Most of the time he didn’t mind the sentence on his arm, it was his badge of courage, one nobody could take away from him, even if he were to lose his arm, a testament of his tenacity despite the Core’s cruelty, a testament transcending this wretched life in the anemic shadow of the towering walls. It was a sign of belonging, both to the people populating the Outsides, since most had one, and inevitably to the group he had joined after his release, specializing on stealing from the Core that had labeled him a thief, and also punished him for it. It was now his business card.
And sometimes, he hated it; he had even considered removing it. Removing the memories attached to it. Scrambling the lines of text and removing the fluorescent ink, leaving him with a patch of scar tissue that would cover most of his forearm, was a fairly safe procedure compared to having the bone carvings removed, which included opening the flesh under heavy sedation, often alcohol, and then filing the bone down with a handheld file or simply scrambling the sentence with a sharp instrument. But no matter how much fury he emptied onto it, at the end of the day, it was purely a cosmetic procedure. It didn’t hurt or inhibit his lifestyle in any way, nor did it change the past, undo the sentence, or erase his record. The Core still had every possible sample of him that they could need; bodily fluids of all kinds, flesh samples, hair samples, x-rays, voice recordings and eye scans to name most of it. Or so he had heard from a number of people. Since he was sedated through it all, remembering nothing, he often wondered how anyone else could remember anything.
But why they went through the trouble of tattooing the sentences, albeit through scarring, and especially with fluorescent ink, nobody outside the Core knew. But as with the purported samples, everyone had theories. To trace them. Pure spite. Boredom. Senseless tradition. Poison. Spice or tenderizer. Parasite eggs. Spermicide.
It wasn’t like they could’ve been mistaken for an inhabitant of the Core anyway. At least not the one’s visible; prison guards, police and, on rare occasions, the squads that executed the raids. No one had ever heard of anyone who had seen a member of the Core that wasn’t of the previous three, let alone one of them without armor. With their angular shapes and reflective, lifeless exterior, they looked like they belonged on a circuit board, stationary and blinking, rather than moving about with weapons.
Most, if not all of the people that performed the procedures of removing the sentences, and there were only a handful of them, professed that it was nothing but regular tattoo ink, and they themselves often kept theirs, some even embellished them, working it into a larger piece, overthrowing its intention.
The Core saw the removals of the sentences as an especially egregious offense, forcing the people that performed them to constantly be on the move, along with their often bulky equipment. The Core’s raids, executed by a dozen cursed automatons lowered from a helicopter were targeted at either insect breeding or sentence removal. It was an imposing squad, much heftier than both the police and the guards, and often perfectly invisible at night.
There were also rumors of a special kind of Core police, targeting individual Outsiders or specific groups as a whole that they deemed dangerous, and infiltrating them. But no one had ever exposed one of them. However, the probability of there being spies among them Sono considered to be very high. It would be a bigger surprise if there weren’t any. But so far their presence had not brought along much of an upheaval. Maybe the Core simply didn’t feel threatened by the activities of the Outsiders…
Though there wasn’t one official resistance movement, there were several smaller groups in the Outsides, most of them working in symbiosis with each other. Many of the groups preferred people without sentences, often young people, to carry out their more elaborate missions. Besides the benefit of size and agility, they were unnoticeable in the dark as opposed to the majority of its members who looked like a society of enlightened Grinch’s. Some seemed to think that it was a major factor, but Sono had grave doubts. Surely the Core would have better gadgets available than having to rely on spotting a greenish glow in the dark. Perhaps it left a trail or something, invisible to the naked eye.
Those that truly loathed the Core, hatred filling every inch of their body, its destruction becoming their sole purpose of existence, obsessed about having everything removed from their skin, every single trace of the Core removed, like it was nothing but a pus-filled abscess. Sono hated the Core too, immensely, but to make it into an evil as large as that would be to flatter it, with a strong chance of losing himself in the process. He had plenty of friends that had disappeared that way, mentally as well as physically.
For better or worse, Sono thought that it would be to kill off a part of himself. Had the trials suffered in prison not shaped him? Nine years was a long time, and however atrocious it had been, the glimpses of magic, though few, still lifted him today. They gave him hope, and meaning.
The elderly often held sessions of what could be considered school inside the prison, sitting before a large gathering of kids, telling stories, teaching them the alphabet or how to count. But since the quotas set by the Core weren’t always easy to fulfill, school did not always assemble, or attendance was poor, if there was an available and willing elder at all.
After a few years in prison, he was sent to a stone quarry, where school came in the form of unstructured talks, about everything and nothing, sometimes as a group, and sometimes one on one while the others slept around them.
Listening to Aunt Yanda telling stories in prison was one of those magic moments he could invoke at will to bolster himself. It wasn’t so much the details anymore, they were all but dissolved, but the sensations he summoned. Back then, the pains, hungers and evils had disappeared as wonder filled him, but little of that survived today. It was more like a memory of a dream in a nightmare.
But, each time the smell from the enormous pit on the north side of the city made it to the south side, where most of the Outsiders lived, it was difficult not to clench a fist in rage, regardless of the place one’s mind was in. Not only did the pit smell, it glowed too, and would one not know what made it glow, the greenish tint of the surrounding pollution would be somewhat becoming. It was constantly refilled with prisoners of all ages, the majority of them dead from the Core’s indifference, which exasperated the underlying heart and lung problems every Outsider suffered from.
The Outsiders who died outside of prison were taken to a rudimentary burial ground near the pit, each one buried underneath a pile of debris. There were countless of these mounds scattered around the area adjacent to the pit. A very long time ago, before Sono’s grandpa was even born, they had attempted to bury everyone that ended up in the pit, taking them to a place nearby to be properly buried, but very soon discovered that the pit never shrunk, on the contrary, so they eventually gave it up altogether. That was how the burial grounds were born.
A few, as Sono had witnessed, took the matter into their own hands in prison, and ended it independently. The tools utilized to accomplish it were either poorly suited for the job, or blatantly over the top, harrowing either way for everyone involved. Sometimes they threw themselves under or into powerful machines, which crushed them to a pulp in an instant, or they committed suicide by guard, attacking one of them which often ensued with a barrage of bullets fired at them. Some found sharp enough objects to slit open their wrists with. Once, a man had tried to hang himself by tying his pant legs to a fence, and then sticking his chin over the crotch of his pants. When the guards spotted him, they shot him in his stomach several times, and he remained hanging there, coloring his underwear and legs a deep red.
The dead bodies, or whatever remained of them, could lay there for days before the guards took action; ordering whoever happened to be close by to clean it up by pointing with their weapons. Corpses were put in a large metallic cart, but where only rolled away when it was full, which usually didn’t take long.
The wall around the Core was the tallest and sturdiest structure around, with an unpleasant surprise be
hind it. Many years ago, a small group of Outsiders had gotten past it, supposedly by digging for years, only to discover there was another one just like it. It had looked like a dry dam inside, with dusty, almost imperceptible roads between them, miniscule in comparison to the towering walls.
The Core was shaped like a circle, and the prison was somewhere inside that circle, although no one knew that for a fact, it was just surmised. Everyone arrived at the prison sedated, and left the same way, or worse. Never better.
The Core had several modified wind turbines on top of its high walls, acting as fans, to divert the foul smell from the glowing pit. And they weren’t spread out like sentries with identical intervals; they were strategically placed, as if someone had actually spent time to calculate how to direct the smell straight to the heart of the Outsides. A foul smell always hung in the streets, saturated every garment and sometimes became powerful enough to sting the eyes. Since the wind wasn’t what it used to be, or so people said at least, and the three nuclear plants evidently produced all the power the Core could need and more, such ludicrous excesses were possible. The nuclear plants, along with a few buildings flanking them, were situated far from the city, by the shore, all protected by vast fields of razor wire and countless watchtowers.
The Core also had hundreds of drones at their disposal, for a variety of tasks. The majority of them scattered the pollution above the Core, or tried anyway, a handful of them assisted the wind turbines on the walls, and fluctuating numbers of them acted as sentries, hovering above the walls and the Outsides, masked by the pollution. Unfortunately the Core was so vast that any opening in the sky seldom became noticeable outside the walls. Often even the walls were veiled by pollution.
The further one got from the Core, the thicker the pollution grew, until a certain point where it all looked alike; a floating gruel made from ground up gravel that everyone was forced to ingest. The ground was contaminated too, every single patch of it, but since all enterprises involving the soil had long been abandoned, it didn’t matter much.
Rumors had long circulated that the people inside the Core who didn’t quite align with the rest were either thrown inside a tiny, brightly lit deprivation cell, without food or water to slowly wither away, often within days, or they were given a piece of rope and a stool and then taken to a neighboring cell, where the ceiling was higher and fitted with a sturdy hook. What happened to them after that, nobody knew. They certainly never ended up in the pit. If the rumor was true, for them to leave the pit like that, with putrefying humans out in the open, was surely for effect; a display of their supremacy, and the insignificance of the Outsiders.
The rumors had originated inside the prison, where contact between the prisoners from the Outsides and the prison guards from the Core were inevitable. The only contact with the Core was through their many law enforcement agencies. The patrolling police, usually around three or four cars, one of them always near the shops and the market, rarely went out of their armored vehicles, and when they did, things went fast, and without words. The police cars were where one first experienced the Core’s penchant for sedatives. No one ever remembered the ride.
Sedatives were used frequently on the prisoners, most often in liquid or solid form, and they were either gulped down docilely or one got hunted down and shot with a dart. Fresh bruises weren’t uncommon upon awakening, regardless of the option one chose.
It was in prison that the dealings most resembling an actual interaction with the Core took place.
In an empty, fully mirrored room, where even the floor and ceiling were mirrored, one’s sentence was blurted out in a voice completely devoid of cadence through the speakers up in each of the four corners. Depending on how one responded to the sedative, it could be an unpleasant trip. Trying not to vomit had been of far greater concern for the eleven-year-old Sono than the outside world when he came to on the floor. Not until the guard grabbed him did he realize where he was, surrounded by mirrors, and immediately afterwards that he had a strange wound on his arm. The voice, that of a haunted computer, which others claimed repeated one’s sentence over and over at least ten times, echoing throughout the room, had been merely a blurred noise in the background for Sono. The guard had then hauled him out of the room, and on through a network of sterile dark bluish corridors, without a single door visible along the way, until, like a portal, at the end of a long straight hallway an unassuming door of polished steel stood facing them. Beyond it, the expanse of the prison opened up.
His reaction to the sedatives, namely nausea, disappeared after he’d been sedated a couple of times.
The guards were outfitted from top to bottom in shiny black armor, with either handguns fastened to their sides or rifles over their stomach, without anything that could even suggest a glimpse of something familiar to an Outsider, like skin, lips, ears, nails, or hair of any kind. Their gloves were heavily reinforced, especially around their knuckles, making their hands appear gargantuan, and their boots were simply extensions of their armor, like some kind of bulletproof rain boots. But what set them apart from the raid squad, whose armor had not a single distinguishing mark, besides the GUARD written in white across their chest, were the bright yellow X’s on the bottom third of their sleek, oval-shaped masks, approximately where their mouth would’ve been. The police shared this with them, both the POLICE across their chest and the bright yellow X as the only vestige of their mouths.
Though most procedures in the prison were mechanized, the trickier things had to be carried out by a living being and not a computer code, though the two were often hard to tell apart.
The bright yellow X embossed onto the bottom third of their masks worked in two ways; as a deterrent in case the extinguishing exterior and the expressionless mask failed, and as a symbol of their inability to speak, since Sono hadn’t heard a sound from any of the guards, not even a grunt or sigh, even though five minutes didn’t go by without passing one, sometimes even appearing in his dreams; he envisioned the mask prevented them from speaking aloud somehow, though they still managed to communicate with each other.
But communication could happen in something as simple as a tiny turn of a boot.
Though he had not personally experienced any kindness or memorable gestures from the prison guards, would one take away their armor, they were not very different. Or so he believed, and hoped. And there were a lot of guards around. Therefore, the rumors regarding the cruel treatment of the Core’s own inhabitants weren’t easily dismissible.
His grandpa wouldn’t fare well in prison. It was basically a labor camp, toiling day in and day out, and even the sections with the lightest loads were tough on the elderly.
Oftentimes, one didn’t even know what it was that one had been assigned to do. Assembling the same tiny pieces with a magnifying glass and tweezers, or welding unassuming metal scraps together for weeks on end. And, out of nowhere, one could suddenly wake up at any one of a number of quarries, cement factories, coal mines or hangars filled with mountains of junk to sort through, usually rusty metal, tires, old appliances and electronic devices.
Not even three-quarters of the Outsiders Sono had been at the stone quarry with lived long enough to see the prison again.
Maybe they were all in fact facilitating the acceleration of their own annihilation. It was much more probable than their salvation. But maybe it was dumb to look for salvation in one’s imprisoners.
To the Core, the Outsiders were probably just disposable parts of an immense machine that they controlled. Though some of the Outsiders in prison had adopted even bleaker sentiments, Sono had been surprised to find Outsiders on the other side of the wall harboring sentiments that overran them both.
Despite the bland pot of timidly boiling water before him, suspended from a rudimentary sawhorse-like frame constructed out of rebars, whose steady humming pleasantly engaged his ears, Sono turned to the side, to stare at the equally bland drum by the wall. It was actually an old oil barrel plastered with faded charcoal h
andprints; his grandpa’s handprints. It was by far the most melodious piece of metal he had ever encountered, even at rare times when he himself, tone-deaf as he was, pounded and slapped the top of it.
Two
“I saw her again Grandpa! I saw her!” Sono leapt toward him as fast as he could across the concrete pieces.
“Did you hear me? I saw her again! In a dream, last night! Wait, I’ll tell you!”
Chin down, eyelids forced apart wide, he tried to run even faster across the jagged land.
“Careful so you don’t fall!”
Pouting slightly in concentration, Sono shook his head almost imperceptibly.
Sono eventually jumped down from the last concrete piece onto solid ground.
“Heyaaa!”
His grandpa offered him a few absentminded nods. “Who did you see?”
“The girl! The one that hopped around here before. Don’t you remember? I told you about her; Turn.”
Edgar gave a single nod, with his eyes closed.
“This is important. Listen to me, please.”
“I’m listening, Sono.”
“She was in my dream last night. Do you know what was sticking out of her mouth? A horse’s tail. Fucking weird, right?”
“Hmm…how do you know it was a horse?”
Sono didn’t, and though he tried to convert his exhilaration into something more sleuth-like given the development, it failed miserably. “What else could it have been?”
“That’s for you to think about, not me.”
“You’re the shaman.”
“I am, but I don’t meddle with dreams offhand like this. It would be highly irresponsible. If I were to tell you something, it would hinder your own quest. It’s something you must initiate. And then I can only guide you.”
Sono crumpled his face in disillusionment. “Now it’s a fucking quest?”
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