Shielding Bracelet
This story was inspired by Black Mirror: White Christmas
There were no direct flights to Saden, so I had to take the train, which meant spending an entire day in transit. Since becoming an evaluator, business trips like this had gradually become routine.
This time, the person I was assigned to evaluate was named Gordon Chase, male, fifty-two years old. Twenty-seven years earlier—when he was twenty-five—he had been sentenced to fifty years under the Shielding Law for aggravated fraud and the seduction of women.
Twenty-seven years ago, I mused, flipping through the file in my hand. That must have been right around the time the Shielding Law was first implemented. I'd heard there had been considerable opposition when the law was first introduced, but I was only two or three then and had no memory of it. For as long as I could remember, the Shielding Law had been a standard tool for controlling crime.
The Shielding Law was born from breakthroughs in neural interface technology, which also led to the successful development of the shielding bracelet. Unlike the traditional approach of imprisoning criminals together, the shielding bracelet could punish offenders without restricting their physical freedom. Once a criminal was fitted with the bracelet, it could impose varying degrees of shielding according to the sentence.
Of course, this shielding didn't block phone signals or anything like that. It blocked the signals the body itself produced—language, gestures, eye contact, micro-expressions, and so on. The shielding bracelet was primarily used on offenders convicted of fraud and seduction, whose crimes hinged on releasing dangerous interpersonal signals, thereby eliminating the possibility of reoffending at its root.
Naturally, shielding sentences had a set duration, and determining whether someone was no longer dangerous and could have their bracelet removed was now my job. I'd been an evaluator for over three years—still not a veteran, but I'd dealt with all kinds of people. Gordon Chase, however, was proving to be particularly unusual.
According to his file, his first offense was at nineteen, and despite subsequent punishments, he never stopped committing crimes. That was why, when the Shielding Law was enacted, he received a fifty-year sentence. Based on the nature of his offenses, he was shielded from nearly all forms of human communication—the maximum punishment the bracelet could impose at the time.
Such long-duration, comprehensive shielding was exceedingly rare and only occurred in the early days of the law's implementation. As the legislation was refined over the years, more humanitarian considerations were factored in, and such extreme sentences became far less common.
Even among those early cases, most had since received sentence reductions. But looking through Gordon Chase's evaluation records, I found that none of his previous evaluators had submitted reduction recommendations—they all still considered him dangerous.
Yet how could someone who had been shielded from virtually all human signals, isolated from humanity for over two decades, still pose any threat to society? It was with this doubt and curiosity that I arrived in Saden.
Saden was a small town that attracted summer tourists thanks to nearby Lake Beto. But it was deep autumn now; the town held only its residents, and the streets were quiet. Gordon Chase didn't live in town but alone in a cabin in the woods, thirty kilometers away.
I drove as far as the road would take me and followed the GPS through the forest, doubting I'd taken the right fork—until I spotted the cabin. To be honest, it was better than I'd expected: a simple wooden structure but reasonably tidy. In the clearing out front was a vegetable garden, and the man currently hoeing it must have been Gordon Chase.
I walked over and introduced myself. Though aged, he still bore some resemblance to his photo, and the black bracelet on his right wrist was especially conspicuous. After a brief introduction, I explained why I was there. He stopped his gardening but kept both hands on the hoe, watching me warily. I knew that with the bracelet active, normal communication would be difficult and would affect my evaluation. So I produced the demagnetizing ring from my bag.
"I'd like to talk with you. If it's all right, I'm going to place this ring over your shielding bracelet. It will temporarily neutralize the bracelet's effect and allow us to communicate normally." I spoke slowly, explaining what I was about to do. The bracelet wouldn't prevent him from receiving information from others, but after so many years alone, his ability to interact might have degraded significantly—I hoped his speech hadn't deteriorated too much.
I held up the ring to show him and reached for his right wrist, but he knocked my hand away forcefully.
"I need you to cooperate, or I won't be able to submit a favorable evaluation." I tried to make him understand the consequences of noncompliance, but it seemed to have no effect on him whatsoever.
When I attempted to force the demagnetizing ring onto him, he shoved me to the ground. It was embarrassing to admit—though I was over twenty years younger than him and worked out regularly, he was far stronger. Perhaps his years of living in the wild had made him as powerful as a feral creature.
I scrambled to my feet and tried again to communicate, but he was even more impatient than I was, raising the hoe and swinging it at me. He was shouting inarticulately—if I didn't leave now, he might very well split my skull open.
On the drive back to Saden, I was frustrated but also felt helpless. In all my years on the job, only Gordon Chase had ever refused an evaluation. Everyone else fought for every possible reduction. I was starting to understand why his previous evaluators never recommended a reduction—they'd all been shut out just like me.
That night, lying in my inn bed, I couldn't organize my thoughts and fell into my habitual overthinking.
Should I bring a few burly colleagues and force Gordon Chase to submit, then put the bracelet on him? But if he wouldn't cooperate, what good would that do? Or had his feral existence destroyed his capacity for communication entirely?
I searched in vain for insight into this man, finding only his old criminal records. In the photo, the twenty-five-year-old Gordon Chase was young, handsome, and slightly bookish—nothing like the creature he'd become.
It wasn't that I had no leads at all. Going through his evaluation file, I found that while previous evaluators' content was sealed for independence, their names and ID numbers were visible. The most recent one, from five years ago, was Yvonne Ye—someone I actually knew.
"Someone I knew" was an understatement. When I started as an evaluator three years ago, she'd been my mentor. In her early forties, she'd been doing this work for over twenty years and taught me a great deal when I was new. After she was transferred to another district, we'd gradually lost touch. Since she'd evaluated Gordon Chase five years ago, reaching out to her seemed like the best option.
But after returning to Saden, I hesitated. The evaluation code prohibited evaluators from discussing their subjects with each other—just as evaluation content was kept confidential—to prevent one evaluator's judgment from being influenced by another's.
Rules were rules, but people were people. I knew evaluators talked privately among themselves, though this was a first for me. That was why I felt somewhat awkward when I finally called Yvonne.
"What's up, Little Nan? You don't call often. What do you need?" Her voice came through the phone.
"Yvonne, I've run into some trouble during an evaluation and was hoping you could help."
"Well, that's unusual for you. What is it?"
"Do you remember someone named Gordon Chase? You evaluated him five years ago. Can you tell me why you didn't recommend a reduction?"
"Gordon Chase? Let me think." The line went quiet as she searched her memory. After I added a few more details, she finally located him among her vast roster of subjects.
"I remember now—the man who lives in the woods. He refused to cooperate with my evaluation and wouldn't wear the demagnetizing ring, so I didn't submit a reduction application."