[Quote][indent][color=gray]There was an earthquake that cracked the west side and opened a sinkhole, and four cars were swallowed up in a freak accident. They talked about it on the news, alongside photos of the dead kid dressed up in the conference room. And because the Omelans all had very good educations where they learned about the literary meaning of symbols, they knew that the dead kid in pretty clothing was a reminder of the fact that the child in the hole was also an Omelan child.

The rest of the world, which had variable public education and overworked language arts teachers, freaked out on social media. The sentiment boiled down to: “If Omelas is a perfect city and has really good social services and there is ready access to birth control and easy ways for people with wombs to give up the infants they gestated to people that want them, and therefore all children are wanted and cared for by someone in Omelas, regardless of whether it is their biological progenitor, where do the Omelans get the load-bearing suffering child?”

And the follow-up freak-out: “Oh my god, they must be stealing our children.”

Of course, nothing in the freak-outs materially touched the Omelans, because Omelas was a shining city on a hill that could only be hurt when there was no load-bearing suffering child, and the dead child had been immediately replaced, so Omelas wasn’t assaulted by foreign troops, and there were no trade sanctions against it, and people didn’t stop going to its beaches. But they had to do some media spin, and the Nice House Experiencers went on TV to reassure the world that the load-bearing suffering child was an ethically sourced, no one’s son, and definitely an Omelan, and meanwhile some of the Nice House Experiencers privately spoke among each other.

“Look, maybe we shouldn’t have a kid in the hole?” one of the Nice House Experiencers said. “Maybe the kid in the hole was always a bad idea.”

“What’s the other option?” the second Nice House Experiencer said. “Look me in the eye and tell me there is a better solution than putting one single kid in the hole, and letting that one single kid have a miserable life, in return for the good lives of all of our children?”

“What if they put your kid in?”

And the first Nice House Experiencer didn’t have an answer for that. Because she knew in her heart of hearts that she would damn every last person in Omelas rather than subject her child to the hole.[/color][/indent][/quote]

[quote][indent][color=gray]“What are you trying to solve?” the executioner said. The executioner was the only one in the room, but she was relaying the questions from the Nice House Experiencers who had sourced the questions from a public questionnaire and had approved of every single one, because at the end of the day, admittedly, every person in Omelas lived in a Nice House.

“If we kill enough kids then you will eventually stop putting kids in the hole,” the murderer said. “I’m an accelerationist.”

“A lot of people died because you killed the kid.”

“I’m sorry about that,” the murderer said, and he sounded genuine. He sounded like he really cared about the well-being of all the Omelans and their susceptibility to freak accidents, but he cared about the one kid just a little more.

“How did it feel to kill?” the executioner said. This was not a question that was on the list. This was a question the executioner wanted to know for herself.

“Bad,” he said. “But it’s better than being locked in the hole for your entire life.”

The executioner didn’t say anything to that. She turned away from him to prepare the syringe and the chemicals.

“Before I’m dead, I’d like to say a few words,” the murderer said to the executioner’s back. “We will keep killing the kid in the hole. You are going to run out of kids before we stop killing the kids that go into the hole. Even if you kill me, now we all know about killing the load-bearing suffering child. You can’t kill me in any way that matters. The kid will die again and again until you stop putting kids in the hole.”

And he grinned a big white grin (they had really good dental care in Omelas that wasn’t tied to a separate insurance) and was executed by painless lethal injection and so became the first person in Omelas (other than all the load-bearing suffering children) who Omelas, as a state, had killed, and Omelas became the sort of city that killed people using painless lethal injection.

But that was okay, because it happened during the period of time while the kid wasn’t in the hole, so it was a fluke, the same way the typhoon was a fluke, the homophobia was a fluke, the Omelans being shitheads on social media was a fluke. It was something that could only happen while Omelas wasn’t [i]Omelas[/i] and was instead just like every other city with no load-bearing suffering child and many load-bearing suffering adults.[/color][/indent][/quote]
[indent][indent]— Isabel J. Kim, "Why Don't We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole?"[/indent][/indent]