Prisoner 52

Prisoner 52

by

S.T. Burkholder

Copyright
© 2014 by Shane Burkholder

All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the copyright owner, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

ISBN: 978-0-692-23097-8

For my grandfather, who I never knew

Day 1 – Arrival

He was ushered in with the rest of them and through the sensor arches that detected nothing upon their naked persons save their shame and their crime. Beyond lay a vast chamber, filled with the thousand thousand murmurs of one voice and glowing screens in the darkness there to match them each. The guards who waited beyond the thresholds herded them on to those who lined the broad incline that began ahead and which split the descending rows and rows of sentencing consoles down the middle. These in their turn snatched them roughly from the queue and corralled them into the aisles on either side to take whichever seats were not occupied or fall to their own devices if there were none.

Like the others h
e was taken by the arm out of file with the sort of technological force that had made demigods of men. The Enforcer who had him remained impassive within his exo-suit and did not regard him as he handled him into the row over which he presided. He stumbled over the other men who were already sat there and seizuring before the screens and the images they displayed.

He collapsed into the first console he found and conformed to the curving back of the chair that arched overhead to connect with the body of the screen before him. It sensed his pressure and the restraints raised
and lowered into place to bind his feet and hands and neck with rusted metal bands. On the screen the head of an aging man spun idly and disconnected of a body and over it flashed the words, 'Please remain still for viewing enforcement or severe injury may result'. The arms of tiny clamps lowered before his eyes and twitched.

He remained
as frozen as he had been and looked upon the pincers that maneuvered toward his eyes with the mild disinterest one tracks the approach of a fate they long knew to be coming. The metal claws slid into place and he did not flinch or stir at their touch and they peeled his eyes wide enough that they began to burn. Water dripped from nozzles within the sockets of the spreaders and kept his eyes lubricated.

S
omething pushed against his head and clicked into place. He knew the console had interfaced with his neural net when the cable drilled into locked position and he screamed a moment through gritted teeth. Thus the head on the screen ceased to spin. Its cold eyes looked at him from out a philospher's face and he contemplated the unfinished nature of its hairless scalp and brow, the intricacies of his drawn and wizened wrinkles.

"Greetings." It said. "I am Master Control, the resident Artificial Service Intelligence Matrix for Arbitronix United Installation #2397B. Please make ready for genetic marker assembly."

A syringe revolved round from the underside of the restraint that held his left arm in place and dipped into the pale flesh above his wrist and filled its glass tube with his blood. It chimed and he saw a light above the neddle that had been red become green and then there was a sucking sound and he saw the crimson of his veins bead through the tubing that ran into the console. He read the readout of the instantaneous medical battery and the words that told him he could not hope for disease or abnormality to cut short his punishment, those after them that said there was no need to correct any that he could have.

"Sejanus, Hastur Victor." Master Control said. "Homeworld: Kurweiler; Citadel Inductee, Orbital Breach and Planetary Assault Forces; Active during: Union Insurrection, Giddeon Reach Punitive Campaign, Third Reclamation War; Deserted the 12th day of the 9th month of the 11635th year of the Galactic Core Count. Warranted in 27 systems for crimes pursuant, including but not limited to: 229 counts of murder; 7 counts of mass murde
r; 554 counts of assault; 31 counts of man-theft. Warranted to the Concilium of Man at large for crimes pursuant: 1 count of insubordination; 1 count of murder perpetrated upon a superior officer, 1 count of murder perpetrated upon an officer, 1 count of murder perpetrated upon a fellow soldier; 1 count of desertion. Crimes due for sentencing: 1 count of insubordination; 1 count of murder perpetrated upon a superior officer, 1 count of murder perpetrated upon an officer, 1 count of murder perpetrated upon a fellow soldier; 1 count of desertion. Do you comply with these charges?"

"Yes." Sejanus rasped.

"Thank you for your compliance. Sentence forthcoming," Master Control said and repeated as it set to revolving again then stopped. "Hastur Victor Sejanus, you are hereby sentenced to serve 29 regenerative lifetimes upon the penal world Cocytus or until such penal world is decommissioned, whereupon you shall be transported to another penal world to be designated at such a time to live out the rest of your sentence. Is this understood?"

"Yes."

"Thank you for your understanding. Please make ready for Tracking and Identification Containment Bracer assignment."

A strut uprose from the shadows around his feet and bore upon it the opened wristband. It stopped at his arm and its satellite clamps shut the bracer about his wrist. A moment passed and he felt nothing and Master Control said nothing. Then he felt its sensor needles pierce deep through flesh to the bone of his arm and their ends splay to fasten themselves therein. His screams became a part of those others made in that dark hall and he a part of them, a part of the entire abbattoir so that his misery was adrift unknown in the incalcuable whole of thousands.

"Prisoner designation forthcoming," It said, then revolved and repeated and stopped. "Hastur Victor Sejanus, henceforth you are the 71st prisoner of the 1st containment sector of the 7th containment tower. You are Prisoner 1771 and Hastur Victor Sejanus is no more. Do you accept your designation?"

"I," He stammered.

"Hesitation is noted." Master Control said. "Prisoner 1771, do you accept your designation?"

"Yes."

"Thank you for your acceptance. Please make ready for enforced viewing of thought-reversal materials.” He heard Master Control say, but distantly, and his mind began to reel to far away places as a serum was pumped through the auto-syringe and into his arm.

Images cycled upon the screen before him and that passed so suddenly and rapidly that they ceased
to be images at all and became instead thoughts alone, or the ends of thoughts, and ideas communicated to him without the need for digestion. But he knew them in his mind for what they were, for his mind is what they were. He saw given life upon the console the confines of a memory he had only dimly looked into, the collected experience of a lifetime he now lived over again and moment to moment severed from what they meant.

He felt at first what seethed within his breast begin to dwindle, the energy that tossed
crazed and unsettled therein to ebb and recede and pass away. It was the way flames snuff out, and passions die, and the maddening heat that had driven those around it to flee at any cost was gone. And in its place there was erected no monument to subsistence or wisdom, but of hopelessness and all that is without power. Dreams of confinement and seasons absent of reprisal. But his eyelid twitched.

It did so again and through nothing of his own accord and he could see the vagaries of the machinery holding open his eyes to be doing the same. There was a series of clicks and mechanical pings as with springs overstrained and his eyes blinked involuntarily, then voluntarily. The smell of fried electrical circuits wafted to him and he heard somewhere out of sight the cable hooked into his skull begin to crackle and spark. His mind was his own again and on the screen there were no pictures, no thought-projections. Only the words that had laid beneath them all and that he read as 'obeisciance is unity'.
A profound calm settled over him and the haze of madness that had cloaked his mind for as long as he could remember lifted away, an interial force that before had just been contained and escaped in no way but violence. He looked and saw the serum still ran through the syringe.

“Reconditioning complete.” Master Control said and it
s face returned to the screen. “Prisoner reformed. Enjoy your stay, Prisoner 1771."

The restraints and apparatuses fastened about his limbs and head slackened and finally lowered into the darkness
which lay at the feet of all the consoles. Then the leather curvature of the chair straightened of a sudden and the panel of bare steel that had been at his feet yawned open beneath him. He twisted round and scrabbled uselessly at the sheer padding and slipped toward that abyss. It swallowed him like the maw of some perfidious beast that had posed in the long ago as the mouth of a cave hiding riches for adventurers to plunder.

He was taken into the rusted shadows of a pipe perforated here and there by shafts of diffuse light and in which the only sound was his skin scraping against the metal. The chute rattled and rumbled beneath him and shook him all
about in the intestinal tract it passed him through. He was conscious of a stinging pain all over and thought more of the stains of rust he had seen fleetingly through the gloom.

The air took him and he tumbled free of the pipe, bloody and covered in its scum, and was stopped with the ground yet beneath him. He hovered
above the earth as if gravity had become a forethought and was bathed in the white glow of a repulsor bay. Hands and arms clothed in the black of exo-suits reached into the blinding nimbus he had come to occupy and took him squinting from it. They cast him sightless into the mass of bodies that were clumped shivering together beyond and which turned then to regard this man who had fallen into place behind them, added to their dismal crew.

He
shuffled carefully toward the others and hunched slightly like some goblin that had been ejected from the familiarity and safety of his cave by greater horrors. There was no one that spoke and whether it was from the cold or from the thing around them of which no man wished to speak, he could not say. He wanted not to say, or say much of anything, and counted it a special joy that he was not alone in the sentiment. As all men are who are tired and in want of rest.

The pale yellow of the tracklights at the height of the walls
shined down upon them sickly and behind him more men arrived to fill what space was left to them. There was soon room only to breathe, but still he could feel through those immediately behind the press of new bodies added to the whole. He sucked at the air above his head that had not been expelled by as many mouths as that at his feet and saw the glint of metal in the dark reaches overhead as the turrets there tracked their barrels across the prisoners below and moved along the rail system spun above it all like a web.

"Tram inbound to station." Master Control said over the broadcast system of the magrail port. "Please clear away from the edges of the platform."

There were lights then, somewhere beyond the crowd of heads that searched in their wobbling way for some inkling of whence it came. They looked like treetops to him, swaying in the prevailing dark of a deep night and made into deeper shadows by the moon that rose above their horizon. There was no sound in its approach or in its stopping before them, a serpent come quiet out of hell to ferry them.

"Commence boarding." Master Control said and repeated in its perfect way and beneath it he could hear the guards behind shout some variant thereof.

The men at his back surged forward onto him and those he formed a rank with within the mass and they onto those before them. Steadily they moved forward and by gradual turns issued into the flicking innards of dozens of tram cars arrayed across the great length of the dock and so packed them thick.

It started into motion as noiselessly as it had come to a halt and glided over the magnetic track that ran unseeen beneath the floor of the tram car. He studied the holosigns that ran long
atop the bank of windows that displayed only darkness, dispelled rarely and briefly by light-columns along the stone walls of the tunnel. He became convinced as he looked upon them that his race had fashioned no other words than 'Arbitronix United' and those that ran beneath them, trite moral platitudes all. His eyes fell from them and to the menagerie of tattoos and ritualistic scars of those around him and sensed some terrible gap that had been riven between the two and ever widened until it was sure to engulf the world it had been struck into. The tram glided on.

He leaned forward with the intertia and waited silent and cramped with the rest of them, save a cough or snort here and there, muffled by the thick of bodies. He tried to read in their faces the stories of the men with whom he would share this new home and with every glance they seemed less of flesh, less of substance. As though the markings upon their skin were without design and had always been writ there, absent any special purpose. He thought that if he chanced a peak into any random cargo freighter he might find the same.

"Please stand clear of the doors." Master Control said, but there was no allowance for movement, and thus the cars opened themselves all along the train. "Commence disembarkation."

Men were squeezed out of the cars by the desparation of those behind to be free of the writhing closeness, to hurry from one temporary prison to another until they were left only with that which cannot be got rid of in the mind. Sejanus was forced at random by the human current out the left side of the tram and onto a long thin platform that was
overseen from along the wall by waiting Enforcers, encamped at intervals between its support pillars.

They were thus fed down the narrow tunnel that the train had let them off in. The voice of Master Control sounded distantly above the shuffling of their feet and the shouts of the guards
who beat them along the ledge with unsophisticated clubs, but he could make no sense of it. He passed squinting into the glow of every light-column and blind out of it again and every sound seemed to him too loud for its truth in nature. Nothing could be itemized; everything was confounded together in some sensorial blur as in a dream, taken all at once and digested with little understanding. The leaking of pipes overhead. The sudden flare of a guard's flashlight. Laughing voices, jokes told, rotten smiles that leered full into view as if from across a great distance and possessed with fiendish speed. Then a greater light broke ahead.