On Monday mornings, I send out a story via email: ultra-brief tales of 1,000 words or more, usually in genres including horror, science fiction, and the supernatural. Those stories collectively are called Once Upon A Time. I’ve also published several ebooks and compendium volumes of those stories so far.

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Here's story 248, of 266 so far.

The Fairness

When the child came, the world changed.

Its origin was a mystery. Whether it came from above, out in the starry darkness, or from the depths of the ocean or somewhere else, no-one knew. The only thing we knew immediately was that it wasn’t like us.

We still don’t know if it was truly a child, but it had a childlike manner. When it spoke, it spoke our own languages, but in the way that a child would. Full of curiosity, and wonder. And sometimes rage.

And it brought its gift, perhaps unintentionally. Its terrible clarity.

The child was with us for only seven days, and then it was gone. There were theories that one government or another had taken it somewhere, but it quickly became clear that any attempt to do so would have been futile. It just went away, as suddenly as it had come. But it left its gift behind.

At first, the newspapers, social media, and television reporters called it a series of miracles. Then they called it a curse. In time, they learned its true, inevitable name.

This is the year 2033, and it is also year two of The Fairness.

Earth is very different now. Outwardly, it looks much the same, but human culture has been radically altered. The change began — or The Fairness began to take effect — the same day and hour that the child left. It is both beautiful and horrible in its simplicity.

So much of the world is unfair, particularly the world that humans have made. Injustice and inequality, violence and greed, war and conquest. Death and disease. To the eyes of a child, incomprehensible and undeserved. Not fair.

The illnesses of the privileged were the first thing we noticed. In the countries without universal healthcare, the rich got sick, because they could afford to. The poor, or the uninsured, went to bed one night with their infections and their injuries and their cancers, and they woke up the next morning cured. It was only fair.

The vulnerability of the powerful came soon after. Any act of violence impacted only the perpetrator. Bullets travelling backwards. Force redirected. Impossible things, like magic, but we see it every day now.

Murder has ended. Rape has ended. Assault has ended. War has ended, in the spectacular self-destruction of every vestige of the planet’s myriad armed forces. Nuclear weapons no longer exist, gone from silos and submarines. Missiles vanished, along with the vehicles which would have launched them. Aircraft and naval vessels, runways and bases. Firearms and ammunition. Gone, from everywhere. Only bemused personnel left standing, looking around in shock, wearing their uniforms but with all rank insignia and regalia removed.

The mechanism of effect of The Fairness is unknown; our knowledge of physics is utterly inadequate to explain it — indeed, our science would seem to preclude it even being possible. Our satellites and observatories can detect nothing in orbit or in nearby space. Our most sensitive equipment can find no anomalies that could account for even a fraction of it.

Half the planet thinks the child was alien. The other half thinks it was a deity, and specifically whichever deity each individual happened to believe in already. There have been crises of faith, and the finding of faith, and conversions between faiths. There have been suicides beyond count. But life goes on.

The Fairness achieved what technology couldn’t: the moderation of human interpersonal interaction. The haunted eyes of schoolchildren tell the story well. The wave of anguish and self-loathing experienced in the instant before uttering or typing a hurtful word has served to irrevocably alter how we treat each other. The clarity of emotional consequence has rendered psychopathy and sociopathy obsolete. No-one is without empathy and sympathy anymore. The Fairness lives within us all.

Food production was profoundly affected. We expected mandatory vegetarianism or even veganism, but we were interested to learn that The Fairness cared most about was balance. No captivity, and no suffering in death, but the eating of animals remained acceptable. Ritual butchery has vanished, though. Who would continue after seeing the frightened animal run away unharmed, while the butcher fell to the ground with his own throat somehow cut?

We live in a world that is functionally post-prejudice. Racism, and sexism, and all the other -isms, are confined to the mind. The day of over four thousand dead police officers in the United States and far beyond heralded an instant change in how humans wear their authority, and exercise it upon those who are different from them. The jails have emptied, and dissolved into fine dust, leaving only green fields behind.

In many ways, it’s so much better.

But there are still crimes, even if they’re pre-emptively prevented and punished in the same moment. There is still hate. There is still rage. There is still fury.

The Fairness has its own fury, too. Its anger. Its tantrums.

When a man lifts his hand to strike a woman, forgetting about The Fairness in the heat of his primal savagery, the force which meets him is many times his own strength. Violence is now an act of self-harm, and the injuries are appalling.

When the powerful try to abuse their power, everything is stripped from them. Position, possessions and assets, but also their families’ memories of them. Wives (and husbands) and children who no longer recognise them, but are instinctively repelled by the miasma of low reputation which then surrounds the once-mighty for a long time afterwards.

The weapons were not taken away, but were left to taunt and to maim those who would still wield them. The conflicts and border disputes weren’t resolved, but transformed into a new game of deadly brinksmanship, as each side manoeuvred in the looming shadow of The Fairness, scheming to incite their enemy to breach the new laws and bring destruction down upon themselves.

Resentments were not quashed, but left to fester in impotence and veiled malice.

Our old world was rife with evil, and wrongness, and the product of our species at its worst. But there was also light, and hope, and the possibility of self-improvement. We live now, in year two of who knows how many, in a culture that has utterly changed.

Under the left-behind omnipotent morality of a departed child-god, to whom we can never appeal.

JINX

KESTREL face a new and terrifying enemy: an all-seeing mastermind who already knows exactly who they are, and many of their deepest secrets. Nothing stays hidden forever, and the line between privacy and liberty is razor-thin…

Book 3 in the KESTREL action-thriller series.

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