Page 64 - Demo

that palely lit gantry, the gleaming white fluoropolymer passage to my old life. To sunsets, again. To air that wasn’t recycled. To them. To see their face again, instead of the endless litany of clerks and poor souls that filed in and out like ants beneath the looking glass. And yet, I was afraid. I had grown used to life up here, away from it all. It wasn’t unusual, I was told. They called it Canary syndrome. It happens to most people in my line of work, and that’s why there’s all the monitoring and daily paperwork and debriefings. It means you’re ready to go home, when you can no longer think of it. I forced myself down the gantry.
I know it isn’t intentional, but I find it hard to deny the inescapable contronymity of the station. The conservation of forces that directs the celestial dance of ships and their people, as they are cleaved together and cleaved apart. It was a mirror, where I was asked to reflect upon society’s ills and cast them back upon itself. For fifteen years, I had been the silver backing. Though now it felt more like flaking nickel or beaten copper. A week, per case, from a queue of litigants, arrayed in the filth of wealth or the sooty finery of poverty. The light behind the bench was blinding. They said it was to protect me, to make justice faceless and to reveal the truth in the faces before me. I didn’t believe it; watching the shadows dance in that windowless room, as lawyers shuttled case material and evidence, legal precedent and the arguments of interested parties was a charade. It was my choice and my choice alone on what cases to hear. Usually I had decided long before we’d even entered the courtroom and I ascended those stairs to the dais of light. Of seven cases, one. Always seven. Always one. Then seven days to arrive at a conclusion. I knew the laws were imperfect; their craftspeople were. So I tried to arrive at what I believed most just. What I could argue was just, given what I had. I was doubtful of myself in the beginning, and there were hard days, but I held to one thing to aid me: them. I knew I could never look them in their eyes again if I ever faltered and failed in my task. I know there were more just choices. I can always find justice looking past, and injustice propagated forward. I still do not know if I can look them in the eyes. How I w-