The Book Censor's Library

by Bothayna Al-Essa

But surely we have no thoughts. If we all turned to thinking, what would be left for the government to do?

“Who’s this Anna Karenina? Is there someone else?” she’d ask. And for a moment, he wondered if there was.

“You must fully understand the nature of your job. These items you’re inspecting are more dangerous than drugs or weapons—even love. They’re books!”

There was a time when robots were modeled after humans, but now it was the other way around.

But if all those people had demanded democracy, he didn’t understand how the democracies could fall, giving birth to the New World. The old man had smirked when he asked him. “That’s because democracy was never truly established.”

“When the world is this abysmal, getting used to it is the worst thing that can happen to you.”

The System had taken possession of everything, and it knew that it had won, but it still felt threatened by a child’s imagination.