The two halves of Flint’s stamp snapped back into place with an excruciating pop, pinching the skin in his neck. He had barely made it back to his prison sector in time, and recreational time had already ended, prisoners filing out of the room to whatever factory they were assigned to work at next. Flint joined the group, resisting the urge to rub his stinging neck and draw attention to the stamp he had just repaired.

Myasma had put the duty of coming up with a convincing story to conceal the escape information entirely on Flint, ushering him out of her sector without even an idea of what the story would be. The rest of his second day came and went with Flint pondering this idea, coming up with idea after idea, each one somehow stupider than the last.

At the dawn of Flint’s third day of imprisonment, he decided to wait before performing the loophole again and wandering the penitentiary. In theory, all of his stamp’s Juice had already been injected into his body, and he wouldn’t have to revive himself again if he broke his stamp once more. He wanted to see Aurein, ask him for his advice, but decided that it could draw suspicion if he disappeared from his sector for two entire recreational hours over two days in a row. If only one guard was paying enough attention to Flint’s whereabouts, it would definitely complicate things.

The work day began, Flint tirelessly assembling rifle parts. He decided to make conversation with Big T.

“Can I tell a story?” Big T repeated, a wide, disbelieving grin across his face. He chuckled loudly to himself, every guffaw thick, slow and rough. “What are you, a kid?”

“No, no, that’s not what I mean,” Flint said, embarrassed, but also unable to suppress a laugh. “But I am technically a kid. I mean, how good of a storyteller are you?” he clarified. The beep of a digital stopwatch resounded behind them.

“I couldn’t tell a good story if my life depended on it, man. But what was that about you being a kid? You’re as middle-aged and bored as I’ve ever seen.”

Flint looked down at his work. It wasn’t really worth hiding it any longer.

“You won’t believe me, I know you won’t,” Flint began. “But I’m dead. I’m actually a ghost whose real body died almost a hundred years ago when I was 12 years old. This—this body—I stole it from someone. I possessed them.”

Big T looked genuinely shocked. It was an expression Flint realized he hadn’t seen before on the man, and it made his face look different.

“So you’re telling me you’re-”

“Immortal,” Flint finished. “Yeah. I’m immortal.”

“No shot,” Big T said, enunciating each word. “No shot.”

“What?”

“You’re not gonna believe me either, but I am too.”

“You’re immortal?!” Flint exclaimed, too loudly.

“Keep it down,” the guard behind them said.

“Basically immortal,” Big T elaborated. “I control DNA. I’ve spliced anti-aging genes into myself, and I can regenerate at a near-instant rate.”

Flint chuckled to himself. He couldn’t suppress it. Another immortal like him? The idea was too insane to be true.

“I can tell you’re not lying,” Big T said. “About bein’ immortal. I could tell there was something off about you from the beginning.”

Flint cocked his head at Big T.

“It's all in your eyes. There’s a look in them I’ve only seen in myself. The look of someone who knows they’ll live until the end of time, who’s seen generations live n’ die. I bet you feel isolated from everyone else, huh?”

“Yeah, I do,” Flint said quietly. There was a moment of quiet between the two where Flint focused only on the sounds of machinery in the factory.

“So, wait a minute,” Big T interjected, changing the subject. “You said you died almost a hundred years ago? Wasn’t that around the time Teo Nora was takin’ over this place? Did he kill ya?”

“Oh, yeah, I forgot about that. No, he didn’t kill me, not directly. But I did die around the time he was conquering the galaxy, yeah. That was such a weird time—not knowing what space travel was, but still seeing it change everything around us.”

“Tell me about it, brother,” Big T agreed, smiling while he screwed two parts of a rifle together. “Those were the days. The galaxy felt so empty then. Ya know, I was actually one of Teo Nora’s fighters at the time. Maybe I was the one who took over your planet?”

“Really?! You fought for Teo Nora? That’s… that’s something else. But I don’t think you were the one in charge of my planet. I would have recognized you by now. I would have remembered if I ever met someone as big as you before.”

“And I suppose I woulda remembered meeting someone as small as you,” Big T joked, putting a massive hand on the top of his head and lowering it a massive distance until it was level with Flint’s own. Flint laughed and shook his head.

There was a rare sense of giddiness in Flint’s heart as he worked, talking to another immortal like himself. An excitement he hadn’t felt before in decades.

“So I guess we’re in the same boat. Immortal and stuck with a life sentence. How long are the life sentences in The Ray, anyways? Usually prisons only make it one or two hundred years since nobody actually lives that long. Even if we can’t break out, maybe we just wait it out?”

“Oh, yeah. Life sentences here are thirty thousand years,” Big T explained.

Flint chuckled, then stopped.

“Huh. Shit.”

----------------------------------------

Allef laughed when Flint explained the situation to her.

“Of course Myasma didn’t have a story in mind!” Allef chuckled. “She had no idea what the story should be, and she was too embarrassed to admit it! Damn, I miss her. How was she doing?”

“She seemed about as healthy as anyone else in the prison,” Flint explained. “But she looked antsy. She said she wanted to kill the man who put you two in here.”

“Damn it,” Allef cursed.

“What?”

“She’s still fixated on that. I told her to let it go, but she insists on getting revenge. I was hoping she wouldn’t still be focused on Zero by now, but… damn.”

Flint’s eyebrows rose and he leaned forward in his plasticky chair.

“Wait, Zero? The Zero? Leader of Keila? What happened?”

“I mean, don’t get me wrong, I want revenge, too,” Allef explained. “But this is Zero we’re talking about. Ever since he killed Mom and Dad, Myasma’s insisted on taking care of me at all costs, punishing anyone who tries to hurt us. Now she wants to punish Keila, Zero in particular. I’m glad she has that protective habit, don’t get me wrong, but this just isn’t worth it. Sometimes it’s better just… letting things go. I didn’t realize she hated them so deeply.”

“She’s that protective of you, then? I’ve heard of helicopter moms, but never a helicopter sister,” Flint commented.

“She isn’t really protective in that way. Myasma knows I can take care of myself, I just think she feels like she has to be the spokesperson for my family. That and I don't think she really trusts my decision making. I blow off all my limbs one time and it’s like I shouldn’t be allowed to take charge anymore,” Allef added sarcastically.

Flint raised his eyebrows in a surprised expression. Allef flexed her robotic fingers, studying them, and chuckled quietly.

“Did Myasma tell you we were bounty hunters?” Allef asked.

“She mentioned you had never belonged to a faction,” Flint replied.

“When we were a family—with parents and all—we got by every day not by living off one faction, but leeching off of all of them. We took bounty jobs from Aikajo to steal something from Vior, then we’d turn right around and take a job from Vior to kill someone from Talo and steal the things we looted off of his corpse. We helped every faction and no faction at once, just whatever worked for us at the moment. You’d be shocked at the kind of shit you can get away with when everyone around you is at war. Mom said it was out of defiance of Teo Nora, refusing to participate in his empire… but, I dunno. It felt to me we did a lot of fighting for people who were supposedly opposing Teo Nora’s great war.

“Even when I was really little we lived in our ship, touring parts of the galaxy and taking whatever jobs we wanted. We were all Valins—all but me, at least, so we could handle a lot. Stealing, killing, destroying—it was a pretty dangerous life, which is part of why I don’t think Myasma’s anger at Keila is completely justified. With the way we were living, one, if not all of us, were going to die at some point.”

“What happened with your limbs, then?” Flint asked.

“Oh, yeah, that. It was six years ago, I think I was about 14 when it happened. We were trying to hijack a valuable cargo ship going from one of Tymin’s biggest mining facilities to one of their flagships, steal all of the stuff on it and sell it for a big sum. It was one of the highest-stakes things our family ever did, stealing that cargo ship. We did successfully hijack it, but we underestimated how how powerful the cargo ship’s escorts would be, and we wound up with a whole lot of Tymin military on our tail. Since I’m not a Valin, I would always build stuff to help us with whatever mission we were doing, usually a bomb or a hacking program or something along those lines.

This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

“Our missions usually went like this: my parents would formulate a plan, and Myasma and I would follow along and listen to whatever orders they gave us. It worked almost every time, but with how wrong this one mission was going, I thought I should step in. I modified the fusion engine of the cargo ship we stole into a small bomb that I could eject from the back of the ship to knock Tymin off our trail. My family was already distracted with fighting Tymin soldiers who had boarded our ship.

“I finished building the bomb and was about to launch it at the Tymin ships following us when a stray bullet hit the back of the cargo ship and set off the bomb right in front of me. I had some self-made armor on and I managed to guard myself in time, but the blast damaged both of my arms and legs beyond repair. The fusion reactor embedded itself in my side. Not only that, but the explosion ended up damaging the cargo ship too, and we had to abandon it to get away. It’s safe to say I never stepped out of line again after that. I stuck to my parents’ orders from that point forward, and after they died, I stuck with Myasma’s. That’s just how it is.”

“And you built yourself those mechanical limbs?” Flint asked, pointing at one of Allef’s robotic hands.

“Oh, these creaky old things? Hell no. Tymin gave me the limbs I’m wearing right now. My actual robotic limbs are packed to the gills with weapons. They are weapons. Tymin confiscated them off of me because there’s no way anyone smart would let me have them inside of a prison. They couldn’t just leave me without limbs, so they gave me some dinky old ones that I couldn’t escape with instead. That’s what these are.”

“Do you think your limbs are still somewhere in the prison?” Flint asked.

“I’m sure they are. Those damn things are so perfectly made, I’m sure they’ve been taking them apart and putting them back together again the whole time I’ve been here to learn a piece of my genius. They’ve gotta be experimenting on them somewhere. I’ll tell you what: I can’t help you with Myasma’s plan, destroying the Panopticon or telling a story or whatever, but I can tell you that at some point in the escape, I need to get them back. If I can, escaping this prison will go from difficult to downright easy.”

----------------------------------------

The next day, Flint decided to find Aurein.

When recreational time came around in the middle of the day, Flint studied Allef’s equation sheet, calculated a time he could execute the loophole, and, when the large digital clock in the rec room ticked to the right number, Flint sat in the green chair and snapped his stamp in two.

Alarms of pain flashed in Flint’s mind at the skin in his neck being painfully stretched and broken, but no alarms in the prison alerted the guards to his freedom. He had done it.

Once again free to roam the prison without being tracked, Flint snuck through the door dividing his prison sector and his neighboring sector and began to wander. Fifteen minutes and five sectors later, Flint found his golden-eyed comrade sitting alone near the corner of this sector’s rec room.

Upon seeing Flint, Aurein did a double take. When he finally processed that the person he was seeing was in fact Flint, Aurein got up, surprise evident in his usually scowl-like expression.

“Flint…” Aurein said, still in awe. “How the hell did you get here?”

“It’s a looooong story,” Flint replied, smiling. “But that’s why I’m here.”

----------------------------------------

Aurein seemed deep in thought. He scratched his chin, now dotted with stubble from his time within the prison.

“You need a story,” Aurein repeated, “and it needs to tell people what again?”

“That everyone needs to rise up on the third resupply day. Do you have any ideas?”

Aurein didn’t reply, instead returning to his deeply thoughtful state. He mouthed something, scratched his chin for a while, mouthed something again, and then turned to Flint.

“Got it,” Aurein said.

“W- wait, ‘got it?’ You mean you came up with a story?” Flint confirmed.

“It’s more of a legend than a story, but yes.”

“Already?”

“Do you want to hear it or not?” Aurein said, impatience crawling into his voice.

“Yes, please.”

“Call it the story of the cannonball man,” Aurein started. “Say that, on a distant planet, there was a man with a highly unstable temper. He lived a pretty average life in his dead-end cubicle job, but his boss was a total ass. Everyone who wasn’t a higher-up in the company was treated poorly, including the low-ranking cannonball man.

“The company’s boss would sometimes hold special feasts for the company. The only issue was, only the higher-ups were allowed to indulge. The boss would deliver the finest meats and baked goods for the high-ranking employees, carrying it right by the cannonball man’s cubicle.

“When the first feast was delivered, the cannonball man tolerated it. He burned with anger at the unfairness of the action, watching the people above him get treated while he was ignored, but ultimately accepted it.

“When the second feast was delivered, his rage grew. Watching all of the greedy aristocrats of his company be rewarded made him clench his fists and grind his teeth, but he didn’t do anything… yet.

“On the day the third feast was delivered to his company, the cannonball man could no longer keep the rage inside. As soon as his boss walked through the door with plates of delectables in hand, the cannonball man exploded into action. He murdered, destroyed, taking out every employee he could and bringing the entire company to ruins along the way. Rumors say the company was in such disarray after the cannonball man’s assault it was as if a cannonball had hit the building.

“You could then point out to whoever you’re telling this to how ridiculous of a crime it was, and that it only took three feast deliveries to set off this short-tempered man. Then add that they should tell others about it. How’s that for your secret message-story?”

Flint found himself slack-jawed.

“It’s… it’s perfect,” Flint said. “How did you just… come up with that?”

“I don’t know,” Aurein shrugged. “It just came to me.”

“It tells prisoners everything and still sounds like a normal, but weird, story on the surface. Nice job, man.”

Aurein just nodded. “And I wanted to bring something else up about your plan, Flint.”

“What’s up?”

“You said you had to destroy the Panopticon as part of your plan, right?” Aurein asked.

“Yeah. It’s the only way to allow all of the prisoners to escape The Ray without everyone getting injected with the Juice and dying.”

“You- wait, the Juice?”

“Yeah, the blood coagulant. The Juice,” Flint stated matter-of-factly.

Aurein gave him a confused look. Flint realized this must have been his exact reaction when hearing the same thing from Allef.

“Regardless of what it's called, you won’t be able to destroy the Panopticon,” Aurein stated. Flint was taken aback. “At least, you won’t be able to destroy the Panopticon correctly.”

“What do you mean? Why not?” Flint asked.

Aurein hesitated, looking uncomfortable. He broke eye contact with Flint, looking somewhere far away, before continuing.

“Before I joined Talo, before we met, my family was a part of Tymin.” Reading Flint’s expression, he said: “Yes, I know, I haven’t told you before. My family wasn’t actually in Tymin’s combat force, but my planet was occupied by Tymin and my parents were big fans. Part of why I joined Talo in the first place was just to distance myself from my family as much as possible.”

“That’s right, because when your brother-” Flint started.

“Yeah,” Aurein interrupted, giving Flint a knowing but warning look. “Exactly.”

“So you were a part of Tymin once,” Flint said. “What’s that have to do with The Ray?”

“Everything. My family was always in the know about Tymin news. Eleven years ago there was an attempted escape at The Ray. The farthest anyone had ever gotten to actually escaping. But nobody escaped. Why? Because every prisoner died before they could set a single foot outside of the prison.”

“What the hell?” Flint exclaimed. “What happened? How have I not heard of this?”

“Tymin did their best to keep the knowledge of the event out of the public view. They couldn’t hide it from their own faction, however. What happened that day isn’t entirely clear, but I’ve heard enough about the Panopticon before to know that there’s a secret weapon employed within that supercomputer. I think if it's damaged, even a little bit, the Panopticon automatically sends out a signal to every stamp to inject the Juice into every prisoner. It’s the final failsafe against escape. No matter what, you can’t escape The Ray without being injected.”

Flint was suddenly hit with a vision of every prisoner, every uniform-wearing person he had seen since his capture keeling over and dying in the same agonizing way he had. He was struck with the sheer quantity of souls that would leave the physical world for the great beyond all at the same time. Flint clenched his fists. And to think that Tymin would just repopulate The Ray and do it all over again…

“But,” Aurein said, interrupting Flint’s turbulent thoughts, “that’s only if you damage the Panopticon. Destroying the machine all at once is a different story. Your Val with your ghostly guns is powerful, yes, but you just don’t have the capability to destroy the entire thing at the same time. I know how you can.”

“Your Val?” Flint asked.

“Yes. Help me disable my stamp—I can execute the loophole the way you did. As long as you bring me blood thinner before I die, I can help you. My Val lets me control gold—density, shape, everything about gold, but only gold. If I get my Val back, I can turn many different objects into gold and concentrate them into a single golden ball. If I concentrate enough gold into one spot, then whenever I return that gold to its original form again, it will create a titanic explosion. Become a ghost and sneak my gold bomb inside the Panopticon on the day of the escape—I will detonate it for you and we can destroy it without killing everyone in the prison.”

“Hmm… that could work,” Flint said, nodding. He recognized how similar to Myasma he seemed at that moment, with his eyes squinted in concentration and his head constantly bobbing. “But how are you going to get enough material to build the gold bomb? I think the guards will notice if the bars on your cell suddenly vanished.”

“I’ll just turn small things to gold. Loose screws, food, anything I can get my hands on. If you can bring me some of your food every once in a while, that would speed up the process. We have over three months until the day of the escape. That should be enough time.”

“Got it,” Flint said. He was more aware than ever of the countless responsibilities piled on him, everyone reliant on him in one way or another to execute the escape. “And, one more thing. Do you think Talo’s old leader is here?” he asked Aurein.

“Hm? Who?”

“I’m trying to see if there’s anyone else in the prison we could try and get on our side on the day of the escape. Isn’t Talo’s old leader, Spine, in this prison? I remember hearing someone captured him five years ago.”

“Spine? No, he was captured and put in a prison a whole galaxy away. That one called Zysti that’s even more technologically advanced than ours. I don’t think there’s any chance of getting him on our side. They wouldn’t just put him with the rest of the captured members of Talo anyway—remember how much everyone loved Spine?”

“Yeah,” Flint said, realizing the impossibility of the situation and the stupidity of his question. “I guess he probably would have already united the Talo prisoners and found a way out by now if he was here. Well, it was worth a try.”

----------------------------------------

The following days were slow and quickly blended together. Flint rehearsed the Cannonball Man story to himself and ran it by Allef and Myasma, both of whom reacted with resounding approval.

When recreational time came around several days later, Flint searched for his first target to communicate the escape plan to. He picked an older man who was sitting around with a reading tablet, swiping the screen frustratedly. Flint positioned himself behind the prisoner’s chair.

The man was flipping through the tablet’s reading catalog, various soulless books of Tymin propaganda and classic literature from numerous Tymin-occupied planets.

“Can’t find anything good?” Flint pointed. The man looked up at Flint and, only a moment later, a guard appeared behind Flint. There was that Nora-damned beep of a stopwatch again.

“I’ve already read everything,” the man said. “I’ve been in here for almost a decade.”

Flint couldn’t help but suppress a smile.

“You might find this story interesting then,” Flint said, leaning towards the old prisoner.

“Have you ever heard of the Cannonball Man?”