The chip, which can, of course, be used by the implanted citizen as an internal alarm, can also be activated by the network which can assign it various functions.  So I found myself instantly, alertly awake– with a splitting head ache.

“Ah, good to see you awake,” said the supervisor cheerfully, as I struggled to sit upright, slightly nauseated and unable to rub my aching head with my hands still shackled.  

“No need for the soft cuffs, officer,” said the man mildly, and the plastic restraints were snipped off my wrists.   I pushed myself upright and rubbed my head, neither of which helped the throbbing in my skull.

The supervisor, a thoughtful looking man, scanned my history from the chip. “You are not a bad person,” he told me reassuringly.  “There is no violence or criminality in your past, outside of some ill-advised verbal outbursts and the incendiary images you have committed to writing over the years– you know, those ironically intended things you write in high emotion that can be interpreted as actually, say, advocating the murder of various government officials.  You and I, and any person who looks at it for more than a moment, know you never actually advocated the killing of anyone.  Even those, as you have pointed out precisely and with great fairness of mind, are deserving of death.”  

His kindness disarmed me, as it was intended to.  I found myself almost tearful as I sat before him.  I tried to keep my mind blank, focused on his words alone.

“Unfortunately, nobody looks at these things for more than a few seconds, as you know.  And you are not here for those writings anyway, it’s much more subtle than that.  You are, in fact, a kind person with the best of intentions.  Anyone can see that.   Why don’t you tell me, for the record and also, as one human being to another, why you felt it necessary to surrender for crucifixion?   It appears you could have easily avoided it, you are probably about number 14,000,000 on the priority list for this special handling.”

“Sonderbehandlung,” I thought, the German term stamped on Jewish passports in the extermination years.  It meant “special handling”, Nazi code for “expedited for extermination”, one of the several German terms of art from those years I was familiar with: vernichtungslager, wir scheissen auf die freiheit, lebensunwertes leben, entartete kunst, arbeit macht frei — all similar in spirit.  

“Ah, the Nazis, always with the Nazis,” the supervisor said nodding with a sad smile.  “They did an indelible number on you and your family, didn’t they?   Not only shooting a whole bunch of them in the back of the head, virtually all of your mother’s side, leaving their bodies in a ravine in the Ukraine, not only disappearing your father’s side, and their entire lice-ridden shtetl in Belarus across a small river from Pinsk, wiped off the map without a trace, but invading your mind so thoroughly that to you all government authorities are capable of becoming mass murdering monsters, all populations their witting and unwitting accomplices.”  

He had a pretty good point, I had to give him that.  A society that is OK with millions of people dying so that others can have low cost slave labor?   A society that imprisons more people per capita than the most ruthless totalitarian states on the earth now?  A society that goes shopping for luxuries they don’t need as….

“….as millions of children go to bed hungry in a country that throws away countless hundred dollar a plate dinners in fine restaurants in the very cities where these kids eat paint chips to fill their bellies…. yes, the doomed children.  Always the doomed children, isn’t that what it is?  Tell me your plan, why you deserve to be crucified.  There’s nothing I can do to change your fate, you understand, but I’d like you to be able to get it all off your chest, as best you can.  There is no rush, take your time.”

And I began composing my thoughts, to tell him exactly what it was about my idealistic plan that marked me as a man worthy of the cruelest public execution a private contractor could perform for a government entity.