Faster and Deeper than the Eye

The meme had spread like wildfire and lingered like a heat dome: A photo of cop holding a smart gun with the caption Mindless unaccountable killing machine and the same photo, with the cop erased and the smart gun seemingly floating on air, captioned Smart gun.

You had hated the joke but welcomed the gun. You hadn't broken your Dad's heart by joining the police because you admired them. It had been a sacrifice, deliberate if not well thought-out: to accept whatever cost to your soul it would have to make sure there would be one more hopefully good person in a place where they were scarce and needed. A gun who could see what was in front of it and refuse to shoot the unarmed and the harmless was welcome - you trusted buggy code better than some of your coworkers.

And buggy it was. Innocents still died — the bystander and the protester — and cops no longer even paid the questionable price of bad media coverage when this happened, buggy code being an easier bipartisan issue. But fewer innocents died than before. It helped.

So you kept pushing for internal reform. Kept denouncing the increased push for "election surveillance responsibilities." Kept outing what you could, always at the edge of what could get you fired. Kept demanding, too, more reliable software.

It didn't occur to you that the software may be working well until your locked gun fired itself at a mirror making a bullseye on your forehead's reflection.