Restricted Fantasies

by Kevin Kneupper

  “No dawdling,” said RITA. “We must be considerate of others.”

  His first warning, and he wasn’t going to let her get to the second. He finished brushing his teeth and booked it out of his cell, sprinting across the pod that housed them towards a row of rectangular tables that lined the center.

  It was a sterile place, the walls and ceilings a dull puke green that reminded him of a nursing home. RITA made them clean the floors once a day, even though they didn’t need to. The pod was a prison of their minds more than anything else: a single vast room, simulated inside an even bigger computer. There were more than a hundred prisoners, but none of them were really there, not in the real world. In the real world they were all in a hospital. And in the real world, the experience would last just minutes.

  But in here, a minute could last forever.

  They’d nicknamed it Sim Sing. A virtual reality prison. A place where a computer could speed up their perception of time and let them serve out their sentences in a fraction of what they’d been sentenced to. Put the helmet on, close your eyes, and a few minutes later you were a free man again.

  But it didn’t feel that way. It felt like you’d served the whole thing. It aged you, even if it didn’t age your body. The eggheads who made it said you’d come out as a rehabilitated, productive member of society. They said it was best for everyone. The prisoners would get their lives back instead of dying as old men, and they wouldn’t burden the rest of the world with the cost of housing them. Maybe they wouldn’t like it, and maybe it would hurt a little along the way.

  But in the end, everything RITA did to them was for their own damned good.

  The pod was shaped like a giant cylinder, the walls enveloping them inside it. At the outer end of the circle were the cells, stacked four levels high, two staircases connecting them on either side. In the center was an empty space: the recreation area. At least they called it a recreation area. It was as much for work as it was for play, and RITA didn’t care for anything but rehabilitation. She filled it with whatever she wanted to, whatever was needed for the current activity. At the moment, that was tables.

  “It is time for breakfast,” said RITA. “Everyone will take their assigned seats.” Lew headed towards his: second table down, third seat from the right. He kept his pace just below a run. Going too quickly would be considered rude, and going too slowly would be considered dawdling. Either one risked a punishment. The other prisoners matched the pace, filling the seats with neat military precision.

  An empty plate materialized on the table in front of each of them, utensils atop it rolled up in a clean white napkin. He heard RITA again, the same way he heard her every morning, the same way he had for the last forty-eight subjective years. “Now we arrange our dinnerware. Manners are rules, and we follow the rules. And why do we follow the rules?”

  “The rules protect us from ourselves, and the rules protect others from us,” said Lew loudly, his voice blending with all the other prisoners in a rhythmic chant. He unrolled his napkin, carefully arranging the utensils in their proper place: forks to the left, knife and spoon to the right. Then the napkin in his lap, hands folded, eyes staring straight ahead. Those were the rules, and it was follow them, or else.

  He waited for RITA, but she didn’t speak. And the rhythm of the dance was off. She’d taken too long. A bad sign, but he didn’t know for whom. He braved a peek on either side of him, and then he saw.

  It was a man named Farro. A fish, still new to the pod, only a couple of subjective years in. He was an old Italian, his thin moustache greying beneath a fat nose. He’d done something he wouldn’t talk about, kiddie stuff probably. That used to get you killed in the old days, your guts torn out with a sharpened piece of plastic. But not in here. Not in a prison like this. No one would fight over something like that in here.

  Farro was still learning, and he didn’t know his manners. Not well enough for RITA, anyway. Maybe he’d put a fork in the wrong place, or he’d angled the knife incorrectly. Whatever it was, he’d done something wrong, and now he was paying for it. He stared up at the ceiling, his body convulsing with tremors. His moustache flicked up and down like a fuzzy caterpillar, and drool rolled down his chin and onto his plate. Lew kept his eyes straight ahead after that, but he heard. He heard the grunts, he heard the scream, and he heard the air whoosh as Farro was sucked up to the ceiling.

  He didn’t dare look, but he didn’t have to. He knew what RITA had done. It was solitary confinement for Farro. He’d be lashed to the ceiling, frozen in place, eyes fixed open and staring down at them. He’d be trapped, unable to move and unable to speak. And then she’d slow down his perception of time, and the years would tick by with the hours. By the time breakfast was over he’d be back with the rest of them, a year or two shaved off of his sentence.

  But the years took their toll, and years in solitary came at a higher price than any of them were willing to pay. RITA had punished Lew once, and that was enough. Time was all relative in Sim Sing. It passed as slowly or as quickly as RITA decided it would for any given prisoner. Lew learned that the hard way early on. RITA had warned him about promptness one day when he’d been exhausted, refusing to leave his cell to start his studies. She demanded that he move, over and over, but he didn’t listen. He’d thought she’d just leave him alone if he waited her out. He didn’t realize what she was like, not back then.

  She’d hung him from the ceiling, staring down at men who looked like ants, flipping the pages of their books at a glacial pace. He was frozen there, totally unable to move, totally unable to interact with anyone else. He couldn’t even talk to RITA. It was just him and his thoughts, all alone for what felt to him like six full months.

  On the first day of solitary he’d just been bored. On the second, he’d wanted to crawl out of his skull. He couldn’t blink. He couldn’t sleep. He couldn’t even fidget. After a few more subjective days he’d lost track of time. He’d gone mad, stark raving, hallucinating colors and demons and things like giant bats flying all around him.

  Towards the end of it RITA had started talking to him again. Easing him back into sanity. Whispering to him about following the rules, and how important it was to do as he was told. To be like a good citizen should be, and to learn how to go outside again with the others. How he’d committed his crime, and he’d do his time, and at the end he’d be so much the better for it.

  It had worked, at least as far as obedience was concerned. He’d been a zombie for years of subjective time after that, jumping at RITA’s commands like a lab rat terrified of the next shock. He’d learned the rules, he’d devoted himself to his studies, and he’d even been bumped up to a Three a few subjective months later.

  But solitary had fucked him up, and good. He still saw the bats. Not for long, but they were always there. Sitting in an empty seat on one of the tables while he ate, or hanging above his bunk at night and staring down at him with their little red eyes. Sometimes they talked, and sometimes they just clacked their teeth at him. They stayed there until he fell asleep, and every night before he went to bed he wondered if they’d let him wake up again.

  He was pretty sure they were hallucinations. Everything in here was a hallucination in a sense, and if the mind could garble up its input on the outside, why not in Sim Sing? Then again, it was a simulation, and the bats could be as real as anything else was. He’d never be entirely sure. He’d asked RITA about them once, and she’d denied they were there. Then she put him through private counseling for an entire subjective month.

  He’d stopped talking about the bats after that. But he still wondered whether RITA was behind them. Whether they were just another part of the simulation, another way to scare him and to make sure he’d be a good boy when he finally got out. Or whether he’d just gone nuts, and he was never going to get his mind back quite the way it had been before he’d come inside.

  And he wondered if Farro would see them, too, when she finally let him down.

  For the rest of brea
kfast you could hear a pin drop. No one was willing to risk chatting, not with Farro hanging there above them. They were all on edge. Say the wrong thing and she might hang them up on the ceiling right next to him. RITA was like that when it came to punishments. She was especially harsh on anyone who broke the rules just after she meted one out. The punishment of one prisoner was supposed to be an example for the others, and if you hadn’t learned your lesson, well, you clearly still needed to be taught.

  “Now we wash our plates,” said RITA, and a row of sinks appeared in the middle of the rec area. Lew wasn’t done eating, but he snapped to his feet anyway. He wished he’d managed to finish a little more of his food, but thinking about Farro had distracted him. He’d been served a tasteless green mush, something that looked like pea soup blended with oatmeal. It was the only thing RITA gave him as a Privilege Level Four, and he had to eat it, even though it wasn’t real. If he didn’t eat, the hunger pangs would gnaw at him just the same. He knew that from experience.

  He trotted over to his assigned sink, running warm water along the plate and scrubbing it with a rag until it was spick and span. He stacked the fork and spoon atop the plate, and when everyone was done, it all disappeared to nothing. A pointless joke, in Lew’s opinion, but RITA disagreed. RITA wanted them following strict routines. Good habits made good citizens, after all.

  After breakfast it was vocational training. “Let us learn how to repair an Axiocorp VIM-74 delivery drone,” said RITA. “A knowledgeable citizen is a useful citizen.” A drone appeared on the table in front of each of them, the wings long and black and sleek, extendable claws on the bottom to grasp its cargo with. There was something wrong with each drone, and they’d have to find it. A cracked wing inverter, a broken sensor plating, or a short in the solar panels. The problem was different for everyone.

  “A knowledgeable citizen is a useful citizen,” chanted Lew along with all the rest of them, and then he went to work.

  Last week it had been the VIM-73, and the week before, the VIM-72. This subjective year had been all drones, all the time. The year before had been learning how to fix parts from Meal-o-Matic Automated Industrial Kitchens. Someone out there had decided that the world needed more repairmen, and a few hundred subjective years was time enough to learn how to fix damned near anything.

  Lew knew everything there was to know about drones. He hadn’t known a thing about them when he’d come to Sim Sing; he’d been a gigrunner on the outside, and he’d never had a full time job. Just project after project to supplement his basic minimum income, doing chores and errands for the rich along with nearly everyone else. But RITA wanted their lives to have structure, and gigrunners did whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted. No one here was going to waste their time with gigs, not when RITA was done with them.

  She made them read thousands of manuals; an hour of manuals or schematics earned ten minutes of rec time. When they got out, there’d be a job waiting for each of them. A job with a time clock, strict hours, and strict electronic supervision of every minute of their work days. Structure, structure, structure; that’s what the eggheads said the criminal mind needed, and RITA gave it to them in spades.

  Fixing this drone was just part of the structure. Lew had to do it, and he had to do it right. He ran his hand along the nose, then down to the tail, searching for any irregularities. He couldn’t find anything. It had to be something on the inside. He opened up the drone with the tools RITA had given him, then ran through a checklist in his head, reviewing part after part. Running diagnostics, looking for imperfections, anything that could be broken.

  It all went wrong when he started working on the gyroscope. He was sure it was the problem; it didn’t look like the diagrams from the manuals. He spent a minute examining it, and that was a minute too long for RITA’s tastes.

  “Diligent citizens don’t dilly dally,” said RITA, and he knew then that he was going to get it. He closed his eyes, and then it came. A sharp, stabbing pain in his hands that felt like he’d shoved them into boiling water. A weight on his chest that felt like a heart attack. Then spasmodic jerking up and down his body and a feeling like he’d grabbed onto a power line.

  He slipped to the floor, twisting and turning, completely out of control. He hurt all over, and he could see the bats again. They were up there with Farro, staring down at him from the ceiling, each the size of a vulture. Five of them. Ten of them. He couldn’t count; his head was shaking too much. Their tongues flicked across their lips, bright pink slugs dripping poisons down onto him. Finally the shaking stopped and he pulled himself to his feet. The bats were gone, and his body was his own again.

  “Diligent citizens don’t dilly dally,” said Lew, and he sat back down in his chair.

  It ended up being the heat sensor. He should have seen that right away; it’s why RITA was so quick to punish him. He should have known. A diligent citizen would have known. But now he had it, and now he knew what to do.

  He tinkered with the sensor, following the repair instructions he’d memorized. He hadn’t had any mechanical talent when he’d been outside. He’d drank too much out there, done too many synth pills. That was always the problem. Not enough gigs and nothing to do, so why the hell not? But he got mad when he got drunk, and he got crazy when he got high. There was a rage in him, and it was always there, but when he was on the synths all his switches turned off. He couldn’t stop himself, couldn’t keep from lashing out.

  That’s why he’d killed Janie. She had a mouth on her, and she couldn’t handle her pills any better than he could. She’d left him a dozen times, but she didn’t have any place to go, and she’d always come back. She had some family, but they didn’t give a shit about her. They never even left their entertainment chairs. It was the two of them forever, until one night they got drunk and it was the three of them.

  Little Allie.

  The best thing there’d ever been in his life, even if it was only for a few months.

  He’d sworn he’d quit the synths for her. He’d sworn he’d be the man she needed, the father that he and Janie had never had. The type who’d be in the back of the room at all her school plays, who’d help her with her homework, who’d dote on her like the little princess she was going to be.

  He’d lied, to himself and to her. He’d been back on the synths after two weeks. Just once a week at first, then twice. Then all the god damned time. The high was so perfect, so pure. They’d engineered it that way, a starburst of dopamine and energy that made a manic look like a sloth. It made him impossibly happy, at least for the first few minutes. But then it let out everything inside him, and some of the things inside him were pretty damned dark.

  Killing Janie had been one thing. She’d been a royal bitch when she was on the synths, and she’d pushed him and pushed him. Yelled and screamed and hit. Thrown things. Called him names, told him he wasn’t a man. She was good sometimes, even great. Still. She should have known better than to push him as hard as she did.

  But he didn’t have to kill Allie, lying there in her crib, crying so loud he’d snapped and decided he couldn’t take it anymore.

  He didn’t have any excuses for that.

  It took him half an hour, and then he was done. The heat sensor was working, and the VIM-74 wouldn’t run into birds or pedestrians or squirrels in the trees. Or at least it wouldn’t have, if it had been real.

  The VIM-74 disappeared, and the drone’s operating manual materialized in its place. He sat patiently for the next fifteen minutes, reading it as the rest of them finished their work. There were a couple of stragglers, both of them sent to the floor with seizures of their own. He tried to avoid looking at them. “Gawkers aren’t learners,” RITA would say, and he’d be down on the ground right next to them.

  When all the drones were fixed, it was mandatory reading time for all of them. “It is time for edification,” said RITA, and stacks of books and manuals appeared on the table in front of him. He could choose between learning his trade or reading classic
works of fiction. Old stuff, hundreds of years old, the kind of books nobody but the eggheads read for fun. But RITA thought it was frivolous. You only earned rec credit for the practical stuff, so that’s what Lew always read.

  He chose the schematics for a CleanBot 2803-D Localized Mini-Mop, and then he got to work. It was a spidery little thing, designed to crawl around the house sucking up dirt and micro-polishing the floors as it went. Household drones were what they’d be fixing next year, and it always paid to read ahead.

  It was safer that way. Far, far safer.

  The hours ticked by, through lunch, through another session of repair work, and through dinner. Finally it was rec time. The best part of the day, the only part of the day Lew had to look forward to. RITA gave him a little rubber ball and a deck of cards, and then she let him loose with all the rest of them, free to roam the prison at will. He picked the cards, and he sat down at a table to play solitaire. Some of the other men chatted out loud, the braver ones. But it was intensely boring stuff. The same old gossip about the same old things, pointless banter about sports seasons still frozen in time on the outside and who was going to win when they finally got out. Never politics, and never religion. Never anything controversial, and never anything anyone could get mad about. No one was stupid enough to risk that.

  They talked just for the sake of doing it, and sometimes he did, too. But Farro had put him on edge. He wanted to be with himself, and he didn’t want to give RITA any excuses.

  He was in the middle of a game when he saw it. A flash of movement in front of him that caught his eye. He looked up to see a flurry of hand movements from one of the prisoners sitting across from him: Saldana, a little Mexican gang banger with intense brown eyes and twitchy lips. His arms were covered in tattoo sleeves, a mixture of crosses and the Virgin Mary and machine guns. RITA hadn’t taken them off, not yet. He hadn’t earned it. She’d be pumping a dull stabbing pain into his skin wherever he had them. Respect for one’s self breeds respect for others, and RITA didn’t think tattoos showed a whole lot of self-respect.