Author: Alastair Millar

Mandy was pretty, vivacious, and my next door neighbour; she’d pop round evenings or at weekends while my spouse was at work to swap gossip, recipes and just chat. But Marco didn’t mind – “you’re such a cliché,” he’d say, laughing, “her gay best friend!”. She was smart, too. Occasionally she’d tell me about her job, some high-flying tech sector gig, dropping references to interlinkages, how humaniform and non-humanoid robots were being taught to recognise each other and differentiate themselves from people. She mentioned something about shutdowns and ‘artificial disobedience’. I’ve got to be honest, most of it went over my head, but I liked to hear her talk.

One day she gave me a present – a carved ceramisteel box that couldn’t have been cheap. Inside was a metal cube with a single blue button on the top. “I want you to have this,” she said. “But you can’t tell anyone about it. Trouble’s coming, and when things get really bad, you should push the button. It’ll cause chaos. You’ll know when. I trust you.” I put it away safely, and put her behaviour down to stereotypical female neurosis, which shows how little I know about women I guess. But I never told Marco, so there’s that.

About two weeks later, I was up early and pottering around the kitchen when I saw them come for her. A long black hovercar landed in the street, and men in suits knocked on her door; they didn’t give her a chance to collect anything, just hustled her out and into the waiting vehicle. It was over in under a minute, and I never saw her again. Later that day, they said on the news that government agencies had conducted a “round-up of scientists and techworkers deemed insufficiently loyal to the State”. There was nothing I could have done, and now there was nothing I could do. I felt like hell.

I was still trying to process that when Marco was taken a month after that; he’d gone off to work at the Mall on Saturday morning as usual, when it was blitzed by a Purity Patrol. Somehow they realised he wasn’t straight and took him into custody for ‘perverting the morals of the youth’ just for being there at the weekend when the kids were likely to be hanging out. He had time for one message before his commset went dead.

There was, of course, no information about where he was being taken, or for how long. And there was nobody I could ask, even as his partner, without making myself an immediate target too. It was a short path from Marco to me, and I was pretty sure they’d be knocking on my door soon too.

I sat in the living room feeling sorry for myself for a good couple of hours; the two people I most cared about had both been disappeared. I could be next. I had nobody else I could trust or run to. I felt like a mouse trapped in a maze, with no way out. Eventually I pulled myself together, and tried to think straight.

The only thing that occurred to me was Mandy’s box. I took it out of the bedside cabinet I’d kept it in, sat on the edge of the bed, and looked at it. Were things really that bad now? With scientists and those deemed ‘deviants’ being taken off the streets, and nobody daring to protest, I decided that they were.

So you can blame me for what happened afterwards. Because I opened the box, and pressed the button. I’m not sorry.