by Ben Oliver
‘Want to play hide and seek again?’ a voice comes from beside me. I turn and see Harvey, his old-fashioned steel crutches under both arms. The boy has cerebral palsy, a disease that shouldn’t exist any more, but Harvey was born poor.
‘Remember what happened last time? Malachai yelled at you for hiding in his room.’
‘Fuck Malachai,’ Harvey smiles. ‘I’ll hit him with the business end of one of these if he starts his shit again.’ Harvey brandishes one of his crutches and grins.
I laugh. ‘Maybe next time?’
‘Fine, loser. As One,’ Harvey says as he limps away to find someone else to play with him.
This region of Earth’s last election was won by a landslide by the current Overseer, Galen Rye, whose slogan was As One. He became a cult hero among both the richest members of society and the poorest. He had a knack of appealing to the extreme ends of politics. He promised to tighten migration control when the rest of the world was eliminating borders, he promised to eradicate homelessness by reinstating compulsory conscription into the emergency services, and he promised to vote against the algorithms of the machines when he felt human logic and the will of the people were at stake. He won the poor vote by convincing them he would fight for them, promising free training in virtual architecture, human thorium reactor engineers, and more teaching positions for low and no income households.
Galen Rye was predicted to lose by a landslide. I remember my dad telling me to listen carefully to what he was saying – he told me that this was not what hate sounded like, this was not what fascism sounded like, this was the voice of pure manipulation. A man who knew how to unite foes against a new common enemy and use it to his own advantage.
Rye won by a record margin. His supporters are adamant that he is a force for good. I’m not so sure.
I watch Harvey use one of his crutches to trip Chirrak. They both laugh. It breaks my heart watching these kids burn away their childhoods in a pit like this. I was one of them not so long ago – in a lot of ways I still am.
I put these thoughts aside; this is a time for happiness, brief as it may be. I walk over to Akimi, who is still dancing away in her temporary dress. She grabs my hands and we dance together, smiling and laughing and enjoying these fleeting minutes that will be gone so swiftly.
Tomorrow is just another day inside the Loop.
It’s 5.32 in the morning and a rumbling sound thrums through the walls.
I’m alert immediately. Anything that breaks the routine is likely to provoke a fight or flight response in me.
I realize this is not so much a sound but a feeling; it’s a vibration, like a minor earthquake shaking the ground beneath the gigantic prison. I know what this is – this is the Dark Train. A new inmate is arriving.
I close my eyes and try to go back to sleep but it quickly becomes evident that it’s not going to happen. Despite the depleting effects of the harvest on my body, my brain is wide awake.
I get up and walk to the door, press my ear against it, as if I’ll somehow be able to hear the new inmate taking that long walk around the Loop to their cell, but I can’t, all I hear is the deep and constant silence that I live with every day.
I’m loath to start my morning at this time – two additional hours can feel like a lifetime in this place – so I lie down on top of my sheets and stare up at the ceiling in the dim light.
I return to the world I have created. The story I’m writing in my head; this is a technique I have developed to keep me from losing my mind in the endless hours of silence. I can get lost in another world for a while, like I can with books. This story is set far in the past, long before the machines controlled everything, before pre-life cosmetic improvements for the rich, before the ascension of the Altered and their dominion over the Regulars, and long, long before Galen Rye. A time that my dad used to talk about, a very brief period in human history when we almost got it right, not everyone, not all the time, but we were close.
I walk through this world, far away from the Loop; I’m free to go wherever I want, and I always end up in the same place: the riverside. This place is where my favourite memories live; this is where we used to go as a family on long summer days, where we’d forget about everything for four or five hours and just relax. My sister and my father are with me in this place now, and there are no such things as Alts and Regulars or war or hate. There isn’t much to this story – no conflict, no danger, no twists and turns – but it’s a world where I can be happy. And yes, Wren exists in this world too, and yes, sometimes when I walk along the riverside in this world I’m holding her hand, and sometimes she smiles at me, and sometimes, for a while, I even forget that it’s not real. I can see how easy it would be to lose myself in here, and I don’t blame all of those in the outside world who are addicted to Ebb.
Before I know it, hours have passed – it’s 7. 30 a.m. and Happy’s voice comes through the speakers.
‘Inmate 9-70-981. Today is Thursday, the ninth of June. Day 744 in the Loop. The temperature inside your cell is nineteen degrees Celsius. Please select your breakfast option.’
And the routine begins again: I eat my tasteless breakfast, I watch Galen’s daily address, I complete my workout, then I open the second book in the trilogy; The Two Towers, and read.
I’m so lost in the fantastical world of Middle Earth that I’m almost unaware of the sound of birdsong and the slight breeze as 11.30 comes and the back wall opens up for exercise, but I mark my page and quickly stretch my legs before sprinting out into the sunlight.
Again I hear the mixture of sound coming from all sides of the Loop; the conversations picked up from the day before as though no time has passed, the mad ramblings of the crazies, Pander singing and, of course, repetitive threats from across the yard; ‘Luka Kane I’m going to kill you, Luka Kane I’m going to kill you.’
I’ve got so good at blocking out the unfulfillable threat that I almost miss the sound of crying on the other side of the wall to my left.
The new inmate, I think as I complete my first lap and turn to spring back to the pillar.
I feel like it’s my responsibility, as it was Maddox’s before me, to help my new neighbour, to tell them that it’s going to be alright, to tell them that the fear goes away, but not now – now I have to complete my sprints. Forty-three more minutes.
The sun feels hotter today, which is impossible – the machines keep the temperature of this part of the world at a constant nineteen degrees from 8 a.m. until 5 p.m., at which point it slowly lowers throughout the night to five degrees. It must be the thought of a new inmate, possibly a new friend, that makes me feel more exhausted than usual today. Every time I complete a lap and glance at the screen it seems like no time has passed at all.
Finally though, it finishes, I hit forty-five minutes of painful sprinting and I collapse against the joining wall.
I allow the sounds of the Loop to come back to me; the background chatter of the inmates, the beautiful singing voice of Pander, the continuing game between Igby and Pod, and the droning cries of Tyco Roth as he relentlessly promises to end my life, but over that I hear that some of the nastier inmates have realized that there’s a new prisoner in the Loop and they’ve turned on them, as they do with all newcomers.
‘Welcome to the Loop, you’re going to die here,’ one calls out.
‘Stop crying, there’ll be nothing left for the energy harvest,’ another yells over the laughter.
And finally, I hear the quiet sobs from the cell next to mine again. I can tell by the tone that the new inmate is almost certainly a girl.
I know what she’s feeling. Right now, sitting in her cell or out in the grey concrete yard, she’s never felt so alone and so hopeless. I felt it too, and the words from the heartless inmates feel like fists raining down on you.
There’s a unique cruelty to this place; they take your life away from you without a second thought. It all happens so fast; the televised trial is over in seconds, you’re not allowed to say goodbye
to anyone, you’re dragged to the platform where you wait for as long as it takes for the train to come, then the first surgery to ensure you can never escape, then imprisonment. Surrounded by a silence that begins eating away at your sanity immediately.
It takes some time for my breathing to return to normal, and I try to think of the right words to say, and the right way to say them so that I can help the new inmate in some small way.
‘Hi,’ I say, finally, and wait for a reply, nothing comes, not even a break in the tears. ‘Hey, it gets better, you know? Not great, but . . . better.’
I turn and lean against the wall, I can feel every minute of the girl’s pain and anger.
‘Umm,’ I say, fumbling for more words, ‘I know what you’re feeling, we all felt it, well almost all of us, some these guys are just psychos, you know? And, uhhh…’
My thoughts are interrupted by a siren and the one-minute warning.
‘All inmates must return to their rooms within one minute. All inmates must return to their rooms within one minute.’
I look up at the blue sky and try to take in as much of the fresh air and warmth as I can before I’m locked away again. I can’t enjoy it though, not while the girl on the other side of the wall is in so much pain. I wish there was something I could do.
There is, I think, remembering the enormous pile of books in my room.
I run into my cell, crossing the threshold and activating the sliding door early. I move quickly to the foot of my bed, and search for a book. A very specific book: The Call of the Wild, the first one that Wren ever gave me. I find it and run back outside, ducking under the half-closed door. I’m all too aware that if the door closes with me on the yard side the drones will shoot me, not with bullets – that would be too kind – but with a tranquillizer agent that induces horrific hallucinations, followed by a terrible sickness that lasts days.
I know this because an inmate named Rook Ford once tried to commit suicide by drone. Rook had lost his mind after five years inside – he’d been incarcerated at age twelve and day after day his sanity had faded. He made a loud declaration about how he was taking control back from a broken system and he refused to re-enter his cell after the one-minute warning. When he recovered, five days later, he wasn’t the same person, something had changed in him, and he quietly told anyone close enough to hear that whatever they shot him with was far, far worse than death. He was convinced that he had been in a nightmare world for hundreds of years. He refused his next Delay, accepted his deletion, and they say he boarded the Dark Train with a smile on his face, although this is probably just a made-up rumour, seeing as no one could have seen him getting on the train.
The thought of the poisonous darts loaded into the insectile flying robots makes my heart race and I sprint to the wall.
‘Hey, new girl,’ I call out as I throw the book in a high arc. I see the nearest drone spin in the direction of the soaring paperback, and for one horrible moment I’m sure it’s going to shoot it out of the air, but its sensors must take it for a bird or a floating leaf and it leaves it alone.
The book dips over the metal barricade. I turn and run back to the door, which is now almost all the way closed.
I take two long strides and dive, turning in mid-air so that I land on my hip and roll under. I feel the hard, cold door press against me as I squeeze through, and just before it slams shut I hear my new neighbour’s voice call out in a surprised and grateful tone, ‘Thank you.’
‘Who’s the new girl?’ I ask Wren, nodding my head in the direction of the cell beside mine.
Three more yard sessions have passed since the two words my new neighbour spoke to me, and I haven’t managed to get anything out of her, other than another thank you when I threw her a second book.
Wren doesn’t reply – she doesn’t appear to have heard me. A deep line divides her eyebrows as she stares anxiously at nothing.
‘Wren?’ I say, getting the warden’s attention.
‘What? Oh, I’m sorry, Luka, it’s just . . . nothing, it’s nothing.’
‘Are you OK?’ I ask. ‘You’ve been distracted since you got here.’
Wren smiles, she’s good at faking it but I can tell she had to force it on to her face. ‘Really, Luka, I’m OK. What were you asking?’
‘The new girl,’ I repeat, ‘who is she?’
‘Kina Campbell,’ Wren says, taking a bite of her sandwich. ‘Nice girl, a Regular, like you.’
Wren bites her lip and looks guiltily at me as though she’s misspoken. I ignore the comment.
‘I gave her a few books, I hope you don’t mind?’
‘They’re your books,’ she replies, smiling.
Wren’s eyes drift off to the left, checking the time in her Lens display. ‘Better get moving,’ she says. ‘See you tomorrow.’
‘Yeah, see you tomorrow.’
And she’s gone again.
That night, when I watch the rain, I can’t help my mind drifting off to that made-up world. I imagine Wren and me sitting on a hillside somewhere, talking about the future, our future. It’s a stupid fantasy, a stupid teenage boy’s dream that can’t ever come true. Even if I wasn’t serving a death sentence, even if I wasn’t destined to die from a botched Delay, Wren is a nineteen-year-old Alt and I’m a sixteen-year-old Regular. Outside of the Loop she’d never even look at me.
I truly hate this place. Sometimes it becomes unbearable and I understand exactly why Rook Ford tried to have the drones kill him.
As the back wall opens up for exercise the next day, I find myself not running. Instead, I walk to the dividing wall and press my hand against it.
I’m trying to think of something to say when my neighbour speaks.
‘Hello.’
Her voice is hoarse and quiet, and I’m sure that today is the first day she’s managed to stop crying.
‘Hi,’ I say.
‘Thank you for the books, I think I might have gone crazy without them.’
‘That’s OK.’
‘My name’s Kina,’ she says.
‘Luka,’ I reply.
‘Luka?’ she repeats. ‘The same Luka that guy keeps yelling about killing every day?’
‘The same one.’
‘Why does he hate you so much?’
I think about this for a second. I have my theories, but I don’t know for sure. For a moment the image of the boy falling off the roof of the Black Road Vertical flashes in my mind. ‘Honestly, I wish I knew,’ I tell her. ‘I guess he knew someone I knew on the outside.’
‘Well,’ Kina says with a new brightness in her voice, ‘thanks again for the books, Luka.’
‘I’ve got plenty more,’ I say, feeling the conversation coming to an end and not wanting it to. ‘Books I mean, hundreds of them, and I’ve read them all so you can borrow them whenever you want.’
‘Luka the librarian,’ she says, and laughs. ‘How did you get them?’
‘I’m friends with the warden, Wren. She’s nice, you’ll like her.’
‘Wren?’ she says. ‘Oh yeah, she seems nice.’
‘She is, she’s really great,’ I tell her, and I can’t help but smile.
‘So, Luka, how long have you been in this fine establishment?’ she asks.
‘Two years, two weeks and four days,’ I reply.
‘God that’s . . . a long time,’ she says in a low voice.
‘Ah, the time flies when you’re . . . trapped in crushing silence.’
Kina laughs, and the sound makes me smile again. ‘Well,’ I say, stepping back from the wall, ‘better get on with my sprints.’
‘Sprints?’ Kina asks.
‘Yeah, I like to run.’
‘Really?’
‘Yeah, it keeps me fit and leaves them with no energy to take at the harvest.’
Kina laughs at this. ‘I like that. A little act of rebellion.’
I smile. ‘Exactly. Speak tomorrow?’
‘Tomorrow,’ she replies.
The run doesn’t feel a
s hard as it usually does. And that night, after dinner, even the harvest is bearable.
As midnight approaches, I drag myself from the floor, my legs so weak that they shake uncontrollably as I stumble to the back wall and look to the sky through the window.
I stare at the clear black night and wait, and wait. Midnight comes and I turn my eyes skyward, but the explosions don’t appear.
Impossible. Happy is not late, not ever, not even by one second – the system is flawless, it runs everything. I look at the time on my screen and see that thirty seconds have already passed since the scheduled rainfall.
‘Happy?’ I say, not tearing my eyes away from the sky. But no reply comes from my screen. ‘Happy!’
My screen flickers and then comes back to life.
‘How can I help?’ the screen asks, in that familiar voice.
‘The rain—’ I start.
My panic is interrupted by the first flash in the sky, followed by a second and third spreading out into the distance in a long net of lights, and the clouds spiral out and join together.
‘What just happened?’ I ask.
‘Everything is as it should be, Inmate 9-70-981,’ Happy tells me.
‘The rain,’ I say, finally looking away as the first drops slam into the yard. ‘It was late.’
‘Everything is as it should be.’
I look from the screen back to the falling rain.
I’m so relieved at the sight of the thick drops beating against the ground, running down the walls, drenching the waiting drones atop the column, that I ignore the error for a moment and just watch, pretending it never happened.
But it did, and I don’t know what it means.
There is talk among the inmates of the late rain.
It surprises me. I guess I always assumed that I was the only one who watches the rain each night.
I hear their voices in the yard, asking questions; Why? What does it mean? What’s going on out there?