/lit/ - Literature

When the party passed the law, people started to get worried. "Weed out the undesirables", what a way to phrase it. How blunt and to the point. The rules were equally simple: Nominate any one person, be it the single mother next door, the crazy hobo shitting in the streets outside the welfare department or the president himself. The nomination was anonymous but it triggered a delicate, bureaucratic process. You'd wake up to a letter in the mailbox, informing you, that you were nominated for execution. One week would pass. One week that would give you the chance to set up your defence. But the defence could be literally anyone, that was the good part. One person to stick up for you, tell the court that you were a decent person, a hard working individual, an asset to society. And that would be it. Nomination dropped.

First people refused to do it, thought it had to be some kind of sick joke. Some teenagers nominated each other for shits and giggles, just to defend each other the next day. So nothing really happened for a long time. Some people nominated annoying coworkers, but their spouses or children or friends usually saved them. A lot of people nominated politicans and other officials but the higher-ups had their own system of looking after each other and no one was ever in real danger. Until Alex Kostner.

Visceral