by John Shirley
Gull glanced at the trustee, and they strode on. The trustee looked up at Faye as she slipped by, surprise widening his eyes. Faye felt him watching as they went through another door …
The Craft and Training Unit consisted of seventeen male inmates in orange jumpsuits, working around tables in a brightly lit wire-windowed room; they were almost evenly divided between Hispanic, white, and black—and one had a Sikh’s turban and beard. The inmates barely glanced up when Faye followed Samuel and Rita in. Unlike the trustee in the corridor, they didn’t seem surprised to see her.
They knew we were coming, Faye decided. They were briefed.
A sleek, wheeled autoguard stood in the corner, silently watching. It was five feet high, black and white, its body smoothly prow-shaped, its head like a smaller version of its body, a green light glowing from its black-glass view pane. There were two lights on either side of its body, one red and one blue, like the lights on police cars, unlit in the absence of crisis; between the lights was a grid for its computer voice—and for a siren. A panel under the grid would open, she knew, to emit crowd control gases. The robot’s head turned smoothly and took the visitors in; she assumed it was processing the signals from their badges. It swiveled back to the prisoners.
A couple of much-tattooed white inmates, heads shaved, glanced up as she approached their table, smiling at her. They looked at her legs, and then back at their craft construction: they were working with intricate wooden parts, connected by screws and nuts and bolts, all made of wood. There was no need for screwdrivers, for saws, for any tool but a small wrench of light plastic. She looked around and saw everyone was working with the same materials, but some were building miniature houses, some constructing little cars—rather well-realized cars—and there were three sculptures of human shapes, including one that was clearly female but not embarrassingly so.
“This is a hand-skills class,” Rita said. “Advanced. They don’t need an instructor. It preps their motor skills so they can do factory assembling later.”
Faye looked inquiringly at Gull. “Can I talk to some of them?” He looked, in turn, at Rita, who gestured grandly at a table. The gesture said, Of course—but Faye suspected these would be the only prisoners she was allowed to talk to.
She stepped up to a prisoner at the end of the nearest table. “Hi, I’m Faye,” she said to him. “I’m a journalist from Priority Media.”
“Derreck,” he said, glancing up. He had a small gray mustache; several little blue teardrops were tattooed at the corner of each eye. Despite the teardrops, he seemed cheerful.
“Can I look at your model car?” Faye asked.
“Sure, check it out!” He held it out to her. “It’s mostly finished …”
It was about fifteen inches long, a well-proportioned mockup of a convertible. “It’s amazing all the detail you can get in with those prefab parts, Derreck …”
He nodded, gazing critically at the car. “Yeah, but there’s so many kind of parts, see, you get good at making lot of different things with ’em …”
He took the car back, looking up at her for a lingering moment; she was aware that he was taking in her figure, though it wasn’t much in evidence. Then he looked fixedly back at the car.
“What’s your feeling about McCrue Statewide, Derreck?”
He shot a quick look at Rita. She looked at him with raised eyebrows. Go on, answer her.
“Well, it’s prison,” Derreck said, nervously removing a wheel and refastening it onto an axle. “No one’s thrilled to be in one. I mean—prison is prison. All pretty alike.”
“Are they? Some privatized prisons have whole families in them. Seen anything like that?”
“Naw, this isn’t that kind. They do keep some peeps for Immigration here, in Sub12, but not like that.”
“Nothing to complain about?”
He shrugged. “Like to have more variety in the food. More commissary stuff. Lights go out sometimes when you’re trying to go to the head.”
Rita checked her watch. “Shall we visit the meals department?”
Several bored inmates were drinking coffee in a small room lined with white and chrome appliances.
Faye, Gull, and Rita were standing near a gray metal door with Subpod 17 stenciled under the wired window. She could see only corridor through the window—and the trustee she’d seen earlier, running his wet vacuum over the floor. Had he followed them here, somehow?
She’d expected a big cafeteria space, an industrial-sized kitchen. But meals was a just a series of distribution counters, that opened in various parts of the prison pod at mealtimes, closed with steel shutters the rest of the time. There were no cooks, just a few personnel who did the microwaving. The food was prefab, each meal in its Styrofoam tray, brought to the pod on trucks once a week. The breakfasts were all the same, except on Sundays when they added pancakes; there were seven lunches and suppers, one for Monday, one for Tuesday …
“It’s true that the food is … kind of repetitive,” Rita said. “We’re working on offering more variety. But it’s nutritious, sprayed with vitamins, everything they need. Would you like to try today’s lunch? We have meat loaf, or, if you prefer, veggie loaf. It’s all kosher.”
“No thanks. Just the coffee …”
“Coffee’s not bad, don’t you think?”
“No. Not bad.” It wasn’t bad. It wasn’t good. It wasn’t important.
“Shall we go to the printers?” Rita suggested.
They went. Another long passage through many doors took them to a big hangar-like room where men in orange jumpsuits guided blocks of basic production plastic into 3-D printers. The inmates looked into monitors, made adjustments on a computer screen, and talked softly under the watchful eyes of four autoguards. A variety of car parts, printed three-dimensionally, were shunted out of the printer; workers checked them for symmetry and defects, then stacked them.
“Those printers can make any shape,” Faye murmured. “Isn’t that kind of dangerous? Can’t they make weapons?”
“What the printers can make is preprogrammed. The prisoners can’t program them here, not at all. This stuff can’t be hacked. Every last piece is closely monitored. Prisoners absolutely cannot make contraband forms. If anything’s missing, the mechanism knows it right away from the weight differential.”
Faye pointed to the odor marked Subpod 17. “What’s through there?” she asked Gull.
“That’s high-security,” he said, glancing at Rita.
“Can we have a look through it?”
Rita slowly shook her head. “It’s not safe.”
“That’s kind of a contradiction in terms, high-security that’s not safe, isn’t it?”
“Not if you know prisons,” Rita said, giving her a look of watered-down contempt.
“That’s just why I’m here,” Faye said. “Because I don’t know them—particularly this style of prison. This is the biggest prison in the world. It covers an entire state. I really need to be able to see it pretty extensively to get a sense …”
Rita gave her a pitying frown. “It doesn’t actually cover the whole state. Arizona is still … Arizona.”
“Statewide covers a little more than eighty percent of the state of Arizona,” Faye said. “That’s more than three-fourths of the state covered with thousands of buildings like this one …”
“Ms. Adullah. We can show you medium-security cell tiers, and one of the yards, and that will have to be it. You could spend months trying to see even half of Statewide—And you’d see the same thing over and over, though some pods contain men, some contain women—”
The lights went out. All of them, just like that.
There was a click to Faye’s left, and a noise she’d only been peripherally aware of till now receded: the humming from the 3-D printers faded; the prisoners muttered …
A few whirling lights went on, shining from the autoguards across the room. “Stay in place until power is restored,” said a man’s firm voice, emanating from one of
the robots. It was a deep, commanding, very natural-sounding voice but entirely synthetic. “Stay in place …”
The lights cut back to almost no illumination as the robots trundled behind machinery, establishing that the prisoners were staying immobile.
“Samuel?” Rita’s voice was taut with annoyance and serrated with fear. “Can you get a timetable on power restoration?”
“Yes, ma’am, I’m hearing it right now. They’re telling me … they’re not sure. They’re not sure what’s happened.”
Faye could feel cool air drifting over her from the left. That click must have been a door opening, unlocked by the electronic disruption.
You wanted your chance, she thought. Here it is. You can tell them you got lost in the dark …
No. Really stupid to do that. But …
There was no other way to find out …
Don’t do this, Faye.
But operating on sheer will power, Faye turned, hands outstretched, and felt her way along, till she got to the frame of the doorway. The metal door was standing slightly open. Still mostly blind, she felt her way through the door and into the corridor that led to Subpod 17. She could hear Gull talking to someone behind her …
I should turn back.
Then a hand closed over her wrist. It was a hand with a sweaty palm, smaller than Gull’s. She assumed it was Rita’s. The hand tugged on her and she went with it, suddenly not wanting to be in the dark in this big room with all those inmates. “Rita? That you?”
“No.” A man’s voice from the darkness. A light, Hispanically accented voice. Not Gull. “You okay. You came to see, so I take you.”
“I can’t see anything. I should go back …”
But she let herself be drawn through another doorway. Was it curiosity, ambition, opportunism … a desire to get to the truth … She wasn’t sure.
Go back, you fool.
Then a light came on just ahead—a flashlight, the beam angling downward, the glow shining upward enough to show her the man holding the light.
“This is her, the reporter,” said the man who had her wrist.
He let go of her, and she looked back and forth between them. The man she’d followed was the trustee she’d seen working on the floors. The other man seemed slightly Asian, his skin cocoa, his features mostly Caucasian, his hair straight and smooth.
“My name’s Rudy,” he said. “Welcome to ARU.”
She licked her lips. Her mouth was so dry. She was alone with two prisoners. “Um—ARU?”
“Absconder Recovery Unit. A punishment unit, if you’ve been naughty. I’ve been here since I tried to escape.” He turned to the trustee. “Carlos, man—did you shut that door behind her?”
“Yeah, hodey. But they’ll find her when the cameras come back on.”
“What happened to the lights?” she asked, for something to say. Trying to decide if she should turn around and bolt back down the hall.
Rudy shrugged. “Shitty system. It’s easy to overload it, get a surge going that shuts it down. If we talk to a trustee in heating and air conditioning—they can do it.”
Carlos hooked a thumb at Rudy. “Him, he was an engineer.”
“Computer engineer, on the outside,” Rudy said. “What the fuck, Carlos, we got to show her at least Unit 18, before they find her.”
Carlos nodded. “Come on. Lights out for only a few minutes more.”
She followed the swinging flashlight and the two men along a walkway; to her left was a wall, to her right were doors, with wired glass windows in them. Faces appeared at the windows to watch, looking ghostly in the shifting, indirect light. Someone shouted at her from a door. She hurried to catch up with Carlos and Rudy.
They reached the end of the tier, and Carlos tried the door. “Still unlocked!”
“How about the doors to the outside world?” Faye asked.
Rudy chuckled. “Separate circuits. Plus there are autoguards, there are drones, there’s the worm, more walls, more buildings, just more and more and more, lady.”
“Electric fences, you go far enough,” Carlos said, leading the way through the door. “Couple of miles out from here. First touch on gives you a little jolt, makes you jump back. Try again, lethal jolt.”
That reminded her of something she’d read, somewhere, in her research. “Privatized prisons are so badly built and so inefficiently run they have to be especially harsh to keep prisoners in.”
They were in a different style of cellblock now. There were bars instead of the wired-window doors. “This is Sub18,” Rudy said. “Part of an old jail. They built the prison around it. They like to have the view into the cells from the walk, here …”
There were women in the cells, Faye saw; two women in each. They all seemed to be cringing back away from the flashlight as it went by. Most of them were Hispanic; she saw two black and one white woman. All of them were fairly young. They wore prison orange shifts.
“I was told there were no women prisoners in this pod,” Faye said, barely aware she’d said it out loud.
“Not any on the books,” Rudy said.
“I should talk to them.” For a moment she found she couldn’t quite speak, then she asked, “Rudy—is this what … Is it …”
“Yeah, Rudy said. “These women are kept here for people to use. Not for other prisoners. I mean, they’re here for big shots, and prison personnel. When they get old enough they get harvested … Oh fuck!”
The lights were going on, starting down the tier, flick flash flick flash, as if stalking down the hallway toward them. Faye blinked in the sudden blaze of light.
Rudy looked around, eyes widening. “Shit—Carlos we got to get back before …”
Too late. The autoguards were coming from both ends of the cellblock. Behind one of the autoguards came Rita and Gull staring coldly at Faye as they marched toward her. They seemed quite confident behind the rolling, flashing machines.
“Do not move,” the autoguards said simultaneously. “Remain exactly where you are.”
Faye sat in the warden’s office, across from his desk, her wrists cuffed in front of her. The hand cuffs were linked by a long shiny steel chain to ankle restraints. She wore a prison ID badge on a thong around her neck. She was still in shock, feeling unreal.
She was sitting in the warden’s office, across from the desk. Sitting at the desk, silent and nervous, was a pale, nearly chinless man in his midsixties, wearing a white shirt and tie, with a badge that said, Howard Skaffel, Assistant Warden. Rita stood beside him, her arms crossed against her chest, face expressionless. Gull was waiting just outside the door. Faye could hear him shift his weight out there from time to time.
“Are you a Muslim, Faye?” Rita asked.
She’d called her Ms. Adullah before. Now she’d switched to that condescending use of the first name that people in authority chose when they were treating you like a bad child.
Just get through this. They can’t do this for long. Eventually they have to let you go. They’re just trying to scare you.
“A Muslim?”
“Your father was Muslim.”
“It’s not an ethnicity. It’s a religion. I’m not a believer.”
“You’re half Palestinian.”
“I’m partly Arab, if that’s what you mean. My mother was Italian American. Is this some kind of Homeland Security question? I had to be completely cleared before they let me in here, you know. You have my Four Pass. Look at it again.”
“People make mistakes in granting clearances,” Skaffel said, looking at the ceiling. The assistant warden hadn’t looked directly at her the whole time she was here. He pursed his mouth. For the first time he looked at her—only momentarily. Then he looked down at the papers on his desk. “We have a court order here, based on your trespassing, and the Probation Collections review of your debts. You’re thirty-two thousand dollars in debt, young lady.”
She snorted. “So? Who isn’t, who went to college? I missed a couple of payments when the Trib folded, tru
e, but …”
“You should’ve discussed that with Debt Court.”
“I did! I was given an extension.”
He glanced up at her and tapped the paper. “Probationary only. Your probation has been revoked. PCI took your case to Judge Gipps this morning.”
“This is absurd. I want to speak with my lawyer!”
“You waived that right,” Rita said softly.
“What? When?”
“We have the paperwork.”
“I never signed any such thing.”
Rita shrugged. “We have your signature.”
“That’s not my signature and you know it. You don’t want me to talk about what I saw in Subpod 18—”
“If you continue shouting,” Skaffel said, looking at his hands, “I’ll have Samuel take you to Unprivileged Custody. You won’t like UnCus.”
Had she been shouting? Faye realized she had. She controlled her tone. “Just get me a lawyer. I’m a journalist. I was sent here by one of the country’s biggest media companies. They’re not going to let this …”
“Do you suppose,” Skaffel said, studying his fingernails, “that this is, what, 1975? We’re in touch with Priority Media. They deny giving you permission to use their name here.”
“That’s not true. You saw my paperwork!”
“Faked. That little bit of fraud is a felony.”
“I don’t believe any of this. Put someone from Priority on the speaker phone.”
Skaffel ignored that. “We have found that you’re a debt felon. The Privatization Act of 2021 gives us the right to arrest and incarcerate you until you’ve served your term or paid your debt—”
Nothing to lose.
“You know what I think, Assistant Warden Skaffel?” Faye said, leaning forward to catch his eye. “I think you’re really, deeply ashamed of what I saw in Subpod 18—”
“Gull!” Skaffel bellowed, standing so suddenly his chair pitched over behind him.
The door opened, Gull creaked into the room in his squeaky shoes. “Yes sir?”
Skaffel’s voice was a hiss now. “Take this inmate to UnCus.”
“I’m a journalist, not an inmate and you know it!”