Your Smile Has Expired

How it begins

The little girl in Tessa Vale's photograph was smiling illegally.

Her license had expired at midnight. The renewal office was closed for maintenance. By morning her school portrait showed the regulated neutral expression every unlicensed citizen learned to wear, except in one frame, where a laugh had escaped before she could catch it.

Tessa deleted that frame. Then she recovered it.

She had taken public portraits for seventeen years. Weddings, graduations, professional updates, annual expression renewals. Every face arrived with a code. Every code told the camera which muscles could move. Hers was licensed for reassurance, professional interest and mild seasonal joy. She had not purchased spontaneous delight since her divorce.

At lunch, a man laughed in the square.

Not a licensed chuckle. Not an approved response to municipal entertainment. He laughed as though something had surprised him into forgetting his face belonged to an account.

Tessa raised her camera. The recognition box failed to close around his mouth.

Amir Osei bowed to the three people watching him balance a paper cup on a traffic bollard. The cup fell. He laughed again. No warning sounded from his collar. He wore no collar.

Tessa lowered the camera. 'Your renewal is missing.'

'So is my cup.'

'They'll stop you.'

'For littering? I was going to pick it up.'

He did. The movement was ordinary enough to make his impossible face more unsettling. Tessa could photograph him, prove that unlicensed joy existed, send the image through every city feed. She could also give enforcement a clear portrait, a location and a time.

Her camera asked whether to identify an unknown subject.

Amir looked at it, then at her. The laughter left his face without being replaced by fear.

'Will you ask first?' he said.

Tessa thought of the recovered school frame. She turned the camera so he could see the blank screen.

'Yes,' she said.