Execution Day
Earth is a galactic prison. Humanity are its prisoners.
The broadcast lasted forty-seven seconds.
Val watched it on a phone borrowed from a stranger on the Tube. An older man in a hi-vis jacket who’d gone very still. The way people go still when the ground shifts under them and they haven’t decided yet whether to fall.
Earth is a galactic prison, and humanity are its prisoners.
Val knew the voice. Knew the cadence. Tribunal-formal, the way they’d been trained to speak back when they still attended briefings.
They handed the phone back. “Cheers,” they said, which wasn’t a word they’d used for the first four hundred years. It grew on them.
Got off at the next stop and started running.
Val had a flat in Peckham. Three rooms, eleven thousand books, and a kettle that took four minutes longer than it should because they’d never gotten around to replacing it. The walls were covered in things. Maps. Photographs. Newspaper clippings. A child’s drawing of a dinosaur taped up in 1987 and never taken down because it had seemed rude to remove it. Three millennia of observation had a tendency to accumulate.
They pulled a box from under the bed. Inside, a small device that looked like a flattened river stone. Warm to the touch. A direct-channel communicator. The kind you weren’t supposed to keep.
Val kept it anyway.
“I need to speak to the Presiding Chair,” they said. “Tell them it’s Councillor Vaelithos. Tell them I’m annoyed.”
The response came in four minutes. Which meant the Council was rattled. Normally they made you wait three days on principle.
The tribunal chamber existed in a fold of space that didn’t have a postcode. Fourteen seats arranged in a crescent. Pale light. The kind of architecture designed to make you feel small.
Val walked in wearing dark jeans, a burgundy jumper with a small moth hole near the hem, and trainers that had seen better years. They’d grabbed a coat on the way out. Long, slightly too big across the shoulders and plenty of pockets. Val loved a good pocket. A cup of tea, still warm, held loosely in one hand.
The Presiding Chair, a tall, silver-edged being called Zorath who had been running tribunals since before humanity had discovered fire, looked at them the way one looks at a problem that was supposed to have resolved itself.
“Vaelithos.”
“Val, now. Been Val for about six centuries. I find it sticks.” They looked around the chamber, counting faces. “Right. Who wrote the broadcast?”
Silence.
“Because… I’ve read the original charter. The one filed when the containment was established. The word used ~ in every copy, every amendment, every footnote ~ was sanctuary. Not prison. Someone changed that. Recently. I would very much like to know who, because it has caused,” they gestured broadly, “a situation.”
“The semantics are irrelevant,” said Zorath. “The sentence stands. The review is complete.”
“The review?” Val set their tea down on the edge of the nearest console. “You reviewed 300,000 years of human history and your conclusion was termination. In what, six months? I’ve been there for three thousand years and I’m still finding new things to read.”
“The record is clear. Warfare. Ecological destruction. Systemic cruelty on a scale that…”
“Is also the record of a species that kept trying.” Val’s voice didn’t rise. That was a trick they’d learned from watching humans. The quiet ones were often the most dangerous. “You want to prosecute them for 300,000 years of violence? Fine. Pull up the record. All of it. Because I’ve read every page, and you know what’s on page two? They tried to stop. Badly, yes. Catastrophically, sometimes. Embarrassingly, often. But the trying never stopped. That’s not a prison population. That’s a species in the middle of becoming… something.”
“Becoming something is not sufficient grounds for…”
“I’ve watched them build and burn the same city fourteen times.” Val held up a hand. “You know what they did the fifteenth time? They built the hospital first.” They let that sit for a moment. “That’s not nothing. In my considerable experience, that is genuinely not nothing.”
Zorath’s expression altered. “The execution protocol is already in motion. The switch…”
“Yes. The switch.” Val picked up their tea and sipped. Then stepped further into the chamber. The easy manner shifted. Layered beneath, something older and considerably less patient. “That’s actually why I came. Not just for the argument, though I do love an argument. The switch. You haven’t run a full-spectrum analysis on what you’re actually turning off, have you?”
“The termination sequence is standard…”
“Standard for what? A colony? An outpost?” Val shook their head. “The containment field has been in place for 300,000 years. Do you understand what grows around a containment field over 300,000 years? It’s not just a cage anymore. It’s integrated. The field is threaded through every cognitive network on that planet. Turn it off ~ ” they paused, “~ and you don’t just end human consciousness. You collapse the entire substrate it’s been growing through. Which means everything the containment was actually protecting ~ the mineral seams, the temporal buffers, the fourteen other species currently nesting in the planet’s quieter regions ~ all of it goes with it.”
The chamber was still.
“You built a sanctuary,” Val said, “and you’re about to destroy what you were protecting along with the walls.”
Zorath was quiet for a long moment. “Even if that were true. Even if we were to... delay the sequence. The core matter remains. Humanity’s crimes are documented. The record…”
“The record was tampered with.” Val’s voice was flat now. Certain. “I’ve spent the last four hours going through the archive and there are seven hundred and forty-three entries with corrupted timestamps. All in the last century. All making the same kind of acts look worse. Specific other acts, attempts at repair, moments of collaboration, the ones that don’t fit the narrative, look smaller.” They looked around the crescent of faces. “Someone wanted this outcome. I don’t think it was anyone sitting on Earth.”
Silence.
“I want an independent audit,” Val said. “Full access to the original charter, the unmodified archive, and the source code for the execution sequence.” They sipped their tea. Still warm. “And I want it before the twenty-four hours are up, which means you lot need to move considerably faster than you’re comfortable with.”
“And if we refuse?” said Zorath.
Val smiled. A very old smile. Patient in the way that only things that have watched centuries pass can manage to be patient. “Then I stand here and I keep talking. I’m very good at talking. Ask anyone who’s had the misfortune of being trapped with me at a social function. Or a lift.” They tilted their head. “I also have a rather comprehensive record of the Council’s activities going back four thousand years, and I know a phrase ~ a human phrase, actually, quite a good one ~ mutually assured disclosure. I’ve always liked it. Very efficient.”
Silence.
Then, from somewhere at the far end of the crescent, a younger councillor, new, in galactic terms, barely eight centuries old ~ said, quietly, “I’ll authorise the audit.”
Zorath glared at them. Glared at Val.
“Fine,” they said. “We delay.”
Val nodded, finished their tea, plopped the china in a pocket, and pulled their coat a little tighter.
“Brilliant,” they said. “Now. When we’re done with humanity ~ and we will sort it, I promise you that ~ I’d like to formally submit my services as their representative.”
They paused at the door.
“And then, after that, I’d like to submit a second application. On behalf of everyone else in this room.” They looked back. “Because if someone’s been tampering with humanity’s records, I’d very much like to know what they’ve been doing with ours.”
Outside council chamber, a planet of eight billion people went about their morning commutes. School runs and arguments. Ordinary acts of grace, with no idea how close it had all come.
Written for Bradley Ramsey Flash Fiction February…
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I read this as sharp, humane, and quietly powerful. To me, you flipped the “execution” premise into a defense of humanity becoming rather than a condemnation of what we are. Val is an unforgettable creation, wry, ancient, and deeply compassionate. My takeaway is your story argues that imperfection isn’t proof of failure, it’s evidence of growth. You absolutely nailed "smart" science fiction with emotional intelligence and moral backbone. I liked it!
Powerful stuff MB ! ⚡️