longer.blue

You Should Have Fought Harder - A Short Story By The Technologist He sat in the quiet of his living room, scrolling past a headline that might as well have been a eulogy for the American spirit. “Voter Rights Bill Officially Repealed.” His thumb froze mid-scroll. The words didn’t surprise him. They hit like déjà vu. Familiar. Inevitable. Still, somehow unreal. Then it came, not from the screen, but from somewhere else. Deep. Loud. Across time. “You should have fought harder.” The voice didn’t whisper. It thundered. Not a sound in the ear, but in the bones. It was his own voice, but not of this moment. Older. Wiser. From a version of himself who had already seen how this ended. At first, he laughed. A bitter, tired kind of laugh. He had protested. Signed petitions. Posted. Voted. Argued with relatives. But that wasn’t fighting. That was maintenance. He remembered the day his neighbor had said, “It’s all gonna collapse anyway. Why waste energy?” He had nodded then, complicit in the slow surrender. He didn’t want to seem dramatic. Now the headlines didn’t feel dramatic enough. The line between policy and oppression had faded into soft gray bureaucracy. In that blur, fascism had found its American voice. Measured. Polite. Procedural. The voice came again. “You should have fought harder.” He looked around. Nothing was broken, but everything was broken. The kind of damage that didn’t leave rubble, just silence. The kind that rewrote textbooks and erased heroes. And what haunted him most wasn’t that the voice was angry. It wasn’t angry at all. It was disappointed.