The Last Human Referee

By 2061, refereeing a professional football match no longer required a referee. A network of cameras, sensors in the ball and a calm synthetic voice called every foul, every offside and every goal within a fraction of a second, and it was almost never wrong. Horacio, fifty-four, was the last human referee in the league, kept on largely out of tradition. The final between Southport United and Kingsbridge Rovers was to be his last match. From the following season, the system would be on its own.

His job, these days, consisted mainly of standing in the center circle and blowing his whistle whenever the voice told him to. The players had long since stopped arguing with him; there was no point arguing with someone who was only repeating a machine. Having spent thirty years watching players' faces, he could usually tell who had been fouled and who had simply fallen before the system announced it, but nobody had asked his opinion in years.

In the seventy-first minute, with Southport leading one-nil, the stadium lights flickered and the voice fell silent. On the giant screens, two words appeared: SYSTEM OFFLINE. The technicians, running along the touchline, estimated twenty minutes at the very least. According to the rules, which nobody had read for a decade, a match without its system was to be decided by the referee on the pitch. Sixty thousand people turned to look at Horacio.

He blew his whistle and pointed for play to continue. For the next quarter of an hour, he ran harder than he had in years, calling fouls and throw-ins with his own eyes and a voice he had almost forgotten he had. Then, in the eighty-eighth minute, the Kingsbridge striker fell dramatically inside the penalty area, and the stadium erupted. Horacio had been ten meters away. He had seen the defender pull his foot back in time; he had seen the striker start falling before anyone touched him. Without hesitating, he waved away the penalty and showed the striker a yellow card for diving.

The striker leapt up, furious, but one look at the referee's face was enough. Not another word did he say. Southport held on to win, and when the system came back online four minutes after the final whistle, the first thing it did was replay the incident from eleven different angles. There had been no contact at all.

Before Horacio could leave the pitch, the players formed a line in front of the tunnel. One by one, from both teams, they shook his hand. The last one was the Kingsbridge striker, who held on a little longer than the others, nodded, and walked away without saying anything.