The Eternal Prison (50 page)

 

I remembered their bodies, though. I remembered the black kid, skinny and taut, always in motion, always fucking kicking his legs and swinging his arms, always bopping around. He was my roommate for five years, wanted to be be I5, security. I always told him he was too goddamn scrawny for I5. When I tested into I5, he didn’t say a word to me, just turned away, kept walking. I never saw him again. Five fucking miserable years later, I was in fucking Manhattan, taking orders from some fat sweaty asshole named Scagnetti, breaking heads in Chelsea. I never saw him again. He tested into G1. General. He was going to be working in sewers or morgues or digging ditches, probably all of it, every shit job that Droids couldn’t handle for some reason.

 

I told myself I was lucky to have tested into something respectable. A lot of kids thought testing into the I Cat was the best possible result—be a cop, see the world, get to shoot bad guys. Category I was tricky. IE6 you got to wear a uniform, stand around all day, useless. IE4 and, rumor had it, you got taken away immediately and were never seen again. I tried to figure out what I’d done, what part of the tests I’d somehow aced to get made a cop. There was one where they showed us pictures of flowers, hundreds of us sitting in a big room with a big Vid on one wall. Like fifty, a hundred pictures of flowers, all kinds, all colors. And then we had to write five thousand words on any subject, as long as it was coherent and from a first-person point of view. I remembered being alone in a room with a creepy guy with these big, round eyes, just fucking huge eyes bulging out of his head. Sitting across from him, and he would hold up these black cards, nothing printed on them, and stare at me, and I was supposed to say any word I wanted. I kept throwing random words at him, but he never reacted. He never said anything or wrote anything down. He just went to the next card without even looking at it.

 

I remember climbing ropes in a big gym, wearing these really comfortable red pants they issued us. I was strong and I enjoyed climbing; a lot of the kids hated it and didn’t do well. Was that it? I climbed fucking ropes well so make me a cop? I’d never understood.

 

Halfway through, word got passed around that a bunch of kids were breaking out, running away. An excited buzz went through the whole dorm: this was exciting shit. We all chattered about it. Just deciding not to test? Everyone had been tested. We had no idea how you lived if you hadn’t tested. Where would you go, what would you do?

 

The more I thought about it, the more excited I became. I’d never thought about it before. It had simply never occurred to me, to just walk the fuck away. Holy shit. It was like I’d spent my whole life treading water, and then someone came by and said,
Hey, look, there’s actually no water. You’re free.
I was the only one from my floor who showed up that night, sneaking away and walking to the shadowed commons outside the dorm. There wasn’t much by way of security—we were kids. I knew it was possible, it would be easy, just pick a remote direction and start walking.

 

Looking back, I wonder if maybe letting a few dozen kids sneak away is part of the whole plan.

 

There were about a dozen of us, maybe a few more. We stood around nervously. We’d never left the dorm—not on our own, unsupervised, not without a destination and a hover. Not without intending to come back a few hours or days later. One or two of the kids tried to organize, to issue instructions, but no one was really listening, and finally one kid just stood up and walked off. The rest followed, alone or in twos, just wandering into the night, until I was the only one left. I was breathing hard, just standing there, but I couldn’t see what good it would do. If you weren’t tested, what were you? How did you live? Who fed you?

 

After a while, I went back up to my room and fell asleep.

 

Every night, exhausted, we sat limp in our rooms or in the hallways and tried to make sense of it. We’d been hearing about testing week our whole lives. No one had ever really explained it to us, but we knew this was where we started everything else.

 

My roommate, the night before scores were released, you could tell he knew what was waiting for him when they published the lists. We sat there in our room exhausted, talking in slow motion, one of us saying something and the other responding ten minutes later.

 

“Tomorrow’s forever, man,” he said to me. “We wake up tomorrow, we find out who we’re gonna be. Forever.”

 

I considered this. I remember sitting there chewing over the word
forever.
It didn’t mean anything. I’d been a kid in the dorm forever. There was no way you could change that.

 

“Forever,” he repeated a moment later, and it sounded like sand hitting the floor. He never spoke another word in my presence.

 

 

I was a good cop. At first I almost liked it, and I wanted to succeed. I didn’t want to wash out and get recategorized. Recat was the worst—it never went well for people. It was interesting; a lot of kids thought they just handed you a gold badge and a license to kick ass and bought you a nice suit. But it was a lot of training first, five years on Desolation Island. At first I almost liked it. It was really physical. In year two we started on SFN Law Codes and I hated it, but passing grade in Law Code was pretty low so I managed it, but I hated it. I thought maybe we’d get back to learning interesting stuff, but it was all downhill from there, and I hated it ever since. I hated crowd control techniques; I hated the rallies where they shouted at us how fucking incredible we were; I hated being awake for a week straight to prove how hard we were.

 

It’s funny. Not a single one of my friends from the dorm mustered into I5. There were five hundred kids in my dorm. I didn’t know every one of them well, but I’d know them if I saw them. I never saw a single one ever again.

 

I’d never cursed like this when I was a kid. None of us did; we knew the words, but it just wasn’t something we did. Desolation Island taught me how. The men who ran it, our teachers, our commanding officers, they didn’t like us. We weren’t their kind when we arrived, and they didn’t like us at all, and they abused us from the first moment. Looking back, it was obvious: they were shaping us, because we all quickly figured out that you could behave more like them and then they were easier on you. The more like them you acted, the more they liked you. On my first day I’d said
please
and called them all
sir
and they’d called me a fucking faggot and boxed my ears until I had a persistent hum in my head. When I started telling them to fuck themselves, they still boxed my ears, but they did it with a wink and a jolly smile and started calling me Kitty.
Hey, Kitty, get your pale ass over here and break down this weapon.

 

They were still calling me names and beating the shit out of me on a regular basis, but now it was with smiles, and you started to feel like you were part of something, that we were all in on it. That these guys had been beaten up and called names and that someday you yourself would be banging some kid’s head into the ground, yelling at them to man up.

 

I got posted to New York. Prestigious. They only post the best to places like New York or Moscow or Islamabad or Bogotá. And I was real good at it, for a while. You felt good, working connections and paying attention, noticing something and making sure it didn’t blow up into something bigger. You felt like you were making a difference, even if it was kind of a rough and disreputable job. But I could handle the occasional bullshit you had to shovel because I really thought I improved things, one bust at a time.

 

So I dealt with the security details for VIPs who made me want to assault them instead of protect them, spoiled assholes who barked orders at me and called me “chum.” I put a few shells in a few ears on verbal orders from majors who appeared out of luxury hovers to pass the word, and I didn’t feel good about it, but I told myself there was a good reason for it, somewhere. I watched my partners and squad mates getting rich, shaking down just about everyone, a hundred yen here, a thousand there. Bodyguarding rats. And I walked some really bad people in the front door of Rockefeller and out a back door, untouched, unprocessed, and took the bracelets off them and smiled at them instead of kicking them in the balls until they cried and charging them up the ass with a whole fucking bouquet of violations. I did all these things and got sicker and sicker about it, but I still clung to what I thought the job was. I did it. I did it all and laughed with Miggs and Heller and Mage and got blind drunk every night, roaring, trying to make enough noise. But all I ever heard was that kid saying
forever
like it was a lead weight he was spitting out.

 

And then Heller disappeared. For a while. For two weeks. We’d been partnered for a few years, and I’d gotten used to the psychopathic bastard and his foul mouth. Got used to him hurting the rats just so he could say he’d marked them. He didn’t want to kill anyone, he wanted to mark them all, scar them, be able to look at the lilliputians and know that they’d met him before. I’d gotten used to him, and then one day he was gone, on unspecified leave. Un-fucking-specified leave. The man hadn’t so much as taken a lunch in all the years I’d worked with him. He enjoyed breaking heads too much.

 

And then he came back.

 

Heller was still Heller. He still told everyone they were a fucking cunt at least six times a day. He still enjoyed breaking heads. My skin crawled standing next to him. The way he sometimes seemed to get orders out of thin air, to make decisions that were completely fucking irrational, to sometimes use phrases I’d never heard him use—none of it made any sense, but I started to drink on the job. Fuck it. I woke up hungover and started in immediately so I’d be humming nicely by the time our shift started, and two hours in when Heller was tracking down some Taker who had information on the location of a political POI, muttering under his breath like always and terrorizing everyone, I was hammered and didn’t notice how he was one fucking step off from normal.

 

Every day was a grind, every day was a descent. Rumors started to float about cops disappearing, coming back. Rumors were everywhere, but I barely heard them. And then one night I got woken up at three in the fucking morning by six identical assholes in nice suits with Internal Affairs.

 

I got killed on my first day after being reassigned to Chengara. Stupid. I’d been wandering around, in a fucking haze, going through motions like they were programmed into me. I didn’t know why I was doing half the things I was doing; they just bubbled up from some dark center, moving my limbs. I hadn’t gotten around to worrying about it, because it was the only thing that kept me moving. I’d been kidnapped and knocked out, and when I’d woken up I was in an artificial body and some smiling, plump woman with a slight German accent—so slight it was maddening—was telling me to smile and be cheerful, because I was fucking immortal now. So I was on autopilot, somehow knowing everything I needed to know about being assigned to Chengara. I knew where everything was; I knew the routines, the schedules, everything. Even though I’d never been there before.

 

Two of the inmates started snarling, and without thinking, I stepped between them. The one in front of me tried to shiv me in the belly, but I knocked the taped-up blade from his hand with a neat snap of my arm I was pretty sure I wasn’t capable of performing. Before I could goggle at that, everything went black, and I woke up back in one of the labs underground. The other shithead had stabbed me in the fucking
head.

 

No harm done. The same smiling woman greeted me cheerfully and sent me back to duty. Assured me that over-the-air backups meant I had only lost a second of memory, at most, and would suffer no ongoing problems. I was immortal. Endless. Forever.

 

 

The only thing even approaching normal was arrivals. That duty was at least slow-paced and continuous. You woke up on the elevator with a half dozen others, instantly alert and alive, and then you made sure there were no slowdowns or fuckups with debarking the assholes from the train. A good hour, maybe more. I felt like I got to think a little. When I rotated off of arrivals, it was a fucking nightmare: waking up in the elevator, you could hear the shouting, and then we were out in the yard, a fucking riot, orange jumpsuits everywhere, sniper fire going off, and it was just old-school shit, beating them back with Tasers.

 

Standing Order Thirteen instructed us not to kill unless necessary. That made it a little challenging. Though you could game the definition of
challenging
if you tried hard enough.

 

Then, back in the elevator, and blink—you’re out again. And you woke up some random time later and did it all again. Asleep, kicking ass. Asleep, kicking ass. No transition, nothing in between.

 

At arrivals, I got to chat a little. They said working a normal shift detail was better, because you almost got to be normal. They said that at first Internal Affairs returned processees to their original detail because they thought it would help people cope with the transition, but it turned out that while it did help the processed get their bearings, it freaked everyone else out, so until the majority of the force had been processed they’d started rotating everyone to new duty when their number got pulled.

 

Well, shit. So now I’m stuck in this shithole. I’ve got fifteen minutes a day to myself, when I’m lucky. They say they have to switch us on for a little bit every day or we get disoriented. They need us to turn on immediately, so we get these fifteen-minute windows to percolate and clear out the cobwebs, and I use them recording this… diary, I guess. I listen to yesterday’s first. I say the same thing all the time. But I still say it. I listen to myself saying it, and then I say it again, because nothing else ever happens. My life is all past now.