Dr. Elizabeth Chen walked the long corridor from Interview Room Seven to her workstation cubicle with the careful posture of someone balancing a tray of fine china. That’s what it felt like these days—like her composure was something fragile she had to carry without spilling.
The Processing Center’s main floor was an open-plan office that would have looked at home in any tech company circa 2020: standing desks, ergonomic chairs, plants that someone watered on Tuesdays, and motivational posters that said things like “HEALING STARTS WITH US” over images of sunrises and diverse groups of people holding hands.
What made it different were the screens.
Hundreds of them, mounted on every wall, embedded in every desk, floating as holograms above workstations. Each one showing a different face, a different case, a different life reduced to data points and offense scores. The Queue, they called it. The great waiting list of ancestral sins awaiting judgment.
Chen sat at her desk and let the chair mold itself to her spine. The station recognized her biometrics and bloomed to life: three main displays stacked vertically, with her case queue on the left, reference databases in the center, and communication feeds on the right.
Forty-three cases pending review.
She’d started the morning with thirty-eight.
The work never stopped. For every case she processed, two more appeared. It was like trying to bail out the ocean with a teacup, except the ocean was human history and the teacup was her own diminishing sense that any of this mattered.
She opened the next file:
Case: MARTINEZ, ISABELLA R.
Relation: Great-granddaughter of subject MARTINEZ, CARLOS A.
Year of offenses: 2020-2021
Preliminary classification: Pandemic Minimization, Public Health Undermining
Suggested action: Full Historical Context Analysis
Chen pulled up the archived posts. Carlos Martinez, age 42 in 2020, had been a regional manager for a furniture company. He’d posted during the early pandemic:
“Everyone calm down. We’ve survived worse. Media is making this way bigger than it needs to be. #PerspectiveCheck”
“Third week of ‘two weeks to flatten the curve.’ Anyone else noticing the goalposts moving? Asking for a friend.”
“If we shut down the economy every time someone gets sick, we’d never open. Life has risks. Deal with it.”
The preliminary analysis flagged him for “contributory negligence in public health outcomes” and “dismissive rhetoric that enabled pandemic spread.” The fact that Carlos Martinez had lived in rural Montana, had maybe 150 followers, and likely influenced precisely nobody didn’t matter.
Impact over intent.
The algorithm had calculated that posts of similar sentiment, aggregated across millions of users, correlated with reduced mask compliance and increased transmission rates. Therefore, every individual post, even one from someone in Montana with 150 followers, bore fractional responsibility for every death.
It was math. It was science. It was irrefutable.
It was, Chen sometimes thought in the small dark hours when she couldn’t sleep, completely insane.
She started typing her analysis, fingers moving automatically through sections she’d filled out hundreds of times before:
Historical Context: Subject Carlos Martinez posted during a period of significant uncertainty and conflicting public health messaging. While his rhetoric minimized pandemic severity, it reflected broader cultural tensions rather than individual malice…
She stopped. Read what she’d written. Deleted it.
Mitigating factors weren’t what they wanted. They wanted confirmation. Validation. Evidence that the system was working, that history was being held accountable, that all this machinery of judgment was making the world better.
She tried again:
Historical Context: Subject Carlos Martinez consistently posted content that minimized pandemic severity and undermined public health messaging during a critical period. This pattern demonstrates typical characteristics of what we now classify as Pandemic Denialism, a form of digital behavior linked to increased mortality rates…
Better. Cleaner. The words flowed more easily when you stopped fighting them.
“Elizabeth!”
She looked up. Marcus Wade from Processing was walking toward her, coffee in one hand, tablet in the other, wearing the kind of smile that people wore when they were about to tell you about something they found fascinating and you were going to find exhausting.
“Did you see Okoye’s interview?” he asked, not waiting for an answer before pulling it up on his tablet and thrusting it at her.
The screen showed Prosecutor Sarah Okoye in a pristine white suit, sitting in one of those interview sets with a fake city view behind her and lighting that made everyone look like they were being interviewed by angels.
“…finally closing the accountability gap that’s existed for too long,” Okoye was saying, her voice rich with conviction. “For generations, people were able to cause harm—real, measurable harm—through their words, their posts, their casual cruelties, and face no consequences. They benefited from systems of oppression, contributed to cultures of toxicity, and then died peacefully, leaving their descendants to inherit those advantages.”
The interviewer, a soft-focus woman with concerned eyebrows, nodded sympathetically. “And the Ancestral Accountability Act addresses that?”
“Exactly. We’re not punishing people for being born. We’re addressing the reality that privilege, trauma, and systemic harm are all inherited. If you benefit from your ancestor’s position in society—a position they maintained partially through harmful speech and behavior—then you share responsibility for making that right.”
“Some critics say it’s unfair to hold descendants responsible for things they didn’t do.”
Okoye’s smile didn’t waver. “I’d ask those critics: is it fair that the descendants of people harmed by that speech still suffer its effects? Trauma is inherited. Disadvantage is inherited. Why shouldn’t accountability be inherited too?”
The logic was airtight, seamless, perfect. It was also the kind of logic that could justify absolutely anything if you were willing to trace the connections far enough.
Marcus was beaming. “She’s incredible, right? Did you see the poll numbers? Seventy-two percent approval for the Act. Up six points from last quarter.”
“That’s great,” Chen said, trying to sound enthusiastic.
“Your case count is up too. You processed forty-one last week. Regional record.”
“I know.”
“Keep this pace and you’ll make Senior Analyst by Q3.” Marcus clapped her shoulder. “You’re doing important work, Elizabeth. Healing history. That matters.”
He walked away, trailing optimism and expensive coffee. Chen watched him go, then turned back to her screens.
The Isabella Martinez case was still waiting. Forty-three cases were waiting. Thousands more were in the Queue, and millions more were being compiled from archives, social media exports, recovered hard drives, data leaks, every digital trace of human existence being fed into the machine that decided who was guilty and who was guilty by association.
She approved the Martinez case for prosecution. Clicked SUBMIT. Watched it vanish from her queue and appear in someone else’s—probably Sarah Okoye’s, who’d turn it into another triumph of justice, another step toward a world where every old sin was finally punished.
Her screen refreshed.
Forty-three cases pending.
The work never stopped.
On her right-hand display, the news feeds were updating. The Garrett case was trending on three platforms: #GarrettTribunal, #AncestralJustice, #GuiltIO. People were weighing in with the careful precision of archaeologists examining evidence and the rabid enthusiasm of Romans at the Colosseum.
“About time someone held these people accountable. My family is still dealing with trauma from that era’s toxic masculinity.”
“This is ridiculous. He didn’t do anything wrong. His GRANDFATHER didn’t even do anything wrong.”
“Intent doesn’t matter. Impact matters. If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.”
“Seven to twelve years for TWEETS? This is North Korea shit.”
“Comparing accountability to authoritarianism is exactly the kind of minimization that enabled these harms in the first place.”
Round and round it went, the same arguments looping endlessly, everyone certain they were right, everyone certain the other side was dangerous, everyone casting stones from houses made entirely of glass.
Chen minimized the feed. She didn’t need to see it. She knew how it went. She’d helped write the script.
Her phone buzzed. A message from her mother:
“Saw the news about your department. Very proud of you, 宝贝. Dad says congratulations on your promotion consideration. When are you coming home for dinner?”
Chen stared at the message. Her parents had come to America in 2095, part of the big climate migration. They’d worked brutal hours, learned English in their fifties, built something from nothing. Her father still had scars on his hands from his years in construction. Her mother still flinched at loud noises, a remnant of the instability they’d fled.
They’d done everything right. Followed every rule. And still, Chen knew, if she looked hard enough into the archives, she’d find something. Everyone had ancestors. Everyone had history. Everyone had thrown stones.
The question was just whether anyone was looking.
She typed back: “Soon, Mom. Love you.”
Another file opened automatically: the next case in her queue. Chen read the name, the offense summary, the preliminary score.
She started typing her analysis.
The work never stopped.
And somewhere, in forty-three different homes, forty-three different people were going about their days, unaware that someone they’d never met was deciding their fate based on jokes and complaints and casual thoughts from people they’d never met either.
It was efficient.
It was fair.
It was justice.
Dr. Elizabeth Chen told herself this as she worked, and almost managed to believe it.
| <– Chapter 2 | Chapter 4 –> |