Grand Theft Planetary & other stories

by HL Jones

  ***

  After the spectators had been herded out of the court– some wiping tears from their eyes, some punching the air in empty, revenge-induced celebration – Aaron herded his charge into a tiny grubby room off of the main corridor and cheerily made them both a filthy-looking tea. Daniel looked at his communally-abused mug, chipped and brown, and almost refused it. Yet, he drank it down anyway; he desperately wanted to fit-in with this rag-tag bunch of guards. The last thing he needed was to be singled out as a troublemaker, or as someone who thought himself above everyone else. His degree in psychology – a rarity thanks to the astronomical costs in higher education – would do that if it ever became common knowledge. Daniel had omitted his qualifications from his application form for this very reason.

  Aaron belched loudly and patted his gut. “Better out than in.” He looked at his watch, then gently pushed Daniel out of the room with the butt of his carbine. “Come on, dogsbody. We’re on patrol.”

  A rickety old elevator took them down to a world of hissing pipes and dripping brass tubes far underneath the court complex. Aaron sparked up a sweetstick and breathed it into Daniel’s face as they walked down the catwalk between huge hanging cages, each one holding a dishevelled prisoner. Some moaned with hunger, others raged obscenities at Daniel and Aaron. It was clear that they were all in misery. “This is the holding area, sport,” said Aaron, ignoring the suffering around them. “Each cell holds a piece of scum, so no fraternising, no teasing, and no disturbing our guests.” He threw his sweetstick into the nearest cage, showering the prisoner in hot ambers. “Isn’t that right, filth?”

  “Get lost, screw!” snarled the convict, a foul-looking woman with a huge angry scar running down her naked body.

  “Now now, sugar tits,” grinned Aaron, “don’t get impatient. We’ll have you out of there in no time.”

  “So how long will it be before these prisoners are released?” asked Daniel. He didn’t care what happened to them; they were criminals, pure and simple. He simply wanted to show his interest in the job.

  “Release? We don’t release anybody!” Aaron grinned and pulled a telescopic club out of his belt. He jabbed the woman convict viciously with it. “Did you hear that? My friend here thinks you’re going to be released!” He jabbed her harder. “Come on, give us a laugh!”

  Daniel blushed at the naked woman thrashing around in her cage. “So what happens to these people then? This is a prison facility, isn’t it?”

  “Not just any prison facility, my boy,” said Aaron, spreading his arms wide, “this is Time and Punishment! We send criminals back through time to die in history’s worst accidents and events! Don’t you know anything?”

  “Well yeah, obviously,” replied Daniel, quickly piecing together everything he’d seen and heard so far, “I know that some criminals are sent back in time to suffer a horrible death. I saw that in the court earlier. What did the judge mean though, when he said, justice has been served and a part of the past saved?”

  “Kin’ell!” exclaimed Aaron. “Haven’t you had your induction yet?” He sighed when Daniel shook his head. “Listen up. Time travel follows Newton’s third law, which is…?”

  “Every action has an opposite and equal reaction?”

  Aaron raised an eyebrow. “Well well, look at the professor!” Daniel grimaced; low-level security guards on their first day shouldn’t know physics, he chided himself. “So,” continued Aaron, “if we send something back through time, we need to bring something forwards through time, of roughly the same mass.”

  Daniel nodded. “So we send someone back to the past and bring someone to the future?”

  Aaron beamed. “I didn’t realise that dogs had brains! Well done.” He patted Daniel’s head with a sweaty hand. Some of the prisoners laughed and hollered abuse. “Anyway, once a criminal is sentenced to death, we sling them into one of the time tubes and swap them with someone who’s died needlessly in the past. Hence, a part of the past has been saved.” He flourished as much as his sizeable bulk would allow. “It’s the ultimate kind of justice. A horrible, unavoidable execution for the convict, and a reprieve for the innocent.”

  Daniel frowned. “Why not simply replace the murder victim with the murderer?”

  “So the perp ends up killing himself?” Aaron lashed out at a prisoner’s cage with his baton, catching a couple of reaching fingers. “It’s got a nice flow about it – the criminal kills his future self in the past. The thing about time is that it hates loops. Create a loop in time and… well, things go a bit weird.”

  “How so?”

  Aaron shook his head. “I don’t know, it’s all very technical. All that I do know is that there’s an area of the New York hives which is off-limits, guarded by hundreds of Time and Punishment soldiers. I’ve heard lots of stories, of course. The techs talk about it all the time.” He sparked up another sweetstick. “Things appear out of thin air. Nasty, deadly, horrible things. A loop in time creates a portal to other places.”

  “What about replacing a murder victim with another criminal?” Daniel asked. He was uncomfortable with the idea of messing around with time. What if something went wrong? Could someone go back and murder his father, effectively killing him and his entire future bloodline? There was no defence against that kind of attack.

  Aaron picked his nose, then wiped it on a cage. “Funnily enough, that’s how Time and Punishment started off – replacing murder victims with murderers. However, as soon as you change the victim, it invalidates the original trial. Take this morning’s execution. Vince was convicted of murdering Susan and Barry Winters. If you swap them out for, say, a Keith and a Kyle, Vince has suddenly been wrongly convicted.”

  “He would have still killed though.”

  “Yes, but not the people he was found guilty of killing.” They came to a huge metal door at the end of the cellblock. Aaron typed in a PIN on the rusty control pad. “Bloody lawyers, eh? So to avoid all that unnecessary messing around again, only people who have been killed in accidents and mass atrocities are rescued instead. No legal mess, no questions asked.”

  “Won’t that upset continuity?” Daniel pulled the door open for Aaron as he squeezed himself through the bulkhead.

  “As long as the people brought into the present are kept separate from the rest of the population, it’s not a problem, dickhead. You ever heard of the Separates?”

  “Yeah, that’s the colony in orbit around Mars.” Daniel had seen pictures of the Separates’ ugly irregular-shaped space station on the news. “They’re plague carriers, afflicted with some genetic disease and have quarantined themselves.”

  “That's the official story. The reality is, they are actually people from the past, rescued by us.”

  “Oh.” Daniel stopped and looked around; he was in a room filled with more snaking pipes and cylinders. Against one wall were a trio of man-sized brass tubes, patina-encrusted and with a large glass porthole set in the front of each one. There was a slight chill in the air, as if the room was used for storing perishables. “What’s this room, Aaron?” asked Daniel.

  “This, my lad, is the honeymoon suite.” He stomped up to the nearest tube and peeked in through the oval porthole. “Empty.”

  “Honeymoon suite?” Daniel scratched the surface of the tube; it flaked off in large patches, revealing a surprisingly shiny metal underneath.

  “Yeah, honeymoon suite, for our more… persistent guests.” He peered into the second tube. “Now that we have mastered time travel, if someone is convicted of multiple deaths, they can serve multiple death sentences. These tubes hold multiple sentence servers. What we call the Mess prisoners.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” exclaimed Daniel before he could stop himself. “I mean, it’s not possible to die more than once, is it?”

  “You thought time travel was strange?” Aaron lit another sweetstick. “You’re not the religious type are yo
u, dogsbody?”

  “No,” replied Daniel, “I’m space born.”

  “Oh right. You guys don’t bother with religion.” Being born in a tiny cramped environment, with every resource used as efficiently as possible, space-born people rarely had room for a religion in their frugal lives. “When a convict dies in the past, we can bring their essence back to the present.”

  “Essence?”

  “Being, mind, spirit, soul – whatever you want to call it. We bring the criminal’s essence back to the present and put it inside a cloned body so we can re-kill them.” He blew smoke into Daniel’s face. “Imagine suffering death after death after death, remembering what it feels like to have a bullet rattling around in your brain, or your entrails spilling out of your stomach, or being buried alive.” Aaron sighed. “It makes you wonder why people kill. I wouldn’t want to die twice, let-alone die horribly.”

  “Is this all legal? It doesn’t sound ethical.” Daniel felt a sudden shock of realisation wash over him; there was a soul. That means religion…was correct? Is correct?

  “Legality of time travel is a bit of a grey area,” said Aaron. “All the World Government says is that the punishment must fit the crime. They’re aware that Time and Punishment are doing good work in righting the wrongs of the past. They don’t know about the ability to re-kill people, or how we do it. Remember, every time we send a murderer back, we rescue an innocent person from the past.” He took a long drag of his sweetstick and coughed loudly. Daniel thought against reminding him of the dangers of smoking. “The WG are actually pushing us to give the death sentence to people convicted of softer crimes so that more people can be saved.”

  “You can’t just fill up the victims of the past with the criminals of the present,” said Daniel, still uneasy about the whole thing.

  “Why not? Each event in history is analysed very carefully for people who simply didn’t stand a chance. Those people who would die, no matter what they tried to do. Think about any of the atomic explosions during the Middle East Exchange. There were a lot of innocent victims, killed without a hope in hell of surviving a nuclear explosion. Now, most of the victims in those explosions are now crims.” Aaron wandered over to the last tube and checked its dials. “Talking of crims, this one is going to be our longest resident. Want to take a look?”

  Daniel peered inside the porthole. The man inside had bone-white hair and a thin gaunt face. He was sat in a meditative position, his upturned hands displaying thin spidery fingers. He was immediately recognisable; Raphael Fernandez, the world’s most wanted.

  Aaron breathed smoke over the glass. “Surprised, cock breath?”

  Daniel gawped. “I thought he would have been hanged for what he did, or sent off to die in a deep space mine somewhere!”

  Aaron’s laugh tailed off into another bronchial cough. “Can you think of someone more suited to be a Mess? He’s going to be re-killed for a very long time.” Aaron activated a comms link set into the tube. “Oi, Rabbit. Wakey wakey! I have a visitor here for you.”

  Raphael’s eyes snapped open and fixed on Daniel; they were bright pink, almost glowing with energy. Daniel felt a shock go through his legs, his flight-or-fight instinct unexpectedly triggered by the biggest mass-murderer in the history of mankind.

  “Rabbit,” continued Aaron, “let me introduce you to a human being called Daniel. Daniel, meet some filth.” Aaron winked at his apprentice. “How many deaths do you think it'll be before Rabbit's mind breaks under the strain? 40? 50?”

  “I… I don’t know,” replied Daniel, finally able to take his eyes away from Raphael. “How many times will he be killed? I mean, in total?”

  “Did you hear that, rabbit?” Aaron said to the prisoner. “Danny-boy’s asked how many times you’ll be killed! Let’s see…” He pretended to count on his fingers. “Add ten, carry the one, times five… I make it one million, one hundred and ten thousand, one hundred and eighteen times. Is that right, Rabbit?”

  The figure was silent.

  “God damn you!” Aaron spat out the smoking stick and lashed out at the tube with his fists. “You killed over a million people, you bastard! And you'll pay! You'll be begging us to kill you for good. I’ve even reserved a clone just for me and my buddies! We’re going to get your essence into it, then drag you into one of our interrogation rooms and torture you to death! I’m going to pull your teeth out one by one, and that’s one of the nicer things we’re going to do to you!” He stopped, panting from his sudden outburst.

  Daniel watched the prisoner’s reaction; there was none. “He doesn't seem to care, does he?”

  “He's a psychopath.” Aaron entered some maintenance commands into the time-tube's console and sighed. “My wife's sister was killed in the Wave. She was visiting friends in New York. Her body still hasn't been recovered.”

  “I'm sorry.” Daniel tried to look sad for his mentor's benefit.

  “Did you see the video?”

  “Yes. I watched it on PlaNet.” Watching a known terrorist blow up the side of a volcanic island for no reason was good entertainment. Then the Wave appeared, a 150 foot tall wall of water smashing coastlines all over the world, creating trillions of dollars of damage, killing over a million people.

  “Who would think a landslide on some tiny island in the middle of nowhere would cause a worldwide tsunami?” asked Aaron, closing the console.

  Both Daniel and Aaron's communicators chimed urgently; Aaron pulled the pen-like device out of his pocket first. “Grimes here.”

  “I need some assistance!” cried a panicky voice. Gunshots and screaming could be heard in the background. “One of the prisoners is running amok in the courtroom!”

  “On my way,” replied Aaron. To Daniel, he said “This is a bit out of your league, cow-banger. Have a wander around, get used to the… ambience.” He left, wobbling away as fast as his thighs allowed.

  As soon as the bulkhead banged closed, Daniel peered into Raphael's cell; huge pink eyes stared back, mere millimetres away. Daniel cried out in surprise and fell over.

  The eyes, in a strong firm voice said “Are you OK?”

  “Of course,” said Daniel, scrabbling to his feet, his pride a little dented. “I wasn’t expecting you to be so close to the glass.”

  “I am sorry,” said the eyes.

  Daniel straightened his khaki jacket and, without anything else to do, examined the two empty tubes in the room. Each one was empty, dank, and smelled faintly of shit and blood. He wondered who the last occupants were, and how they had eventually died.

  “Those tubes would be occupied,” said the pink eyes, “If not for mankind’s willingness to punish without understanding.”

  “There’s nothing to understand when a million people are killed,“ replied Daniel, “so just be quiet, please.”

  “Of course.” The eyes blinked. “I’ve often wondered what it would feel like to die. Sometimes, I imagine having my head removed by guillotine.”

  Daniel put his finger to his lips. “Be quiet, please.”

  “The sudden numbness as the blade slices through nerves and bones, watching the world tilt as my head drops into a bucket, not being able to scream or draw breath. A prisoner in my own dying mind, able to see but not act. Panic, then insanity.”

  Daniel sighed. “You're going to experience death many times, so you’d better get used to it.”

  “I will.”

  Daniel watched the eyes, but they did not falter. “So, since you’re not going to be quiet, what was your motive? Why did you create that tsunami?”

  The eyes disappeared; Raphael had returned to his meditative posture. “You would understand why,” his voice crackled out of the tinny tube speaker, “if you had seen the world through my eyes.”

  Suddenly the bulkhead clanked opened. A lab technician hurried in, his white coat flowed behind him like a shockwave. “Righty,” he said as he breezed past
Daniel and flipped open the computer terminal on Raphael’s tube, “let's get this party on the road, shall we?”

  “Party?” enquired Daniel.

  “Just an expression, sweetie.” He looked Daniel up and down like a dog sizing up a bone. “You’re new here, aren’t you? My name is Jeremy.” He offered his hand to Daniel, palm-down as if expecting Daniel to kiss it. “If you’re not doing anything later, maybe me and you could have our own little party? I like new meat!”

  “No thanks,” Daniel said, shaking the hand awkwardly. “I’m taking my girlfriend out. To dinner. Sorry.”

  “Girlfriend? Oh well, nobody’s perfect.” The tech’s fingers clattered over the keyboard, then flipped the console closed. “And my work here is done. Toodles, Daniel. Toodles, big bad killer guy!” Jeremy bounded away, slamming the bulkhead closed.

  “You don’t have a girlfriend, do you.” It was a statement from Raphael, not a question.

  “Was it that obvious?”

  “The technician programmed in the place and time of my first execution. Would you be kind enough to tell me where and when?”

  Daniel hesitated; was he allowed to give that kind of information to convicts? It couldn’t hurt, he reasoned, so he lowered the console screen and looked at the array of numbers glowing in green. “These numbers mean nothing to me, I’m afraid.”

  “Please read out what you can see.”

  Daniel did. Inside the tube, Raphael smiled. “It looks like I will be performing in front of an audience soon. How melodramatic.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I have a vast knowledge of historical and geographical places. That data set is a four-dimensional reference.” He breathed deeply. “Rome, Italy, first century. Someone has a love of the theatrical.”

  The bulkhead opened again to admit Aaron, who was reloading a combat shotgun. “Well,” he smiled, “that’s one prisoner that got an early sentence.” He looked at Daniel, then at the open console. “Daniel, what are you doing?”

  “Nothing.” Daniel snapped the console closed. “A lab technician came in. I was looking at what he did.”

  “Well don’t. You wouldn’t understand.” He looked at his cheap watch. “It’s almost time to send Rabbit off on his first adventure.” A buzzer sounded and Raphael’s tube shuddered in response, valves and pipes jerking to life. Aaron made an obscene gesture through the window just as the tube started to revolve on its base.

  “What’s going on, Aaron?” Daniel watched with fascination at the moving obelisk. “Why is it turning?”

  “It’s turning, dogface, so that the door opens up into the Receiving room. When Rabbit gets sent back in time, someone from the past will appear. A few representatives will bundle the poor bastard into a cryo chamber and ship them to the Separates colony.” The tube had stopped rotating. It started to hum. “You might want to cover your ears, boy.”

  There was a flash accompanied by a huge bang, and a blast of icy air hit washed over the two prison guards. Loud voices, one sounding panicked and desperate, could be heard from the next room. Behind them, the bulkhead slammed open and a floating gurney, pushed by Jeremy the Technician, entered the room. “Howdy, prison guards!” he greeted them. “What’s the good word?” The tube started revolving again until the door was visible.

  “As you can plainly see,” replied Aaron, “my life is a rollercoaster of babes, bucks, and being famous. How about you?”

  “Fabulous!” Jeremy started to unzip a large bag on the trolley. “Could you two give me a hand please? These things are rather awkward.”

  To Daniel’s utter surprise, inside the bag was Raphael – or rather, a mindless clone of the prisoner. It looked dumbly at the trio as they lifted the naked body into the tube. “I wish the real Raphael was this quiet,” muttered Aaron as he slammed the tube door closed. Jeremy took a small slim box from his jacket and, with a set of tweezers, transferred something invisible into a recess in the tube.

  “What was that?” asked Daniel.

  “A tiny fleck of Granite,” replied the technician. “It’s partly to counter-balance the mass of the prisoner’s soul coming back from the past, but it also detaches the soul from its old body too.”

  Aaron pressed a silver button on the tube and a projection appeared in the air. “Let’s see how our favourite convict is getting on, shall we?” Raphael was on his back, scrabbling away from something off-screen. Suddenly, a lion appeared and grabbed a leg. Blood oozed onto the sandy floor. Another lion grabbed an arm and pulled; it came away in a shower of blood. Raphael’s face contorted into a scream.

  “Why doesn’t sound travel back from the past?” asked Daniel, looking away from the images. Aaron shrugged. Daniel pretended to study Jeremy’s computer screen; he couldn’t watch the death of a man that he’d been talking to mere minutes earlier. It felt wrong.

  Silent minutes passed, then Aaron clapped his hands together. “Well, that’s that. He’s dead!” Daniel glanced at the projection; Raphael was completely dismembered, parts of his body lying in pools of running blood. His head was nowhere to be seen though, probably taken off by one of the lions. Daniel felt queasy, but swallowed it away; he couldn’t show remorse. It wasn’t professional.

  Jeremy tapped something into the computer, then pressed a large flashing pearlescent button. There was a small bang from the tube; inside, the lifeless clone suddenly came to life, kicking and thrashing around. It started to scream.

  Aaron tapped on the glass of the tube. “Welcome back Rabbit! You OK in there?” The screaming didn’t stop.