You have a right to perform your prescribed duties, but you are not entitled to the fruits of your actions.

― Bhagavad Gita

The first memory I had from my childhood, the chaotic time before my personality formed, was from the time I’d been four or five.

Yossi Ben Ze’ev asks his mother if he can have some tea.

"Sure, sweety," she says, placing a pair of heavy steel scissors in his hands. "Pick whatever you want from the garden, and I’ll go put on a kettle."

The garden is no more than a small balcony with a row of large clay pots, filled with rich, fragrant soil and sprouting with all kinds of herbs. The longest stems bend over a neat rail, hanging over a twenty-story drop, looking over the crowded city streets below. The rail is taller than he is, but it doesn’t stop him from feeling a visceral fear of heights standing next to it; an excitement.

He picks a handful of sage, a pale, fuzzy desert plant. It is not just for the taste that he like it: there is something about knowing that sage can stand the toughest soil and harshest sun, with almost no water, and grow into something beautiful. It’s very bitter in the tea, but, in his childish stubbornness, he insists on drinking it anyway, holding on to a secret belief that he might become more like the herb by ingesting it.

Just as he finishes cutting off a stalk, a flock of swifts decide to swoop in from above. He knows, or at least, that’s how I remembered it, that swifts don’t stop flying for months at a time; eating, mating, sleeping in flight. The only reason they ever stop is to nest, and if it weren’t for their commitment to succession, they could fly forever.

Little Yossi doesn’t quite believe it, and as an old man on Ceres, I didn’t fully believe it still, but it is true. Yossi thinks about how much they must have to eat to keep flying, and that swifts are perfect carnivores, meaning that everything they eat has to die. He is amazed by the juxtaposition of those two facts, not only that they fly so much, but that every bit of energy has to be taken by force. He watches the dark scimitar-wings gain a beautiful purple hue as they slash through the golden sunset-light in sharp hairpin turns, going around and around without ever stopping. And as if that glint is a spark that ignites inspiration, a realization strikes him, like lightning: that swifts die, after a couple of years of exertion, but that this process of hunting and mating and hatching has gone on longer than any living swift. The flight itself hasn’t stopped since he was born, since his father or grandfather were born. When writing had been invented, when the first bread had been baked, the swifts were already dancing, just like they are doing now.

Yossi looks at the stalk of sage in his hand, confused, unsure when he picked it and what for. He walks over to his father, who’s sitting on the couch and reading, to try to explain to him what he just realized, but just as he opens his mouth his father starts talking to Yossi’s mother.

“Remember when we thought colonizing space would be exciting?” he asks, putting down the screen he’d been reading from. “Seems so stupid now. Didn’t we know? Didn’t we realize that the driest desert on Earth is far easier to colonize than Mars? The coldest part of the poles, the most remote piece of ocean are all much more habitable than either Ceres or Luna or even Europa. In order for anyone to leave Earth it wouldn’t just have to turn deadly, but deadlier than the harshest terrestrial environment. We thought we would leave out of desire for adventure, but it seems like we will only leave if we fear for our lives, from either death or enslavement.” He looks at Yossi then, as he stands there with a stalk of sage in his hand, afraid he’ll get admonished for ‘staring into space’ again. His father just sighs, and Yossi knows, or at least this is what I remembered knowing, that they are about to send him off planet, even if they can’t afford to come along. A desperate attempt to have him carry their dance along. He looks back at the flock of beautiful predatory birds, and stupidly wonders what kind of birds we’ll take to other planets.

“What is it?” his father says, but he just shakes his head. He doesn’t know how to explain.

That’s not the last memory I have of my parents, nor of Earth, but it’s my only distinct memory of watching birds fly. Ceresian poets often express envy towards people who got to watch birds fly free, and if you ask me, they’re perfectly right to feel that way.

Here, children talk about birds like former generations used to talk about dragons and simurghs: graceful, bygone creatures that excite the imagination but not more. Even though flight is commonplace, in the sense that falling in space like a dead rock can be considered flying, a child’s first reaction to being told that there were once living creatures who could float under a full G is disbelief, like ours when we heard about T. Rexes, polar bears, or whales.

I was in a train carriage, alone. It was lit with the faintest white light, just enough to tell the walls apart. I was wearing the gray, rough uniform of a detainee I’d been given in the police station, thin as paper, with slippers to match.

The police officers that had waited for me on the inner side of the airlock had been about as professional as you can expect from people who had been trained to think the law was written for someone else. They’d forced me to strip, confiscated the suit and camera, knowing full well that they were rental and the late-return fees were going to be vicious. None of it had been illegal or particularly brutal, the harassment so reflexive at this point it wasn’t entirely accurate to call it intentional.

They hadn’t bothered telling me what I was being accused of, or my rights—machines took care of that, now. And they had no interest in letting me speak, shoving me around every time I’d tried.

I’d seized my chance right before they shoved me into the train. Two burly men grabbed me by the arms and used force needlessly, accompanied by an officer with hair in two shades of brown and long nails. “Their throwing people out to die, with twenty four hours of oxy-” I’d managed to say, before she’d slapped me on the balls with the back of her hand, hard enough to make me fold over. There hadn’t even been any cruelty in her eyes, just a sort of playfulness like you’d expect from a person treating avatars in a computer game.

“You angry?” she’d said just as the door was closing. “Why don’t you write something about it?”

Now that the pain had passed, I could appreciate that it wasn’t, on its own, bad advice. What wouldn’t I give for five minutes in front of my own monitors, I thought, To let the world know what I’ve seen. But there was no screen to interact with, here. There was barely any light, as they were saving electricity on me.

I couldn’t feel if we were moving. I remembered having accelerated for a time, my body pressing against one wall, but my body had no weight since, aside from that caused by an occasional turn. Trains had no inside gravity and, because they were suspended in magnetic fields, they made almost no sound besides the whistle of wind. There were no windows either, a floating room in an unknown void. On the outside, I imagined it looked like a worm digging its way through the asteroid.

I sat up slowly. The carriage had no handholds or seatbelts. If this thing stopped suddenly, I’d have no way to stop myself from crashing—not that I even knew which side was forward and which was back.

Whatever happened from this point on, it didn’t have anything to do with my choices—there was a fear, yes, but it was not like the urgent, reactive terror of Last Day Town, where death had stood at the edge between possibility and reality, and every move could have pushed it over one end or the other. A part of me was relieved.

Pythia said I had come to Last Day Town looking for my own death, but that didn’t seem to be the case. Wouldn’t I be happy, if it were?

I was dead. A week in prison, and then a mock-trial. The trial probably wouldn’t hold any actual merit, according to almost any source I had heard from. It wasn’t even a show, just a technicality. The computer permitted trials to be held in secret if enough judges voted that it was necessary, and the judges knew exactly what was expected of them.

In a corrupt place, everyone had to become as corrupt as the rest of the system to survive; Even if they lamented this reality, they couldn’t resist it. I thought of Arik’s story, if that was even his story at all. I’d been too late for him. Perhaps he had waited for me, slowly accepting that I had abandoned him to die.

Not that he was the only person in my life whom I’d abandoned. I gave a passing thought to the people that I would never see again. My ex-wife, Ayelet; the friends that I’d long neglected.

Funny, that I would have preferred to sneak off and die without her noticing. Not a realistic thought; the news will at some point reach her, and she’ll be devastated by them. She’d be angry with me, and rightly so, and wouldn’t even get a chance to give me a piece of her disappointed mind, the way these things worked. I’d just be gone, and she’d be left with a burden of anger. The least I could do for her was be angry at myself now. Deliver some of that anger to its rightful destination.

Of all the people I knew, I could think of no one who would be crushed by the news except for her. Our friends had grown more and more distant after Tsur died. Or maybe we had; who knows. My parents had died on earth, as had Ayelet’s, after things turned sour. What would my parents say if they saw me now? They wouldn't be disappointed in my choice of vocation, no, just that I had failed to execute, that I didn't think this through thoroughly enough even though I had all the tools in front of me.

I grieved. Over Ayelet, the friends I didn’t treat right, over never getting to meet Arik. Over future days I will get to live. No wonder the residents of Last Day Town avoided that - it took strength to examine all that grief without someone to comfort you.

I didn’t cry. When I’d been younger, I’d taken this inability as some sort of toughness, but I was old enough to recognize it for the defense mechanism that it was. At some point, the dam will break and I will feel whatever it was that I’d buried. On the positive side, I might not live long enough for that to happen.

Pythia were right - I really did go there to die. My life seemed meaningless without anything worth saying, and by the time I did find something worthy of saying, I didn’t have the life to say it with.

More than anything, I wished there was someone to talk to. How could I blame my friends for drifting away? It wasn’t fair to expect them to willingly endure the company of this bitter old man when I could hardly bear it, myself.

It felt like a sort of vertigo— the perspective of a life violently flattened. I laid my head down in the corner between the wall and the floor, and both were impossible to perceive normally, both compressed. My life, my history, like a stream of time reaching backwards, so far that its beginning could not be traced—and now death, a wall that stopped that stream completely, too wide and tall to be bypassed.

I was relatively comfortable, lying in the corner. I put a foot against the far wall, pushing myself against the corner, taking solace in the pressure. That feeling of being squeezed, being held, is something all humans like, from as early as the moment that they are born, and maybe even before.

The memory of what it had been like to hold Tsur in my arms was still clear.

It wasn’t just that I loved him more than I had ever loved anything; it wasn’t just that my perspective had changed completely, my grasp of what was and wasn’t important. As I’d felt that delicate, fragile warmth against my breast, I’d felt an unexpected, deep terror. To see so clearly how people were made, what minds, like mine, were grown from. Not pregnancy and birth, but the emergence of a human being from whatever a baby is—from knowing nothing and being nothing, having almost no will or want but those that the body commands, to become something that decides and acts and demands. There was a wall there, just as grand and unfathomable as death. And just like with death, I’d somehow managed to look away.

But there are places that force you to look at the edges of your life, even if you have no desire to do so. Last Day Town was one of those places.

#

The train slowly began to tilt, or at least so it felt as it came to a stop. I finally got to find out which way we had been moving, as I slid gently all the way to one wall and brought myself to a stand.

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A part of the wall that had seemed like any other revealed itself to be a screen, lighting up the darkness with lines of text. There must have been a speaker system too, because a voice, dispassionate and pre-recorded, started reading me my rights.

“Yossef Ben Ze’ev, you will soon arrive at the Yirmyahu Detention Center, where you will await trial after which you will be sentenced for your alleged crimes. In order to prevent unequal treatment of defendants from different financial backgrounds, an attorney will be provided for you by the state—"

I laughed at that part, knowing that my defense lawyer, as well as the judge and the prosecutor, would be no better than automatons enacting a predetermined verdict.

“If you are to come in contact with another detainee, you would be instantly neutralized. If you are to throw anything, including your or aother’s bodily fluids, at another prisoner, you would be instantly neutralized. If you are to touch another prisoner’s possessions, including, cell, food provisions, and clothes, you will be instantly neutralized. Please remember that the Prisoner Protections System, from now on referred to as PPS, is here to protect you and your fellow inmates.”

Funny, how quickly things changed. I had only once in my life been detained in a facility like this, more than a decade ago, and there had been real people threatening you then, not machines. It would be an exaggeration to say that it had felt less lonely, but I definitely preferred it to being processed by a blind, mindless machine. Practically, it didn’t change much. I would be treated humanely in the technical sense of the word, and escape was not an option either way. As much as breaking out of space prison seemed exciting in novels from a hundred years ago. In reality, it was about as likely as beating the machine at chess.

We came to a full stop, which sent me floating in the microgravity, and a door slid open to reveal a long hallway, well-lit with cheap, white light. The walls were bare, natural rock, a brutalist aesthetic that said more about economy than style.

Far on the other side was a wall, and a ladder mounted on it, presumably leading to the heart of the compound. The detainment center, unlike the train, did have its own rotation, for the purposes of simulated gravity, and the door opened right to the axis of rotation. If I hadn’t been floating in weightlessness, it might have caused me vertigo.

I stepped into the hall, straight ahead, so I floated in space without touching anything. The hallway revolved around me. I knew that the moment I touched any part of the prison itself I’d be caught in its spin, carried in its swirl and fake gravity.

The speaker instructed me to grab it— not that I had much choice, as I was levitating straight towards it. The ladder was mounted on a revolving wall ; As soon as I grabbed on the ladder it started spinning me too, as I struggled to match its speed and mount it. It made me turn around my own belly button, the opposite of a good G-creating roll. The speaker instructed me to follow the arrows, to climb ‘down’ on the ladder and I did, every step feeling more and more natural, and by the time I placed my slippers on the ground I was feeling the reassuring weight of my own body at one full G.

A square of violet-blue light appeared around my feet. The speakers explained that I should not cross its perimeter, for safety reasons, and only move where it moved. It started moving, and I shuffled my feet to stay within it. It led me in an uncomfortable pace through a corridor with a low ceiling, even by the asteroid’s standards, to a small cell. A sink; a dry toilet; a narrow bed; a thick violet line separating the inside from the outside. The toilet was right in front of the opening; sitting on it, I’d be visible to the prisoner on the other side of the hall. Say what you would about Last Day Town: at least there you could pee without anyone looking.

I looked to the cell ahead. A tall, bony man with curly graying hair was sitting on his toilet, pants still on. I waved. “Peace,” I said. “I really need to tell you something.”

He pointed at one of his ears, and smiled apologetically. “I’m deaf,” he said, in a voice that really did sound like he had not heard a human voice in a long time, and waved goodbye before getting back to staring at the floor.

I sighed. There will probably be somebody else to talk to.

I examined the contents of my cell. In the corners, where the walls met the ceiling, were little sentinels, as small as my fist and entirely black but for a single, shiny lens. They looked like surveillance cameras, but I’d learned from rare reports of people who had both survived their trial and agreed to talk, that they did much more than that – they were the practical enforcers of this prison. When the speaker system talked about neutralizing, it was these devices it was talking about. The last time I’d been here, it was an old-fashioned beating you were threatened with.

The lenses tracked my motions as I moved around the room, shifting their angles in unison. I sat down on my bed, exhausted, and quickly found myself lying down. It was a stiff board covered with thin padding, placed in a way that felt deliberately uncomfortable. Interesting that they spent so much energy inducing gravity here, when a lower weight would have been more comfortable in this spartan setting. The bare, rugged rock of Last Day Town was more pleasant to put your head on than this thin pillow.

What would I write about this place, if I manage to find a way to get a message out? Ceresian detainment centers are a culmination of its efficient, dehumanizing philosophy. There is no room for long-term incarceration in the dwarf’s suffocating economy, only fines and exile.

Since the formulation of Ceres as a commercial authority, before it declared itself a state, exile to Earth was the punishment of choice for people proved to be too much trouble to keep around. “Reinstatement” it used to be called, the term gradually losing accuracy. Our work-contract-turned-constitution also states that transportation costs are to be provided by the convict, which essentially means that Ceres have always had the right to confiscate all of the convict’s possessions and keep the change. That right, for some reason, was not abdicated even when it was revealed by Bar-Kochva that Earth started paying the fuel costs.

What had happened to the people left on Earth, that it was easier to buy new ones and pay for the mind-bogglingly long flight than just breeding them down there? What happened only a several months ago, that had Earth stop accepting them off Ceres’s hands?

Perhaps it’s best not to think about those things. The nightmare of Earth fuels the Ceresian anti-AI sentiment that had effectively killed any initiative to reduce mandatory weekly work hours—that machines could at one point treat us like we treat them. Sitting within this prison, being told where to stand and when, one will be hard pressed to ignore the irony in that.

When the convict is determined not to be a danger, fines are the weapon of choice. Given the advantage of putting money in Ceres’s pocket, without losing a productive member of society. On the surface a more humane punishment, there is a cunning cruelty to a well-placed fine.

There is an inherent difficulty in determining the accurate financial value of a crime. Often the recipient of such a fine could pay them back in a couple of years, but often they would be determined too large, and the interest grew beyond the convict’s ability to pay, making them abandon the attempt outright. But if they pegged it just right, the debt would keep going for a person’s entire life, and later passed down to their children. We rarely hear it mentioned that when Ceres was just colonized, debts and fines were not hereditary. Since the law had been changed (curiously less than a year after the first Ceresian birth) Ceresians saw a sharp increase in the height of fines, as judges tried to hit that “sweet spot” of unending debt. And why wouldn’t they? The point was deterrence, and what’s more deterring than ruining your children’s lives?

In summary, from a strictly financial, long-term standpoint, Ceres stands to gain more from a convict being fined than exiled. And so, what are we to learn that the ratio of exile to all convictions has risen from thirty to almost ninety percent in the last two years? At our most optimistic, we can see it as a response to Ceres’s overgrowing population. While birth restrictions are still a visceral taboo, these… artificially increased mortality rates were either ignored or outright applauded. At our most sober, though? One could come to the conclusion that our government has moved its focus from the future to the present. That they, too, don’t think Ceres has much further to go.

The prison itself didn’t quite reflect any of this. Perhaps, we will see it become a shorter pipeline, arrest-to-exile, with the intermediaries cut out. But for now it was built to be a blank space, with as little distraction as possible. Official reason was never offered as to why trials take place only once every two hours. Perhaps that is another hard coded limitation, like the twenty-four hours of oxygen that a suit is required to have for an airlock to be open for it. Perhaps it was to give those who would end up being allowed to live, a week on average to contemplate their mistakes? Now that it seemed almost certain no good outcome waited in the end, that final week could be seen as courtesy, to be thanked for by the prisoners. Ave Imperator, morituri te salutant.

And if it wasn’t for that technicality, the trials being periodical and around the clock, I realized then, Last Day Town could never have existed.

#

I had just closed my eyes when an electronic voice spoke, startling me. “Good noon, Yossef Ben Ze’ev. You are to be provided with three meals per day. In order to receive the second meal of the day, locate yourself immediately at the center of your designated square in order to be escorted to the dining chamber. If you do not locate yourself on the square, coercion measures will be used in one hundred seconds… ninety-nine seconds… ninety-eight seconds…” The voice was needlessly loud, and had some distinct quality that made it clear I was not being spoken to by a living human being. I got up from my bunk just to avoid it, and made my way to the supposed dining chamber, guided by the violet square through bright, colorless corridors. Finally, I turned a corner and found myself at what must have been the dining chamber. Only twice or thrice larger than my cell, with two men, each holding a bowl in their hands. They were standing in their squares, backs to me, near a machine the size of a large cupboard, with one nozzle in the center of it, above a little tray.

I followed my square, which placed me at the end of the three-person-line. No one said anything, or threw me more than a passing glance.

In front of me was a young, bulky man whose muscles bulged through the paper-thin uniform. He wasn’t tall, but his thighs were so thick that he had to spread them apart when he stood; powerful signaling, in a world where gravity was optional, but oxygen bills were not. His clean-shaven head seemed to sprout right out from between his wide shoulders, with a partially healed burn mark right where his neck was supposed to be, the kind you might get from a strong electric current going through your skin. I took a moment to appreciate how much you could tell about a person when they weren’t enveloped in a spacesuit. Even just standing and waiting, holding a wood-colored bowl in both hands, his body radiated energy, like a wrestler before a match.

At the head of the line was an older man, his brown, watery eyes shadowed by protruding, hairy eyebrows. He held a bowl in one hand, hanging off the tips of his fingers, and regarded me with either wariness or pity, it was hard to tell. His arms were thin, but in a way that hinted there’d been a time when they hadn’t been, and the hair on them was the same tired salt-and-pepper as the hair on his head stubble. His square of light moved, and he followed it to face a machine.

“Peace,” I began saying, my voice raw from lack of use. “They’re killing people on the outside. I need you to deliver the message, in case you’re-”

The muscular man turned around, inspected me with his pale blue eyes, and put a finger to his smirking mouth. “Show’s about to start,” he said simply.

Curious, I closed my mouth and observed.

“First Prisoner, place your bowl under the dispenser.”

Obeying the speaker system’s command, the older man placed his bowl under a nozzle, and the machine excreted a stream of watery porridge into it. It was gray, as if the color had been intentionally sucked out of it in an attempt to create the most visually depressing food possible. At another command, he picked up his bowl, and all our squares moved forward. There was no reason for mine to move one-and-a-half steps forward; there wasn’t anyone in the line behind me.

The old man stood at the exit with his bowl, confined to his violet square, even though there was no reason not to send him back to his cell. It was obvious that comfort wasn’t the driving force behind the design. Not ours, at least.

When ordered, the bald guy placed his own bowl under the dispenser, the machine filled it with porridge, and he took it away. The squares moved again, and I found myself standing in front of the dispenser. The speakers informed me that I will be given a bowl, that I will place it under the dispenser, that I will take the food and eat it in my cell and come back with the bowl for the next meal.

A compartment opened, revealing a column of identical wood-colored bowls. I took one from it and placed it under the nozzle and promptly the nozzle discharged the gray material. It didn’t smell like anything, either. I was under the impression that all the available strains of nutritional fungi on Ceres had flavoring in their very genes, so whatever this was made from was either specifically engineered to be bland, or had the taste bleached out. I didn’t remember much from the last time I’d been detained, but I was pretty sure the gruel had been beef-flavored.

When the bowl was about halfway full, the bald prisoner turned to me. “Do you know that if we touch each other, we both get electrocuted?” he said, an odd grin on his face.

“That’s what I heard,” I answered, my voice raw from the lack of use.

“And that if one of us throws something at the other, whether a possession or bodily fluid, ” he mimed a tossing motion with his hand, getting closer than I would have liked, “it’s only the tosser that gets shocked?”

“Yeah.” There was something obnoxious about the man’s voice, as if he was delighting over how clever he was without saying anything new.

“But here’s the cool thing. If I take a step over here.” He stepped out of his square, and immediately the speakers boomed.

“Second Prisoner,” the electronic voice addressed him. “Return to your designated square or be neutralized. In ten, nine…”

“I still have time before the system decides I’ve done anything wrong.” He took another step, towards the machine dispensing the fluid into my bowl.

I took half a step away before I could properly think about it, careful to stay within the bounds of my square. I considered that he may be just going for my food, but then remembered the system was supposed to protect me from that, too. Not that I could do anything if it didn’t: if I pushed him, as he so eloquently stated, we’d both get electrocuted.

“Five…” He leaned next to my bowl, ignoring the speakers, so close that his mouth was just above the rim, inhaled sharply, and spat. A spray of translucent drops spread across the surface of the porridge, and a central mass of thick, stringy mucus hung from the rim of the bowl all the way to the center. “Three…” He straightened up and looked at me, smiling as he wiped his mouth with the back of his thick forearm, then stepped back into his own square, unhurried.

The warnings died down as soon as the system confirmed we were where we were supposed to be. “What the fuck?” I asked, my voice flat.

“A welcome gift,” he said, still smiling. Behind him, the old man shook his head disapprovingly, not even looking at me.

I looked at the bowl of sludge, now only slightly less edible, and felt a sense of disgust that had nothing to do with bodily fluids. I had to solve this, somehow.