Lew looked up again, and Saldana locked eyes with him, moving his hands. It was sign language, the only way they could communicate without RITA following along. She knew English, Spanish, and even Romanian. Dimitrescu had learned that lesson the hard way. Whatever language the prisoners spoke when they came inside, she’d been programmed to understand.
But one of the prisoners had slipped in a few subjective centuries back who’d grown up with a deaf sister. They didn’t know about that on the outside, or maybe they hadn’t had time to figure it out. It might have only been an hour or so out there since the first of them had come inside. The prisoner had known sign language, and RITA didn’t. So he’d taught someone else, and then someone else, and eventually they were all signing up a storm.
RITA didn’t even know what they were doing. They moved their hands slowly, and she thought they were just fidgeting. It was a pidgin language all their own, a mix of the original with signs for every profane thing they could think of. And it was the only way they could talk to one another in peace.
“She’s in a pissy mood today,” signed Saldana.
“How’s Farro?” signed Lew, glancing up from his cards.
“Looks fucked up, man,” signed Saldana.
Indeed he did. Farro was down again, sitting in his seat, bouncing his little ball on the table in front of him. But his face was blank, and foaming bits of saliva collected at the corners of his mouth. His eyes were wide, and he wasn’t blinking.
It must have been bad. He must have seen bats, or maybe something even worse.
“Hey, man,” signed Saldana. “You gotta see something in my cell.”
Lew stared down at his cards. It could be a trick. Some of the prisoners were still just as violent as they’d been on the outside. He hadn’t done anything to piss off Saldana, not that he knew of, but lots of them were crazy. Most of them weren’t crazy enough to break the rules, but sometimes somebody snapped. They’d start looking for reasons to fuck with someone just to break up the tedium, as long as they thought they could get away with it.
RITA could stop Saldana in a moment if he attacked him, but maybe she wouldn’t. There weren’t many fights, not for decades at a time, but when one happened, sometimes she let it go on and on just to let all the anger loose. No one else would be watching them in the cells, so she wouldn’t have to set an example for the others, not right away. She could wait and punish them any time she wanted, and she always did.
But a fight was the least of his worries. It wasn’t the preferred method of fucking with someone, not in here. The real psychos let RITA do their dirty work. Trip someone up somehow and get RITA to catch them breaking the rules, and your victim would be begging for something as trivial as a beating.
Saldana was up to something, and he didn’t want to know what. It was safer to stay away.
“Can’t,” signed Lew. “Can’t go inside your cell. She won’t like it. She’ll see.”
“Got to,” signed Saldana. “You won’t believe it. But I need some help. You gotta help me out. This is big. You’ll see. It’s just me in there. You gotta come see.”
“Can’t,” signed Lew. Saldana was going nuts, and he didn’t want any part of it. Saldana’s cellmate had gotten out a few subjective decades ago. His crime was just a felony assault, and he’d only had a few years. He was in and out, and not a lot of people came in, not anymore. It couldn’t have been more than a few minutes outside since Lew had arrived, and he’d probably finish his sentence before they had time to hook anyone else up to the machines.
Maybe Saldana was going crazy in there all alone, sitting in the darkness with no one around him. Cellmates were a hassle. They snored, they took up space, and sometimes they talked too much. But they grounded you. Kept you tied to everyone else. Gave you someone to talk to in private. Saldana didn’t have that, and it was driving him wild.
“Just come,” signed Saldana. “I need help. You gotta—”
Lew quit looking. Whatever Saldana was signing, he didn’t want to see it. RITA was going to find out, and she wasn’t going to like it. He stared at the manual instead, waiting out the rest of rec time without looking up. Saldana could keep his tricks to himself.
“The lights will go out in twenty minutes, and we will be in our beds,” said RITA, and rec time was over.
Lew carefully put the cards back into the pack, sealing it up and putting it in its proper place in the middle of the table. As he walked away, Saldana brushed up against him, flashing him a few more furtive signs before he trotted back to his cell.
“Lew,” signed Saldana. “Lew, I found a way out. And we gotta use it while we can.” Then he smiled, nodded, and disappeared into his cell.
A way out.
He didn’t believe it. He wanted to follow up, to ask what he’d meant, but Saldana was already gone. There wasn’t any way out. The only way out was to wait. Three-hundred eighty-four years, and then he was free. Until then he was trapped along with all the rest of them. He’d been right. Saldana had gone completely nuts.
Lew made for his cell and started into his bedtime routine. He’d wasted twenty, maybe thirty seconds, and he had to get moving if he was going to be safe.
“Lights-out will commence in five minutes,” said RITA. “We will brush our teeth, and we will remember to floss. The healthier we are, the more valuable we are to others.”
“The healthier we are, the more valuable we are to others,” said Lew, and he got to work with his toothbrush. He made it just in time, spitting out the last bit of mouthwash and jumping into bed moments before the lights flickered off.
He couldn’t sleep. Some of it was the usual stuff. One of the bats was perched on the bathroom sink in his cell, its eyes glowing yellow in the dark. It kept chattering at him in a high-pitched screeching voice, and it only knew a single word. “Allie. Allie. Allie.”
He tried not to look at it. The bats always smiled when he looked at them.
Then there was the snoring. His cellmate had a problem with it. Henderson, a bloated union guy from somewhere in the Midwest. He was old, near retirement age, and he should have just quit and lived on his basic minimum. But he’d embezzled a bunch of money instead, and now he’d never make it to the paradise he was always going on about. The Florida Automated Beach Community for Citizens of Wisdom and Value, the place he’d been saving up all his money to get to. He’d serve his sentence in here instead, and then he’d end up living out the rest his life in a cheap entertainment chair.
Until then he was snoring.
And even if there wasn’t all that, Lew wouldn’t have been able to get to sleep. Not with what Saldana had said. He couldn’t quit thinking about it. A way out.
It couldn’t possibly be real. Saldana had snapped. This place did that to people, the longer they were in here. The doctors would find that out in a few hours back in the real world, once they were all on the outside for good. Saldana was mad as a hatter.
But then again, so was Lew. The bats knew it, even if nobody else did.
He inched his hand under the covers, taking a few minutes to gradually move it all the way down to his crotch. He was going to be up anyway. Might as well try to sneak one in. He started rubbing, almost too slowly to feel anything.
And then he heard the voice.
“Masturbation is not permitted, Lewis,” said RITA.
He jerked his hand up to his shoulders. He was the only one who could hear her, or at least he hoped he was. He waited a few minutes, eyes pressed shut, but she didn’t punish him. It was one of the only things she was ever lenient about. The eggheads must have known they’d keep trying no matter what RITA did, and that there were some things you just couldn’t stop a man from doing. So she let them get away with it a few times a week, but only if they tried their best to hide it, and only if they didn’t try too often.
He let the bat sing him to sleep, chanting his daughter’s name until finally he drifted away to blissful oblivion. He didn’t dream, not in here. He thanked G
od for that. It wasn’t just that they knocked an extra seven and a half hours a subjective day off his sentence and he didn’t even have to serve them. It was that he couldn’t have nightmares. He couldn’t have handled the nightmares. Not in here.
He woke to the sound of RITA’s voice. “Everyone will prepare for breakfast. A prompt citizen is a productive citizen.”
“A prompt citizen is a productive citizen,” said Lew, and the day began all over again.
It didn’t go well.
This time it was Biggs. He dropped his spoon, and RITA didn’t like something about how he’d looked at the slop she’d put in front of him. “Your scowl is inappropriate, Mr. Biggs,” said RITA, and then he screamed.
He’d been an ugly man before, all pudge with not a bone to be seen. He had pocks on his face, old acne scars he’d never dealt with, and the result was a piggy-looking mess. But RITA had decided to make things worse. She could always make things worse.
Lew couldn’t help but look. She’d done something to his face, twisting it like molten plastic. It looked like one of those masks from a Greek play, his flesh contorted into a mock grimace. Everything was stretched, his cheeks poking up at unnatural angles, his eyes little dots hidden within the folded skin. It reminded Lew a little of a doll he’d had as a boy. He’d melted it with some fireworks and its head had been left as nothing but a formless mush, keeping only the vaguest outline of its original shape.
Biggs kept screaming for a few minutes, but then RITA must have said something to him in private. He choked the noise down, and soon all the rest of them could hear were his muffled grunts as he tried to shovel his breakfast into the floppy lips she’d left him with. She’d change him back in a few weeks, but only if he followed the rules. A functional citizen is a valuable citizen, and she didn’t want them so damaged in the head that they couldn’t function.
The rest of the prisoners rushed through their breakfasts. They all made damned sure they finished, especially after that little show. RITA was in a foul mood, if she had them. Lew could tell. This was hair trigger punishment, even for her. Something had her in a huff. And as Lew caught Saldana’s eyes from across the room, he was pretty sure he knew what.
It only got worse as the day went on. RITA was looking for excuses to zap people. She left Newcombe on the floor for nearly an hour, twisting and convulsing. Foster got it worse; he fucked up the drone he was working on and she melted his hands into the table. He was trapped there, the white plastic fading into his pink flesh, his elbows flailing as he tried to pull himself free. But she wasn’t going to let him go. She’d never let any of them go.
Lew saw Saldana, signing at him quickly from across the room before turning his attention back to his drone. “We gotta get out. We gotta do it soon.” Lew didn’t even want to think about it, not then. He wanted out, and he wanted it more than anything. He hadn’t been able to quit thinking about it, not since Saldana told him. He was pretty sure he couldn’t last another three-hundred eighty-four years, not if RITA kept on like this.
But it couldn’t be true. And even if it was, he didn’t even want to think about what RITA would do to him if they got caught. He lost himself in his drone instead, soldering away at the sensor array until he thought he had it fixed.
And then came the bats.
They were hanging from under the tables. Lew could see them across the room, dozens of them, rustling their wings and grinding their teeth. They were right next to the other prisoners, but no one else knew they were there. No one reacted, not a single one of them. It was all in his head. It had to be. But that didn’t make them any less dangerous.
The more anxious he was, the more of them he’d see. That was how it worked, he thought. Hallucinations, after effects of his time in solitary. The anxiety brought them out, made them manifest. And the more people RITA punished, the more anxious he’d be.
He knew there was one by his feet. He could hear it. It was chirping at him, running its wings along his legs, trying to get a rise out of him. He was done for if it managed to get him to react. RITA wouldn’t know about the bat, and she wouldn’t care if he told her. She’d just punish him all the same.
He felt its wing brush along his leg, and he shuddered. Its little claws gripped his pants, tugging away at him, and then it crawled into his lap. He tried to ignore it, tried to pretend it wasn’t there, but he couldn’t help himself. He had to look down.
He nearly screamed when he saw its face. It looked like a little baby, like a child’s face had been stretched across a bat’s snout.
It looked a whole hell of a lot like Allie.
He cried to himself on the inside for nearly ten minutes, staring at the drone, praying RITA wouldn’t see. When he looked down again, the bat was gone. He looked up, and he saw Saldana watching him. “Rec time,” signed Saldana, and this time Lew nodded back.
The minutes ticked by slower than they should have, but eventually it came. Lew took the cards with a forced smile, and when Saldana got up to go to his cell, Lew followed.
It was a cramped little room, two bunks and one of them empty. His bookshelf was bland: the Bible, along with a bunch of drone manuals. A few religious posters lined the wall next to pictures of children Lew presumed were Saldana’s family. Everything else was neat and orderly, just like it had to be.
“Is it true?” signed Lew. “Are you fucking with me?”
Saldana smiled, cockier than it was wise to be given the way RITA had been acting, and then he signed back. “I can get us out. But it has to be two. Can’t go with just one.”
“Why me?” signed Lew.
“Have to pick someone,” signed Saldana. “Who the fuck else?”
It was true. Most people in there were dumb as dirt to begin with, and nearly all of them were too afraid of RITA to even think of something like this, let alone to actually do it. She filed away at their souls day by day, brushing the scrapings into the trash, a machine sculpting them into suitable parts for an even bigger machine. They’d be citizens when she was done with them, and good ones. The kind who’d follow the rules and who’d never make a fuss. She’d wind them up, point them in the direction she wanted, and then they’d just keep clacking along like they were supposed to until their lives were done.
But that was the problem, at least for Saldana. He needed someone who didn’t give a shit about the rules, someone who’d shove in their whole stack and risk it all for the prize he was offering. And after a few lifetimes in here, the only thing anyone knew anymore was the rules.
None of them were brave enough to do it, not even Lew. But that didn’t account for the bats. He might not have been brave enough, but he was crazy enough. Tortured enough. He couldn’t listen to them talking about Allie, not anymore. Saldana had seen something in him, a man long past his breaking point, and that was the only kind of man who’d go along with something as foolish as this.
“How?” signed Lew. “Just tell me how.”
“Look,” signed Saldana. “I made it. I figured out a way to make it.”
He peeled away a poster from the wall, a Virgin Mary deep in prayer and held aloft by a tiny boy-angel, a heavenly aura spiking out from her every pore. And behind her was something better than hope, something everyone in there had prayed for since the day they’d arrived.
Salvation.
It was just like it always was in the movies: a square hole about three feet wide dug into the wall behind the poster, a dull green light shining at the end of it from somewhere in the distance. Lew leaned down, staring in awe at a long tunnel running to someplace he could barely even see. He couldn’t make it out, whatever was on the other side.
But it was there.
Another place, another room, something that wasn’t even supposed to exist. It was a sim, after all, and why bother simulating something if no one was ever going to use it? But it was there all the same. Another room. There was more to Sim Sing than what they could see, and maybe there was a way to get there.
“I fo
und it in the schematics,” signed Saldana. “She’ll just give them to you if you ask. Schematics, manuals, design specs. You can get any of them for anything.” Saldana smirked, shaking with a silent giggle before his hands went back to their flurry of motion. “Even the specs for the computer that runs the place. She’s stupid, eh? So stupid. Only knows what they told her to know. Can’t think for herself, can’t color outside the lines. Not like us. Not like people.”
“What is it?” signed Lew, staring down the tunnel. “What the hell is it?”
“A back door,” signed Saldana. “A way out.”
“She’ll see,” signed Lew. “She’ll catch us—”
“She can’t see,” signed Saldana. “She just sees a wall. It’s not there, not for her. They didn’t tell her it was there, so it isn’t. The whole thing’s a blind spot as far as RITA’s concerned.”
“You dug this,” signed Lew. “You snuck away a spoon?” He couldn’t think of anything else that made any sense. Saldana must have taken it at breakfast. Slipped it away somehow without RITA noticing. But RITA made everything in here, and she always noticed.
“No fucking spoon, man,” signed Saldana. “Just words. You can dig with words in here, if you know the right ones. It was right there in the manuals. Took me a couple decades. Couldn’t figure ‘em out. Had to learn computer code. Had to get books to tell me what they were even saying. Had to work it all out from the bottom up. But I figured it out. A back door. The geeks put it in here. Another room from an earlier version of Sim Sing. They don’t use it anymore, but it’s still there. Easier just to leave it in than to take out all the work they did.”
“Another room,” signed Lew in disbelief.
“The best kind of room,” signed Saldana. “Every jail’s got one. A processing center.” He had to cover his mouth to keep from laughing out loud in triumph. “They made it to send us back home. So it’d be easier on us when we got back outside. Feels more real so people don’t go loco. They didn’t end up using it. They pull you straight outta here instead. But the manuals, man. The manuals say it all still works. We go out this way, the computer’s gonna mark it down in our files like we did the whole damned sentence. And the geeks’ll never know the difference. It’s a couple seconds to them either way.”
Restricted Fantasies Page 5
