The Prisoner (2 page)

The programmer must have felt verbose.

At the base of the niche were two trays with slimy green things inside. She leaned forward a fraction. Not trays, but slight hollows. Laurel knew what came next, and the thought filled her with dread.

“To your right are earplugs. Hold one by the larger spherical end and insert the pointed end into your left ear.”

The plug felt like a blob of jelly, like the candy her mother used to make. Laurel tried to push her auburn mane out of the way and froze when her hand encountered air. There was not a hair left on her body. The blob fell to the floor and jiggled a little before coming to rest. The training had been one thing, but the reality was far more horrifying.

“Remain calm.” A click, then a different voice, this time female and with a warm Hispanic lilt. “Pick it up and try again, five-one-five-eight-five-three-one-six. No punishment for the accident. The floor is sterile.”

Laurel recovered the plug. The programmer hadn’t recorded instructions for this eventuality. It could be her imagination, but the new voice had a whiff of humanity, assuming the fallibility of fumbling fingers. After pushing both plugs into her ears, she waited until the voice sounded inside her head. It had switched to the implant in her neck.

“Continue with the nose plugs. Hold the spherical end and insert the pointed end into your left nostril. Breathe deeply.”

She held the nose plug, also green but much softer than the earpieces and long, at least three inches. It looked like a fat worm with a bloated ass. When Laurel pushed the tip into her nose, the slimy object slipped from her fingers and rammed deep into her, almost of its own accord. Then it fizzed and expanded, leaving a ball-shaped blob resting on her upper lip. She jerked her head back, panic gripping her muscles in an age-old terror.
I won’t be able to breathe!

“Remain calm. Repeat with your right nostril.”

Calm. Calm. Calm!
Her legs trembled, but she contracted her calves and bunched her toes. Almost over. Almost. With ears and nose plugged, the cold jelly feeling predictably alien, she stood motionless before the empty niche and tried to control her shortening gasps. Her tongue dried to a barky texture, like a piece of beached driftwood.

“Step into the next room.”

Laurel did a quick double take. The wall to her right had vanished and now opened into another room, its center occupied by a sinuous form.

“Lie down on the bed.”

Bed?
Like an abstract white sculpture, the form grew seamlessly
from the floor—a shape that reminded her of a sofa dreamed by a stoned avant-garde designer: a formless shiny mass dipping in its center. Laurel sat down and swung her legs over. She adjusted her anatomy to the shape, her shaking legs hampering her movements.

“Remain calm.”

For once, the voice made sense.

Gradually, the bed softened. Like an enormous amoeba, the shape absorbed her body. Laurel felt a powerful suction under her buttocks as the sculpture molded to her back and limbs.

She scrunched her eyes, terrified of what she knew would follow. The bed continued to move, adjusting, rearranging, softening and hardening in places, molding to her anatomy, and robbing it of any capacity to move. Her legs flexed at her knees and rose, her body adjusting to a child-delivery position. Then her head started to sink. She opened her eyes and tried to straighten out, but her head seemed caught in a vise.

Her head continued to fall. Now her toes must be pointing to the ceiling, and her head arched back almost to her spine, her throat stretched.

“Remain calm.”

Laurel rotated her eyes frantically. They were the only things she could move besides her gaping mouth, which drew in short gasps. The tips of her nose plugs tickled the back of her throat. Most would scream at this point, definitely, or at least whimper, or empty their bowels.

She detected movement on the fringe of her vision. A thick phallus-shaped green mass neared her face. She saw its tip approach her eyes and pause before the blobs projecting from her nose. This was it: the real thing, the truth. Somewhere deep in her mind, a voice screamed.

“Remain calm.”

Then the hoselike object rammed past her lips and slithered down her throat, sizzling, expanding, digging deep into her.

Then the lights went out, or she passed out, or died, and Laurel didn’t care anymore.

17:08

Impressive. His fears didn’t melt away—he
was
risking his neck—but the tension twisting Lukas Hurley’s gut into a painful knot relaxed a notch. He twiddled a joystick and zoomed a pin camera for a closer look at the woman’s expression. Yes, there was horror in the disfigured face, her mouth open wide to accept the long green cylinder into her throat. Horror, revulsion, and fear, but she’d done a good job of mostly masking all three. Donald Duck, the woman’s boss, had selected his people well. Lukas thought the moniker he’d chosen apt. His only contact had been a quacking voice on a phone.

Money could be a powerful enticement and Donald Duck had paid him a truckload already, with a second installment due before the end of the day. The problem was, if the Department of Homeland Security caught him, Lukas could look forward to a similar truncheon down his throat on his way to a tank. His hands felt clammy. He rubbed his palms over the front of his lab whites, then reached down to a drawer and removed three plastic envelopes. He rested them on top of a wastepaper basket he’d positioned to one side under his desk.

Flat on his work surface, a tablet PC displayed an inmate’s restricted file of a type he’d never seen before. Prisoners bound for hibernation in the central area of the tanks arrived at his station without personal records or names, only numbers—long numbers and a bar code. Lukas peered at a holograph of a serious-looking bald woman with a row of numbers superimposed on her chest.
Laurel Cole, 26, 5’3”. Caucasian. Lawyer. 913. Center
.

No term of sentence—not that Lukas expected to see one.
Center inmates didn’t merit hope. Yet he knew the courts had sentenced the woman and her colleagues to only a two-year stretch. Someone had doctored their files with the
Center
tag. Someone from Donald Duck’s team, and that spelled clout.

The operators outside the fishbowl, as workers called his office, could follow inmates past the intubation room all the way to the hibernation tanks. But not all the inmates. Those earmarked with only a number and a bar code faded from their screens after intubation. There was a rumor that the inmates sent to occupy the center spaces in the tanks were test subjects, willing guinea pigs to improve hibernation technology in exchange for a lump sum paid to their families. But Hypnos, the corporation running the hibernation penal installations, had never confirmed that, and Lukas didn’t believe a word of it anyway. He’d never seen any testing involving center inmates, only oblivion. Supervisors like him were the only ones with clearance to escort these rare souls on their voyage—a task made more palatable by a modest bonus each time they donned the cloak of eternal ferryman. Lukas, a modern-day Charon with a Christian evangelist’s name—a supreme paradox.

During hibernation, inmates were suspended in concentric rows inside tanks measuring thirty feet square and nine deep. A cross-shaped, six-foot-wide empty area bisected each tank to simplify maneuvering the bodies in and out of their allotted positions and up to the maintenance labs above.

When engineers at the Department of Homeland Security had studied the layouts, they complained about the wasteful arrangement.
Can’t we pack inmates closer? Why the empty corridors and centers?
Eventually they had seen the sense in the corridors, because they were necessary for operation, but insisted Hypnos find a use for the center of the space and increase the tank capacity by four, from 136 to 140 inmates. Hypnos Inc. obliged and produced a design to populate the central areas. Yet the blueprints presented to Congress were the original ones: 136 inmates to a tank and an empty middle. An empty space that didn’t show up in any statistic and didn’t appear occupied in any of the scant published diagrams available to the public. And such spaces were always
deserted in the tanks the DHS inspectors were allowed to see. Congress approved the untouched arrangement—a clear sign of someone’s powerful and anonymous footwork. Lukas suspected the unknown someone or someones used the extra room to store enemies.

In his ten years at the company, he’d accompanied a dozen wretches into areas that didn’t exist in the station’s formal layout or its architectural drawings. It was a clever ploy. Where to hide a tree? In the woods, of course. Where to hide a body? In a tank full of them. Yes, the C area looked innocent enough, but it was a limbo for anonymous souls.

Lukas pecked at his tablet PC and the holograph grew. Laurel. The Spanish name of a splendid Mediterranean shrub:
Laurus nobilis
, bay. He tasted the name of the woman in the photograph, pondering that Romans used bay’s aromatic leaves to make triumphal crowns for victors.
Laurel—what an encouraging name
. He’d risked storing the files Donald Duck had supplied on his tablet to learn the faces and names he otherwise would have never known.

The first time he had heard the quacking voice on his cell phone—obviously filtered through a distorting circuit—Lukas thought someone was having fun and severed the call. That was before two men pushed him into the back of a car as he was leaving for work, drove him to an abandoned warehouse, and made him stand before a quacking speaker. He’d never met the voice’s owner, but it belonged to a persuasive man. A few days after his abduction, Lukas fielded a call from Cuzco, Peru, to learn from his awed bank manager that Donald Duck was not only persuasive but also true to his word.

After selecting one of his files, Lukas placed it on standby. During the minutes following an inmate’s intubation, the program locked on to a routine to coax his or her body into deep hibernation—a tamper-proof routine coupled to scores of fail-safe sensors. Once the inmate was stabilized, the program looped into its maintenance subroutine; this was the spot where Lukas had to slip the patch provided by Donald Duck’s men. The lines of code would override the maintenance program, hiking the Thermogenin dosing into Laurel’s
bloodstream—a protein to uncouple the electron transport chain from the reaction producing adenosine triphosphate. As a result, her body would produce heat by thermogenesis and ward off the onset of hypothermia. Then the rogue patch would loop yet again into the reanimation sequence. When Lukas finished, he adjusted Laurel’s mixture of gases and set a timer to launch his patch for ten minutes after immersion in the fluid. A tiny set of numerals appeared on the top of the middle screen and remained static.

Lukas bit his lower lip and ran his hands down the front of his lab coat again. Within a few hours, he would be on his way to Peru with Elena. In the land of the Inca Empire and Machu Picchu, they would build a big house and settle as wealthy landowners, to her family’s chagrin. “He’s a loser; a jailer,” her brothers had insisted. “And twice your age.” Or perhaps they said a jailer and a loser, but the order of words didn’t matter. Her father had spat at his feet and had slapped Elena’s face. That had mattered, had stuck in his gut like a branding iron.

Over the three plasma panels on his desk, Lukas glanced through the bubble isolating his office from the main control room. He weighed the expressions and postures of his staff. Normal, routine faces, a tinge of boredom here and there. He looked at an expanse of synoptic boards, counters, and the myriad screens of the network controlling the station. Normal. No flashing lights out of sync. From Lukas’s vantage point, the control room could have been in any power station. At desks bristling with overrides, screens, and communications terminals, four men and a woman followed the automatic processing of inmates into the station. From a peak of over thirty thousand, occupation had halved in less than ten years, so there was plenty of room.

After processing and during their sentence, the inmates remained suspended in a fluid. At intervals of four to six weeks, the computer would remove them from the tank and coax their body temperature to normal for a few hours, triggering extensive protein synthesis. Since chemical degradation of macromolecules piled up—although at a slower rate in low
temperatures—periodic arousal was necessary for their bodies to repair and flush organs, tissues, and cells. Of course, the inmates remained deeply sedated during these periods, to prevent psychological damage.

His central screen offered a view of an empty room clouded by the steam from high-pressure lances, which were sterilizing the bed Laurel had just left. Lukas turned to another screen, where a young black man inserted plugs in his ears and nose with an expressionless face. Again, impressive. On his laptop, Lukas scrolled down to a file.
Bastien Compton, 28, 5’11”. African-American. Lawyer. 913. Center
.

Lukas keyed a string of instructions onto his keyboard, and a screen on his right flared to life with a layout of tank 913. Less than half full, and its center occupied by a single inmate: Eliot Russo, a long-term resident. Why him? Eight years in hibernation? It was too long. It occurred to Lukas that the costly ploy to spring the man from 913 was a waste of time. He was bound to be raving mad after eight years in a tank. An unlucky tank with the number 13. Then Lukas frowned and added the digits of tank 913. Doubly unlucky. A tank with two 13s. But that wasn’t his concern. By the time Russo regained consciousness, if he ever did, Lukas would be out of the country.