Artemis

by Philip Palmer

  THESE days every prison had a Specialist in Prisoner Welfare advising the staff on how to respect the human rights of the scumbag inmates. Even major infractions of the rules – drug-dealing, rape, murder – were liable to incur the mildest of sentences. A telling off. A brief period of solitary. A few more ghastly mornings sitting in a circle with fellow sinners repenting and vowing to be more empathetic from now on. But nothing that’s actually going to hurt.

  Thus, I had reasoned, all I had to do was tough it out for a few weeks. Sit in a cosy cell playing mental chess with myself. Then when I emerged I’d be Queen Bee of Giger. My rep would be secured. And I could do my deal with Shalco, prior to launching my escape bid.

  That, as I say, was the plan.

  They didn’t bother with shackles. They didn’t even slo-mo me. They just led me into the punishment block; and then they attacked me.

  The blow was fast. I didn’t even feel the air behind me stir and suddenly I was on the ground, bleeding from my ears. My skull was fractured in several more places. I could hear a roaring sound, like the wind whistling through my eye sockets. I got to my feet. The DRs took a step back. One of them had blood on its metal fist.

  “Cruel and unusual punishment,” I told them coldly, “is now barred under the laws of the SN Government. It is also an offence to—”

  All three DRs moved, but this time I was ready for them. I threw one DR against a wall, struck the second in the neck, dislocating its power supply. And failed to see the sucker punch from the third.

  I went down. A powerful hand picked me up.

  “You can’t do this,” I explained.

  And then a fist hit me in the face. And all the cheek and jaw bones whose graceful harmony of parts made me look like me were shattered and crushed by a single violent robot’s punch. The DR smiled, an eerie silver smile, and opened its mouth. In the mouth were metal fangs. I groaned inwardly.

  I tried to strike back, but the DR caught my hand and broke my fingers so I could not make a fist. And then it—

  No more.

  I took a beating, that’s all that needs to be said. Every bone in my body was broken. Then acid was poured upon my body. Then the sprinkler came on and sprayed salt water on my fleshless dying carcass.

  But none of this really happened. It was all in my mind.

  What really happened was that I was led, shackled and hobbled, into the punishment block; and at some point during my journey a sedative dart had been injected into my body, causing me to lose consciousness and wiping my short-term memory.

  Then my body was taken to the lab and wired up to the brainthrasher. The reality simulation machine that is used to administer violent punishments to criminals and rebels alike.

  They used to call it the “brainwiper,” and it can indeed be used for that. To erase memories, to rebuild personalities by implanting false experiences. But more usually it’s used to inflict pain. A myriad types of pain. Pain so intense that the hapless offender will (out of sheer despair and desperation) find remorse in his or her black soul, and henceforward turn over a new leaf. Only to find that the pain does not cease. Repentance is not an option.

  It’s torture without physical damage. There’s no limit to the amount of agony you can inflict on a victim, because THEY CANNOT DIE.

  Within thirty seconds of taking that first punch, I knew this was a simulation, and so I settled in to endure it.

  But it took longer, much longer, than I expected or could endure.

  Time manipulation, you see, is the cruellest of tricks. If you can alter a person’s inner chronology, then a second can be made to last an eternity.

  In reality, I spent only two days in the brainthrashing device. That’s how long it took them to realise their error. And that’s not long at all, not really.

  Because, fortunately, help was on its way. For the moment I’d concluded the fight with Teresa Shalco’s goons, I’d sent a signal via my Rebus chip to Dekon, alleging malpractice at the Giger Penitentiary. Alarm signals had been sent to the SN Government. And this meant the Recon Committee would soon be on the case, anxious as always to protect their precious “human rights.” This was my failsafe strategy – for I’ve always been cautious to the point of paranoia when I know my arrest is imminent.

  And thus, it only took two days for the Recon Committee to come to my rescue. Two days! Before a doppelgänger bureaucrat touched down and ordered my release.

  But in my mind, those two days were two hundred long, terrible, agony-filled years.

  I used all the survival tricks I had learned in my time with Baron Lowman to ameliorate my agony. I blanked out the world, and all my sensations. Dwelled upon my happy memories. Schemed terrible revenges. Conjured up music in my mind. Tried, quite simply, not to actually mind what was happening, as the hallucinations became increasingly more vivid and painful and gothically brutal.

  Eventually, as I was being quartered – my legs and arms wrenched off my body by straps fastened to a wheel which was being turned by my OWN BLOODY FATHER – the pain suddenly stopped.

  “You’re free to go,” said the DR and I realised I was sitting in a chair fastened to wires. The DR unhooked me. I tried to stand, and then I swooned.

  Yeah I did. I actually passed out, aka fainted, aka “swooned.”

  Being flogged, hung, drawn, eviscerated, quartered, and feeling the heat from the flames which are roasting your flesh – it can really take it out of you.

  I swaggered into the rec room in Spoke A. An old looking guy with a bald head and facial wrinkles eased up to me.

  “Take a seat,” he said.

  “I’m fine,” I told him.

  “Take a seat.”

  He had his hand on my arm. He eased me over to a bench. I sat down. I felt my vision start to swim. I wanted to cry.

  “Head up, look proud, don’t let the bastards get to you,” the old guy said.

  “I’m fine.”

  “You’re not fine. You look like shit. Don’t let the Clannites see you like this. Take a minute. Take ten. Eat this.”

  He passed me a square of something brown. Chocolate. I ate it. It tasted of nothing. I remembered the taste of ash. I remember eating my own—

  No! I forced myself back into present reality.

  “Who are you?” I asked suspiciously.

  I ate a bit more chocolate. This time it tasted more like chocolate. A lifetime of memories came flooding back. I’d eaten this stuff before. Hadn’t I?

  But… when? I couldn’t remember.

  “My name’s Billy,” said the old guy. “I’m a trusty. I’ve been where you’ve been.”

  “My name is—” I said, and realised that I had forgotten the details of my assumed identity.

  “I know who you are.”

  That made one of us.

  “Billy, will you—?” I said, and couldn’t think of the next word.

  He waited patiently.

  I shook my head. I couldn’t remember the words. Any words.

  He offered me a glass of water. I sipped it. It refreshed me.

  I felt a surge of delight. That was what I had meant to say. I had been thirsty, and wanted a drink.

  I sipped again.

  “Who are these people?”

  Billy had led me through wombs and rooms that I didn’t recognise, into a dining hall I had never seen before. A high vaulted chamber where silent men and women sat, staring into the far distance.

  “Political prisoners, by and large,” said Billy.

  “There are no political prisoners,” I said scornfully. “Not any more. They were released after—”

  “Some of them wouldn’t go.” Billy nodded at a old grey-haired man with blind staring eyes. “Carter Broderick. Leader of the June Revolution.”

  I stared at the old blind man.

  “Broderick is dead,” I said, stunned.

  “That’s the story that went out on the news.”

  “That’s him?”

  I stared at Broderick. He stared
back at me. A stare that haunted me for years after.

  “Two hundred and fifty years in the brainthrasher,” said Billy. “There’s not much of him left. But that’s him.”

  “Is he bitter?”

  “Beyond bitter.”

  “Mad?”

  “Beyond mad.”

  “He’s a hero,” I said. “A genuine hero. Some say greater than Flanagan.”

  “Flanagan was a chancer. Carter Broderick was an idealist.”

  “You followed him?”

  The bald guy laughed.

  “Nah. I fought him. I was a Space Marine. I served the Corporation loyally.”

  “So what are you doing here?”

  Billy spat. An affectation of his. “I served the Corporation loyally,” he said bitterly. “A lot of us ended up here, after the Last Battle.”

  “There were amnesties, weren’t there?”

  “Not for the ones like me. Not for what we did.”

  I looked at Billy again. He was old and had skin that was weathered and worn, but he carried himself with the special grace of the true warrior.

  “Were you a Soldier, with a capital S?”

  He glared at me.

  “Nah. Wash your fucking mouth out. I was a volunteer. Not a zombie. I made my choice, and stuck with it. We all did. Back in those days.”

  “Why are you helping me, Billy?”

  “It’s what I do,” said Billy, grinning shyly. “I help people, if I think they can help me in some way.”

  “In what way?”

  “I want to escape.”

  “Escape is impossible,” I explained.

  He grinned at that.

  “You don’t need to be so fucking coy,” he said, “There’s no surveillance in this room. It’s considered to be a breach of their human rights. These aren’t prisoners, you see. They’re just – well, they just won’t leave. So you can speak frankly. Will you take me with you?”

  “What makes you think I’m planning to escape?”

  “I know. I know your sort. And I know what you did to those guys. You’re on your way out of here, and I can help.”

  “I don’t need help.”

  “Of course you need help.” Billy smiled. He was holding something back.

  “Give,” I said.

  He gave: “They’re planning to kill you tonight,” he said. “Shalco and her people. In your cell. They’ve bribed a dubber. A DR will come into your cell at midnight and force your tongue down your throat. They’ll call it suicide.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I’m the lookout.”

  This was Billy’s story.

  He really was an old-timer. He’d been a green recruit during the Loper Insurgency, and a veteran with fifty years experience when Earth was invaded by Peter Smith. He’d fought, of course, on the losing side, but quickly switched allegiance.

  Billy was a hundred and twenty-five years old when America rebelled. He was at the Siege of Beijing. By the time he was two hundred, he’d quelled forty-five uprisings and was awarded a Purple Heart after losing his legs and eyes in the Belt War.

  Billy was the laconic sort. “What was it like?” I asked him one time. “Serving the Galactic Corporation?”

  “I didn’t,” he said. “I worked for the army.”

  “You served in the Marine Corps. The Marines were fully owned by the Galactic Corporation.”

  He shrugged at that. “I worked for the army. I did what they asked me to do.”

  “You never had, like, moral qualms?”

  “Nope.”

  “Never?”

  “Never.”

  “How many people did you kill, Billy?”

  “We don’t keep score. It’s not a game.”

  “Ball park.”

  He thought about it. “Couple of million,” he hazarded.

  “Couple of million?”

  “Not counting entire planets. Just enemy combatants killed in action.”

  “Millions.”

  “You asked for ball park.”

  “I did,” I conceded.

  Billy had been a doppelgänger rider and pilot. One of the best.

  This was after he’d lost his legs and his eyes of course. His army insurance covered the cost of limb and organ rejuve. But that meant ten years with stumps, walking in an exoskeleton, viewing the world through artificial eyes, before the legs and eyes grew back. But he was still fit for virtual duties.

  The truth, you see, and ignore whatever you’ve heard elsewhere, is that doppelgänger robots really AREN’T that scary. They’re strong, for sure, and vicious, without a doubt. But also slow. Operated by amateurs and volunteers with no real idea how to fight. Most of the time.

  But for the serious action engagements, in the days before Soldiers were bred, the doppelgänger department used crippled and aged Marines to ride their robot bodies and spaceships. That’s how they enforced order on the ten thousand and more colony planets in which the Corporation held the majority shareholding.

  “What was it like?” I asked.

  Billy smiled. Memories of his doppelgänger days always lit a spark in his soul.

  “It’s like,” he said, “being God.”

  “In what way?”

  “In every way.”

  “Where did you serve?”

  “Cambria. Gullyfoyle. Pohl. New Earth. Weisman. Juno. Too many to name. All the trouble spots. We allowed an asteroid to hit Pixar, so we could re-terraform it and turn it into a theme planet. And Cambria had a big rebellion. The colonists lived underground, they came swarming out to attack the doppelgängers in their castles. I led the commando squad there. I could operate fifty, sixty robot bodies at once. I was stronger and faster than any human, because of my robot body. And smarter than any human, because I was a Marine. And I couldn’t die. I fought wars, and I won ’em, sometimes single-handed. It’s Marines like me that held the Galactic Corporation together.”

  Yeah, I have to concede, he wasn’t always laconic.

  “Cambria is where they raped the colonists,” I said. “The DRs. Ritual rape, once a year. I read about it. There’s a whole body of work about it.”

  Billy shrugged, and spat on the floor. Spitting, I realised, was his way of saying, hey, the fuck, did I make the universe?

  “That happened lots of places,” he said, “not my fault, not my responsibility. That was the Gamers. People paid the Corporation for a chance to do that shit. We stood guard, we didn’t pay no one, we were paid. There’s a difference, okay?” He stared at me belligerently. “I never raped no-one, not as myself, not in any robot body. I draw the line at that. I fought, I killed; that’s all.”

  “But you quelled the rebellion. You made it possible for—”

  “Don’t get philosophical on me.”

  That was Billy’s response to everything. He didn’t like to think too deeply about things.

  I liked Billy.

  But the truth is, he was a monster. A mass murderer. A warrior who had helped sustain the most evil regime in the history of mankind.

  That’s why he was in Giger. He was past redemption. But he had a simple code: do what you do ’cause it’s what you do, and do it well. That’s all that mattered to him.

  Billy wasn’t, in my view, a bad man. He wasn’t, in any sense, evil. He just lived by his code. Never looked outside it.

  I know a lot of people who are like that.

  Me, for instance.

  That night the DR came to kill me.

  I didn’t sleep at all of course. I just lay down in my bunk, allowing my muscles to relax, gathering my strength for the fight to come.

  I had locked the door. But I knew that wouldn’t make a difference. You can’t keep DRs out of a prison cell; they have a shortband lock-override facility. Even I couldn’t lock the door against them.

  I had also turned the light off It was pitch-black, and I had my eyes closed. So that I could focus on sounds more intently.

  There were no screams of pain that night.
No one left their cell. Everyone knew what was going to happen.

  So I waited and listened, in the pitchest of darks.

  Then the cell door opened, soundlessly. Except no movement is truly soundless.

  The DR entered, pacing forward slowly on its metal feet. Again barely any sound was made. But my heightened hearing could hear the CRASH CRASH CRASH of footsteps.

  Then the DR lunged and stabbed at my bunk but I was no longer there. I was clinging to the ceiling by my hands and bare feet, using my fingerspikes and heel spikes to grip the hardplastic.

  I had my eyes wide open now, and with my night vision I could see the robot’s spectral silhouette. A body shaped like a human being but seven foot tall and with two extra arms fitted to cattle-prod inmates.

  The DR looked up and saw me roosting like a bat, and abandoning all pretence at stealth it fired two plasma bolts up at me.

  But I was in mid-air. Leaping, arcing, turning. Then I swept down with my two fingerspikes extended and slit open the machine’s metal head. Then landed on its back and burrowed a finger into its electronic brain.

  My two middle fingers, I should explain, are built up of erectile bone. They are undetectable to scanners. But when extended, they form a cutting tool of remarkable sharpness. DRs are designed to withstand bullets and missile blasts of less than six krismas. But if you have a tool sharp enough, you can open ’em up like a tin can. So I gouged and dug, and eventually plunged my right fingerspike into the main control chip and scattered the circuits with surgical precision.

  The killer robot was turned into useless scrap in moments.

  Then I got back into bed and waited for the next one. It never came.

  In the morning the DR carcass was silently removed.

  And I was called to see the Deputy Governor, Sheila Hamilton. Escorted by DRs. Led to the Holo Hall, where the DG’s image glared at me with contempt.

  I raised the middle finger of my right hand to her. Without the fingerspike extended.

  “I wanna make a complaint,” I said truculently.

  “You destroyed a robot officer!” she said accusingly.