by Gavin Chait
‘That will be well,’ says Daniel.
The others make camp, clearing a space and searching for branches to chop firewood. They are not far from Calabar now, can almost see the loom of its lights on the horizon after the sun goes down.
It is not often that the others eat this well while travelling, and have the luxury of sleeping through the night without taking turns at watch. One by one they fall asleep.
Symon picked up a strange lingering smell coming from the north-east, perpendicular to their direction of travel, soon after they arrived. It is subtle. The others will not have noticed, but it is familiar to him.
He walks up the island, swimming across a channel to reach a further bank. At the far end of that island, he finds the source.
The man has been tied to an oil palm, his arms and legs knotted about the trunk, as if hugging it. His elbows and knees have been broken. Blood has caked and dried on the sand. Flies cover his hands and face.
What is left of his face.
His jaw has been ripped out, his upper palate and teeth visible where his head rests against the tree. There is a terrible, wet, gasping rattle from his exposed throat. His tongue is dry and coated in flies, hanging loose down his neck. Tiny maggots burrow and churn in the suppurating wound around the exposed bone of his upper jaw.
Above his head is a short loop of thick rope hanging from the handle of a heavy cellulosic knife. The knife is embedded in the trunk. The man’s lower jaw hangs from the rope.
As Symon nears, the man opens his eyes.
He makes a sucking, gargling sound: a plea. His eyes are begging, too dry to weep.
Symon studies him. Assesses. He places his hands about the man’s head and efficiently snaps his neck. He stares into the other’s eyes all the way through, acknowledging the gratitude and release as the man goes.
He buries the body beneath the shadow of the oil palm, returning in the morning to camp. He carries a small stone in his pocket. The symbol cut into it is two parallel arcs, one broken off-centre with a dot between them.
He says nothing.
A few hours later, they paddle into the docks at Beach Town, below the city.
24
‘Symon!’ screams Samara in the vastness of his memories. He is being dragged again towards a point. He knows where it has to be. ‘Please, not there. Symon!’
He becomes aware again. Drifting, floating, his naked body angled diagonally to the two-and-a-half-metre by two-and-a-half-metre cube that defines his cell. The walls are padded. There is no bed. A pipe protrudes from one wall, a plastic cap on the end. The cell smells of old sweat, urine and excrement. A single light burns from a shielded bracket flat with the upholstery.
‘Symon!’ he yells again.
[I am here.]
‘Symon, is that you? No,’ his voice filled with anguish, ‘only echoes of you.’
He is subsumed in the memory once more.
‘Where are we? Orbit?’
[I have only just resumed awareness. That blow knocked me out as well.]
‘Where’s the connect?’ feeling his head, the jagged tears where his ears used to be. ‘My ears! They cut off my ears!’ Howling in outrage, frustration and fear.
[Samara. Control.]
‘My ears!’ Rubbing at the scars, as if willing them to return. Pounding at the walls, achieving nothing more than flinging himself awkwardly around within the cell.
Eventually, Samara calms, his screaming and sobbing giving way to moans, then hoarse breathing.
[Samara, we are on Tartarus. We will remain in solitary confinement until we are released or we can get that door open.]
Samara strokes the fabric of the walls, pushing on it. The surface is smooth and lined with stiff foam.
He maps his space. The tube is for waste and he discounts it. He inspects the corners, looking for the doorway. As he does so, a small slot, wide enough for a sachet of food, rotates out of the wall alongside him, slightly above the fabric of the wall below it.
[Eat. We must have our strength.]
The slot remains open. He can see that it is self-sealing so that he cannot get a glimpse of the outside of the cell. He takes the sachet, orienting himself so that he is facing it, his feet on the panel below and his left arm braced against the opposite wall so that he does not move.
He sucks down the paste. It is tasteless, but Symon quickly analyses it, confirming it is nutritionally complete. He can see now the microscopic edge of the doorway along the vertices of this face of the cube. This is the door.
Still sucking the paste, he pushes his forefinger into the corner.
[I can’t squeeze through. It is metal-on-metal and under pressure. No space.]
Samara finishes the sachet, rubbing his finger to secrete a tiny silver drop on the outside, and deposits it back in the slot. The fluid is the substance of Symon’s biological mesh network. Symon can maintain connection and use the fluid to interact or explore remotely. It will decay quickly outside a host, but Symon may find a control panel he can access.
The panel slides closed. A vacuum gust sucks.
Samara feels the pressure change inside the cell and realizes that air transfer takes place via a fine mesh panel running alongside the slot in parallel to the wall.
On the other side of the wall, empty sachets fly out from all along the pipe from other feeding slots. The silver drop clings to the bare metal. Slowly, it slides across the panel, tracing the outline of the outside of the cell, looking for a control panel, wiring, locking mechanisms, anything that can offer a way through.
This pipe is too narrow. It is the width of a corridor between facing cells, but only a few centimetres high.
There is nothing. It must be in the walkway above. There is no access.
The drop continues, searching for an inspection panel, but it gradually fades and dissolves before it finds anything.
Back in his cell, Samara pounds the walls in frustration.
Days pass. He regrows his ears but lacks the materials to resynthesize his antennae. He locks himself inside his mind, drawing on Symon’s long-term memory store to hide in a simulacra of the world he has lost. He watches old movies, slips into reveries of Shakiso, walks in meadows and swims in the great lakes on Achenia.
Symon continues to explore, little silver beads visiting other cells via their food slots. He finds little.
Tartarus is a prison. The American government was early to the rush to orbit, building one of the first space elevators and, then, one of the first metal cities in the sky. It had a suitably glorious name: Star City 1. They imagined a world of casinos and exclusive hotels along with rich retirees.
Then they watched as other, private, initiatives surpassed it. Their city atrophied, died. The few investors moving to other cities. Budget cuts meant that funding such a city was unaffordable. It was a vanity project, and Congress was not willing to let it go.
A way to finance it was found.
More than six million inmates clog the American criminal justice system. Sentencing is automated, calculated, swift. But there are prisoners the country would rather forget. Prisoners they cannot kill since the end of the death penalty. Prisoners they do not want.
They send them into orbit. Two hundred and fifty thousand individual cells were built. There is an air-processor. Megatons of food sachets are sent up once a year. Prisoners are transported, unconscious and naked, weekly. Effluent is ejected, frozen, into space.
The company that manages the prison has automated as much as they can. They tell the families that any bodies are converted to fuel for the station: a lie. The fusion generator provides all the energy the system needs. In a rare moment of introspection, they realized that casting dead bodies into space might cause consternation if any are seen burning through the atmosphere. Instead they are dumped at sea, buried amongst other waste. There are no wardens. Just a single control system called Athena.
Athena watches. Athena dispatches her Furies – deadly drones – to patrol the e
ndless tunnels between the cells. None escape. All are forgotten.
It has been wildly popular. Except with the inmates. They usually go insane within months.
They gave it a glorious new name: Tartarus One. There are plans to build a second, larger prison. It may even happen.
Samara can hear the other inmates. Their manic cries, the incessant sobbing and pounding against the walls. There is no hope here, no prospect for release, no path to rehabilitation. And they will not let you die.
Every day he hears doors open, somewhere all through the city. He assumes that new prisoners are arriving or that bodies are being removed. He refuses to enter his memories again. He knows that he could decide not to come back, preferring to die in the arms of a remembered Shakiso than remain in his cell.
Instead he waits, floating in gravity-free confinement.
More days go by.
The light never changes. The interval between meals is always the same. Every six hours. The slender hatch remains open till he eats and returns the sachet.
[Samara.]
‘Yes.’
[I have calculated the approximate time since we blanked.]
Samara says nothing.
[Tartarus has a slightly eccentric position. It is affected by the sun and moon. The attitude adjusters are not quite accurate. It has been twenty-three days.]
‘We have only fifty-four days before Achenia departs.’ His voice is flat.
[I have also tallied the periodicity of when doors open.]
Again, Samara says nothing.
[There is something unusual about the sequence. An elevator arrives once every seven days. At that time a number of doors open and close as prisoner exchange happens. There is also a set time once every twenty-four hours when it appears that dead prisoners are extracted from their cells. However, every two or three days a door opens at random.]
‘What?’ Samara is suddenly alert.
[I have been processing the data. It sounds as if an individual prisoner is released into the tunnels at these random intervals.]
‘Do you have any idea what for?’
[I am not sure. But – I do not believe it ends well.]
‘The Furies?’
[Yes, they hunt the prisoners.]
‘To what end?’
[I do not know. Perhaps for sport?]
‘That could work in our favour. Do you have any idea of what those released have in common?’
[I do not know. I will process.]
Samara lapses back into silence, but he has a glimmer of hope. He waits. Days pass.
[Samara. There is a potential pattern. From the sound signatures it appears that these inmates maintain their fitness. Perhaps performing exercise will attract notice?]
Samara straightens and places his hands against one panel and his feet flat against the panel below. He realizes that the prisoners attempting this must all be tall, otherwise performing this trick is impossible. There is no way to gain leverage, and exercise is otherwise impossible without gravity.
He pushes up and down, up and down, flexing himself against the two walls. He continues for hours, pausing only when the food slot opens to eat from the sachets.
Another day passes, but Symon reports that no more random openings have happened.
On the third day of exercising, the entire face of one panel slides back and away to the left. The passageway outside is in darkness. Samara carefully sticks his head out.
The glow in his eyes vanishes as he adapts his skin to match the bare-metal walls of the tunnel. As he moves – floating in the middle of the corridor, and pulling or pushing as he propels himself – he appears invisible, transparent, reflecting the surface under him around his body.
Symon has built up a reasonable map of the nearby tunnels, and determined which way faces towards the outside, but he has only a limited idea of how the overall system is structured. He needs to find a maintenance and engineering warehouse that he assumes will be close to the elevator entrance. Maintenance must have been planned for during the life of the prison?
He is aware of temperature and movement sensors embedded in the walls. They do not trouble him. He reflects only ambient heat.
He sees the rounded metal ball of a Fury flying past a junction up ahead, its magnetic thrusters keeping it centred in the tunnel. Samara ignores it, turning in the opposite direction.
It is a warren of interleaving tunnels, a grid of columns and rows of seemingly random intervals. He goes slowly, making no sound.
[Fury.]
He stands still, bracing himself, leaving space for it to pass, as the Fury turns into his tunnel and floats alongside him. It is almost spherical, with a grotesque lion-like face.
[I thought they were supposed to look like hags? With snakes for hair? This is disappointing.]
Samara grabs it, propelling a bullet of silver into its guts. Systems are adjusted, sensors confused. Now it is his. He holds it, maintaining control over it, ensuring it reports correctly back to Athena.
[It has a map. I’m translating it.]
There are scorch marks in this section of the tunnels. Inmates who ran the gauntlet and were slaughtered. Dried blood floats in the stillness of the air.
[Calculated. The map is not complete. Look. Notice that huge central shaft? Almost like a funnel to the outside?]
‘Strange. It doubles the size of the prison. Can you see what it might be?’
[No. It seems protected from the Furies. Although it seems to share a common control room, they have no access, so no need to know the interior.]
‘Fair enough.’
[I have calculated a path to the stores.]
Hours pass and he makes it into a different tunnel. This one is lit. He follows it to an ordinary-looking hatchway door. It is unlocked.
Inside, there is gravity, and he drops silently to the floor.
[They waste the energy here, where there is no one to appreciate it?]
It is a large space, about the size of an aircraft hangar. Boxes are piled up on pallets. Sheets of metal, aluminium rebar and baskets of thermoplastic packing pellets. There is more than enough material for him to build an escape pod.
There is a sound, as of quiet conversation.
[Three. Behind the boxes to the rear.]
He creeps silently between the box stacks, pushing the Fury ahead of him.
‘I raise you four packets,’ says a voice.
‘He has you now, Seymour,’ chuckles another softly.
Past a crate of mechanical components, three men are seated on stools around a small table. They must have once been big men, but now they are skeletal. They are of varying ages. One looks very old. Sheets of fabric are wrapped around their bodies. It matches the fabric of the cell padding. Empty sachets are piled between them, cards in their hands and on the table.
Samara shifts colour, returning to his normal matt titanium. He does his best to hide the Fury behind his back. He clears his throat, gently.
The men jump, swearing, trying to hide. One spots him.
‘Fuck’s sakes, it’s a man!’ he shouts. They relax but remain wary, and then one spots the Fury.
‘It’s a Fury! Fuck!’
‘It is mine,’ says Samara, clearly. He pulls the Fury in front of him and pushes it to face the floor. ‘I control it.’
Their jaws gape. The one called Seymour walks over to Samara. He is hunched, bent, his ribs protrude and his stomach is hollow. He prods the Fury.
‘How you do that?’
‘I am Achenian. I am able to control such devices.’ He warns them, ‘Do not attempt to remove it from me as I will lose control of it again. It will then call Athena for help.’
Seymour stares aghast.
‘If you wait a moment, I will reprogram it.’
The others watch as he crouches over the black, evil-looking device. He is silent for a few moments, then releases it. The others jump, but Samara motions at them to stay calm.
The Fury hovers above them then begin
s to patrol the warehouse. Every few hours, it will plug itself into a wall socket to recharge.
‘What you do to it?’
‘I’ve programmed it to send out a response to Athena that it is patrolling well and that there is no trouble. It won’t call for help. I have also set it to protect us. Its enemies are now other Furies.’
The men guffaw. Exchange disbelieving but happy looks. This may be the first hopeful experience in years.
Remembering his manners, Seymour wipes his right hand on the sheet around his waist and proffers it.
‘I’m Seymour, that’s Henry, and the old guy is Sancho.’
They shake, awkwardly and self-consciously.
‘We ain’t got much food. Exist off what’s left in the empty packets as they collect down here. But you survived. That’s a big deal. We’ll find a way,’ says Seymour.
The others nod. It must have been terrifying, and unspeakably lucky, to survive and find this place without any of Samara’s abilities. How many tried and failed?
‘Thank you for your hospitality, but I don’t intend staying long,’ says Samara.
‘Well, those are brave words, friend. I been saying ’em for thirty years,’ says Sancho. All his teeth have fallen out.
‘We ain’ got much to do. We can show you what we got?’
In most Earth-bound prisons, any new arrival would never receive such a fulsome greeting. Tartarus is no ordinary place. These men have been isolated so long, starved for novelty and weakened through continuous hunger. Their conversation spoken as if dragged from them, exhausted; individual words lost along the way, leaving their speech oddly stilted. They still have their sanity, and life has become fragile and precious.
The men abandon their card game. A well-thumbed deck left behind by some ancient building party.
At the end of the warehouse is a packing system. Every six hours, a net filled with empty food sachets is released from a pipe and deposited into an empty box on a conveyer belt below. The net must be where the empties are collected after each feeding.
A stack of thin sheets of cardboard alongside the spout, and an elaborate folding mechanism to convert each into a box, sits beside the top end of the conveyor belt. The conveyor belt deposits the large boxes on to a mobile pallet at the other end.