Sky Cell (Abrami's Sister pt. 2)

"We’ve got a new one arriving this morning. Prisoner 108. Dahl’s started a pool on how long this one will last."

"Who is he?"

"He’s a she. That’s all my people will say. This time they’re citing regs."

"They always cite regs."

"This time they’re serious. But there’s only one ‘she’ that makes sense."

"Abrami’s sister? No way, Boyd. The guys back home are screwing with you. They haven’t even backed up her conviction records yet. Besides, conspiracy can’t land you here."

"Conspiracy to commit genocide can. I hear they amended the charges again, right after her conviction."

"The tribunal went for that? Good. It’s about time they used section 37 the way it was intended."

"So how long do you think she’ll last?"

"Up here versus ratting out her own brother? I give her five weeks, but only if it’s her."

"Five weeks? Are you nuts, Shay? Prisoner 106 didn’t make ten days. By the end of that, he was mess. From what I hear, it took the psych-techs weeks to put him back together."

"You haven’t been up here long enough, Boyd. Prisoner 106 was a wannabee. I remember when Prisoner 12 went eighty-four days. And he was only Abrami’s pilot, not a blood relative. Real Greens are tough."

"Guess that’s why we still have a job."


The grav-car circled the plateau lazily once the reinforced window-shields slid back, giving prisoner 108, as she’d come to think of herself, a panoramic view of her destination. In the time since her conviction, her captors had stripped away almost everything, her clothing, her possessions, her makeup, her freedom, her name. But not her identity, nor her desire to resist.

Below, amid the low outcroppings and sandy gray-brown hills strewn with rocks and boulders, a spire rose above the desert, as smooth and black as obsidian, which it both was and wasn’t. Technically, it was a synthetic with a similar composition to volcanic glass, but with a much higher tensile strength from a tighter molecular matrix though it still lacked an overall crystalline structure. Technically, it was also grown rather than extruded from the earth as quick-cooling lava.

Prisoner 108 didn’t know those details. She only knew that it was tall and impressive, even from far above. She wasn’t sure how tall, there was nothing below to give it scale. It was the dominating feature on a desolate plain. The sides were polished and vertical. There was a slightly rounded platform on top, like a nesting box sitting atop a pole.

The grav-car hovered then slowly descended. The top of the platform was flat and enameled a blue nearly identical to the cloudless sky near the horizon, nearly identical to the color of her jumpsuit. Perhaps not enameled but grown with a surface layer of the desired color. There were discontinuities on its surface, items grown in the same color that she thought might be a bed and some kind of seat.

The pre-departure briefing told her a great deal about her impending incarceration. She had received a number of modifications to ensure her safety. The first was a series of medical nanite injections to boost her immune system, both to detect and clear out any internal overgrowths and to deny access to any external vectors. That meant no colds, no flu, no pneumonia, no Candida outbreaks. She had also been injected with a series of highly tailored impulse-control modifiers to ensure she ate and drank when such necessities were provided. There would be no hunger strikes. LOW OrbIT had learned from its early failures.

Her jumpsuit was proactive, embedded with genetically engineered organisms that thrived on dirt and sweat and dead skin for built-in self-cleaning, thus circumventing any hygiene concerns. The organisms had been designed for deep-space, military EVA’s. They could even live on her excrement in extreme conditions should she choose not to use the minimal facilities provided. If she chose to live in her own filth, it would only last a little while and provide her no legal, humanitarian respite.

Her skin had been modified to provide it with an inherent resistance to UV radiation, the equivalent of a near-complete UV block to prevent any complications from long-term exposure. Even her corneas had been modified to prevent damage or blindness in case she took to staring overlong at the sun, as many prisoners did. Her mouth had been colonized with bacteria that ate plaque and her teeth coated to prevent decay. Her head had been shaved and her scalp treated with a hair growth inhibitor.

Her brain had been infected by other colonies of nanites responsible for maintaining proper brain chemistry, keeping her endorphins balanced, ensuring she didn’t slip over the edge into depression or full-blown psychosis. The people watching her wanted her to experience the mind-numbing nature of her surroundings completely, but to remain relatively sane. Near the lymph node cluster of her left arm, they had lodged a medical suite the size of a small analgesic capsule that monitored and broadcast all her vitals, from heartbeat to hydration to brain and blood chemistry.

What she hadn’t been told is that the area of her brain responsible for auditory interpretation had been colonized by another set of nanites that responded to a narrow range of overlaid, sub-audible frequencies which would at first make her increasingly anxious and tired, then quickly put her to sleep if the sounds persisted or increased in volume above a certain threshold. In practice, it meant she could approach but never reach the edge of the platform, so she could never see the planetary surface below and not end her confinement through a creative use of gravity.

This modification also meant her watchers could put her to sleep on demand, using the same sub-audible tones. This way, they could drop her, pick her up, examine her if something unexpected happened, all without her knowing or having to interact with anyone. It also meant they could resupply her provisions occasionally while she slept.

Provision replenishments came at random intervals to prevent her from gaining any sense of time or routine. The nutrition packets in each drop were identically packaged, but varied in caloric content and time release so that a set of three meals would sate the average person between nine and seventy-two hours, depending on how they were tailored. Only water provided any sense of routine, though even that requirement varied slightly with the moisture content of each nutrition pack. Everything, including the water, was dispensed from the waste disposal unit which was fashioned to look like a standard recycler, though only the water was recycled and that only partially. A variant on the jumpsuit flora inhabited the recycler, reducing everything but the recycled water to a fine, powdery dust that only needed removal once a year.

Rumor had it that the planet itself had been selected very carefully. It was tidally locked so it had no day-night cycle. It was just the right distance from its star to maintain a temperature between 15 and 25 degrees C, varying very slowly over the course of its elliptical wanderings. No hypothermia, no heat-stroke. Not even any real weather, discounting the occasional low dust storms that lapped at the base of the spire. The planet was barren of all indigenous life. It seemed to replenish its own oxygen, though without life the initial survey team was baffled as to how. No scientist had been given an opportunity to examine this unique phenomenon. The planet was the exclusive domain of the military now, housing up to 144 prisoners at a time spaced in identical sky cells distributed so that none was within visual range of another even on approach.

At first LOW OrbIT had denied the existence of the sky cells and refused to release any information about them. But over time, they found that giving briefings about certain conditions and rumors about others was more effective than a complete information blackout, as it gave the minds of potential inmates something to chew on before they landed. The strategy was so effective that fully one third of the people sentenced to the sky cells never made it beyond the isolation of the interstellar trip to the planet. Another twenty percent started talking soon after they hit the platform.

In the sky cells law and ethics collided with society’s need for information and intelligence to protect itself. LOW OrbIT had tried various mechanisms for ripping what it wanted from people’s minds, everything from truth serums to vocal impulse inhibitors to nanite memory stimulators. All either had devastating, sometimes irreversible side effects or had been shown to be less than completely effective. The only acknowledged side effect from a sky cell was a mild to severe case of agoraphobia, a condition deemed neither cruel nor unusual in a society so heavily populating closed and artificial environments. The medical nanites and other modifications to the prisoner would be washed out immediately upon her release, so that she suffered no lasting alterations.

Everything was provided for the safety of the prisoner. Nothing was provided for her comfort. To end her isolation, all she had to do was tell them what they wanted to know. Or convince them that she didn’t know anything, which could take some time as military personnel with clearances high enough to have access to the sky cells tended to be a rather cynical group as a rule.

All this meant that once prisoner 108 was dropped, she would be completely isolated and alone, with no human contact. Every moment would be observed and recorded from an orbital platform. Every utterance would be analyzed. There was no escaping the anonymous watchers, though she would never see them. The opportunity for personal interaction was gone, a right stripped away by her lack of cooperation. Her only companions would be her own thoughts and the unchanging, unending sky.

Even the grav-car was fly-by-wire and unoccupied except for the prisoner, both to prevent any interaction between passenger and crew as well as a security precaution to ensure there was no way to hijack the vehicle from on-site.

As the grav-car hovered, prisoner 108 felt a slight throb below and behind her ears that resulted in a feeling of pressure on her sinuses. She would come to recognize that sensation as the sub-audible stimulation that slowly turned off her senses and put her into a conditioned sleep. She barely saw the grav-car begin its descent before gravity called her eyelids shut and a dreamless darkness claimed her.


When she awoke, she was lying on a thin, foam mattress encased in a synthetic cloth that felt like vinyl, but wasn’t. The casing was probably some carbon nanotube construct that was stronger than steel and bonded to the obsidian base of the bunk on a molecular level. Even if she could damage it, she had already been informed that the punishment for that destruction of LOW OrbIT property would be to do without even that minor comfort for the duration of her incarceration.

Beside the sleeping platform was a cube with a lid and a slot on one side with a blue plastic spigot beside it. The lid lifted to reveal a commode, a standard, waterless recycler rife throughout the cells she’d inhabited already. Fortunately, she’d already gotten over any shyness about her body functions no longer being private, but she still felt an odd sense of vulnerability about doing those things completely exposed to the sky.

When she examined the side slot, she found a pre-packaged ration bar. As soon as she saw it, she realized she was hungry, very hungry. The nutrition bar filled that need as water from the spigot slaked her resulting thirst, but neither provided any real sensation to distract her mind. The food bar was odorless and the color and consistency of the skin that formed on oatmeal left uncovered too long. It was wrapped in a rice paper like skin that she had peeled away and set aside. The bar had about as much taste as she figured the wrapper might. It was nearly flavorless, like a chewy granola bar without the chocolate or raisins, or a slightly soggy, salt-free rice cake bound together with flexible silicon caulk. But she devoured it quickly, her impulse to eat making her ravenous to the point where she couldn’t resist wolfing it down. Later, she would wish she could savor its disgusting texture in her mouth.

Even as she thought the wrapper might at least provide something to occupy her time, she noticed it melted into a pool that rapidly disintegrated until it was nothing more than dust that slowly drifted away. As she experimented over the next few meals, she found the process began quickly after the seal was broken. More nanites or tailored bacteria. She also discovered the wrapper was edible, and provided a contrasting, papery texture to the nutrition bar but no real flavor. She stopped receiving even that distraction after she crafted a wrapper into a paper glider that disintegrated as it sailed beyond the edge of her platform, much to her delight.

She got her fill of water after every meal, sometimes between if she was thirsty, but never if she just felt bored. To operate the water dispenser, she had to sit on the bed and bend her head beneath the spigot before she flipped up the tab opening the tap. No bottles to watch melt from towers into molten flows of dust. At least the water tasted clean and clear, not tainted with any metallic or plastic tang as were most of the recyclers she’d used before. After a few meals, she longed for a break from the monotony of that flavorlessness, even with the implications of where that tang might come from.

Sated, she investigated her open cell. She had access to an area about the size of a standard tennis court. The bunk and recycler stood at the very center of the platform. While from above, she could clearly see the platform against the landscape below, here the blue blended seamlessly into the sky. There was no distinction, no horizon, nothing to focus her attention. She suspected the platform edges were equipped with camouflage transmitters to blend it with the sky.

The last human voice she’d heard before she’d been dropped had told her the exact information they wanted from her. It told her resistance would only prolong her isolation. Other prisoners had advised her to try not thinking about what they wanted, but she thought they had been planted by the people holding her. She knew that would only make things worse. Trying to resist thinking about something just seeded thoughts of it within her brain. Just like by telling a toddler to ignore a cookie jar just within reach while you were out of the room, you ensured it would become the object of her every obsession.

At first, she enjoyed the freedom of the sky, the openness after so many weeks confined in cramped conditions under artificial lights. She lay on her bunk for hours soaking up the warmth of the distant, pinpointed sun that was not her own. Soon she found it lulled her into a twilight between thought and dreams. If she closed her eyes, she sank into the cushion of the bunk and could feel the platform sway slightly beneath her. It seemed to move just enough to reinforce the sensation that she was floating in the sky. Almost like a monochromatic version of sensory depravation, only she had just enough markers to anchor her to reality, the sun, the bunk, her hands and feet, the recycler. Her mind refused to drift into hallucination, however much she wished it might just to break the crushing boredom between each sleep, the unchanging sameness of this moment and this moment and this moment.

She lived for any stir of breeze, anything to distract her from the thoughts circling in her brain, reminding her in someone else’s voice that she held the keys to end her captivity, and that her punishment fit her crime. By turning her back on the security needs of her society, she had forfeited her right to human interaction.

Her feet made no sound upon surface of the platform when she walked. She had no blanket to rustle, no pillow to fluff. When she screamed occasionally to remind herself she was still alive, the sky absorbed her protest like a formless void, leaving no echo, no ripples, no telltale indication her voice had existed at all once it faded from her ears.

She paced off each day, each hour, each minute of her indeterminate sentence until even her steps lost their meaning. She tried approaching the edge of the platform, but could never get close enough to see even a hint of the ground below. Each time she tried, anxiety gave way to pressure, then grogginess then sleep before she came within a dozen paces. Each time she woke up back on her bunk, drifting in the blue. She tried running toward the edge, but found she could never build enough momentum to make it before she collapsed. Once, she tried repeatedly, as a demonstration of her resolve to her watchers. Each time she awoke on her bunk, she jumped to her feet and sprinted outward again. The last time, the tickling behind her ears changed. Her muscles still went to jelly, but she didn’t lose consciousness. She just became trapped as within a nightmare, floating, falling, anxious and terrified, yet unable to move. After enduring that limbo for what could have been minutes or days, she managed to summon the strength and resolve to crawl back to safety. She didn’t test those boundaries again.

She played with shadows in her bunk like a child, inventing games and characters within her mind. In her desperation for human contact, she took to reciting monologues about her childhood, all the stories, all the moments, every incident she could remember however trivial. Everything she’d told them before. She didn’t always stick to her half-brother, but constructed a random, broken, schizophrenic family history, like pieces of a puzzle they might fit together into a complete picture where she had failed. Or a mirror they might reconstruct from the shards she clutched in her bleeding hands. No new memories or insights emerged. Nothing she uttered ended her isolation.

After that, she began to forget how to speak, how to communicate, how to form even fundamental words. After what might have been weeks passed, she became an automaton. She ate, she drank, she urinated, she defecated. The rhythms of her body became her only markers of time, her clock and calendar until she forgot to wind them and they, too, became unreliable. Finally she drifted, spending hours just staring at the sun. She floated in the endless blue before slowly sinking beneath its surface, drowning in the sky.

She knew she was near the breaking point. She knew she couldn’t hold on to her sanity much longer. The childhood memories she had recounted were still too sharp, too fresh, almost new in their ability to bleed her and beat her and bring her pain again.

A change in her surroundings brought her back to consciousness gasping for air. At first she thought the static in her mind had taken over her hearing until she realized that the sound came from outside her head. A wind had risen, a real wind strong enough to ruffle and snap and tear at the cuffs of her jumpsuit. When she sat up, she felt it along her scalp and the stubble of her hair. Wind, glorious wind, strong enough to raise billows of gray-dun dust to define the edges of the platform, thick enough to darken the sky and anchor her back to this life, this reality, this torment her captors put her through. She was here, really here, in a prison of someone else’s construction not trapped within the sky and a past that had passed her by. As the sun faded to a tiny, dull orb, she became giddy in her excitement. She jumped up and danced and laughed and screamed her joy, until her savior became a dark and angry god.

Lightning slashed across the sky, blinding her with its fury. Nearly simultaneous thunder rolled through her in waves of sound that made her heart stutter in its regular, rhythmic beats. She spread her arms wide, throwing back her head, daring the storm to take her, as she had once dared her mother before a particularly vicious incident. As she did, an epiphany overtook her, a memory that flashed like a slide or a single frame of video across her mind. The exact information her watchers wanted. A name she had heard only once and only for an instant, when she was four and recovering from one of her mother’s worst ministrations, one that left her with a swollen head and blackouts and memories that came in jumpy visuals like stuttering scenes from several silent movies randomly spliced together to make a disjointed film. Souleymane had whispered the name of a friend who wanted to hide her once she recovered, the only time he had mentioned him. He was ten and had said this was the only person he would ever trust, a person she remembered, one who had kept in touch and watched her if only from a distance.

Tears streamed down her face, dried instantly by the wind, leaving her cheeks streaked with smudges of dust. She knew she now held the key to her release. Before she could stop herself, she remembered speech and shouted toward the sky the words she’d longed to say to Souleymane all those years ago but had been too afraid to utter. The wind tore her voice away before it even reached her own ears.

When she came back to her senses, she covered her mouth with both hands. She fell like a stone unto her bunk as the nanites in her brain were overloaded by the sudden release of the chemical imbalance that caused depression as she realized her mistake. She curled up tightly and wept, thinking she had lost her only advantage, thinking she was once again at the mercy of the unseen eyes in the sky.

No one heard her confession. At that moment the technicians were scrambling to boost the signal of the audio emitters surrounding the underside of the sky cell to overcome the noise floor raised by the gale force winds. The unprecedented dust storm had obscured their satellite visuals. The lightning was chewing huge holes in their monitoring systems, briefly taking them offline, overloaded by the wild swings in electromagnetic flux. The systems would survive. They were speced for the military so they would reset, but some data might be lost. They needed her sleeping to minimize that risk. After several unrecorded minutes, the technicians finally cut through the noise and sent prisoner 108 into a deep and dreamless sleep.

She awoke uncertain whether she’d imagined the storm. There was no evidence on the platform to suggest it had been any more than a dream, not even a sensation of grit inside her jumpsuit. But even if was a dream, it had restored her sanity to where she now knew her way out. They hadn’t taken her, so perhaps they hadn’t heard what she’d said. But what to do with the information? They had nearly driven her mad and she hated them for it. They had no regard for her life or her sanity. She did not feel inclined to sacrifice someone who had helped her to people who had actively tried to harm her. So, she chose to continue her resistance.

Even though she was afraid they already had what they wanted, new words escaped her lips, words she reshaped subtly to suit her purpose by simply adding one "s." She said something new, a sentence of four words with one variation, words they’d never heard before. Words her watchers at first couldn’t make sense of but then came to recognize one by one, breeding excitement that prisoner 108 had finally broken, eliminating another threat, scoring another victory in their endless twilight war.

Their celebration lasted until they understood the meaning of the sentence she repeated over and over again, if only to hear a voice in her ears as she stared at the empty sky. Linguists parsed the words to make certain they had them right, that there were no alternatives they had missed. Analysts consulted and cross-referenced their databases to correlate the name. When the results came back, their jubilation faded and they became increasingly convinced they had suffered a major setback if not an outright defeat.

The sky cell would no longer work on prisoner 108 because someone, a rival on a different team playing a different game by a different set of rules, had turned her to his own purpose. He had embedded hope somewhere deep within her, an alternative to cooperation which she had latched onto like a lifeline in a critical moment, a lifeline that kept her from crossing into the controlled insanity they desired. They had seen this behavior before and it was always terminal. In their experience, hope could not be vanquished, only extinguished through careful, patient means. But this individual had sabotaged that effort for his own selfish ends to preserve his own selfish theories on how best to approach not only these interrogations but the very foundations of how intelligence should be stockpiled and shared and used. He would have them throw out the results of years of well-documented experiments, honed to a precise, psychological edge as sharp as any surgeon’s scalpel in favor of the blunt instrument of his own intuition, brilliant as that sometimes might be. One day, they swore to demonstrate their methods to him personally, but only after his powerful allies had passed the way of dust. Until then, they could only hope he was right, at least this once.

The psychological risk analysis revealed it was unlikely they could push her back to this breaking point without making her completely useless in the process. After a series of animated briefings and discussions, the psych-techs finally convinced their superiors to terminate the eighty-seven day, silent interrogation and remove prisoner 108 from her cell. Until the grav-car arrived and the watchers forced her brain into a deep catatonia, Josephine Sorin repeated that phrase with the one variation over and over in tones ranging from whispers to screams to sobbing mumbles until it became a mantra even in her sleep.

"Tell him I’ll go, tell him I’ll go. Tell Michaels I’ll go."


Next Vengeance (Abrami's Sister, pt. 3)

© 2008 Edward P. Morgan III