Prohibition

It had been ten days since my last fix.

I knew what I was going to do was wrong, but unless you knew the yearning that your body exerts, the internal pull which strangles your very soul into submission, then you cannot judge me. Yes, it was wrong. Yet that was always so simple to say, to let the word slip from your lips and forget its inability to exist in our world as a proper description. Of course it was wrong. It was also necessary. I knew it was wrong, but I wanted it and I wanted it more and more each meter that I neared. I was not proud, but that didn’t mean I didn’t like doing what I was going to do. People always want black and white, it comforts them, but I’m not going to give you that. That’s too easy.

The electric autotaxi drew to a halt in a derelict, abandoned part of town. The drop in population had left large parts of the city uninhabited and soon the life had been sucked out of them. What was once so human about the world decayed and shriveled when left untouched, leaving nothing but the reminder – the echo – of the image of man. Yet, it was no longer human, structures neither alive nor dead.

The computerized voice informed me of the fare. I swept my debit card through the magnetic slot on the console and waited for the network to authorize the payment. “Thank you, Mr. Bronte,” the flat, impersonal tone reminding me that it was no longer possible to hide, to disappear; making sure I knew that every movement of my life was tracked. I had made sure I still had a walk to reach my destination, but the nagging which was worse than guilt shook its head behind my back; the disapproval of an almost omniscient power which believed in the certainty of its judgment.

I placed my hand on the door which exhaled smoothly. As I stepped out, I heard the inevitable Japanese-accented Americanism: “Have a nice day, Mr. Bronte.” Christ, who wrote the software for these machines? The singular was always being squeezed out by the criterion of costeffectiveness: why adapt it, when people will just learn from it?

It was a dark winter evening; frosty, the breeze crisp. The taxi hummed as it pulled away to another call or to circle the night streets. I waited until it turned a corner, then