Detective Josephine dragged herself out of bed. The alarm clock said 6:45. Exactly 5 minutes before her alarm was set to ring. However she got out of bed anyway. She had read somewhere that it wasn't good to go back to sleep after waking up before your alarm clock rang because if you woke up it meant you completed one full sleep cycle. The Archangel probably foresaw that too. She got into the shower and sure enough her shower turned on automatically at the exact moment she stepped under the shower's head. It also turned off automatically the moment she thought she should get out of the shower. She then proceeded to put on her clothes and walked out of her apartment. The door locked automatically behind her.
As she walked down the corridor she could feel the eyes of the Archangel on her. And sure enough when she went to the coffee shop at the bottom of her apartment, her usual drink was waiting on the banister, exactly 5 minutes early. She grabbed it and walked to the bus stop. She didn't own a car because the Archangel had decided she simply didn't need one. On the bus, while looking at all the tall buildings going by, she started having her usual thoughts about how useless she was to the system. In fact if she simply didn't wake up one morning, the Archangel system would have foreseen that too and would have a fresh graduate from the academy just waiting to replace her
. The Archangel reigned supreme. Crime had dropped to nearly zero. The police force simply wasn't needed. They were simply figureheads. The omnipresence of the Archangel was such that it could foresee crimes even before they occurred and notify the police force. In fact the Archangel probably knew what kind of crime a person would commit the moment he was born. It made basically all decision making redundant because the Archangel already knows what decisions you will make.
Josephine got off the bus and walked into the police station. The Archangel app on her phone informed her that she will not be dealing with any cases today. The app was the one kindness the Archangel system offered. If you tell humans everything they will do over the course of their lives they will think they had no reason to live anymore, so the app was invented to keep humans on edge and willing to face the next day because they think it might be different. 'Fools,' thought Josephine. The Archangel probably knew even who would kill themselves and who would live if such information was revealed to the public. But for some reason it seemed to think this way was better. No one could change the future, the Archangel made sure of that. But even as she thought that, Josephine had no way of knowing exactly how messed up her future was going to become, because far away from the police station, certain events had already been set into motion by one mastermind. Events that would rock the New World to its very foundations. Josephine heard static coming from her phone. When she took it out to look at it, the blood drained from her face. Impossibly, the absolutely unthinkable had happened. On her screen was one system message.
The Archangel app calibrated for your use has crashed.
At that exact moment her boss screamed, 'JO, GET IN MY OFFICE RIGHT NOW!'
YOU ARE READING
Fall of the Archangel
القصة القصيرةIn a world where humans are no more than gears in a machine, one man steps out to break the system.
