The old body exhaled for the last time. Elara unstrapped him. Two orderlies in sterile suits lifted the corpse onto a gurney. It would be liquefied by evening.
Elara had thought the same thing, once. She had been passenger number seven. Her crime: refusing to design a weapon that could target civilians by their genetic markers. They had stripped her name, her face, her memory of her wife. But the chamber had failed, just slightly. A ghost remained—a recurring dream of hands holding hands in a garden. When the previous Migration Officer retired into the compost, Elara had volunteered for the post. She wanted to be close to the machine that had killed her. migration chamber
“The chair does not lie,” Elara said, the official line. “You will wake on Aurora-9 with a new name, a new body, and a new purpose. You will be happy.” The old body exhaled for the last time
“That’s not migration,” Kael said. “That’s murder.” It would be liquefied by evening
“Happy people don’t need chambers like this,” Kael said.
She closed the file. The next passenger was already waiting outside the airlock—a woman with tired eyes who had falsified climate data to expose a corrupt corporation. Her crime: economic sabotage. Her sentence: migration.