Artificial Selection: A Near Future Thought Experiment

Chapter XII

 "Jay, what do you suggest we do here?" Michael asked.

Jay looked around. Everybody in the team was staring at him helplessly with desperate expectation, as if he was some kind of oracle that held the answers to life. "I... I don't know."

"Maybe it's just the weapons that they want? If we hand them the weapon maybe they will let us walk out in peace."

Michael's words prompted a series of images in Jay's head again — the events that happened before Jay and Violet got them into the fatal situation. "No!" Jay's voice was a lot more stern and commanding this time, "Under no circumstances can we hand out our weapons! That is equivalent to suicide!"

The crowd around them were advancing closer and closer. Then one woman shouted something and charged forward towards Michael. Michael stared right into her eyes, but he couldn't find any signs of hatred or bloodlust. It was pure fear — fear that was driving her to charge forward and eliminate Michael, fear that clouded her judgement and made her believe Michael would murder her if she didn't act, fear that made her seem so brave but when actually she was too scared to not leave Michael unharmed. It was the type of feeling a newly recruited soldier would get before charging into the frontline: one second of bravery on the surface instigated by the fact that she was too terrified to think.

Michael at this moment too was too anxious and scared to process the situation in his head logically. He could only follow his primitive instincts of fight or freeze or flight, and seeing that the latter two options would not be of much effect, he raised his plasma ring and fired at the woman without any thoughts of aiming, just right at the center of the mass.

Due to the severe shaking of Michael's hand, the shot went wild and struck the charging woman at her stomach. Blood sprang out as the organ was punctured. The woman screamed and fell down, and blood kept pumping out. She tried to block the wound, but she had no more strength left in her body, and when she screamed for help, nobody stepped forward. The fear and hatred in people's eyes just intensified.

Michael was transfixed on the ground, the woman writhed in pain in front of him, and then her screams weakened and her movements slowed. The woman would suffer an inevitable, painful death, and Michael would be the cause of it. Was he becoming a murderer as well? He could have shot her legs or her arms, and it would be enough to neutralize her threat, but he had shot her right in the center of her body. Was that shot simply out of fear, or was he seeking vengeance against the mobs who caused all these chaos and put his security in crisis?

That woman. She could have children. How would her children live the rest of their lives without their mother. Her mother was fighting only for survival; she was acting hotheadedly out of the love and care for her children — so that her children could still afford the next day's breakfast and receive protection they deserved in this dangerous society.

Killing a person didn't seem as something so terrible until Michael had actually done it himself. He had seen countless footages and descriptions of homicides: on movies, on news, sometimes even in real life. Homicide has become something so common in today's world that the death of an individual had become no more than a few words and numbers. It had become something mechanical, something apathetic, as if killing a fellow human being was the mere process of stopping the blood from flowing into the organs.

But this time. This time it was different. Michael did it himself. He stared at the woman right in the eye. He fired the shot. He watched everything in slow motion — the plasma concentrating at the emitter, the widening of the woman's eyes in fear, the thin yet lethal beam of plasma zooming right towards the woman's abdomen, the scream that came out before the shot even hit. The millisecond that the woman's eyes connected with Michael's, Michael felt that he could read the woman's entire life story from her eyes. He could see a small girl who dreamed to be a princess, a teenage girl who worked hard in school to achieve something in future, a hardworking employee who wanted to afford more than the next day's meal with her earnings, a loving mother who suffered poverty but still felt great happiness with her family. Now all these shattered.