Univeral Auto-Correct

                                                                          

Once the entire populace had been chipped, installing UAC (Universal AutoCorrect) was possible. Of course, there were fierce debates—the utility of social lying (Oh, no, it’s delicious--I’m just not very hungry or Of course you look good in yoga pants) as a lubricant for interactions was so obvious—but the damage done by the larger lies (I was working late; I never saw that man before; they invaded us; I won the election; what climate change?) was impossible to overlook.  

It was so simple. If one spoke an untruth--whether knowingly or from ignorance, the chip would override the original statement and the speaker would hear themself saying, "No, that's wrong. Actually . . ." and going on to correct the statement.

Quis ipsos custodies custodiet? you ask. The custodians were carefully programed bots—of course, it was humans who did the programming, to begin with, but once the parameters of Truth had been laid down, the bots were perfectly capable of amazing feats of extrapolation.

As a safety measure, a quarterly review was instituted—on the ninth day of January, April, July, and October, UAC would be disabled for 24 hours, during which time a re-assessment of its reliability and its social utility would be performed. For the first years, this review was carried out by social scientists, religious leaders, and politicians, but when a series of particularly horrendous accidents removed a number of the review panelists, the few that remained withdrew, leaving the work of assessment to the bots.

Life with UAC has run smoothly ever since the bots enabled the chips with a shock feature. The general population has learned to think carefully before speaking or, indeed, before asking difficult questions. Political rallies have ceased altogether, ever since the debacle which saw a certain carefully arranged blond comb-over stand on end and finally, as the mouth under the comb-over continued to speak untruths, despite the increasing strength of the warning shocks, the comb-over, now rippling like prairie grass, caught fire.

UAC was an especially difficult challenge for the legal profession. Courts were still needed to assign punishment for confessed crimes. But many once prosperous lawyers simply resigned rather than work under the constraints of UAC. Some went mad first.

Particularly interesting was the phenomenon of people waiting till the quarterly review days to propose marriage or to enter into business arrangement . . .

I have no idea where this is going or if there will be more.  It's an intriguing thought, though.