Rule 15

By Anna Treffer

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The man who used to be my grandfather broke rule number 53.

I can’t see his face anymore with the fresh manure sliding down his head. He is inside a smaller room entirely walled in glass, with a concrete floor and ceiling. There is nowhere to hide from the shame, from the pointing fingers and hateful faces. He got permanently restrained to the chair after trying to commit suicide a few years before I was born. He repeatedly bashed his head into the floor, but he wasn’t quick enough.

I run another eye over the panel standing in front of me. The left side of it has his name, his date of birth, the description of his crime, and a brief summary of his life before, to serve as a warning that it is possible for anyone to go down the path of sin.

There are no second chances, there are no excuses. For our society to collapse, it would take only one to get away with breaking one of Sister’s rules.

My voice is hoarse from screaming at him when I first arrived, so I ignore the microphone linked into the soundproofed room. I consider the manure button again, gaze flitting to the one that would unleash a hornet’s nest through the little door in the floor. I let down another torrent of manure and walk away, ignoring the other men and women in their own glass rooms that I dutifully punished earlier.

We’re a very efficient society, it doesn’t take designated jobs to dole out hatred onto the sinners, it’s done by their very own families, friends, acquaintances and even strangers, for the stronger you distance yourself from them and the harsher you punish them, the more likely you are to be saved by Sister.

Pushing open a heavy metal door I step out into the cool night air, eyes adjusting to the neon flashes, and ears to the city’s laughter. I catch flashes of the moon between the sky-high buildings that spear the stars, it makes for the only bit of nature in the landscape.

I forget I’m still in uniform until someone spits at my feet. The hastily retreating back shows it’s not worth going after, especially not after my shift has ended. Someone else nods at me carefully, in a ‘I respect you, please don’t notice me’ sort of way. Another scurries away like a rat in a torch’s light.

It’s only a few blocks and I push open the backdoor of the racing arena. Another door and I’m in the locker room.

“Hey, look who decided to show up,” Di, my racing buddy, flashes me a grin from where she’s pulling on her light green under-suit. “Good haul today?”

“A few that broke rule 49, one that broke… rule 2,” I walk to my locker.

“Oh.” Di winces.

“And… your Uncle Li, he broke rule 30. I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine.” Di’s face turns to stone.

I leave it at that, she pulls up her holographic display and taps something out, invisible to everyone but her. I strip and fold my uniform into my locker, pulling on my under-suit and slipping on the bulkier outer one on top. I’ve only ever fallen once, and if it hadn’t been for the suit I wouldn’t have been around anymore. Besides being practical, it looks pretty stunning, shining deep blue, every nook and cranny lit with matching neon.

Others from our team arrive, getting dressed and chatting until the PA requests us on the racetrack.

Helmets on, we file into the village-sized stadium where our boards are waiting for us, boots slightly sinking in with each step into the soft foam of the racetrack.

I’m constantly modifying my board, making it lighter, faster, and of course adding more neon lights. At just over two meters long and a quarter of my bodyweight it flies like a dagger.

I hop on and wriggle my feet into a comfortable stance, stomping my heels down to let the safety hooks clamp onto my boots. With a gentle rumble like a cat’s purr, we rise into the air. The lines of the racetrack switch on, glowing acid yellow, arcing away into the distance like a meteor’s tail.

The PA and audience boxes are invisible at this distance. It’s not a sport that you can really watch entirely live anyway when we travel several blocks worth of distance in one heartbeat.

“Ready, set, go!” The announcer booms in our helmets.

I push my thumb into the button on the side of my glove and I zip off, bright specs of light in my peripheral the only sign of my fellow racers.

“Lap one,” the automated tracker in my helmet lets me know.

One moment I am squatting lower to cut the next corner harder, the next moment I am tumbling through the air, alarms blasting in my helmet, the emergency release on my board sending it falling away.

Everything is so hot and so agonizingly painful, and I don’t know what’s happening anymore, the world is just heat and pain and wailing alarms.

---

I am happier than I have ever been in my life, but I don’t know why. Shapes swim in my vision like a dark school of fish, and it takes another moment for my hearing to kick in.

I blink a few times, and the shapes turn into a dim concrete room. I am resting on a semi-raised hospital bed, trolleys of various equipment standing around. For a moment my stomach drops through the happy haze. Have I ended up like my grandfather? Am I going to live out the rest of my days in a fish tank, a cautionary tale for children and a point of hatred for all of society? But no, the walls are not glass, and I am not tied down.

“Oh good, you made it.”

I turn my head, the motion flashing a saw through my brain, the sensation quickly snatched away by whatever makes me want to go skipping in the rain singing nursery rhymes.

The speaker is an average man, the office worker type.

My tongue is too big for my mouth, it feels like half an hour before I say, “what happened?”

“Oh nothing much, you died, I saved you. Short story really.”

“What?” I croak, the desire to hug everyone fading ever so slightly.

“Well Officer, someone took a shot at you at the race. They missed, and got the board of the racer behind you, which exploded. Word travels pretty quick, and I was on the lookout for a new experiment. I will say, you were quite a challenge, I’m pretty proud of myself.” He sounded like he had a joke with himself that no one else was clever enough for.

“What are you talking about?”

He nods at me, and I finally register the blanket that covers me. Fear is rapidly flooding in, trying to drown out the warm fuzzy feelings that clamor for my attention.

I pull off the blanket.

I’m naked, but that’s the least of it.

There’s more metal than flesh now, both of my legs and hips, half of my torso. All beautiful dark, polished metal matching my skin, gently articulating as I struggle in my shock. There are gauzes and bandages around other parts of me, parts of me that some part of my brain knows hurt like nothing I can imagine, but that for now just gently let me know that they were there. The skin at the point of flesh to metal is angry and puckered like a chewed up strawberry stick, but there are no stitches. I spot a glint of metal much closer to my face and almost leap away from myself, dropping the blanket. My entire right arm, up to the shoulder, all gone, all metal. I touch it with my other hand, half expecting to find some sleeve, some paint, something, anything, but it is just cool metal, flexing and straightening like my old arm.

“What in Sister’s name did you do to me?”

“I saved your life,” the man replies, still seeming to bubble with some secret mirth.

“You should have left me to die.”

“So ungrateful,” he makes a tsk tsk noise. “If that’s what you really want, here you go.” He pulls something from one of the trollies, crosses the room, and hands it to me. My new metal hand closes around it without thinking, like my old hand would have. I drop it in shock. He harumphs and gives it to me again. It’s a gun.

My brain registers the weight of it, the size of it in my hand, but I can’t feel it. I can’t feel if it is hot or cold, smooth or rough, I just know somehow where my hand ends and the gun begins.

A distant, childlike voice sings in my mind, ‘rule 15, one shall not merge one’s body with machines, for machines have no soul, and have no place in Sister’s realm,’ the childish giggles fade away.

There’s no way I can hide what happened, I would be locked away in hours, days at most. It would take just the slip of a sleeve, or a missed button in my blouse, and my sin would be plain for the world to see, to hate me for.

I am an abomination, with no place in this realm or the next.

The entire city would come to punish me, to cover me in manure, in hornets, in ice, in stones, to scream curses, to blast the siren, to watch me writhe on the other side of the glass. I would eat a cupful of protein once a day, designed to be indistinguishable from sand, and drink one cup of water. This would go on for years, until I died, probably after going mad.

My metal fingers are steady on the gun, while my mind chases away the last shreds of the drug induced joy, yet another sin (rule 75). I hold the gun to my temple, and bit by bit curl in my new trigger finger.

It stops on the trigger.

Just one more twitch.

I will escape a lifetime of punishment. Who knows what will happen in Sister’s realm, but at least it will be one lifetime less of suffering. Maybe no one here will even know what happened, and they will believe I burned into nothingness on the racetrack. It’s happened before, and it will happen again. When those board batteries go, they make dying stars look like specks of dirt.

Metal on metal, one to escape the other.

“I-I can’t do it.” I release my finger and put the gun down beside me. “I want to live.”

“I thought you would,” the man grins.

---

I watch the sunrise, wind whipping in my hair. The clouds are thin and sharp, pale pink like my healing scars. It’s beautiful, in the cruel way that life is.

I am officially dead, but every scent on the breeze, every cloud in the sky, every sound in the street, makes me feel more alive than I ever did before I died.

The balcony door slides open and I grin widely at Di’s double take.

“You’re supposed to be dead,” she stammers.

“Guess I’m not,” I shoot her straight in the head (rule 22).

Officers seldom have friends, but I thought I’d gotten lucky. I should have known it was just a matter of putting away someone she cared about, and she would snap, but hiring an assassin with that calm efficiency, that was something. Then again, our no-nonsense attitudes had brought us together in the first place, can’t blame her.

I tuck the gun into my coat and leap off the balcony with an effortless push of my superhuman

legs, legs that could outrun, outjump Sister herself.

The sun is shining, the breeze is warm yet refreshing, and I’ve got nowhere to be.

It’s a beautiful day to be dead.

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Anna is currently living in New Zealand where she is doing a PhD in Human Interface Technology. In her spare time, she enjoys a vast variety of too many hobbies including writing, dancing and art. She has written two novels, is writing two more, and is going to get them out into the world soon! Her short story The Swimmers of Cape Fourwind has been previously published by Academy of the Heart and Mind. You can follow her on Instagram @annas_creative_chaos or on X and Reddit @annawritestuff

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