The deputy administrator motioned to her assistant, who hurried to her side as one wall of the office faded away, revealing an expansive view of the nearby spaceport loading dock.
“I’ve wanted you to see this,” she said. “You won’t have that many opportunities.”
Neatly laid out on the dock were thirty or so crystalline tubes, overseen by hovering drones as they awaited storage in the hold of the jumpship prepping for launch nearby. The scene was, in itself, not remarkable. The assistant looked puzzled.
“I’m not sure I understand,” he said.
“You remember those troublemakers the prefect had arrested and examined last month?”
“The ones judged incompetent and violent,” the assistant nodded.
“There you go,” the deputy administrator nodded toward the thirty tubes. “The council is sending them to the asylum.”
“The asylum is real?”
She smiled at his naivete. “Of course it is,” she replied. “Neither the prefect nor the council want such individuals left within reach of our society; the risks are too great. So we scrub out certain memories, drug them up and ship them off.”
As she spoke, the crystal tubes rose slowly into the air, one by one, and floated off the dock and into the hold of the jumpship. The assistant found himself fascinated.
“We can’t have them here, and to dispose of them would be uncivilized,” she continued. “And so...”
“-the asylum.”
“The asylum. A backwater planet where the inhabitants look like us and breathe more-or-less the same air and eat more-or-less the same foods. A planet where their incompetence and violence are commonplace. A planet where most of the inhabitants are as utterly lacking in self-awareness as they are.”
She smiled.
“In other words,” she said, “a planet where they’ll fit right in.”
She waved at the wall, causing a starchart to replace the view of the dock.
“How long have we been sending people to this... asylum?”
“For thousands of years,” the deputy administrator answered, “and far more than you might guess. But not for much longer, I don’t think: the idiots are wrecking their own ecosphere, and probably won’t last another hundred years.”
She pointed to the starchart.
“That’s it, right... there.” The screen zoomed in on a yellow, middle-aged star of no particular distinction.
“Yes. There.” The assistant squinted at the star. “Third planet out...”
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