Periphery Read Free

punishment here, Ruth Norman. That’s over.”
    I glanced covertly at my companions, the ones already hovering around the day-room chairs. I’d been in prison before; I’d been in reform camp before. I knew what could happen to a middle-class woman, in jail for the unimpressive “crime” of protesting the loss of our civil liberties. The animal habit of self-preservation won out. I slipped the band over the sleeve of my overalls. Immediately a tablet appeared, in the same place on the counter. It was solid when I picked it up.
    *
    I quickly discovered that, of the fourteen people in the circle (there were eighteen names listed on my tablet, the missing four never turned up), less than half had opted to stay awake. I tried to convince the dream-deprived that I had not been responsible for the mix-up. I asked them all to answer to their names. They complied, surprisingly willing to accept my authority—for the moment.
    “ Hil…de… ”said the girl with the cinnamon braids, struggling with a tongue too thick for her mouth: a sigh and a guttural duh, like the voice of a child’s teddy bear, picked up and shaken after long neglect. The braids had not been renewed, fuzzy strands were escaping. Veterans of prison life glanced at each other uneasily. Nobody commented. There was another woman who didn’t speak at all, so lacking in response you wondered how she’d found her way to the dayroom.
    We were nine women, four men and one female-identifying male transsexual (to give the Sista her prison-system designation). The details on my tablet were meagre: names, ages, ethnic/national grouping, not much else. Mrs. Miqal Rohan was Iranian and wore strict hejabi dress, but spoke perfect, icy English. “Bimbam” was European English, rail thin, and haunted by some addiction that made her chew frantically at the inside of her cheek. The other native Englishwoman, a Caribbean ethnic calling herself Servalan (Angela Morrison, forty-three), looked as if she’d been institutionalised all her life. I had no information about their crimes. But as I entered nicknames, and read the qualifications or professions, I saw a pattern emerging, and I didn’t like it. Such useful people! How did you all come to this pass? By what strange accidents did you all earn mandatory death sentences or life-without-parole? Will the serial killers, the drug cartel gangsters, and the re-offending child rapists please identify yourselves?
    I kept quiet, and waited to hear what anyone else would say.
    The youngest of the men (Koffi, Nigerian; self-declared “business entrepreneur”) asked, diffidently, “Does anyone know how long this lasts?”
    “There’s no way of knowing,” said Carpazian, who was apparently Russian, despite the name; a slim and sallow thirty-something, still elegant in the overalls. “The Panhandle is a prison system. It can drug us and deceive us without limit.”
    The man who’d given his handle as Drummer raised heavy eyes and spoke, sonorous as a prophet, from out of a full black beard. “We will be ordered to the transit chamber as we were ordered to this room; or drugged and carried by robots in our sleep. We will lie down in the Buonarotti capsules, and a code-self, the complex pattern of each human body and soul, will be split into two like a cell dividing. The copies will be sent flying around the torus, at half-light speed. You will collide with yourself and cease utterly to exist at these coordinates of space-time. The body and soul in the capsule will be annihilated, and know GOD no longer.’
    “But then we wake up on another planet?” pleaded Servalan, unexpectedly shy and sweet from that coarsened mask.
    “Perhaps.”
    The prophet resumed staring at the floor.
    “Isn’t it against your religion to be here, Mr. Drummer?”
    He made no answer. The speaker was “Gee,” a high-flier, corporate, who must have got caught up in something very sour. A young and good-looking woman with an impervious air of