The buzzing from the chip was just wrong, as was the headache.   They had fine tuned the technology to the point that any annoyances were intended, and I resented it.

“You make a fair point,” said the supervisor, motioning to an unseen technician.  Abruptly the buzzing and headache stopped.  

“14,000,000 people ahead of me on the crucifixion priority list, you say?” I said.  

“Easily,” he said, “so many other things had a better chance of killing you before the state got around to rooting you out.”  

“I should have invested everything I had in lottery tickets,” I said.  

“Would a few million dollars have made things any different for you?” he asked.  

“I could have hired the people I needed to make this thing work,” I said.  A bird flew by, one of the last.  It cast a small, flickering shadow on the floor in front of me as it passed.  

“Tell me more about this thing,” he said.

“The wealth of our country was built by slave labor and the cheap labors of exploited people who were hungry and desperate in the countries they came from.  The people who collected the lion’s share of the wealth, the same ones in charge today, had as many qualms about taking what they wanted as a hungry lion has about eating a zebra.  The new theory of evolution was cited, ‘survival of the fittest’, much more flattering than ‘survival of the most ruthless’.  Sciences were conjured, measuring skulls and skeletons to demonstrate the innate inferiority of one race, why others were fit to subjugate them.  The science of race was invented, a laughably unfunny race to bolster racism by any means necessary.”  

“I did tell you to take your time, but I didn’t mean this,” the supervisor said, showing only a glint of impatience.

“If I had a million dollars I would hire a highly skilled business partner, after interviewing a dozen, or maybe fifty, to find one who can understand the idea and help me bring it into the world on a larger scale.  It’s a simple idea that proves hard to explain, market or justify: children in slums deserve to be listened to as much as the children of the well-to-do.  In an elite school you get an ear, in a slum school a barked command.  The child of the wealthy is nodded at with an indulgent smile, the child of the poor is told to get in line, fold their damned hands, shut the fuck up.”  

“And this is your problem why, exactly?” the supervisor asked, not without sympathy.  

My theoretical diagnosis in the DSM XIV draft suddenly appeared in my mind, like a hologram, turning itself to catch the light from different angles.  It actually looked beautiful, the light catching the grooves in the letters, playing across the serifs.  This is the world I will miss, I thought with a sudden pang, these ineffable little miracles of sensory experience.  The tiny rainbows shining through the prisms of light hushed me for a moment.  The supervisor watched this too, grateful for the break.  

“But all good things must come to an end,” I said to him.  I was thinking of Sim Kessel, a French Jewish middleweight who uttered this line to excellent effect in his wonderful, but now out of print, Hanged At Auschwitz.  The former French underground fighter had reached the point in Auschwitz where he became what they referred to, bizarrely, as a ‘Muslim’.  That was the point where the fight was finally gone, the will to live exhausted.  ‘Muslims’ stopped eating, lost weight, became glassy-eyed skeletons and died.  Kessel was many kilos below his fighting weight and had that glassy look, started giving away his moldy bread and weak, stinking soup.  

Somehow a friend with the power to help got him out of the mining brigade, where prisoners were marched many kilometers, in wooden shoes, to labor in mines so hot and airless that men drank their own urine to survive.  These Auschwitz prisoners were the ultimate workforce, they worked as though their lives depended on it and were completely disposable.  A capitalist’s dream, if you know what I’m saying.  

“Pick it up,” the supervisor said, making the old circular choo-choo train motion with his hand.

“Kessel got a job in the camp itself, cleaning the latrine ditches.  He was spared the long freezing marches he was too weak to survive, and spent the day scooping dysentery and other waste out of the ditches in buckets and carrying them to dump somewhere else.  Eventually he was….”

“I don’t really care about Sim Kessel,” said the supervisor.

“When he regained his strength they sent him back to the mines, and that’s when he said ‘all good things must come to an end.  And so I was sent back to the mines.'”

“Interesting,” said the supervisor without expression. “And now, please, the rest of the personal details.”

“You asked me why this brutally unfair arrangement is my problem.  I have no short answer.  I do not understand it myself, what drives me to try to help something far beyond my powers to help.  I imagined that if people saw the creativity, inventiveness and ingenuity of the children of poor people it might kindle some mercy in them.  I don’t know why I thought this.  The black eyed face of a little girl in Yemen, confronting a camera after her family was killed in a drone strike, tugs the heart the same way a boy surrendering to men with rifles in a ghetto does, is the look of a shocked Armenian girl in 1915 who has just seen her mother disemboweled by a Turk on a horse.”

“The point, Jesus Christ, the point!  Will you come to the goddamned point, man?” said the supervisor.

“Nobody can be expected to give a shit about anything that is not directly under their nose.  I was a blind idiot to think that anyone would be interested in and moved by the creativity of children being raised to become inmates of our privatized prisons.  People are preoccupied by a thousand other things, nobody can be expected to give a shit, unless, perhaps, it’s their own kid, doomed to early death or a long stretch in prison for the crime of being born in shit city.  I don’t know what I was thinking.  Just fucking crucify me, then, if you’re in such a fucking hurry.”

“I apologize,” said the supervisor. “I should not have snapped like that.  Very unprofessional, as well as discourteous.  I know this must be stressful to you.”

“Not at all,” I said, displaying another hallmark of my disease. “I came here to give up.  Like Sim Kessel giving away his rotten bread, I don’t care anymore.  I can’t explain why I cared in the first place.  You’re right, my mother’s right, I didn’t make the world.  I am not responsible for anybody’s misery but my own.”  

“Oh, but you are.  You are responsible,” said Gandhi, suddenly popping up like a jack-in-the-box.  His smile was very sad and serious.  “You think you can give up, let yourself be executed and be done with it?  You cannot.  Think about it, man.  Speaking to the man who will turn you over to the technicians of death, the last human in the chain, you are still trying to explain your responsibility.  If you take it up, it is your responsibility.”  

“Fucking great…” I thought, and through hidden speakers all around came my thought.

“Fucking great…” the speakers said in my voice, with a nice natural reverb that reminded me of playing my guitar in the resonant stairwells of public schools in the battered city where I grew up.  The voice emerged in surround sound, really clear and with great suppleness.  It actually sounded beautiful, in a weird way.