If you’re a subscriber, you may have read this story as part of the free book download available to all subscribers (which is also called Quantum Blues and is a collection of many of my short stories).
Given the current state of play of politics in the United States, I thought this view of a future world of mass incarceration was worth a larger audience. If you’ve already read the short story, thank you, and my apologies for invading your email inbox with another round. If you haven’t read it, I hope you take a look. A science fiction magazine that I sent it to said it reminded them of Harlan Ellison’s writing, but they wanted me to make a change I didn’t want to make, so here it is.
Trigger warnings: Parental abuse, grim depictions
1.
My prison cell isn’t the loud, dirty iron cage our ancestors knew. It is pristine, with a perpetual blue tint reflecting the metamaterials of the wall just in front of me. Instead of the loud clangs of iron doors, there is a barely audible hum and an eerie quiet that gives emphasis to my solitude.
And there’s a girl.
I don’t know who she is, though my longing for her lies far beyond the most desperate imaginings of unrequited love. I don’t immediately recognize her, although I know her name is Ketna.
Sometimes the room becomes thickened by veils of colliding memories. When one memory fades into another, I can see the room’s translucent blue ceilings and walls, both lit by a permeating radiance that dims and brightens with my thoughts, as if they are being monitored.
I don’t know it yet, but these memories are not mine. They are a form of punishment for a crime I have not yet committed, but that, according to my keepers, was such a part of my destiny that inevitability itself became the crime. My dreamlike trance describes a personal alternative history filled with contrived remembrances and staged recollections of things that might have been.
Ketna places a small glass object onto a fireplace. She spins around to smile at me as the globe on the object’s pedestal lights the room and fills our minds with a song we both love. Our song.
“Dance with me,” she says, and I feel the thrill from her request as if I’d been waiting for decades. As I reach for her hand a smile nearly breaks open my chapped lips in response to long, tight black curls of her hair swaying with the movement of her hips.
I try to stand but can’t. I’m seated in a small chair, but I have no legs, only slowly bleeding stumps oozing like tubes of dark red putty.
2.
“Look at this thing,” says my friend Orland.
“What is it?” I ask.
“It’s a fish, dummy.”
I peer into the long rectangular glass container full of water, bubbles piping out of a tiny machine in its corner.
I recognize this place. It’s a den on the mining platform off Ryugu, an asteroid that is now a speck of its former self in the aftermath of its harvest. The nickel, iron, and cobalt now gone, the platform will move on.
I’ve never seen a fish like this before, resplendent in an armory of long flat colorful appendages protruding from its sides and spine. It looks as if the orange, white, and blue stripes running up and down its body were painted by tribal warriors. Its grumpy face reports that every day is a bad day.
“What an interesting creature,” I say to Orland. The fish lingers in a way that makes me feel like it is trying to warn me about something.
An alarm blares and we run to the control room. There are only five of us on this platform overseeing work performed by drones, who sometimes issue meaningless alerts as if it entertains them.
I’m wondering how I know this as I look down at the blue sandals on my feet in this blue room. These observations, the associated knowledge, they aren’t mine, are they?
When Orland taps a screen, the sound disappears. “Another false alarm,” he smiles.
This is where I am supposed to be, I think to myself, in this room with Orland. But I’m not. I’m in here. I look at the silhouette of a fence through the wall. I’m hungry. Who feeds me?
“Here, check this out,” says Orland. “Come on, over here.” I stand, walk over to him. “You sit down every chance you get, man,” he chides. “I worry about you. You need to stay in shape, or this gravity will turn you into a string of jelly.”
I nod at the advice. It’s good advice.
Orland demonstrates how to manipulate a carrier. His hand motions to an arrow at the top of a hologram he has summoned, which mostly consists of the representation of an immense ore freighter. “Part of your training,” he smiles. “It’s easy. A child can do it. I don’t know why they make us do this long-assed training program.”
His hand bends around a small milk-colored wave that seems to crest behind the ship. When he does, the wave rises. He then pushes his hand along the wave, guiding it leftward. The ship turns. A series of numbers scroll across the top of the hologram. “Set destination for Earth moon station Juniper 191,” he announces. Then he looks at me. “That’s it. Done. Juniper 191 is about to receive a few hundred thousand tons of cobalt.”
I remember now. As a child, I dreamed of these kinds of days. Of spacefaring in a timeless black emptiness. Dodging the wild, if programmed impulses of my father’s torture bot, which would assault me every morning, my father sardonically peppering me with inane questions while my mother, her tired hurt eyes lurking along the floor, served pancakes or oatmeal from a kitchen drone.
“How’d you sleep, boy?” he’d ask me with a haunting viciousness. I’d look at my scarred hands, crushed just enough almost every week by the torture bot’s calculating flatteners to splinter my bones without completely breaking them.
Did my father customize this torture bot just for these purposes? Well, yes.
On other days I’d feel the pain in the metatarsus of my feet caused by late evening encounters with the torture bot, which held me in place as it used flatteners to apply just enough pressure to cause webs of hairline fractures, its red light glowing to indicate that a recording of our meeting would be watched later by my gleeful father.
So I dreamed of outer space and the hard life of a miner. Not hard in the sense of physical labor. All the work was done by drones.
No, it was a hard life because it was set apart from society. There were no social networks in space, no parties, no real opportunities to get chummy with your cohorts, who were in a state of permanent transit. Miners were the most restless members of society, always eager to move on.
Maybe it was hard for other people. That was the reputation, after all. But not for me. It was perfect solace for me.
I loved watching the drones work, knowing they were trapped within the confines of an existence worth nothing more than the ritual extraction of metals. I hated them. I relished neglecting their maintenance.
Orland fades into the blue wall of my room and disappears.
I try to reach into my thoughts to search for my crime.
I cannot find it.
3.
I am peering into an aquarium. I see schools of zebrafish darting around while two angelfish dangle in the middle of their home.
I’ve concocted a poison I discovered online somewhere. I feed it to the fish, marveling at the striped corpses they become after they rush to consume it. One moment they were picking at the top of the water with their small, ballooning mouths. Moments later, they were floating at the water’s surface, some bobbing to the bubbles percolating from the water filter.
Later, I’m strapped in a chair outside as another dust storm rages across the Iowa landscape.
The torture bot holds my head with two long shafts appending from its sides. Its two hands have morphed into vises. A dozen or so thin tendrils hold my eyelids open to enable dust from the wind to pummel my eyes. “You want to watch a nature show?” asks the torture bot in my father’s voice while a small screen replays a video of the dead zebrafish floating upside down in the aquarium water.
Then I see Ketna standing in front of me in a short white sundress. She’s spinning around with her arms out wide as if celebrating sunlight. Sunrays that have sifted through the dust are bouncing off her dark curls. Her deep brown skin seems to absorb the filtered light and reflect some of it into a soft glow around her cheeks. She smiles at me before disappearing into a vortex of swirling dust.
I don’t know if this imagining has occurred during the session with the torture bot or if it is part of an offering from the room I’m in. I find myself able to squint, and everything distills into the blue room and the fence beyond. I reach out with my hand. A small device lands into my palm. I flip its small monitor towards me and Ketna is smiling from it. “I got in,” she says. “Please tell me you are happy for me!”
Into grad school? Yes, I realize, somehow remembering. She had applied to the Nairobi Technical Institute for Virtual Reality. Amazing, I want to say, congratulations. But I can’t speak through my dry lips. Where can I get something to drink?
A tall, thin man with a charcoal complexion and a finely angled afro is standing behind her, his hand on her shoulder. He whispers into her ear and I can see his mouth say, “Time to go.”
“No,” she says, “just another minute, okay daddy?”
The man nods sadly.
“Will you be okay?” she asks me. She seems to have an English accent I hadn’t noticed earlier. Behind her are tall modern buildings. It looks like she’s in a city park, where she sits on a chair I can’t see as if she is seated on air.
“I’ll message you every day if they let me,” she says.
I want to tell her, no, to move on with her life, but I cannot speak. My throat is dry, my lips won’t part.
“But you have to tell me you want me to.”
I can’t. My mouth is forced into silence by a terminal state I don’t understand, in a room I only know by its color.
4.
The blue room is alive with a pungently spiced kitchen aroma. From beyond the walls, a faceless humanoid drone appears from a gate in the fence. It carries a wide, deep tray that looks from my vantage point to be full of food, but it is difficult to discern precisely because the blue walls are not transparent enough to reveal detail.
From the other side of the wall, the drone approaches. It collides with the wall, pushing out a shape contouring its own, along with its small cargo, then emerges completely into the interior of my room. There is a tall bowl of udon noodles on the tray the drone is carrying. It places the bowl into my lap.
The bowl is searingly hot, so I lift it off my lap towards my chest. A small-stemmed Chinese porcelain spoon painted with a blue tree rests inside the broth.
When I lift the spoon out of the soup bowl, thick ropes of steam emerge, offering me a delectable scent of rich chicken broth. I stir the noodles, flipping them over a small portion of mint leaves, my mouth watering in anticipation. I lift a bite towards my mouth.
The drone smacks it away, then reaches for the bowl with its two-fingered metal hand and hurls it against the wall. “Not for you!” it says. It wheels out of my room, leaving behind a small group of laughing voices that don’t fade until several minutes after the drone’s disappearance.
Mingling with the laughter is my own voice muttering something. “Ignore all maintenance protocols,” my distant, smothered words seem to say.
I cry out loudly, “What did I do??” as I wonder again about my crime.
A voice, Ketna’s, fills the room. “I’m sorry,” it says. “You know I tried, right?” To get me released? I wonder.
On my lap, two shingles of slightly moldy white bread with a peanut butter filling appear.
Desperately hungry, I bite into the wretched package.
The thoughts the room feeds me are not mine. They are part of a life I should have had, but lost because of my crime, which has still not yet been revealed to me. These memories are of a halcyon existence that never was, a set of sweet false memories offered to my soul with the approximate relevance stilettos would have for a mermaid. They are memories of what could have been, had I not spoiled everything by whatever crime I committed.
As I bide time in my blue room, dreams of my possible life, small to large, play out before me, offering morsels of unfinished potential.
It occurs to me that I have never met Ketna. That I can know her so well is nothing more than an illusion of my prison cell and the fence, which I can see through these walls only as a barely distinguishable shape.
Ketna is an invention of something my ravaged mind cannot comprehend. I have been told stories. Or perhaps the hive has disseminated stories within its social network of groups and friends and foes, bringing us awareness of subtle secrets.
“What is my crime?” I ask the empty room.
5.
“When I was a kid, I’d watch old space operas,” says Orland as we sit on a top level of the platform. We peer through small windows to observe the last chunks of the asteroid deposited into a cargo bay. “They seem quaint now. I thought space would be like the sea, like in those operas, but it is different. Even when I’m with people, I feel very alone out here.”
“Have you ever been at sea?” I ask.
“Well. No.”
“Maybe it’s the same. Maybe if you are on staff on a cruise ship, you’re all alone. I would think so. Maybe not in the old days, before drones. But now, with just a skeleton crew? It’s probably horrible,” I chuckle.
“Yeah,” says Orland, “You’d be around people like us who do nothing all day but give instructions to drones.”
6.
“My friend Luisa messaged me from Dubai,” says Ketna, chewing on a straw. Today, long black locks of her hair are falling across the front of her shoulders, the tight curls replaced by caramel and sand-colored waves that shimmer and glide through the night air as we walk along the esplanade.
Shimmering blue balls of light the size of fists follow us, their interiors sparkling with activity.
Her dress is a lovely exposition of purple polka dots on a silky white fabric held up with sensuously fragile assurance by the thinnest of spaghetti straps.
“I just can’t do this anymore,” she says. My chest feels a thud, comprehending her tone.
But why? What have I done?
“I love you,” she says. “I swear to God I do. But Jamison. You’re a misanthrope.”
That’s my name? Yes. Yes, I think it is. Jamison. I like that name. It’s got formal style but isn’t pompous. Is it? A misanthrope? I hate drones, not people.
“You don’t think about your actions. You don’t think Luisa was better off overseeing a hundred drones in that rich family’s house? All she needed to do her job was her tablet. Now she is working 19-hour days like her grandmother did. Changing diapers. Running errands. Doing laundry. Waking up from a nap and starting all over again.” She shakes her head in disgust.
I remember her telling me a story about Luisa’s grandmother, a Philippine woman who worked endless shifts as a domestic worker in Dubai. What does that have to do with me?
I look up because the blue balls of light have begun to screech and wail. They fly off, leaving streaks of photons in their wake before they quickly devour a man a hundred feet away.
I hear her voice fade as it laments, “All because one maverick can take down an entire drone network on some . . . what? Protest or something?”
I look at Ketna, but she’s gone, replaced by a middle-aged man whose long gray hair is streaked with shaded spears of black. He has a sculpted square jaw and thin manicured white eyebrows. His olive skin is ruddy and pockmarked.
He looks at me with a friendly smile, ivory and gleaming. Because his height is precisely the same as mine, his focus on my eyes is a direct beam attempting to draw me into his thoughts.
“You know,” he says, “on a certain level, I understand the difficulty you must feel finding justice in your present, hmmm, what’s the word? To call it circumstances would be to trivialize it, no?” His accent sounds Italian. His voice even has a tenor’s lilt.
“Well then. Perhaps we shall not give it a name. It is a condition but one I don’t need to define for you. I suppose only you can do that.”
“I don’t understand what has happened to me.”
“No. I don’t expect that you would. That is why we can celebrate the benign nature of the system. If the quantum machinery that makes up our current justice system were to somehow give you a genuine memory of a crime you have not yet committed, but for which you were destined before your apprehension, I dunno. That seems a tad cruel to me. And to others, I’ll add.”
“But…”
“Ah ah, shush. I already know what you are about to ask.” He stops walking, I do the same, and he taps his wrist, projecting a hologram of myself standing in front of us. “Quantum state allows me to prevent you from asking this question, just as it prevents the crime you would have committed.”
My holographic self, flustered and alarmed, asks with wide eyes, “How can someone be put in prison for a crime they have not yet committed?” The hair I see in the hologram, usually fastidiously coiffed locks of blue, is an oily mess of black. My posture is slouched, my formerly brown eyes have faded to greying remains of brown that portray one final reminiscence of my potential. My skin is marked by the pallor of a rotting onion.
“A man approaches your beloved,” says the man with the square jawline, “let’s say for argument’s sake, Ketna, who of course you have never met, but is probably as close to a beloved as you ever had, so bear with me here. He charges towards her with a sharp blade yay big.” He spreads his palms across the air.
“But then, he is simply stopped. Not by the violence of other men, but by time itself, its very essence halting the continuum of his space so that he can be taken away. He stands motionless as the authorities lift him into a van, thus removing the threat forever. What would you say to that scenario? Does it not seem inherently fair? Just? Ketna lives. The man has committed no crime, but he spends the rest of his days sequestered from society for an intent which cannot be altered by any known form of jurisprudence.”
I shake my head in confusion.
The squared face smiles at me. “Jamison Fields. Born thirty years ago to this day. Did you know that?”
I shake my head.
“Father was a neural network engineer. Mother a geneticist. Brilliant, both of them, but your father took a nasty turn, didn’t he? If this technology that has delivered you to us had been invented before his descent into alcoholism, your own story may have been quite different.
“You do well in school initially. But you lose interest as you drift from program to program in cyberspace, learning a variety of skills moderately well. Eventually, you proceed to the mining ships of the belt and the gas planets. Saturn was your favorite, your various posts say. You loved viewing the rings from the ships circling the moons of that gorgeous planet, did you not?”
I nod, but I don’t really remember.
“Ah, yes of course you don’t recall. Because your life’s trajectory changed before those days began. Before you were to meet Ketna. Before your attack on the drone infrastructure. Before, well, nearly everything really. Do you know how long you have been with us?”
I shake my head. I don’t.
“Ten years. In many ways, you have been a model prisoner. Barely a peep out of you.”
“In this chair?” I ask, looking down at my feet, casting my eyes to the fence beyond.
“No, no. Of course not. That would not be physiologically possible. Your body would atrophy. No, this session is simply one of your quantum reenactments. It is part of the universe’s historical record, but not a part of yours. Does that make any sense to you?” His voice is remarkably friendly. Like that of a gentle father. Soft, sanguine, encouraging.
Nothing makes sense to me, so I don’t respond.
When I remove my eyes from the ground my body remains flattened but no longer vertical. I’m horizontal on a bed next to Ketna, who is smiling broadly at me. Silky white sheets cover all but her soft, lovely brown shoulders.
“It’s like a dream, this life with you,” she says sweetly as she unfurls the sheets and steps out of bed. Her naked body beckons me. “Dance with me,” she pleads seductively. My feet push the sheets from my side of the bed towards the middle and my heart races with excitement, thinking, finally, I am free.
But the end of the bed is suddenly engulfed in flames that race across its length, consuming me painlessly as I watch from above, my body disintegrating into a blue effulgence of dancing lights and embers. Ketnas’s ethereal hand gently glides down my forehead to coax my eyelids closed.
From above, I see a square of illuminated blue filaments surrounding an empty metal bed. The filaments flicker for several moments before extinguishing into utter blackness. For a moment, I allow for a hope that I will wake up as if from a long nightmare, but that, too, is extinguished. All that remains is the dark, human invention of time.
Thanks for reading!
If you want to download the book here’s another link:
The download originates from an Amazon AWS site and is safe, free, and maybe a little rough around the layout/editing edges.
Wow.
This did something weird to my mind.