New Alcatraz (Book 1): Dark Time

by Grant Pies

  “Then why am I here,” I asked. “If you don’t need my confession, then what are we doing here?”

  “I am simply giving you a chance to come clean. I am giving you a chance to help us. Confess and it will save everyone a lot of time.” Lee sat back again, crossed her arms, and waited for a response. But I was done. After a short silence she leaned forward. “You are also here to help settle a bet for me,” she said; her voice a bit quieter.

  “We have your DNA at the scene of the crime…,”

  My head jolted upward and looked into her eyes. She smiled to reveal a front tooth with a small chip in it. “Yeah,” she nodded knowing her bluff had worked as she measured my reaction. “Your blood was all over the place.” Her words left her mouth gloatingly. My fingertips pressed into the flat metal table. I tried to channel any anger or tension I had into this slab of cold metal. I tried to calm my breathing. Cold sweat dripped down my face, my nose throbbed, and each heartbeat traveled through my head like a church bell.

  “So help me settle a bet. Did you want to get caught,” she laughed. “I mean, a member of the ARC committing a crime and not using a ‘buy out,’ and leaving DNA!” she exclaimed. “If I win maybe I will try to get you out of going to New Alcatraz. Just tell me did you really want to get caught?”

  After her last question, my body had unconsciously changed positions. My arms and legs were crossed, and my eyes had dropped to the floor. I no longer stared at Agent Lee. My stoic expression drifted into a grimaced frown. The agents behind the two-way mirror would be noting each guilty movement. Before I knew what I was doing I blurted out “I did not kill that woman!”

  CHAPTER 18

  2070

  PHOENIX, AZ

  Penal colonies are nothing new. Madeira, at the time called “island of the wood”, was one of the first established penal colonies, created by Portuguese sailors in the early 1400’s. The French also established penal colonies on Devil’s Island off the coast of French Guiana. Mexico used Isla Maria Madre as a penal colony in the 19th century. Ecuador used the Galapagos Islands. Taiwan had a penal colony at Green Island. Vietnam used Con Dao Island as a penal colony during their war against American forces. The British used Australia. Americans used Guantanamo Bay. Island penal colonies have been used throughout the history of civilization. But not all penal colonies were located on islands.

  Many were situated in vast and remote parts of the globe. The Netherlands created a penal colony in the late 19th century. The country situated the colony in a town called Veenhuizen, isolated in the middle of a vast area of peat and marshland. The Ottoman Empire used Tripoli as a landlocked penal colony. Russia used the remote forests of Siberia and its harsh climate to isolate political prisoners.

  When time travel was invented in 2064 it wasn’t long until the Federated Government of North America started planning for a new type of penal colony. The concept was the same; exile prisoners. Give them no chance of ever returning to society. Put them in a place that requires no supervision.

  Around the year 2065, The Ministry of Science sent scouts through time. Just as Red told me as a child, the scouts travelled time like the open seas and mapped out our future. These scouts were time cartographers; surveyors. They travelled until the year 5065. This was the first year the scouts found an earth that was devoid of all humans.

  The Ministry of Science called this penal colony, isolated by 3,000 years, ‘temporal prison,’ and was quickly given the nickname ‘New Alcatraz’ by everyone else. There were rumors that the future earth was a wasteland of ice and glaciers. Others thought a super volcano eradicated all humans, and rivers of volcanic magma cut through the continents and spilled into the oceans. I never gave much thought to it, until I was convicted of the murder of Time Anomaly Agent Emery and sentenced to live out the rest of my days there.

  After I was booked and charged with murder, my attorney tried his best. He really did. He deposed the forensic specialist and the first agents on the scene. He questioned Emery’s family members, of which there were few. He tried to find another suspect, of which there were none. But shitty facts are shitty facts. I knew the outcome before I stepped into the courtroom. After years of representing people who I knew would be found guilty, I found myself on the other end of the equation.

  The trial lasted three days; three times as long as an android trial. Each night after court, I sat in a small cell and wondered why I was there, staring at the blank wall and trying to reconcile what I knew with what the evidence showed. During those nights, I only slept a couple hours, and when I did sleep, the images of the dead agent sparked through my mind.

  Midway through the trial, I even started to doubt my own innocence. Of course I knew I didn’t intentionally kill anyone, but I entertained the thought that I had sleepwalked or blacked out. That seemed more plausible than a grand conspiracy to incarcerate a member of the ARC. Maybe I was framed, but how did someone get my DNA? Who framed me? An angry ex-client? Maybe if I replayed these images in my brain over and over, then they would be distorted and eventually fade away like my father suggested.

  The photos I saw during my interrogation were broadcast during my trial. The jury looked at the pictures of Agent Emery lying in puddles of her own blood. They saw where the killer cracked her skull open, scooped out her brain, and then cut a portion of it away. They saw pictures of Emery’s empty eye sockets, and heard testimony about how my body language during my interrogation indicated that I was deceptive. All of this was circumstantial. But then the jury heard that my DNA was at the scene of the crime. Tiny droplets of my blood were dripped all over the warehouse, and a streak of blood lingered on the door knob of a back door to the warehouse. The jury looked at me, and all they saw was a killer.

  The prosecutor didn’t even bother offering me a plea agreement; they didn’t need to. I had more hope for Whitman, who was surely given a substitute ARC counselor, and at this point was, in all likelihood, decommissioned.

  In the end, the court found that no other sentence was proper. Temporal prison was made for people like me the judge said. I had no motive. I was a seemingly decent citizen. Yet I brutally killed a woman and removed several of her organs. And God only knows what I did with the organs. The news sites all speculated. Some said I sold them. Others said I ate them. People like me should never be able to interact with anyone else besides fellow criminals the judge said…New Alcatraz. A judge will never sentence a person to a certain number of years in temporal prison. Once you go there you never come back. People sentenced to New Alcatraz are there for the rest of their life. It could be a day or a number of years, but every prisoner dies there. No one makes it back.

  CHAPTER 19

  2070

  DENVER, CO

  After my trial, I was transported to the headquarters of the Time Anomaly Agency in Denver to be shipped to New Alcatraz. According to the Ministry of Science, the only time movement device in existence was located in Denver. People whispered rumors of unofficial devices, both government and corporate owned, but nothing was ever confirmed. If this was truly the only device, then the Ministry would not need the Time Anomaly Agency. No one knew how the TAA spotted or tracked time perpetrators. It was known that TA Agents scrutinized any person who won any type of lottery or gamblers who never lost, but beyond that their tactics were clandestine.

  In Denver, they gave me a brown jumpsuit to change into. It had a unique string of numbers and letters for identification. VX70-9908. The jumpsuit had no metal fasteners, zippers, or metal buttons on it. Other than the jumpsuit, the agents gave me wool socks, slip on shoes, and four water purification tablets. After I adorned the jumpsuit, I was escorted down a cement hallway that sloped downward slightly. I imagined the guards could hear my pounding heart echo through the tunnels. My hands shook and cold sweat trickled down my spine.

  The hall was wide enough to drive a vehicle through, and lights were embedded in the floor and the ceiling. Two guards waited at the end of the hallway by a set of elevato
r doors. The guards both swiped their security badges simultaneously in front of two screens on each side of the elevator.

  “Prisoner VX70-9908 has been prepped for transport,” the agent who escorted me down the hallway said to the guards in a militaristic tone. The agent passed me off to one of the guards while the other signed the agent’s paperwork. My shackles clanged together with every movement. At each check point from the courtroom to Denver, the hope that someone would say this was all a big mistake diminished. Every time a guard checked their tablet for my name, and didn’t release me, my stomach dropped.

  The agent turned around, made it back down the hallway, and disappeared long before the elevator doors opened. Inside the elevator, another guard received me. I was nudged inside and the doors slid closed. On the control panel of the elevator there was only an up button and a down button. The guard pressed the ‘down’ button, and the elevator launched downward at great speed, mimicking the sinking feeling in my stomach. The sound of displaced wind inside the elevator shaft rushed around the metal box on our way down.

  When the elevator reached the bottom, the doors slid open, revealing a room the size of several airplane hangars and at least ten stories high. It smelled of metal so strongly that I could taste it in my mouth. In front of me were three agents in lab coats behind a floor to ceiling metal and cement wall with thick glass windows and a control desk. They stood and peered through the glass windows like sailors in the bowels of a ship. Two other guards waited by the elevator.

  Providing a central focus, like a boxing ring in the center of an auditorium, the time movement device consisted of a large raised rectangular platform. At each corner of the platform were tall cylinders with a slightly smaller cylinder inside. Power cables thicker than my arm sprawled all over the large room. They came from under the ground, out of the walls, or down from the ceiling, and led to the stage.

  Even in the expansive room I felt claustrophobic. The cold damp environment kept reminding me that I was far beneath the surface of the earth. Trapped. The elevator was my only exit and I fought the urge to run back and race upward.

  One of the scientists approached me with a large needle. Without warning or eye contact the scientist injected me in my arm through my brown jumpsuit. The warm liquid crawled through my body, and made me sweat more than I already was.

  The guards removed my hand restraints and simply motioned toward the platform. I looked at them and then at the stage. I hesitated, but had no other viable option beyond running and getting shot. In an odd way I felt somewhat special to experience what only a small group ever would.

  I traversed the short flight of stairs that led to the platform. Once on the platform the cylinders loomed over me like smokestacks. There was an ‘X’ marked on the exact center of the stage that was worn and scuffed from the others who stood here before me. Once I reached the ‘X,’ the inner cylinders moved up and down inside of the large outer cylinders like pistons. The thrusting cylinders rapidly gained speed, eventually matching the pace of my heart beat. The machines sounded like a long-ago steam train moving along a track. I held my breath. The hair on my arms and neck stood on end, and my teeth chattered. Time felt as if it slowed down. Either the machine was working or my brain was trying to hold on to every second I had left in my home time.

  The inner cylinders cranked up and down even faster, and the platform vibrated. I concentrated on the scientists and guards behind the wall. Each time I blinked they moved slightly, shifting left or right. The vibration was so vigorous that my legs grew numb. I felt the color drain out of my skin. Now each time I blinked the guards and scientists seemed to quite quickly disappear.

  In their place now was pale sand and forests of tall trees without leaves. The desert scene lasted longer with each blink until the scientists and guards were a distant memory; gone for good. The ‘X’ I had stood on was replaced by dry coarse sand under my feet. Instead of a dark underground bunker, the sun burned white. My eyes blurred at the sudden adjustment. I raised my hand over my eyes to block the sun’s blazing rays. My eyes adjusted, and the landscape of New Alcatraz slowly came into focus.

  UNIT 5987D V.

  FEDERATED NORTH AMERICA

  CASE NO. 2070FN99823

  (The following ensued at the bench)

  Court: Powell, how do you respond to your colleague’s objection?

  Powell: I know this may not seem to directly relate to the offenses Whitman was charged with, but I am trying to both lay the groundwork for his possible reasoning for allegedly committing the crimes and familiarize the jury, which is entirely human, how an android lives and thinks. I also want to point out that Whitman’s interest in both our biological processes and the various regulations enacted by the Ministry do seem to be applicable given the nature of his alleged offenses.

  Klipton: I will stand on my argument that this line of questioning is not relevant. The model is here because he defrauded Wayfield Industries and murdered his owner. I think it only serves to gain sympathy from the jurors.

  Court: Powell, I will allow you to continue the line of questioning, but refrain from posing questions that only seek to create sympathy towards your client.

  Powell: Thank you, your honor.

  (The following ensued in open court)

  Counselor Powell: OK, where were we? Oh yes, what are some regulations that the Ministry has enacted that most directly affects your way of life?

  A: At the present moment I believe the prohibition against androids sitting on juries directly affects me.

  (Jury chuckles)

  Q: Of course. I’m sure. Is there anything else?

  A: Yes, the Ministry’s creation of the Technology Development Agency has directly affected me.

  Q: How so?

  A: The Agency’s main priority is to prevent unauthorized firms from developing new, or expanding on, existing technologies. The Agency confiscates any unauthorized developments and offers them to one of the few approved technology firms. This obviously prevents myself, an unauthorized android, from developing technology to run tests on myself or other android models. The regulation against development of new technologies forced me to deal only with the few authorized firms.

  Q: Is your manufacturer, Wayfield Industries, one of these authorized companies?

  A: Yes.

  Q: So you are you familiar with Wayfield Industries as a company?

  A: Yes.

  Q: Can you explain what the company does?

  A: Yes. James Wayfield founded Wayfield Industries in the 1980’s. Originally, Wayfield assisted in the development of SMS technologies for use in mobile devices. Later, Wayfield expanded into other areas such as software security, three dimensional printers, and nanotechnology. After James Wayfield’s death in 2020, the company focused more on robotics and DNA, and the medical applications of the two. Around roughly 2048, after the creation of the Ministry of Science and the Technology Development Agency, Wayfield Industries was granted provisional authorized status from the North American government to continue developing technology. At that point Wayfield Industries used their advancements in nanotechnology to begin producing full sized humanoid robots, or androids.

  Q: Without sounding redundant, you are one of those humanoid robots, correct?

  A: Yes, I am the latest model of android from Wayfield.

  Q: How many models came before your model?

  A: Before my model there were three others. Each of the previous models was only applicable in narrow markets, or, as with the first model, not at all. The first model, model Alpha, was a prototype more or less. It had limited application in the real world. The second, Beta model, was capable of mimicking the movements of its human controller without using remote sensors, but this still was not widely applicable. The third model, Charlie, was capable of many tasks, but was primarily used for militaristic purposes in the developed nations and factory production purposes in the less developed nations. The major difference between my predecessor models was that it w
as not capable of interacting with humans or learning without uploading software to it.

  Q: What change was made from the model immediately before yours to allow your model to interact and learn?

  A: All of the previous models were comprised of 100% robotic material. The Delta model was the first model to incorporate human DNA. Wayfield has long since tried to develop robotic nanoscale ‘cells’ to inject into humans to combat cancer and other illnesses. So far they have not been entirely successful. But they used the same concept for androids. They injected us with human DNA cells to aid in our learning process.

  Q: And you also have nanoscale robots inside of you?

  A: Yes, one form of them at least. They were added to my model to prevent the degradation of the human DNA portion of the model.

  Q: It sounds like you have learned a lot about your model specifically. Is this information that you were given, or did you seek this out on your own?

  A: No, I sought this information out.

  Q: At what point did you become interested in the composition of your model?

  A: Roughly eight years ago. Pierson asked me to learn about and explain to him how my own body operated. Until that time, I had never given it a thought.

  Q: So Pierson was the one who sparked your interest of the inner workings of your model?

  A: Yes.

  Q: Was it Pierson who suggested you start experimenting on him to help you understand how you function?

  Federated Prosecutor Klipton: Objection!

  Court: Can you both please approach the bench?

  CHAPTER 20

  5065

  NEW ALCATRAZ

  DAY 1

  The wind whipped around me and threw miniscule shards of sand at my face. I scanned the barren landscape for any sign of life, human or otherwise, but found nothing. The heat burned any skin that was exposed. In the distance, I saw jagged mountains and withered trees. Besides the whisking noise from the wind, there was little sound. No birds cawed overhead. No insects chirped. Not even a snake rattled underfoot.