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.
The narrator went on, "Losing his job got him evicted, and while unhoused, he couldn't get a job. It's a vicious cycle. He got a place to live in an SRO — Single Room Occupancy — a temporary residence intended to be more like a motel or hostel, but in the Outskirts they're filled to the brim, three or four immortals, many of them grayscale, in a unit."
The narrated went on and on, and Maia hardly listens, though the sound was linked directly to her auditory cortex; the stream of her own rant inside her head was louder. They would never admit there's still problems. Classic corporatocracy, or noocracy or geniocracy, or technocracy, or whatever they wanted to be called these days. Maia's given it a fair amount of thought, is it rule by the corporations, by the philosophers, by the most intelligent or the most educated? Or is it something else? Maia likes to think it might be a kleptocracy, rule by thieves, or a kakistocracy, some days: rule by the stupid. Stupid, like this whole empathy training thing's stupid.
Like any autocracy they would never admit there's problems, yet they expect her to believe there's a good reason immortals out there are turning to crime.
Now she can see. A field of vision fills her vision. She's outside, walking down the sidewalk; she's in Felix's body, and the view from up here . . . he's tall, she's not used to walking around with her eyes so high up.
He's got two feet on her, easy.
She lifts his giant white hands, ruddy with a red complexion, and wants to gag. Not just tall, he's bulky, built like a giant. Not as much of a giant as the guy she played in the Story on day two, but pretty huge.
Felix is out for a stroll on an early morning. It's quiet and calm. Gray facades of sleeping buildings lean over his head on both sides of the street. The narrator describes it, "He hasn't been back to the SRO to sleep because the pad isn't safe right now. He's been out all night since one of the other guys pulled a knife on him and took his last solida."
Maia wants to reply, "Poor baby, I should let him steal a loaf of bread or something," but in this immersive training experience speech is limited to key plot points only.
A patrol car rolls by, and Felix's shoulders hunch a little, and Maia feels like the big guy is changing posture as if to make himself small.
The narrator says, "At the same time instinct screams to be less threatening, make himself smaller, less conspicuous, he also needs to think to himself that he better not look like he's guilty of anything, he better not show any reaction to the patrol moto, which could be taken as a sign of guilt, so he tries not to change his stride too much in the presence of the guardia."
Sure, Maia thought. So all day long he walks around thinking about how to manipulate the authorities and trick us, make us think he's not about to rip someone off or pull an illegal wand on someone.
"When the car is gone, Felix finds a likely spot on the sidewalk to curl up with a sign out asking for spare coins. He gets into the shade of an alcove," the big lunky body does stoop down in front of someone's garage door, squat, turn around, and takes cardboard and a pen, and a gnomon, a matte black illegal one, and begin to write with the pen. "Coins are good, a free Story is better."
Cute, Maia thinks. He wants drugs, and he's being upfront about it.
The gnomon he sets down next to him on the sidewalk, in case he decides he needs to hold someone up or attack.
The narrator says, "He could use his gnomon to conjure food, but sooner or later after a pattern emerges from repeat spell casting, the guardia track down these imperfect black market wands. A better use of his time until he needs to resort to black market magic is to see how far the generosity of strangers gets him.
"Hours pass," says the narrator, and in a cool theatrical trick, time speeds up, the clouds overhead thicken to block the increasing brightness of Sol; the sun speeds along its path, wisps of nimbostratus coiling, racing and tripping, swirling across the sky, and eventually it begins to darken, and in hyper speed every few seconds someone will stoop down and pass a coin or a Story to Felix, as if maybe once an hour someone stops to help him out.
"A few passersby stop to give him a solidae or two, and he needs to manage his funds carefully. Pay up his immortality first, his pigment subscription second or he'll become grayscale and never get another job, pay his portion of the SRO third, and whatever's left over he can spend on sustenance." And drugs, thought Maia. "He counts the solidae out, stashes what he needs for his subscriptions in a wallet, and is left with a few solidae. Now to decide whether to spend the money on food or Story."
Once in a while the Story narrative allows the trainee to make a choice, and the way the narrator's voice hums and shakes at the end tells Maia now she gets to decide which storyline to take. Food or Story?
"Food," says Maia, and she just knows. She just knows what these manipulative storytellers will do. The writers manipulate you. If you choose to let Felix go for the drugs, he'll probably end up safe and sound, or another addict will beat him up and steal it, or he'll wake up from the Story and toss away his remaining pills, get a job, go back to school, turn his life around, and you'll have learned to empathise with a substance abuser.
Those liars. Sleazes, tagrags, scums, weasels, jackhats. When she chooses to make him take the right path, sober up, get some food in him, take care of himself, nourish his body, he will probably wind up getting shot in a brash violent injustice, to show you that when these criminals go around minding their own business the guardia still murder them left and right. What a crock of poop.
That's exactly what happens, as Felix gets his lumbering body upright, fist full of coins, and a guardia comes up. "Hey, you! Stop there."
The narrator says, as Felix stops, "If they search him, they will find the gnomon, so he runs," and Maia feels his feet hitting the pavement, one two one two, and he makes it all of four steps before an officer shoots starfire into Felix's neck.
The wound that slices into him Maia feels, it hurts, she's yelping and she can hear him yelping, and he crashes down and through his eyes she sees the sidewalk come up and meet his face hard. They had to do that to her, didn't they, put the wound in the same place where she had shot a man.
They just had to.
When she wakes up from the Story her body is screaming, she didn't know she had a body but she hears her scream, she didn't know she had a mouth, she was Felix, she was his body, and hers is out of her control, disjointed from her mind, but she feels the scream in her throat, exiting her, and the body is whimpering, hollering, yelling, out of control, cortisol soaring from a nightmare on steroids, her face is wet with a blanket of tears, out of her control, her lungs are heaving, pant pant pant. They just had to do that to her. Manipulative sons of. They had to do that to her. Again. Three days in a row.
And again tomorrow. How dare they. No one gets murdered like that. The guardia don't murder people. Liars. She didn't kill a man like that. It wasn't like that. It was different.
I cried a lot while I wrote this because it feels wrong to get into the head of someone who doesn't have empathy. These thoughts feel wrong and it doesn't feel good to transpose them onto paper. It can't feel good to read it either. I felt it was something that is worth communicating because we all need to see the bald faced fear of otherness and hear the thoughts of someone who takes that fear and turns it into hate, because until we all see it, it won't be eradicated, and we need to find a way to say this to the part of America that still doesn't see police violence and the taking of Black lives.
This story was inspired by accounts of white police officers claiming that they feared for their lives when they murdered a black person.
The problem I feel is that the claim of fear is coming too late. It comes after they have let fear rule them, control them, and made a choice to take a human being's life because of fear.
Each part of this story will have an author's note to open up conversation, because as always, I want to know how these stories make everyone feel. If I'm not getting it right I want to fix it. The part that's really icky to me about the inside of Maia's head is that my biggest worry is a bigoted person reading this would feel she's right, and agree with her, and perhaps be emboldened, so that's why I can't let this story exist without an author's note stating a clear intention:
Maia is a bad person. She's a bad officer. Her actions are wrong, and I fucking condemn them.
On the one hand writers should confront difficult topics with realism and nuance, and on the other hand, if my attempt to do that emboldens a person who's full of hate, it's not worth it. Period. So, any thoughts?