Life Premium

In December 2018, in the quiet Swiss village of Borgon, municipal councilor and architect Yves Walden has had enough. Thefts, scams, brawls at the train station: the same list, week after week.

His answer is the life premium. Offenders are not sent to prison. Instead, for the length of their sentence, they are deprived of their free will. "A person transformed into a robot," brought back into line with the law.

With two leading neuroscientists, Yves builds a system that reads stress in a city and delivers justice in real time. It works. Crime falls, mayors applaud, and the idea spreads from Borgon to Europe, the Americas and the great Eastern megacities, until satellites promise to cover the whole planet.

Then, in San Diego, the system meets a man it cannot control.

Life Premium is a gripping speculative short story about justice, technology and the price of order, and about what we lose when no wrong goes unpunished.