Inyanga's Star and Other Constellations

Time For Maia's Empathy Treatment

Trigger warning: This story is about an officer-involved shooting, and depicts police violence. It contains subject matter of discrimination and violence motivated by bias. It's allegorical; the victims of persecution are men. All men, regardless of color, height, size, age, education, demeanor, or any other nonsensical criteria for discriminating that you could name. It's a story about putting people in a box. Thanks for reading and leaving your honest thoughts.

Maia's Star Episode I – Part I

It's time for Maia to undergo her third round of empathy treatment today. Day three. One treatment a day. Intensive Story immersion.

Issued to all guardia involved in a male shooting that resulted in a fatality, any time in all of Solari history.

Not until this afternoon, and she doesn't know whether to be grateful she has a break to recover. This way she has to spend all morning in sweats over it, swallowing with dry mouth, trying to focus on the paperwork on her Stellar now that she's riding a desk, it's maybe worse than getting it over with quick. She can't decide.

The irony hits her that Dale's undergoing rounds of Story for empathy treatment too, and he is a man. Doesn't that disprove the whole theory? How can Dale be biased in his guardia work? Watching Dale take the pill for his immersive Story experience, it seemed to undermine the logic.

How can Dale be biased against men, when he is one?

Now he's undergoing empathy training where the Story puts him in the mind of a man even though he's already a man. It makes no sense. Maia tapped an inky pen against her desk in a nervous fury. No sense at all. Someone tried to explain it to her once. "We all have biases, even about our those who share our own identities. It's a blanket policy for any officer who causes a male fatality, regardless of the gender of the guardia involved. No matter who fired the shot. That way no one can cry double standard."

Maia had rolled her eyes to the sky. "I don't have a bias against men, and I'm pretty sure neither does Dale."

Anyway, no one had a good answer. Hora quinta rolls around and Maia, with Dale by her side, reports for this weird duty she's been dreading. Takes a white pill from a therapist magician, gets into position in an arm chair to conk out on, and, shaking a little, takes the pill thinking, What are they going to do to me this time?

The screen that was her field of vision goes dark as if her eyes are closed against her will, black like a blank movie screen, and as always, narration begins before anything, assimilating her.

"Felix grew up with his cousin Rebel," the smooth deep male voice of the narrator says, "on the Outskirts. It's a barrio Soliara's prosperity didn't exactly reach when Felix was born in 209 S.E. It was a hard time back then. The Outskirts was a food desert, with few stores, nowhere to get groceries, and few magicians, back when magic licenses were under a tight quota. Unemployment rates were high and immortality rates were low."

If Maia had a head with eyes in it of her own to roll right now, she would have rolled them.

"His mother died when he was just over a year old," and Maia thinks, uh huh, of course, "and he grew up with his uncle Anthem. Since his uncle was killed in a gang related incident, he turned to Story, and lost his job."

Tempting to stick out her tongue and blow a raspberry. This propaganda. Like everything's so great now, but you need to feel sorry for criminals because it wasn't always so good in the empire. But the contradiction stands, because Constellation needs you to believe everything's good now. If everyone has it so good, why do they pull robberies, mug elders, break into stores and motos? Dear Constellation, you can't have it both ways.