Migration Chamber - [work]

“That’s sad.”

It sat at the core of the Archimedes , a generational ship no bigger than a city block, designed to haul ten thousand souls across the void between stars. The chamber was a cylinder of polished obsidian and humming conduits, cold enough to see your breath, and at its center, a single chair that looked like a throne for a god—or a dentist. migration chamber

“Welcome,” she said. “Please, take a seat. You won’t feel a thing.” “That’s sad

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. “Please, take a seat

The boy’s crime, Elara knew from the file, was stealing bread to feed his little sister. The sister had died of fever before the trial. The Accord did not care.

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.