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The first two weeks in the mine were kind of a blur.
They worked us twelve hours on, six hours off, in an endless rotation that meant very little without daylight or even artificial light cycles.
It felt like one excruciatingly long day.
The so-called rest periods were, at first, like having a blackout. No dreams, and no apparent passage of time. I’d fall into my hard bunk, close my eyes, and a moment later I’d be woken up for the next shift.
But like the prisoners in ancient stories, I kept a count of the days on the wall beside my bunk. I used the blood that came from my knuckles and fingers each day to mark the tallies.
After two weeks, sleeping turned from a momentary rest to a seemingly endless toss-and-turn in the pitch blackness, as a new recruit brought into our dorm had a serious snoring problem.
On the fourth night of snore-fest, the sound suddenly stopped. When the next shift started, Snore-Man was found to be dead – choked by one of his room mates. Nobody owned up to it, and the mech-orgs didn’t ask questions. They just dragged his body out, and by the next rest period, another new recruit had taken his place.
I did him the courtesy of warning him not to snore.
Now that I was in a kind of a rhythm, my mind started to wander while working.
I thought about Jones. I thought about freedom. I recalled the woman who’d attempted to escape that first night. Thoughts of escape seemed hopeless. Every scenario I could think of ended with me getting blasted to powder.
I discussed some of my ideas with Jorgenson, since he sometimes worked nearby. He always shot them down. He was hopeless. Resigned.
But I still had a spark of hope, however crazy it might be. At about two months into my new life, I decided to test some assumptions about the limits of our confinement.
Not a good idea.
It hurt.
Bad.
See, the mech-orgs never paid us much attention if we were working. As long as we loaded cart after cart of terrelium ore, they didn’t care. So, I put my rocks where I was supposed to, but I used my sonic extractor in a specific pattern, trying to use the pulverizer to open up a hole in the wall and see how deep our cell-coding restriction boundary extended into the rock face.
By the end of my shift I had bored about two feet into the craggy surface, just wide enough to reach my arm inside. The mech-orgs were beginning to round us up to take us back to the dorms.
Now would be my only chance to test it out.
I reached my arm in as far as I could, and suddenly every nerve ending in my body felt like it was on fire. My vision turned pure white, and my brain felt like it was going to freeze solid and explode at the same time. I couldn’t withdraw my arm – couldn’t move at all.
When my vision returned, I was lying on my back next to the wall. Thale 86 – my mech-org – was standing over me. Through the ringing in my ears I heard it say, “Pick it up and take it back to Dorm 883.”
Then I felt myself carried by human arms back to my bunk, where it took about an hour before the tingling finally went away and I could move again. I had a pounding headache and all of my muscles hurt. My fine motor skills remained shaky the rest of the night.
“You’re lucky,” said Jorgenson from the top bunk. “The mech-orgs almost vaporized you.”
“Why didn’t they?” I asked.
“I convinced them you were not trying to escape – that you were just stupid.”
“You only told a half truth,” I said. “I am definitely stupid.”
“Listen,” he said, “you need to quit with the talk of getting out of here. It is not going to happen. Why not make it easier on yourself and just give it up?”
“I can’t. Experience has taught me not to. When I first started racing, I was clueless. I’d been picked by the Elite in some ‘random’ selection process. I’d expected to spend my life working in vege-cloning facilities like my family has always done. So when they first strapped me into a ~dart, there were plenty of people who expected me to either put myself inside an asteroid at ninety percent, or just finish last and wind up here on day one. But I believed in an alternative. They told me I could win my freedom after a hundred wins. So I determined to make that a reality. Were the odds against me? Of course. But I didn’t care.”
“And now here you are, a free man,” said Jorgenson, gesturing around at the darkened dorm with his hand.
“You’re missing the point,” I said. “This is just a hiccup on the road to my freedom – another challenge to overcome.”
“Riiight. Like the way you overcame the challenge in that last race – by throwing it.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.
“Oh, come on,” he said. “It was so obvious you let Jones win.”
“Which just further proves my point that I am in charge of my own destiny,” I said, conceding his accusation while bolstering my own argument.
“Try telling that to the mech-orgs,” said Jorgenson.
I turned over in my bunk and faced the wall, where I could just make out my tallies.
Sixty three.
“I’ll get out of here,” I mumbled. “Or die trying.”
A Slave to Race Page 5