Dr. Jules Craig holds the most powerful medical credential in human civilization. With the predictograph and months of recorded personal data, he can map the course of a person’s life with frightening accuracy. Governments rely on these lifeline diagnoses to maintain order across the Solar System. Yet every doctor trained to read those futures must obey the same absolute rule: never reveal an unhappy prediction—and never attempt to learn your own.
Craig has spent years watching people walk calmly toward disasters he is forbidden to prevent. The strain is beginning to break him. When another patient leaves his office smiling, unaware that death waits only weeks away, Craig decides he has had enough. If a man can see his future in advance, perhaps he can choose a different path. Determined to prove it, Craig sets a dangerous experiment in motion. Under a false name, he arranges for another doctor to analyze his own lifeline charts.
The result arrives hours later, sealed in a report meant only for Craig’s eyes. What he reads is not the future he expected. According to the machine that never fails, he will soon lose control of his mind and commit several murders before authorities stop him. One victim, the report warns, will be someone he loves deeply.
Now Craig faces a terrible problem. If the prediction is correct, time is running out before his mind turns against him. If the prediction can be changed, every decision he makes from this moment forward may alter the outcome. But there is one person standing closest to him—and suddenly he is no longer sure he can trust himself.
Jerry Shelton’s “You Are Forbidden” imagines a future where technology can trace a person’s life before it happens. The story drives its tension through one unbearable question: what would you do if the machine said you would become a killer?
