The World Idiot

by Hughes, Rhys

  I shook him free and fled the recreation area, my heart pounding. Then I soothed myself with the thought that I was merely the victim of a subtle jest, an experiment with practical paradox. An imprisoned licence avoider being forced to obtain a licence for a television set provided by the prison authorities. Utterly ridiculous! Yes, it was a jest. There could be no other sensible explanation, none at all.

  I soon located an unoccupied cell, possibly even my own, and fell into a troubled sleep on the uncomfortable mattress. When I awoke I saw that an envelope addressed to me had been slid under my door. It contained a warning letter from the corporation. Apparently, the inspectors had been alerted to the fact I didn’t have a valid licence. I sat trembling on the edge of the bed, awaiting developments.

  They came a few days later, dragged me away, pushed me up a ladder into another courtroom. Again I was found guilty by a flatscreen judge in a digital wig, then prodded, pinched and buffeted down endless corridors and through a door into a courtyard in the centre of which stood a smaller prison. I laughed unhappily. Prisons within prisons. A new sentry clasped me in his arms, hurried me inside.

  This prison was full of broadcast parasites who had defaulted not once but twice and we were made to feel doubly accursed. I had the impression that the process of relocating me here had somehow reduced my physical size as well as diminished my self-esteem. Body and soul shrunk to fit an implacable credo, the unbending and illogical will of the corporation, the nightmare of rigorous absurdity.

  The corridors of my new home were thin and confusing. I stumbled on the communal television room on my second day and stood silently at the entrance, swallowing hard. When I returned to my cell, the expected letter had already been delivered. It accused me of attempting to exist without a licence despite having access to a television. Inspectors would shortly be dispatched to deal with the anomaly…

  They came with their usual sarcasm and fists. This prison contained its own virtual courtroom and judge, its own courtyard that was the location of a third prison, to the entrance of which they dragged me. Then another strong sentry and bare cell, another automatic violation of the television licensing laws, another threatening letter. An appalling process had been set in motion. An inward spiral.

  The prisons grew progressively smaller, but so did I, so did my guards, and everything shrunk in perfect proportion, like a cannibal who boils his own head in the same pot as the skulls of his victims. One morning I had a visitor who was not an inspector. He identified himself as a corporation lawyer working for the best interests of the convicts. He entered my cell wearing a silk suit and oily smile.

  “There is another way,” he declared simply.

  “Kindly elucidate,” I replied.

  “Experiments are taking place on living specimens. Any prisoner who volunteers will be spared the indignity of constant arrest, trial, relocation. Your sentences are adding up into something resembling a paragraph, a page, or even a book, of despair. This can be stopped easily enough. You merely need to sign this form.”

  Without looking, I asked, “And if I do?”

  “A series of controls will be fitted into your nervous system. Knobs or buttons that can adjust your colour balance, your contrast, audibility, even the particular channel of your thoughts, whenever we desire. Your spinal fluid will be drained and replaced with a metallic solution that will enable you to receive corporation signals.”

  “And if I decline this generous offer?”

  “You will continue to occupy smaller and smaller prisons until you are trapped inside an institution no larger than a single pixel on a screen. That will be the point of no return, the dot of ultimate doom, the final spark of closedown, the singularity of sorrow!”

  I chewed my lip. “May I think it over tonight?”

  He nodded sourly. “I suppose so, but you must give an answer before the inspectors come for you at noon tomorrow. In the meantime be aware that the governor of the corporation, Bogie Laird, is visiting this prison in disguise. Nobody knows what form he has chosen, so it’s imperative to be humble to every individual you meet.”

  I blurted impulsively, “Are you Bogie Laird?”

  He snarled and raised his clenched fists, his silk suit splitting its seams as his muscles expanded. “How dare you be so perspicacious? I predict a traumatic final episode for you…”

  Then he lurched out of my cell, howling, his suit rapidly disintegrating as he went, leaving me in an acute state of agitation. But I recovered soon enough and emulated his example, vacating my cubicle and going for one of my usual random strolls. Down one passage I heard a bland vibration, a refreshing change from the ceaseless babble of televised entertainment, and I felt compelled to investigate.

  In a tiny room that stank of stale tobacco smoke and was slippery with spilled tea, a brace of off-duty guards sat around a prisoner who had been recently modified. Standing rigidly to attention, eyes popping with static, lips humming a monotone, the volunteer grimaced while one of the jaded guards slapped and shook him, restoring coherent reflections to his pupils for just a few moments at a time.

  I wanted to jump forward, make my indignant presence felt, sweep an admonishing finger across every bored face. I wanted to express my fury in a mighty shout. “So this is how you spend your free time? Surfing dead channels within the hopeless eyes of a prisoner! But do any of you have a valid licence to watch him? The corporation will be informed if you don’t and inspectors will be activated!”

  But before I could make the leap, it occurred to me that the prisoner in question might be none other than Bogie Laird in a new disguise, and the more I pondered this possibility the more convincing it became, so I lost my nerve and slipped away before I was noticed. My one chance to mock the system had been lost, my final opportunity to use irony as a retaliatory weapon had faded and dissolved.

  Naturally enough, after this incident, I was reluctant to submit myself for treatment and so the hideous cycle of arrest, trial and incarceration in diminishing prisons continued. After many years I reached the smallest of them all, a mere dot. I was trapped inside a single pixel on the screen of a television I presumed was unlicensed, a machine whose owner must soon be visited by the inevitable inspectors.

  Instead of eschewing the recreational facilities of my enforced abode, I wasted half my free time sitting in front of the communal television. Still without a licence, I was also without fear. Arrest entailed no motion at all, for there was nowhere even smaller to send me. It was therefore possible to safely ignore all warning letters. On some level, the lowest imaginable, I had finally cheated the authorities.

  But the entertainment on offer left much to be desired. Every channel displayed the same unchanging image, a room full of people who sat with their backs to me. They were dressed in grey clothes and their bald heads glistened in the glare of an unspecified light source as they watched with grim reverence something beyond the screen. I studied them intently and thought about them during my walks.

  Recursion can be a terrible thing, and one day I found a service ladder to the roof and climbed onto the tiles, my hands rouged with rust from the corroded rungs. There was no safe descent to the courtyard below. On all sides reared the walls of the next smallest prison, and above those loomed the higher walls of the third smallest prison, and over those leered the still taller walls of the fourth smallest…

  And so on, all the way back to the almost forgotten beginning. Prisons within courtyards, courtyards within prisons, prisons within the courtyard of the corporation tower. The concave surface of that impossible building appeared unimaginably remote now, as unattainable as the inner shell of the universe, and the lights of its windows burned like artificial quasars at the perimeter of a synthetic reality.

  The spectacle was unbearable, so I looked directly upwards instead. At the furthest limit of a cylinder so immense and imposing it contained all the misery I could ever conceive for myself, I beheld a glass screen with blurred faces on the other side that were most
ly fixed to the fronts of bald heads. Then I knew this truth. If I am part of a fictional drama and not a factual documentary, I might not go mad.