out. Or was it the only true way she could accept her fate? The Federation was dying of an illness that had no cure and they desperately fought to find new lands with which to study and heal themselves. It’s why they took her lands, spread their deserve and captured those who resisted. They needed that cure, but knew nothing of peace, nothing of allies. All they knew was to take. As she remembered her family, sick from the very plague these wretches brought upon her and others, Inoli knew the best punishment.
“I want to die of your plague, like my father and sister,” She whispered, tears stinging at her eyes, “And in my death, let the cure be found in my remains.”
The pen dropped and he was looking at her now. Really looking. Eyes wide and face contorted in confusion, as if he had never considered such a use for the conjuror’s machines. As if no one in his world had ever chosen kindness over death. Silence filled the room far deeper than the mocking chill of the prisoner before her. A silence that spoke too many volumes to for one person to utter.
The conjurors stared, mouths agape, the other filer’s sharing the same table stared. The prisoner’s in ear shot, murmured amongst themselves and looked bewildered.
Inoli’s smile grew. “What reason to take our land will you have then?” She asked, voice raw and quiet. “Will you stop… or find a new one?”
She didn’t expect an answer.
s-u-f-j-a-n-s-t-e-v-e-n-s
andulkaphoto
vaporwave
2087
