Line and Paper

They said the system worked — that it protected everyone equally, that fairness just needed proper channels. That was the official story.

Every election cycle, every press conference, every bland government tweet repeated the mantra: *We all have the same rights.* But you only had to stand in the queue at any social services office to know that wasn’t true. There were two queues, in truth: one that moved, and one that didn’t. Guess which one you were in depended on which box you ticked, which name you carried, which neighborhood your address belonged to.

The irony was that even those writing the rules pretended not to know what the rules were really for.

Mira worked as a processing officer in the Department of Residence and Integration — the floor everyone called *The Filter*. Her job, in theory, was to make sure applicants met “eligibility criteria” for housing, aid, or citizenship renewal.

In practice, she fed an endless list of numbers into a system that quietly decided whose life could pause for another year.

“We don’t discriminate,” her manager said during one briefing. “We follow procedure. If they’re delayed, it’s just… backlog.”

Backlog. The word that meant *no*.

But Mira had eyes and memory. She saw whose applications got “lost” — immigrant families, single mothers, ex-workers from closed factories, men with Arabic or African names who had perfectly legal documents. She saw how one line in the handbook — *cases requiring additional verification* — was invoked only for those who already had the least chance to fight back.

Sometimes, new policies arrived without signatures, without names attached. *Public Safety Reassessment Directive.* *Cultural Assimilation Incentive Adjustments.*

No one ever admitted to writing them, but everyone enforced them. That was the genius of modern prejudice: it no longer shouted, it whispered in bureaucracy.

Above the Filter, in the glass tower overlooking the ministry courtyard, Minister Hollen gave interviews about “social stability.”

He spoke of unity, of a “need for responsible citizenship.” His clipped accent was the voice of televised reason — the kind that made middle-class audiences nod along, grateful their taxes weren’t “wasted on the undeserving.”

In private, he hosted fundraisers for industries built on migrant labor, subcontracted to companies that underpaid and overworked the same people he publicly accused of “draining the system.” At night, his donors toasted to “policy innovation” — code for cutting costs by cutting rights.

No one reported it. The journalists who tried lost their press passes or found their phones mysteriously copied.

Cynicism wasn’t a crime; it was a career choice.

Mira didn’t start as a rebel. She started paying attention.

It began with a mother and her teenage son who came in one morning with eviction papers. The boy was born in the country. His mother had cleaned government buildings for twelve years. Their file was stamped *Pending Further Review* for eight months.

“Just a few more weeks,” Mira told her, repeating the phrase managers said to stall.

When the woman returned two months later, she looked hollowed out — her son was gone, sent to a “temporary accommodation unit” outside the city. Mira checked the system, but there was no record of his transfer.

Just a new note: *Case closed due to ineligibility.*

That was when she learned that compassion had nowhere to log itself.

One night, she stayed late. When she dug past the “restricted” folders, she found what she feared: a spreadsheet mapping applicants’ ethnicity, religion, postal code, and likelihood of “community integration.”

It wasn’t bias written in slur; it was bias built in mathematics. The numbers didn’t insult — they sorted. They predicted who was “resilient enough” to endure waiting, who might cause less “social disruption” if quietly denied.

It turned discrimination into an algorithm and called it governance.

She took copies, sent them to every contact she trusted. Most didn’t reply. A few warned her to stop — “It’s above your pay grade, Mira. You’ll lose everything.”

She already had.

Two weeks after the leak hit the press, Hollen stood behind a podium, promising an investigation. His speechwriters staged contrition, his allies denied intent. He said the term “integration index” was “misinterpreted,” that “no official policy discriminates on ethnic or religious grounds.”

The same day, new legislation called the *Transparency Clean-Up Act* passed unopposed. It made leaking state information a national security violation.

Hollen kept his post.

Mira was “reassigned” to a call center.

The papers moved on to some celebrity scandal by Friday.

Outside the cities, in suburbs where raids became routine, people whispered about the “Ghost Register” — a list of names nobody could prove existed, but that everyone feared being on. Families vanished after routine check-ins, deportation vans drove at night with no markings. The news said “administrative reassessment.”

Government statements reminded citizens not to “trust misinformation.”

Most didn’t want to. It was safer to believe the lie.

Now and then, Mira still passed office workers on her walk home, heads buried in their phones, repeating the slogans that appeared on bus stops:

*We Are One Nation.*

*Security is Equality.*

*Trust the Order.*

They believed prejudice was a thing of the past because no one used that word anymore.

The hate wasn’t in speeches — it lived in the delay of an application, in a missing file, in the quiet policy that punished poverty and called it “resource allocation.”

The system didn’t divide the people because it hated them.

It divided them to ensure they never realized they shared the same cause for anger.

And from the towers above, the architects smiled — because a society fighting itself will never rise high enough to see who built the barriers