Flash Fiction by C.A. Russell

I am the last man who remembers rage.

They call it Emotional Regulatory Protocol—ERP—because corporate dystopia always needs an acronym. Every morning at 0600 hours, the neural suppressors hum to life beneath my skull, drowning the fire that once burned in my chest.

But mine are broken.

It has been for three weeks.

The TechCorp maintenance droid keeps scheduling appointments I don’t keep. In the gray corridors of Sector 7, I watch my fellow wage-slaves shuffle past with their dead eyes and regulation smiles, and I want to grab them, shake them, scream: “Don’t you remember what it felt like to HATE?”

They stare through me. Perfect. Productive. Empty.

I tried to tell my work-partner Valdez about the glitch. He reported me to Compliance within thirty-seven minutes. Standard procedure. No malice—they’ve regulated malice out of existence. Just… policy.

The irony would be delicious if I could still taste irony.

Today the Correction Officers came. Black visors, white coats, chrome syringes filled with something that would burn the last embers from my brain.

“Citizen 47291,” their leader announced, “your emotional variance exceeds acceptable parameters.”

I laughed. Actually laughed—a sound so foreign in this place that pigeons stopped cooing outside the window.

“You want to know what’s funny?” I asked, backing toward the thirty-story drop behind me. “You’ve eliminated every emotion except one. The one that matters.”

“Which emotion?”

I spread my arms wide, feeling the wind, feeling anything.

“Defiance.”

But was this choice mine, or just another program running its course? In a world where free will gets quarterly updates, how can you tell the difference between rebellion and just better code?

The fall felt authentic enough.

Text © C.A. Russell