The Judge of All the Earth

//This report was given to me to broadcast by the pilot of SLUG DES Pardoner.//

I have a statue of Lady Justice on my desk, with her blindfold and scales. It was given to me as a joke, but sometimes I look at it and wonder. Justice is supposed to be blind, but most often, it has many eyes. For some people (celebrities, banks, the rich), those eyes look at them favorably; for others (the poor, the oppressed), those eyes look unfavorably. Justice, instead of being blind, sees too much.

I was born in a poor family. We could barely afford rent and food each month, we got all of our clothes from Goodwill and never threw them out. At school, we got free lunches; we would eat the greasy slice of pizza they provided and the milk, but save the snack pack (or carrots, when the school decided they would become more "healthy"). Our refrigerator became a repository for any free food we could find and we were hesitant to throw anything away.

When I graduated high school, I signed up for the army immediately. It was the only way I would be able to get money for college -- I had good grades, but not good enough for a scholarship. Life in the army was tough, but I didn't have to worry about where I was going to find my next meal or if I could afford a new shirt when my old one ripped. It gave me security, if not safety.

And then an IED exploded and I got shrapnel embedded in my spine.

I got a pension from the army and a medal, but I lost any security I had in the future, mine and my family's. I would lie in bed all day and watch TV, wondering how exactly I could support anybody.

And then Ma'at appeared. The Tower had fallen a few years ago and EMF activity had slowly been on the rise. Countries were scrambling to get any pieces of the Tower they could find and when I was still in the army, we were getting rumors about some new program involving some new types of drones.

Ma'at, however, was not one of those EMFs that widely showed up in the wake of the Fall. After reading its MO, I understand why: it's a more personal EMF, not really one that appears to large groups of people. Just a singular person, really. And if one single person sees something, but nobody else does, how do you judge if it's real or if they're just crazy?

Well, one day, I guess Ma'at was feeling jealous of the others, because he made a splash. A big entrance.

It was one of those trials that crops up every few years that really shows how broken the justice system is. The defendant was guilty, sure as shit, but the jury acquitted him. There was some loophole or something and they announced he was "not guilty" and he and his attorney shook hands and smiled. And then one person at the back of the courtroom stood up and he had this, I don't know, aura about him. He raised his hand high and yelled, "Let the scales fall from your eyes!"

And the courtroom went nuts. That aura he had seemed move across the room and soon everyone in the audience was standing up and shouting, their voices unintelligible, sounding more like animal noises then actual voices. They surged forward, their hands outstretched. They killed the defendant and his attorney and all the jurors and the judge, too. They tore them to pieces. And afterwards, the man who had started it all, the one whose aura seemed to radiate outward, whose eyes were bulging and bloodshot, said, "We are justice. All sinners will be judged. All sin is equal before us. We are the judge of all the earth."

After that, the engineers set out building SLUG DES Pardoner. When they finished, they asked me if I wanted to pilot it. And I said hell yes.

Pardoner doesn't work like other SLUG Units. When Ma'at resurfaced again and they tested it out, they found that whatever aura caused those people to go crazy wouldn't go away with the death of the man who started it (or the subsequent deaths of everyone possessed by Ma'at . The aura was intangible, immaterial. It would simply travel on towards the next host. They tried capturing it, but the aura couldn't be contained.

They tried refining Pardoner. They looked through some of the more exotic materials pulled from the rubble of the Tower. Materials they didn't even understand, made from stuff they couldn't comprehend. What they came up with, they dubbed "Penance."

Ma'at can show up anywhere: boardrooms, schoolyards, suburban neighborhoods, the slums. And when it does, a light in my room turns red and I roll my wheelchair down the hall to where my Gear Chamber is. Sometimes, if it's really urgent, people will push my wheelchair for me, but they know I don't like that. And then the light above the Chamber will turn green and it'll be my time again.

Ma'at knows me now, I'm sure of it. There will be a riot and it will be at the center and Pardoner will show up and everyone touched by Ma'at will pause. I have made the god of guilt pause and I find myself glad. When I show up with Pardoner, it pauses and it knows what comes next.

Penance isn't a gun or a sword. Penance is a chain. And when I meet Ma'at  I wrap Penance around him and any other bodies it has and it is drained into each link of the chain. Each link absorbs a piece of Ma'at and when Pardoner returns to home, they take the links and put them away. Somewhere deep and dark, I hope. And they install new links, rebuilding the chain each time.

So that's my story. I have to send some money to my family now. I'm glad I could help.