There is something uniquely pathetic about the way humans attempt to use geography as a solution for their own failures of character. Fawad Ahmed, a man whose sixty-two years on this dying rock should have taught him that the state is an omnipresent deity with a very long memory and a very short temper, decided that the best way to resolve a custody dispute was to take a nine-year-old child on a two-year tour of the Indian Ocean. Because, as we all know, nothing says 'stable parental figure' like turning your offspring into an international fugitive before they’ve even hit puberty.

According to the Calgary Police Service—an organization usually preoccupied with the high-stakes drama of ticketing people for idling their trucks in residential zones—Ahmed has finally been hauled back to the frozen tundra of Alberta to face the music. He was apprehended in Mauritius, a volcanic island nation known for its white beaches, turquoise lagoons, and, apparently, its refusal to serve as a permanent sanctuary for men fleeing the consequences of their own broken marriages. It took two years for the administrative gears to grind their way through the global tracking system, but the Leviathan always gets its pound of flesh.

Let’s look at the players in this tragicomedy. On one side, we have the Left-leaning social architects who will undoubtedly view this through the lens of 'systemic trauma,' weeping for the disruption of the child’s life while ignoring the fact that the father used the boy as a biological shield in a game of legal hide-and-seek. On the other side, we have the Right-wing 'family values' crowd, who would normally scream about parental rights unless those rights involve violating a court order, at which point they pivot instantly to the worship of 'Law and Order.' Both sides are, as usual, missing the point. The point is that the family unit has become so thoroughly colonized by the state that your children are essentially leased property, and any attempt to relocate that property without the proper stamps on your paperwork results in a global manhunt.

Ahmed is charged with parental child abduction, a phrase that sounds like a contradiction in terms until you realize that in the eyes of the law, being a parent gives you exactly zero autonomy if that autonomy inconveniences the court’s schedule. The boy, who was nine when this ill-fated vacation began, is now eleven. He has spent nearly twenty percent of his life as a pawn in a geopolitical chess match between two adults who likely should have never shared a ZIP code, let alone a genome. He was returned to Canada last year, while his father stayed behind in Mauritius, presumably enjoying the local cuisine while waiting for the inevitable tap on the shoulder from Interpol.

It is truly remarkable, in a world where we can’t seem to stop climate collapse or fix a pothole, how much energy we can dedicate to the slow-motion pursuit of a senior citizen across several continents. The Calgary police, working with the RCMP and Global Affairs Canada, coordinated this international retrieval with the kind of precision they usually reserve for nothing at all. It’s a testament to the fact that the only thing the government does well is enforce its own dominance. They don’t care about the child’s well-being; they care that a court order was ignored. A piece of paper was signed in Calgary, and that paper is more sacred than the bond of blood or the freedom of the individual.

Ahmed’s mistake was thinking that the world is still large. It isn’t. We live in a digital panopticon where every credit card swipe, every passport scan, and every desperate attempt to find a new life is logged, indexed, and stored in a server farm somewhere in the desert. There are no more 'uncharted lands.' There is no 'away' to run to. Whether you are in the foothills of the Rockies or a resort in the Mascarene Islands, you are still just a line of code in a database that belongs to a government that views you as a tax-producing unit at best and a logistical nuisance at worst.

So, Fawad Ahmed returns to Calgary, a city that is currently more famous for its housing crisis than its justice system, to face a judge who will determine exactly how many years of his remaining life he should spend in a concrete box for the crime of thinking he could outsmart a bureaucrat. It is a fitting end to a boring saga. No one wins. The child is a ward of the state’s whims, the father is a felon, and the public is treated to another reminder that the state’s reach is long, its memory is infinite, and its sense of irony is non-existent. We are all just fugitives waiting for our flight back to the reality we tried to escape.