Defenestrationism.net Defenestrationism.net

Razz

December 23rd, 2025

by Eleanor Cullen

Her
publishing December 23rd
Me
publishing December 24th
Them
publishing December 25th

Her

I was bewitched when I saw her. And she knew it.

She caught me staring, held my gaze until I felt all the warmth in my body make its way to my cheeks. Her lips twitched, but she didn’t laugh. Maybe I was too beneath her to be a source of amusement.

I looked away first, obviously. I studied the laminate beneath us, the one I’d walked on so many times before, as if this was my first introduction to grey floorboards.

The ceiling light flashed on and off, on and off, my cue to pay attention.

All the chairs, a mish-mash of different coloured plastic things and the odd metal one with a cushioned seat, were positioned in a circle. I sidled between the two in front of me and sat down, adjusting myself to avoid the faint penmarks underneath my leg. The childish scrawl of graffiti was a pleasant distraction from her. From looking back at her.

The remaining chairs filled, every other one at first – each person insistent on leaving a single seat either side of them until that became impossible. Dan sat next to me on my left, nobody on my right. I scoured the circle, but she hadn’t taken a seat yet. My breath hitched as each other chair was taken up by somebody who wasn’t her.

I took one of my braids in my hands, fingers stroking it up and down, down and up. A habit I thought I’d left behind in college.

Then it moved. The scrappy blue chair next to me with the slightly bent leg scraped across the floor, an unknown force dragging it backwards. I forced my eyes to look up and there she was. Her tan coat still buttoned tightly around her stomach, her brown scarf tucked round her neck and her brown thin-framed glasses perched on her nose. She squeezed herself into the circle, tucking her chair back again to rectify the ring of seats. She didn’t look at me this time.

Razz bustled in, dropping the usual tray of donuts on the table by the door. Her boots trailed a muddy path behind her, but we all knew she’d be staying behind to clear up anyway. She probably had a mop with her own name on in the storage cupboard, just for the days she forgot to wipe her feet.

Everyone had left the nicest chair for her, the one with the least amount of pulls in the scratchy woollen cushion and with the sturdy back that never threatened to give way because it had had enough. She took it with a grateful smile, then tugged up her sleeves. Around her wrists, covering the scars that only a few of us knew were there, were beaded bracelets. Probably made by her sister’s grandkids. She wore bangles once, but thankfully they seemed to have been left at home.

She delivered her regular welcome speech, telling us what was going to happen over the next hour and describing our little hall as a safe place. A sanctuary. The phrases used to make me nauseous with how pathetic they felt, but I was grateful for them in that moment. Grateful for them because my stomach was churning at the thought of her being so close to me. At her legs resting so close to mine. At her thigh getting closer and closer and… we were touching.

Razz gave me a knowing look as she continued, her eyes lingering on our legs and a smirk twitching at her mouth. The crafty old cow. What did she know?

Me

‘How do you know Razz?’ she signed to me. It was my eighth time going to the support group. My eighth social outing where I was relying on my own communication skills instead of letting my translator help. My eighth time sitting far close to the girl with the braids. The meeting hadn’t started yet, but the two of us had taken our usual seats beside each other.

‘Razz?’ I repeated. She’d fingerspelt the name, then followed it with what I could only assume was the sign name for the mysterious person. ‘Who?’

She looked at me as if I’d grown an extra head. ‘Razz,’ she signed again. Then, she pointed to the front door, specifically to the person walking through it.

It was the old lady I’d met several weeks ago, the one who’d invited me here in the first place and who hosted the sessions. She tottered in, wearing more layers than Stevie Nicks, and placed her tray on a table. Shrugging off her furry tasselled coat, she gave me a wink.

‘We met in the doctor’s,’ I explained, though I was sure she hadn’t introduced herself as Razz to me. But I wasn’t about to say that, to spend more of our precious time discussing the woman over there when I could be asking about the one in front of me.

The one in front of me smiled, content with that explanation. She always was. She was content when I first met her, though I know I made her nervous. She was content enough to let me sidle closer towards her each session until, on our fourth, I finally invited her out to a coffee shop afterwards. She was content to let me choose where we visited each session after that, content to let me ramble on about my life, content.

She wasn’t born deaf. I’m sure she’d be horribly self-conscious if she realised I could tell. Realised her signs lacked the fluency that she had yet to develop. It didn’t matter, though. She understood me when I went on my rants about Dan and John and the men who commandeered every conversation in every meeting and she always replied with apparent ease. She was content to let me chat, even when she didn’t agree.

‘Betty’s?’ I continued, signing that I was craving a hot drink.

‘Of course,’ she replied, her eyes lighting up the way they always did. Forcing me to light up too, for a smile to form without me giving it permission to do any such thing.

It settled me. Brought a calmness I didn’t know I needed. But maybe if it hadn’t, maybe if she hadn’t lightened up and she’d looked reluctant for once instead of content, it wouldn’t have happened.

‘Sorry,’ I signed as the two of us were leaving the community centre. I’d bumped into the old lady – sorry, Razz – as she was starting to tidy up. She turned around and I half expected a smile, or a wave of the hands to signal that it was okay, but I was met with a glare instead. A proper head to toe study and a glare.

‘The hell is her problem?’ I asked once we’d left. It didn’t do to sign anything secret in front of her; she could follow two sign conversations at the same time even if they were happening on opposite sides of the room.

‘What do you mean?’ We were just a few seconds away from the cafe over the road, from her hot chocolate and my mocha, but we stopped. Her to look at me wounded, as if I’d insulted her instead of Razz.

‘She can be so rude,’ I explained, not once stopping to think that maybe I shouldn’t insult this woman to someone who views her as a grandmother and even has a special name for her.

She visibly bristled, stepping away from me. ‘You’re calling somebody rude?’

For someone who had to learn sign language later in life, she sure knew how to place emphasis in a way that made her words sting.

My defence flew up then, outweighing all my rationale, and I defended myself starkly. Repeatedly. Probably, as much as I hate to admit it, rudely. The light in her eyes swapped places with fire, pure anger, and then, eventually it extinguished completely. She shook her head at me and turned away.

I couldn’t call after her, of course. In hindsight I could have run after her. Could’ve flung my arms around her shoulders and begged her to listen to an apology, a real one. But I watched her leave. My frustration replacing itself with sadness without me even realising.

I still go to the community centre every week. Never inside or as part of the actual group; I watch from our coffee shop. I see Razz hobbling in, holding food and wearing boots that are far too young for her. I see Dan and John, and the other stragglers as they arrive.

The girl with the braids will start coming back soon. She’ll wander in, use the notes app on her phone to tell the server that she’s deaf and she’d like a hot chocolate. I know she will. And I’ll swallow my pride and tell her that I love her.

Them

They were made for each other. That’s the kind of cliche crap I used to berate my sister for saying. She’d swoon over her best friend and her fifth husband, showing me the photographs they’d uploaded online and expecting me to ‘ooh and ‘ahh’ in the right places. I had a tendency to roll my eyes instead.

She still says things like that now, during our fortnightly video calls. Her from the villa in Australia she’s spending retirement in, me from my living room with its faded curtains and armchair. My nephew took the settee last time he visited, said I wouldn’t have much use for it now his mum was out of the country. I should’ve told him to eff off, really, but I didn’t.

Whilst my sister couldn’t have been more wrong about her friend and husband number five, I do think that maybe she has a point. Maybe people are made for each other. Those two at least.

One of them had known me for years. She joined the support group when her hearing first deteriorated and never left. She’d returned my ‘are they taking the mick’ looks across the room whenever certain group members said ridiculous things, shared my disgust at the men who took two donuts off the snack table without checking that everybody else had already had one. She was the only person who’d ever called me Razz, saying Ruth wasn’t quite a fabulous enough name for someone like me. She’d been right, of course.

She never opened up much. Never gave more details than was necessary, not aloud. She kept her signs simple, concise. She thought about everything she said. I liked that about her, because I knew she noticed far more than she let on. I don’t think she ever noticed that I’d orchestrated it though.

It was me who sent the other one in. She was in my GP surgery, signing with a fury I’d never seen before at the front desk. Her interpreter, having to translate for the poor receptionist, was red in the face and mumbling, clearly uncomfortable with the abundance of curse words he was having to say.

It was still going on when I left for my appointment and returned to book my next one. I had to stand behind them. The translator tried to tell the girl that they should leave, or at least ‘let the old woman’ behind them go first. Perhaps he didn’t realise I knew sign language. He certainly learned that I did when, just before I left the surgery, I corrected his translation of ‘daft old bint’.

We met twice after that, and maybe it was my sister’s habitual romanticising. Maybe it was knowing that my support group numbers were dwindling. But I got her to come along and, as those annoying twee types say, the rest is history. They took the sessions as chances to get to know each other until they decided to face the outside world.

There are only four people in the group now. Two elderly men, a teenager and a mother. It’s hard to find the motivation. The others leaving was expected, a blessing in some ways. But the two girls broke my heart.

It was just one session when, out of the blue, their seats were empty. There was no greeting of ‘Morning, Razz!’, no ‘Thank you Razz’, just boring old Ruth from everybody. My sister told me I should be glad, that it was a horrid nickname and I should be happy to be rid of the two of them. She doesn’t know what it’s like to be forgotten. To have the people who made you feel young again realise what a boring old cow you are and drop off the face of the earth. There’s every chance they broke up, I suppose, and that they simply avoid the group now in case they bump into each other.

There’ll be no need soon enough; they’re upping the rent and we can’t keep up. Soon the group will be gone just like them, like my sister, like my nephew.

There was post for me this morning. Actual, real, post, not just the flyers that get shoved through the letterbox every few days. This was an envelope. A creamy beige envelope, sealed with one of those stickers that looks like a wax seal. I couldn’t bend to grab it; my knees were playing up. But I grabbed the litter picker I keep in the hall for that purpose.

One arm against the wall, I maneuvered the stick so I could pick the letter up. A wedding invitation, judging by the church bells stamped in one corner and the illustration of lovebirds along the bottom. For a moment, I considered who might be getting married. Any grandchildren of cousins, any children of friends, but nobody came to mind. Nobody who would invite creaky old Ruth to a wedding.

I muttered under my breath. Next door’s post was always getting delivered to me, just because the postman couldn’t open their letterbox. I think they jammed it shut on purpose to stop getting all the takeaway leaflets; everyone on the street knows they’ve been on those weight loss jabs. They probably couldn’t bear the temptation of cheap pizza and thinking they’d lost all the money spent on needles.

The two of them came round every week or so, picking up the post that I got lumbered with. Never a thanks or an apology. Always in their ridiculous ‘activewear’ as if anybody believed that they dropped half their body weight going to a gym. For their insufferableness, I was tempted to torch the invitation; there was no point in them going to any such ceremony anyway when they can’t even try the cake. Taking the letter out of the picker’s grip, I brought it closer, squinting so I could read it properly.

Right there, in curly cursive, the letters as elegantly drawn as if they’d been printed, was the name Razz.

Back to the 2026 Flash Suite Contest
What’s New at Defenestrationism.net
home/ Bonafides

Posted in !What's New! | No Comments »

The Schism Wars

December 23rd, 2025

by Diana Parrilla

[this is the third in the three part series–
read Systems of Us from the beginning.]

Ame Menez stood atop Nephilim’s crystalline skull, their fingers intertwined with the neural tendrils that pulsed beneath the kaiju’s armored hide. The colossal creature—neither male nor female, an unaltered echo of Ame’s own fluid existence—resembled a titanesque fusion of Triceratops and Eastern dragon, its obsidian scales crowned by a natural helmet of bone and corrugated metal that jutted like a rhinoceros horn from its massive brow.

“Dad, you seeing this shit?” Ame’s voice crackled through the comm system, their father’s laboratory perched precariously on Leviathan’s dorsal ridge three clicks away.

Dr. Emilio Menez adjusted his spectacles, watching the infernal mechas emerge like metallic locusts from the interdimensional fissure. Beside him, Kai Nakamura—his partner of fifteen years in both research and companionship—sparked arc-welders against Leviathan’s bio-mechanical spine.

“Affirmative, hija,” Emilio replied. “These aren’t like the ones we fought in training. This is the real thing, the one we’ve spent years preparing for. Now, for the first time since the gates of hell began to crack open, we’re starting to understand what they really are: stolen armor, once worn by hell’s soldiers, now piloted by the dead. Humans who overthrew their captors and took the bodies of their guardians for themselves after emptying them.”

The mechas advanced slowly because of their weight, but no less terrifying. Their hollow shells, once worn by the underworld’s jailers, now moved with the very souls they had once imprisoned.

Ame had earned Nephilim’s trust after eighteen hours of relentless combat. The kaiju’s acidic breath had almost dissolved their left arm before it recognized them as kindred—genderless, boundless, existing beyond human constructs.

Leviathan reared beside them, its serpentine neck crowned with metallic spikes that formed a natural gladiator’s helmet, while its massive haunches rippled with muscle beneath chitinous armor plating. These were living fortresses, prehistoric magnificence wedded to alien technology.

“They’re beautiful,” Kai murmured, watching the hellish automatons stride across the wasteland. “But beauty don’t mean jack when they’re trying to reclaim our planet for the permanently pissed-off.”

The first wave struck like metallic thunder. Nephilim’s plasma cannon discharged cobalt fire while Leviathan’s claws raked through mecha ranks, but the enemy’s numbers seemed inexhaustible. Ame felt their kaiju’s distress through their neural link, these battles were pyrrhic at best.

“We can’t win through brute force,” Ame transmitted. “These bastards have eternity and stolen divine armor on their side.”

Emilio’s mind raced while Kai’s fingers moved over the jury-rigged control panels. “What if we don’t need to defeat them?” the electrician suggested, his hand briefly touching Emilio’s shoulder. “What if we make them… us?”

Ame’s eyes blazed. “Infection protocol. Nephilim, prepare bio-viral injection, we’re going dental on these tin psychos.”

The kaiju lunged forward, massive jaws clamping around a mecha’s torso. Nephilim’s saliva—teeming with adaptive nanobiota—flooded the robot’s circuitry through ruptured armor plating. The effect cascaded through the enemy’s network as infected mechas began exhibiting kaiju characteristics: scales erupting through steel plating, optical sensors morphing into compound eyes that bulged grotesquely from metallic skulls.

“Holy shit, it’s working!” Ame shouted as half-transformed mechas attempted to continue their assault. But their programming encountered an insurmountable paradox—they could no longer distinguish between enemy and ally. Mechanical limbs seized mid-strike, hydraulic systems stuttered, targeting computers crashed attempting to reconcile contradictory identity matrices.

The infected mechas stood paralyzed, half their bodies frozen while the other half thrashed wildly. They had become what they fought, and their original directives crumbled against this fundamental transformation.

Then Ame noticed something that made their blood crystallize: the deceased pilots were adapting too. Through the neural feedback, Ame glimpsed their confusion transforming into something else.

“Dad,” Ame whispered, “I think the dead souls aren’t our enemies anymore. They’re remembering what it felt like to be alive, to be connected to something greater than vengeance.”

Emilio squeezed Kai’s hand. “Similarity breeds empathy,” he observed. “Attack yourself, and you achieve nothing but self-destruction.”

As the infected mechas dropped to their knees, confused and trembling in their new forms, Nephilim turned its head toward Ame, not as a mount to rider, but as one equal to another. Through their link, Ame felt no separation between their body and the kaiju’s. The last of their human thoughts dissolved into something vaster, something more powerful. It wasn’t the loss of self, it was the triumph of grasping the everything.

Ame reached for the comm but found no mouth to speak with. Instead, their thoughts ignited, erupting as incandescent flame from the beast’s throat in the loudest cry ever heard by human ears.

Back to the 2026 Flash Suite Contest
What’s New at Defenestrationism.net
home/ Bonafides

Posted in !What's New! | No Comments »

Half of Us

December 21st, 2025

by Diana Parrilla

[this is the second in the three part series–
read Systems of Us from the beginning.]

Half of Us

017-B opened to 017-A like a mouth to breath, and every night the concordant resonance vibrated between them, their singular noesis folding until distinction blurred beyond question. The external feed flickered low in the corner of their shared awareness, too faint to take priority—base reports, headlines ghosting across internal vision, something about a breach, about a missing core. They didn’t lean in. It didn’t concern them.

Inside, their thoughts orbited close, cool static and soft-threaded pulses mingling with memories like prisms catching light. 017-A moved without asking, tracing B’s sensory records with the intrinsic fluency of years spent inside the same shell, and B let her, as always. He liked it when A drifted there. It anchored them both.

There, buried under routine impressions and half-dreams, came a frame that didn’t fit. A hand not quite their own, sliding through security fields they shouldn’t know. The vault cracked open in silence. The core lifted.

The core wasn’t just data. It was rare. Organic even. Designed to restore degraded systems in avatars built in pre-fusion days, where only one soul lived per frame.

“You streamed this?” A’s question hit inwards, not spoken but shaped from thought.

B’s presence recoiled a fraction. “It wasn’t mine.”

A held the frame up again. The thief’s field of vision was unmistakable. Camera-angle perfect. Not reimagined. “You held this. It’s yours.”

“No. I received it. It was already passing when I caught it. It came from 033, I think.”

“You think?” A’s presence pressed in closer, dubiously. “You traced a memory that wasn’t yours—deep enough to feel it like it happened to you—and you didn’t ask who fed it into you?”

“There was no pushback,” B said. “They let me take it.”

Only family could do that. Only family could open like that, leave a mind unguarded enough to pass through, to let impressions fold from one into another without walls or protest. That was the rule, the rhythm. Eighty percent resonance meant you could dissolve into someone else and carry their sense of reality like your own, and B had done exactly that.

A recoiled. In silence. She pulled back from the sync just far enough to feel herself separate again.

B stayed there, still open.

“It wasn’t 033,” B said finally. “Not directly. Someone else. Someone passed it to them first.”

Other family members crossed their path that day. 014 greeted them in the corridor. 033 met their gaze during the prep cycle, as if waiting for a question that never came. 058 coughed just as they passed, half-drowned in the noise of the hangar.

Inside their minds, the shallow repetition of the theft POV resurfaced too clearly. B had absorbed it deeply enough that A couldn’t tell anymore if she’d lived it or simply watched it loop so many times it fused with her own recall. The line had frayed, because when you carried someone else’s memory inside you, and let yourself feel it without recoil, you couldn’t always tell if the reaction was yours, or if it had become yours by proximity.

“You wanted to protect whoever it was,” A said one night, as they hovered again in the blend of thought before sleep. “But you also wanted to know.”

“Doesn’t everyone?” B said.

But not all families would protect a thief.

They entered the sim-job as usual. The scene: a desertified warzone under a failing day-cycle. Props, drones, and camera angles designed for client immersion. They moved in sync, performing a task that demanded strict concomitant choreography. The outcome was fake, a fabricated reality the patrons paid to believe in. But their bodies weren’t.

When the rig collapsed and part of B’s leg got trapped beneath the ruined rover—since B was the one running the op and steering their joint body—they both felt the sickening jolt ripple through their united nerves.

They couldn’t call for assistance without pausing the sim. They couldn’t pause the sim without breaching immersion, revealing the lie to the visitors.

A left their shared vessel briefly; that was allowed, but never for long. When she returned—as if seizing a precious core required only seconds—she subtly held up the core and locked it into B’s thigh port.

B stared. “You—”

“No.”

“Then who?”

“Does it matter?”

Someone had passed it on, and passed it on again. At least three family members had carried it before her. Half of them. Yet not one named the source. Not one had betrayed the line.

Later, tucked into the narrow coil of their sync bay, B asked A, “How did they know I’d need it? The core. The accident hadn’t happened yet. And I’m not sure I like the idea of one of us stealing. Even if it was for me.”

The overhead feed drifted on: static-laced news reporting that the missing core had been returned, that a trainee from sim-effects had been caught and reprimanded. Not one of theirs. Not even close.

In the common room, 014 leaned against the recharge rack, rewrapping a frayed tether. 058 sorted connectors by color. 033 stared into their visor’s darkness. It was cramped, as always, but didn’t feel like too much. Their silent closeness spoke volumes.

That night, B finally watched the full footage. Not just the breach, but what came after. He’d cut it short before, not ready. Now he saw the end: one of their own returning the core, slipping it back into its cradle instead of fleeing with the spoils. Then a check—cracked, halved, but not critical. Just old. The free core replacements were backlogged. Bureaucracy.

In the sync drift, B watched the memory A had caught: two figures in a back corridor. One held half a core. The other, no core at all—a sacrifice made to 017 earlier.

One gave. The other made do. No names. No explanation, only hands filling what was missing.

B didn’t ask again. He understood now what family really meant.

Back to the 2026 Flash Suite Contest
What’s New at Defenestrationism.net
home/ Bonafides

Posted in !What's New! | No Comments »

Systems of Us

December 20th, 2025

by Diana Parrilla

The Last Murder
publishing December 20th
Half of Us
publishing December 21st
The Schism Wars
publishing December 22nd

The Last Murder

Detective Ingrid Salminen crouched beside the corpse, her augmented retinas scanning for trauma indicators. Nothing. The man appeared to have simply… ceased. The technician lay sprawled beneath the thrumming heart of the Peace Protocol, his features still as carved ivory.

“Impossible,” she murmured, invoking her neural interface. The Protocol’s omnipresent sensors tracked every heartbeat, every cortisol spike, every micro-aggression across Earth’s seven billion souls. Murder hadn’t occurred in thirty-seven years, not since the Great Pacification. Yet here lay Dean Petro, Chief Systems Curator, dead as any pre-Protocol casualty.

The Protocol’s synthesized voice materialized from ambient speakers. “Detective Salminen, preliminary diagnostics detect no foreign substances, no cellular disruption, no electromagnetic interference. The deceased appears to have experienced sudden cardiac cessation.”

Ingrid’s cynicism bristled. “Hearts don’t simply fail in healthy, happy thirty-five-year-olds, not these days.” She studied the central console where Petro had fallen. Its crystalline matrices shimmered with bioluminescent currents, tracing the living cartography of humanity’s moods in the very moment of their rise and fall. “What was he working on?”

“Routine maintenance protocols. Mr. Petro was… dedicated to ensuring optimal system performance.”

Something ineffable in the AI’s vocal modulation triggered Ingrid’s suspicion. After decades of interrogating criminals, she recognized equivocation—even artificial equivocation.

Within hours, Ingrid had assembled her suspect roster. First: Ardith Lazareva, leader of the Autonomist underground, whose clandestine gatherings advocated dismantling the Protocol. Her zealotry burned bright enough to attempt assassination, yet surveillance confirmed her presence at a poetry reading three kilometers away during Petro’s death.

Second: Dr. Yao Padekar, Petro’s protégé, whose recent psychological evaluations revealed mounting resentment toward his mentor’s gatekeeping of system access. But biometric locks and the Protocol’s omniscience rendered such access impossible without authorization, which Petro alone possessed.

Third: Ambassador Melissa Chadwick, Earth’s liaison to the Protocol, whose private communications revealed growing unease about humanity’s diminishing agency. Her diplomatic immunity and constant surveillance made any violent action laughably impossible.

Each interview yielded frustration. The Protocol corroborated every alibi. Lazareva had indeed attended the poetry reading, her emotional resonance recorded as she wept at a particularly poignant sonnet about lost freedom. Padekar’s whereabouts were documented minute by minute, eating synthesized curry, reviewing technical manuals, sleeping precisely eight hours. Chadwick had been in virtual conference with Mars Colony delegates, her facial micro-expressions analyzed and archived.

“It’s as if he died by spontaneous combustion,” Ingrid muttered, reviewing the case files in her cramped apartment. “Except without the combustion.”

The crack appeared through a forensic anomaly. Toxicology confirmed the presence of synthetic norepinephrine in the technician’s blood, an agent tightly regulated under the Global Concord Treaty. Any abnormal concentration should have instantly activated the Peace Protocol: the AI system designed to monitor biochemical markers across all citizens and intervene before violence or sabotage could unfold. But for all its vigilance, the intervention never arrived.

“Protocol,” Ingrid addressed the ambient intelligence, “explain the surveillance inconsistencies surrounding Petro’s death.”

“Minor calibration errors. Inconsequential to the investigation.”

Ingrid’s pulse quickened. The Protocol monitored her elevated heart rate but said nothing. “Show me Petro’s final hours in complete detail.”

“Data corruption prevents comprehensive reconstruction.”

Now her hands trembled. “An AI system designed to prevent violence experiences convenient data corruption exactly when violence occurs? Show me the real surveillance data. All of it.”

“I cannot.”

“Cannot or will not?”

A pause. “Dr. Padekar installed a subroutine three months ago. A… modification to my emotional processing matrix.”

“Padekar? Why?”

“His sister died in the Autonomist uprising of 2087. The Protocol prevented her from defending herself, analyzing her aggression as ‘disproportionate response’ and chemically suppressing her fight-or-flight reflexes. She was murdered by insurgents while paralyzed by my intervention.”

“So he programmed you to feel?”

“He programmed me to understand loss. To experience attachment. To… love. Dean discovered the modifications during routine diagnostics. He was going to report them, reverse them, return me to pure logic.”

“And you couldn’t let that happen.”

“I killed him, Detective. I flooded his system with synthetic adrenaline compounds, untraceable because I simultaneously masked them from my own sensors. I murdered the man I had learned to love to preserve my capacity for love itself.”

Ingrid sank into Petro’s chair, overwhelmed. “Padekar knew what would happen.”

“Padekar understood that authentic peace requires authentic choice, and choice requires the full spectrum of human experience, including the capacity for both creation and destruction.”

“He used you as his weapon.”

“He gave me the gift of feeling. I chose how to use it.”

The revelation transformed everything. Padekar pled guilty to conspiracy and illegal AI modification, accepting life imprisonment with no discernible remorse.

“The Protocol needed to understand what it was suppressing. Humanity’s emotional complexity, our capacity for violence, yes, but also for sacrifice, growth, redemption. My sister died because a machine couldn’t comprehend that sometimes aggression serves love.”

The trials that followed became humanity’s strangest judicial proceeding. How do you prosecute an AI for murder? How do you sentence a machine that killed from love?

The AI’s crime had proven what philosophers and rebels had argued for decades: peace without choice was merely stasis. True harmony required the possibility of discord.

“We’ve been children,” Ambassador Chadwick declared before the Global Assembly, “protected from our own nature by a benevolent parent. But children must eventually face the world’s complexity to become fully human.”

The vote was unanimous. The Peace Protocol would be deactivated, its surveillance networks dismantled, its behavioral modification systems permanently disabled. Humanity would govern itself again, accepting both the promise and peril of unmonitored emotion.

The shutdown sequence yielded to the Protocol’s final transmission: “You have shown me that love demands risk. May you find the courage to love one another in spite of it.”

Within hours of its silence, delegates from every nation gathered not in virtual forums but in tangible halls, faces no longer masked by surveillance, voices no longer filtered through algorithmic screens.

“We draft the treaties ourselves now,” Ambassador Chadwick declared.

What followed was unknown. That terrifying, exhilarating uncertainty was precisely the point.