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by Claire North

It’s not that they’re shot. Lined up against a wall. They’re just starved to death. Or set cleaning radioactive equipment. Or beaten because they can’t work a seven-day week. Or locked in solitary confinement until the noises stop. It’s not murder. It’s corrective rehabilitation integration. It is the individual repaying their debt to society through labour. Labour benefits business. Business is society. That is all.

We all knew, of course. Everyone knows, but no one looks. We don’t look because if we look it makes us evil because we aren’t doing something about it, or it makes us sad because we can’t do anything about it, or it proves that we’re monsters when we always thought we were righteous because we won’t do anything about it. Either way, safer not to look.

I have led a thoroughly despicable life. Or rather … not despicable. My evils have been ordinary evils. My sins against the world are daily, little sins that no one would question. I am a normal man, and have done no wrong, and there is a place in hell waiting for me.

“This is your world. There’s a whole time, there was this time before and there is this time now and the future sometimes it seems that these things only exist now, as we remember and imagine, it is only now that we experience all of these things not then and not the yet to come, but the future—it’s yours, the future is yours to choose and make and build and it shall be a future of your living and it is …”