I have been under this helmet for what seems like forever. Nobody else took this long.
The line is not moving forward.
“Well,” Security says softly. “Will you look at that.”
“I’m not,” I tell him. “I’ve never—”
“And you’re not about to. Not for the next nine hours, anyway.”
“I never acted on it.” I sound petulant, childish. “Not once.”
“I can see that,” he says, but I know we’re talking about different things.
The humming changes subtly in pitch. I can feel magnets and mosquitoes snapping in my head. I am changed by something not yet cheap enough for the home market: an ache evaporates, a dull longing so chronic I feel it now only in absentia.
“There. Now we could put you in charge of two Day Cares and a chorus of alter boys, and you wouldn’t even be tempted.”
The visor rises; the helmet floats away. Authority stares back at me from a gaggle of contempuous faces.
“This is wrong,” I say quietly.
“Is it now.”
“I haven’t done anything.”
“We haven’t either. We haven’t locked down your pervert brain, we haven’t changed who you are. We’ve protected your precious constitutional rights and your God-given identity. You’re as free to diddle kiddies in the park as you ever were. You just won’t want to for a while.”
“But I haven’t done anything.” I can’t stop saying it.
“Nobody does, until they do.” He jerks his head towards Departure. “Get out of here. You’re cleared.”
I am not a criminal. I have done nothing wrong. But my name is on a list now, just the same. Word of my depravity races ahead of me, checkpoint after checkpoint, like a fission of dominoes. They’ll be watching, though they have to let me pass.
That could change before long. Even now, Community Standards barely recognize the difference between what we do and what we are; nudge them just a hair further and every border on the planet might close at my approach. But this is only the dawning of the new enlightenment, and the latest rules are not yet in place. For now, I am free to stand at your unconsecrated graveside, and mourn on my own recognizance.
You always were big on the power of forgiveness, Father. Seventy times seven, the most egregious sins washed away in the sight of the Lord. All it took, you insisted, was true penitence. All you had to do was accept His love.
Of course, it sounded a lot less self-serving back then.
But even the unbelievers get a clean slate now. My redeemer is a machine, and my salvation has an expiry date—but then again, I guess yours did too.
I wonder about the machine that programmed you, Father, that great glacial contraption of dogma and moving parts, clacking and iterating its way through two thousand years of bloody history. I can’t help but wonder at the way it rewired your synapses. Did it turn you into a predator, weigh you down with lunatic strictures that no sexual being could withstand, deny your very nature until you snapped? Or were you already malfunctioning when you embraced the church, hoping for some measure of strength you couldn’t find in yourself?
I knew you for years, Father. Even now, I tell myself I know you—and while you may have been twisted, you were never a coward. I refuse to believe that you opted for death because it was the easy way out. I choose to believe that in those last days you found the strength to rewrite your own programming, to turn your back on obsolete algorithms two millennia out of date and decide for yourself the difference between a mortal sin and an act of atonement.
You loathed yourself; you loathed the things you had done. And so, finally, you made absolutely certain you could never do them again. You acted.
You acted as I never could, though I’d pay so much smaller a price.
There is more than this temporary absolution, you see. We have machines now that can burn the evil right out of a man, deep-focus microwave emitters that vaporize the very pathways of depravity. No one can force them on you; not yet, anyway. Member’s bills wind through Parliament, legislative proposals that would see us preemptively reprogrammed for good instead of evil, but for now the procedure is strictly voluntary. It changes you, you see. It violates some inalienable essence of selfhood. Some call it a kind of suicide in its own right.
I kept telling the man at Security: I never acted on it. But he could see that for himself.
I never had it fixed. I must like what I am.
I wonder if that makes a difference.
I wonder which of us is more guilty.