The squares of light led us apart, back to our cells. I held the bowl full of porridge and spit in one hand, unable to look away. The square led me to the precipice of my cell, and I placed the bowl neatly on the floor. I lay down in my bed, and wondered what the hell the point of any of it was.
“Yossef Ben Ze’ev, you are hereby notified that the prisoner protection system will not tolerate a hunger strike—”
“What the fuck does that mean?” I grunted.
“—You must ingest at least eighty percent of your rations or we will have to take action. Please remember that PPS is here to protect prisoners from all harm.”
I looked at the bowl, trying to map out where the spittle had hit, and decided that the porridge was thick enough that I could just scrape off the top layer.
Standing above the toilet with the bowl tilted, I used the spoon to dig out one spoonful of porridge and shook it until it fell into the toilet-bowl. I was on my way to dig out another spoonful when I noticed the little sliver of spit on the spoon itself. If I used it to dig, I would contaminate the clean portion of porridge. If there even was any. I wiped the spoon with a piece of paper before carving out another spoonful, and repeated the process.
“If you choose to continue resisting, we will soon begin applying coercion for your protection.”
I grunted wordlessly and carried on. Did I scoop out twenty percent already? It seemed like more. On a whim, I scooped another spoonful and tossed it down. The system made no comment, and I tossed away another spoonful, before electing to shovel away the entire contents into the toilet. What would my mother say, to see me throwing away food? I didn’t know, but the system that now had the role of taking care of me made no judgment, which I took as a sign that we were no longer in conflict.
Sometimes, the dysfunctionality of a system works in your favor.
I lay in my bed again, and stared at the ceiling. Do something, I thought. I could’ve handled this, if it had been just a day. But a week is a very long time, when you have to experience each minute, each second. There was an irritation that wouldn’t let go. Not so much for the hunger or the harassment itself, but for the futility of it, the ugliness in that pointless cruelty.
There was a part of me that would’ve chosen to make the trial as early as possible, even knowing what the likely verdict was. There was a part of me that wished for nothing more than a screen to distract myself with, to gorge myself with news from around the solar system or, barring that, to just wallow in the epilogue of my failed life in silence.
But I had a message to deliver. And if I wanted these people to get my message across, I needed to think of a way to get them to listen. I held on to that need, everytime I felt like I was going to
Finally, the system called for me to get up and eat again, and I found myself flinching. I didn’t want to leave this relatively tranquil place. I didn’t want to fail again. But I had to try.
#
“My name is Yossi,” I said as my square led me into the room, and the two other men waited at the exact same position as they had before. “What’s yours?”
“Nothing happens if I spit in your food,” the bald man explained, as if he'd been waiting for it since the last time we’d met, ignoring what I’d said. “Good old Peeps punishes prisoners for touching each other and throwing things at each other, but not for throwing things at each other’s things.” He pointed at his temple with his free hand. “So, I can spit in your food as much as I want. Are you gonna do something about it?”
Behind him, the older man silently placed his bowl under the dispenser.
“Hey, you. What’s your name?” I asked the older man, but he only looked down at his bowl, refusing to make eye contact, refusing to communicate in any way. More than anything else, I felt a sense of disappointment. I turned back to the spitter. “Is this what we’re gonna do here? Spit in each other’s food?”
“Try spitting in my food if you want to get some knuckles in your mouth,” he said, pointing at the first degree burn on the back of his neck, then pulling up a sleeve to show a similar mark on an overgrown triceps muscle; Proof of the depth to which he’d be willing to escalate. “Be my guest.”
“Not interested. What’s the point of any of this?”
“The point?” He wrinkled his sharp nose as the older man took away his bowl, and placed his own. “The point is that everyone in this prison is a fucking pussy. By virtue of being a little less pussy than anyone else here, I am the king of this place. Not much to take, but it’s mine. And I can have my bowl of porridge filled without having the slightest worry that you’ll do something to it.”
Arik would have probably punched him right in the jaw, show him what went where. But I felt too hollow, too cold. Even if I put him in his place, what worth would it have? There was nothing in me that was even close to the raging, uncontrollable fire one needs to strike another person.
He took back his bowl, took a step forward to stay with a moving square and gestured welcomingly as the speakers demanded I place my bowl under the dispenser.
I did, and he stepped out of his square to the instant admonishment of a second electronic voice.
“...Return to your designated square or be neutralized…”
But before he managed to get his mouth near my food, I placed one hand over my bowl. “If you spit at my hand, that’s throwing bodily fluids at another prisoner. Only you’ll get shocked.”
He returned to his square with an appreciative expression, and the countdown stopped. “But if we touch each other, we both get electrocuted,” he retorted quickly. My bowl was starting to fill up. “So if I take a step over here.” He stepped out of his square again, prompting PPS to play the same message from the start. “And then, let’s say, here,” he took another step, his slipper-covered foot entering my own square, “you’ll have to choose between getting fried or leaving your square.”
He reached his hand forward, almost touching my face, and I did take a step back, out of my square. Another voice was added to the speaker system, repeating the same message but addressing Third Prisoner, this time. Not that I could do anything – he was standing in my square now, so my only choice was between getting shocked because I was out of my designated place, or because I pushed him out of mine. My only advantage was that I stepped out of my circle a little after he did, so he should get out of mine and leave me time to get back, but he didn’t seem above getting us both electrocuted just for the joy this whole thing seemed to cause him.
He shot a stream of saliva between his teeth, arching into the porridge I was wary of thinking of as mine, and hopped back into his square. He gave me an expectant look. “What are you going to do about it?”
Once I returned to my square, the speaker system demanded that I pick up my bowl. I did, examining the drops of saliva on the shining face of the gray liquid. “What are you getting out of this?”
The old man looked at us from the corner of his eye, shaking his head slightly.
“What am I getting out of this?” the bold prisoner said, his face closer to mine now, catching my full attention. “That you know exactly who you are, and who I am.”
“Who the hell are you?”
“I’m not a bitch, that’s for sure. I’m the one making sure that, as long as we’re both here, you won’t eat a single bite of food that hadn’t been spat on,” he chuckled, and turned to walk away.
The squares of light led us out of the room and we parted again. I wasn’t even hungry, so logically, there was nothing to be angry about. But as I looked at my hands, one holding the bowl and one by my side, I saw that they were shaking, like the wings of something small and fragile. Back in my cell, I didn’t wait this time for the system to raise its voice at me, and scraped my meal into the toilet right away. I wasn’t even hungry, no, but there was a lukewarm anger that I couldn’t shake, an itch. What did I have to complain about, though? This was still better than Last Day Town. At least I could breathe, sleep, drink, scratch my own asshole if I wanted to. And yet the people of Last Day Town tried. That was the secret, wasn’t it? They all tried to do something. Even Diocletian.
Diocletian. Even if the judicial system accidently let me free, it would still be a week without them getting any message from me. Diocletian would still snitch about my presence at Last Day Town. Not that it mattered - if the police confiscated my camera along with my spacesuit, they already knew that I’d been there. That’s not the reason I’d like to deliver the message - if they did return, if they got to go free, they would be a strong hint for anyone looking to understand what happened in Last Day Town. And it’s not like I wanted them to die. I tested my memory, to see if I remembered Lev Shalem’s mnemonics, if only to keep busy. To my surprise, I found out that I did.
I looked around the room, looking for a distraction, and found a shaving machine in a little holding place under the sink. Who in their right mind would spend time grooming when there’s so little of it left?
#
The bald man’s head shone in the white light, the oily skin of his scalp reflective, like something synthetic.
“Do you know what’s waiting for you, at the end of this week?” I asked before he could start talking. I didn’t know how much I actually slept last night, without clocks anywhere, but I had time to think about how to communicate with this person.
He gave me a hard look before answering. “Are you stupid? Everyone knows. Either you get to stay in Ceres, or they send you to be a slave on Earth.” Surprisingly naïve. His tone switched from admonishing, to freely sharing, as if I’d be interested in what he thinks is going on. “You know what I think he does with the slaves? They can’t do any work that that Sovereign computer can’t do, so I think he just buys them for entertainment. Makes them fight to the death or do all of sorts of fucked up shit.”
I shook my head. “No one’s getting sent to Earth anymore. If they rule that you’re guilty of whatever you’re accused of, which by the way you’re behaving here I assume you know they will, they’ll just throw you out to die, just like they will me, to choke on the surface, measuring our last words by the seconds of oxygen they require. These are our last days. Our last hours. And this is what we’re going to do with them?” I tried shaping my voice into a righteous, angry tone, the kind that would make him wake up and stop. But even I could hear how tiredly it came out.
He scoffed. “Fuck all of those conspiracy theories. This is real. I’m fucking with you right now, right here.” He kept moving his hands as he spoke, punctuating every word, as if he were explaining… not to a child, because children are treated with patience, but someone who was disabled while somehow still undeserving of empathy. “Are you gonna do something about it, or whine?” His breath was hot on my face as he forced me out of my square with nothing but self-confidence. Not that there was any need. I didn’t resist, trying to get as much of his attention on what I was saying. He leaned over my bowl and let out a burst of stringy saliva.
I clenched a fist and tried again. “After your trial, you’ll find yourself on the outside of the asteroid, with nothing but the oxygen on your back to sustain you. You’ll be locked in a man-sized aquarium with your own terror and death, and then and there you will want nothing more than the comfort of other people, and this strength you pretend to have will suddenly seem useless. We’re all going to die. Isn’t that enough to make us care? Not cry on each other’s shoulder, but perhaps enough to not be cunts to each other?”
He raised his head from my bowl, looked as if he was considering everything that’s been said. “Did you just call me a cunt?” He said as soon as we were back in our squares, and PPS went silent.
I took my bowl and offered it to him. “What are you going to do about it? Spit in my food again?”
He chuckled and shook his head, then walked away. After two steps, he turned back. “Fuck caring.”
#
It isn’t a big deal, I thought. It isn’t anything to be angry about. And it wasn’t. I wasn’t. I just felt that persistent buzz, that frustration. Not just at him for choosing to make my life worse for no reason, but at myself for being so weak something so small bothered me, for still thinking about it, instead of spending these hours in some sort of tranquil contemplation, accepting what had happened. Instead, I kept going around in circles and complaining about how angry I was.
It seemed funny, not to be angry because these were my last days, and I was about to die, but because I was spending that precious time thinking about someone I didn’t care for. Moments like any other, Pythia had said.
What awful gravity last words hold. Words like any other, he probably would have added, given the chance. But with all their weight, they did not remedy who I was. Even here, I was annoyed by my inability to change the world.
I’d been having this conversation with myself for as long as I could remember, awake in my bed, angry at myself for being frustrated with others. I’d always expected that tendency to pass at some point. Maybe next year, I’d thought, I’ll be the kind of person who reacts like this, or thinks like that. The kind of person who processes things correctly.
This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.
It seemed silly, looking at the bare rock ceiling of my cell, that I’d expected things, including myself, to be anything other than what they already were.
#
The bald man snorted, pneumatically sucking what sounded like a chunk of snot from his nasal cavity down to his throat, then coughed it up into his mouth. He moved his tongue around to place it just behind his lips, and launched it in a shallow arc into my bowl. Half of the yellow gunk ended up hitting the side, and the rest broke on the surface of the gray gruel.
I looked up and asked, “PPS, I’d like to file a complaint. Could I talk to a human representative?”
No answer. I grunted, the frustration finally getting out of my control. “And we have accept this as humane treatment just because some superstitious assholes are afraid employing AI.”
And at this, of all things, the old man decided to open his mouth for the first time, his voice surprisingly full of emotion. “Afraid? I was on your side, but you deserve what you’re getting if you’re one of those lazy punks who’s ok with ending up like Earth.” In an intonation that made it clear that the next sentence was already as determined as the next line in a computer program, he added, “Why not? Let’s just risk all our lives, our dignity as a race, just so you don’t have to go to work.”
Incredible, that with how little time this person had to talk to anyone, this is what he chose to waste it on—regurgitating propaganda that had been fed to him by someone else. It was a common trick -pretending that the two only options were either using no artificial intelligence at all or losing all autonomy to it, as if there wasn’t any middle ground. I didn’t bother answering—I’ve wasted enough of my life in this kind of fruitless argument, and it seemed like he didn’t even need me to go through the motions.
The spitter seemed pleased that the world coincided with his views. “The question you’re asking yourself right now is this—did they know, when they designed this system? Did they leave this opening on purpose, because they hate you so much?”
“Do you… think they had me in mind, specifically?” I asked. If he had lost grip on reality, that might explain some things.
“Anyone who’s weak enough to not do something about their situation. They’re happier knowing that their prison still leaves a possibility for some good old-fashioned abuse, and not just this sterile shit.” He put a spoonful of his own porridge in his mouth and closed his eyes as if savoring the grand taste of un-spat-on porridge.
“Did they know…” the old man started, in a tone that made it clear that he wasn’t quite following the conversation as much as looking for an excuse to keep talking, now that he’d started. Wherever that sentence led, he didn’t dare speak it, yet.
“So,” the bald man said, his tone soft, encouraging. “What are you going to do about it?”
There was nothing preventing me from punching this guy in the throat, right under that smooth chin, giving him exactly what he wanted. I’d been so close to resorting to actual violence with Ctesibius. Why was it so much harder, now?
I certainly didn’t have enough fire in me to strike him, to willingly expose myself to the pain of electrocution. What was I going to do, then? Nothing, like I’d always done. In this prison, on death row, there was no better time to ask – why hadn’t I done anything, in my entire life? Not anything that mattered, at least.
#
I sat down in my bunk and looked at the bowl in my hand. I was hungry enough to consider eating, which scared me. As if there was a defeat in eating now. I scooped the contents into the toilet before I had a chance to change my mind, and lay in my bunk, listening to the grumbling of my own stomach, as if it were the communication efforts of some newly discovered alien race.
A good thing that no contact was ever made. Imagine how embarrassing that could have been.
#
When I returned to the dining chamber, the old man was already talking, perhaps prompted by our last conversation, emoting with his hairy hands. “…They sent us here to see if it could even be done, a colony like this, but once we succeeded, they packed their shit and moved to Europa, where there are fucking oceans.” He scraped the sole of his soft shoe against the dry rock, agitated. “And mining’s done without so much as a gas mask. But we’re not surprised, are we? We’re used to them sending us as a wedge in some political game, and my great grandfather lived in a settlement, too, and it wasn’t that much safer for him, now, was it?”
He laughed to himself. The spitter, for all the violence his was ready to threaten me with, listened to the old man and laughed politely.
The old man looked at us, saw that I wasn’t laughing and the other wasn’t understanding, and waved a dismissive hand. “It doesn’t matter anyway. The dragon that was bred on Earth will end up eating the entire solar system. Why would it ever stop? Its creator doesn’t mind, as long as it keeps giving him immortality—yeah, that’s what I heard: that he’s immortal, that the system cooked up some drugs that let him live forever. On the other hand, some people say that he’s been dead for a long time now, and the AI that runs Earth pretends that he’s alive while it runs everything, and it’s lost now. The most habitable planet we ever had, lost from human hands.” There was an intensity to his tone now, as the line moved forward.
The bald man still looked at the man, listening attentively while leaning over and spitting on my food.
“Did they know, on Earth?” The old man hurried, as if some permission had been granted to speak and he had to make the most of it. “When there was still time to stop it, when they could have waged war, do you think some people knew that all of Earth would turn into a hell where human beings are treated like wet machines? Where one person held all the power? Did they know, and still choose not to fight, or were they too stupid to figure it out, when all of the signs were in front of them? And which one would be worse, to be stupid or to be selfish, or a fucking coward…”
“Ariel Shem-tov: You have reached the termination of your detainment period. Follow your light square to your designated train on gate number two...”
The old man’s eyes widened with terror, but the tension left him as soon as it came. He turned around, surrender in his every movement, and turned his watery eyes to me. “It told me in the morning,” he said, and pulled at his nose, as if holding back tears. “But I thought I’d just heard wrong.” He looked at me, really looked at me and for the first time asked me a question as if I could actually answer. “Do you think they know what it’s like for us out here? Do you think they know, and just don’t care?”
I didn’t know which ‘them’ he’d been speaking of, nor which ‘us’, but it didn’t matter. The answer was the same. “If we had known, in their place, would we have cared?”
He nodded, defeated, and turned away. We all followed the light square on the floor to the corridor at the end of it. In previous days, every time we reached the T junction at the exit of the dining chamber, we all turned right. For the first time, Ariel turned left. The whistle of a train moving in a narrow tunnel echoed through the corridors—a haunting, hollow sound.
The two of us left, bowls in hands, followed our own squares to the right. I couldn’t stop looking back at the old man, all while checking that I wasn’t accidentally bumping into the spitter, but Ariel didn’t look back. He shuffled around a corner, and I never saw him again.
I stared at the other prisoner’s back, getting ready to have another non-meal when I heard Ariel’s voice again: a howl that echoed through the halls. “I did! I did care—I did everything I could—but it didn’t change anything!”
For a moment, the man in front of me froze, his light square moving ahead without him, and the speaker informed us that we were both out of our designated areas. Him because he chose to, and me because he was blocking my way, though the system didn’t care about that. I thought I saw a shiver pass from one of his shoulders to the other.
#
I sat on my bed, the bowl in front of me. I was hungry, that much could no longer be denied. The last time I ate was before I got in the skipper that took me to Last Day Town, and I wasn’t sure how long ago that had been. I could scoop this bowl down the toilet, and as soon as I did the dilemma would disappear, at least for the next couple of hours.
But how long will I stay here? In two or three more days of fasting, I’d start getting noticeably weaker. And any longer than that I’d be completely powerless. It didn’t seem like too bad of a way to stick it to all of them, to just stop eating, give up on that and peacefully wither away.
But if they did throw me out, and I’d spend my last day as an Anaxagoras or Ctesibius too lethargic to be of any use, I’d be a disappointment to those great chains of impossible focus and dedication. And by now, Diocletian must have rebuilt the lines already. It was a part of our deal that she would, and I believed she’d honor that.
Giving up power wasn’t any sort of rebellion. The spitter wanted me to either starve or fight him, but what he used to coerce me was nothing but psychological pressure, an idea. Both fighting him and starving were ways of giving in to that pressure, acknowledging it. The brave thing to do was to see through, to realize that it’s a fiction. I already had spit in my mouth, and I never spared it a thought. We somehow never worry about that when kissing a lover’s lips, do we? In fact, I remembered reading somewhere that even though back on Earth people used to have very different types of bacteria in their gut and mouth, in Ceres we all had the same forty something species, because of how crowded we were in here, how much of each other’s spit we breathed regularly. So what did it matter? Why must I obey this irrational repulsion? Just because other people told me that it’s something that I should feel? I was going to die this very week, for the love of God. How was I still bothered by this?
I dug the spoon into the porridge, ignoring the strings of spit, and brought it up in front of my face, where it stopped, as if on its own.
“Coercion will be applied in ten, nine…”
“Just give me a second, will you?” I barked. There’s no one there, I reminded myself. No one to be angry at.
“five, four…”
Here we go. Eyes closed, I took in a spoonful, and forced it, gulping, down my throat. The cell was finally silent. It tasted just as bland as it seemed, artificially tasteless.
I finished the porridge and washed my mouth in the sink.
#
The next day, the man who used to be second prisoner was at the head of the line, and there was a younger woman behind me. She had bright green eyes and a button nose, and long brown hair that swung all the way down to her not-unattractive waistline. She looked at us with an air of patient observance, as if she were taking the time to see what was going on before deciding on anything.
“Do you know what Peeps told me this morning?” he said as we waited for our squares to move closer to the machine. “Right after the usual announcement, it told me that after the first meal of the day the judge will have time for me. That means our lessons will have to stop, and you’ll have to complete the work on your own.” His tone was casual, but there was something frozen in his expression.
I didn’t want him to die; I did, however, feel something not unlike happiness knowing that I wouldn’t have to be stuck there with him anymore. When you’re in a deep enough hole, numb enough, it’s easy to mistake relief for joy. “Then you’ll see soon enough,” I said. “After the trial, you’ll see what’s on the outside. Maybe it will change your mind.”
He shook his head as he took his bowl from under the dispenser.
The squares of light moved, and we moved with them. When he turned back to force me out of my square, there was an atmosphere of ceremonialism about him, as if he was cherishing this last chance to harass me. He tilted his head backwards theatrically, snorting and gurgling louder than ever.
“What are you doing?” the woman asked. Her voice was different from what I had expected, firm and commanding, as if she were the matriarch of an ancient, untamed tribe.
“He’s going to spit in my food.” I shrugged, but there was a whole new dimension of humiliation, having this ritual observed by an audience. “The system doesn’t track it.”
The expression on her face changed as quickly as a piece of paper catching fire, from confused one moment to absolutely furious in the next. She turned to him. “Hey, don’t do that!”
#
Here’s something I’ve never understood—when someone’s about to hurt someone else, or acting in any selfish way, people’s natural response is to say something like “Don’t do that!” or “Get away from me!”. I could never get my head around why anyone would expect that to work. If someone wants to hurt you, why would it help to tell them not to? What information is being conveyed, apart from the victim’s desire not to be victimized, which we can assume the abuser’s already aware of?
#
He lowered his head, smiled at her, and discharged a mouthful of saliva into my bowl. He walked back into his square and faced her. “What’re you gonna do? Slap me?”
Her hands clenched into fists, and her face scrunched up in anger in a way that was somehow endearing. She strode towards him, ignoring Peep’s warnings, each step quicker than the last, and I stepped instinctively to the side, out of her way.
Her body language made it very clear that she was going to punch him. And once she did, I thought, she’d be electrocuted, knocked out, scarred. I realized with numb terror that if I didn’t want to see her convulsing on the floor, I would have to actually do something.
He stood with his arms spread wide, ready to take the blow, looking at me as if to make sure that I was following along.
“Are you so afraid of getting shocked you’d let a girl do it for you? Come on, punch me.” There was a strange desperation in his voice.
And finally I realized what was going on, why he’d been talking so much. He wanted me to reassure his philosophy, to justify his brutality by agreeing to play by his rules. But it wasn’t just that, his own brutality was a way to justify what had been done to him, to make it all right, not a big, just the way of a world, nothing to fuss about.
And I wanted to break his nose, right then and there. But Pythia would have never let anyone tell them how to think, wouldn’t they?
She was closer now, almost swinging for the punch, and there would be no way for me to step between them in time. But then again, did I need to?
I took my bowl in my hand, Turned to the man, and threw it at his foot. The girl barely managed to stop her momentum before touching him.
An exhilaration came over me, like a refreshing gust of wind, washing over me. An uncontrollable, mad smile climbed on my face. Did I feel… free?
He looked at it, not understanding, and by the time he raised his eyes there was a realization reflecting in them, and anger. “What are you doing? You were supposed to-”
Yossef Ben Ze’ev, you have been detected by PPs while assaulting another prisoner and as such…
I spoke over both of them. “What is your name?”
“Gil.”
“You were right, Gil. I am afraid. Now can you do me a favor? If they let you go, could you please spread the word that they’re throwing people out with oxygen in their suits?”
“I don’t think they’ll let me go,” he lowered his eyes, lest I see the emotion in them. But he couldn’t hide the wave of regret washing over him. “Fuck.”
“Hope, you fucking coward.”
He raised his eyes again, first in anger, and then, realizing how little time was left, his expression changed to that of quiet acceptance. “Ok,” he said.
“Thank you,” I said, and turned to the woman.
She looked at me, terrified. I looked back at her, so very close, and noticed the different shades of chestnut in her hair, the rare silver hairs like fractures, the hard lines of her lips, the freckles on her nose, the points of darker green in her surprised eyes, the laugh lines hinting that she was older than she’d first seemed, having spent most of her life in low gravity. The smell of her hair filled me with something I had forgotten the name for.
I was terrified, too, but it would do no good to let her see that, now would it? With a charm I had not mastered since hitting on Ayelet the first time we met, I winked at her.
An arc of electricity shot out from one of the sentinels with a loud crack and connected with my elbow.
I had gotten an electric shock once before, and I remembered that although it was very unpleasant, it wasn’t quite accurate to say that it hurt. But this? This hurt.
Are my muscles ripping themselves apart? Am I having a heart attack? If I am, will somebody do something about it? Is it supposed to hurt this much? When does this fucker turn off? I must have fallen to the floor at some point, because I felt my head banging against some hard surface. How long has it been now, three seconds, ten seconds, a whole minute? Who’s the bastard that designed this fucking thing?
Finally, I passed out.