A Certain Type of Freedom, Let The Walls Come Down

[Prisoner D6DO1065]

He hadn't slept in years.

The corridor pulsed in a rhythmic pattern of blinking red light. The bulb of the light a little ways off on the ceiling blinked on and off. The Pusher had begun to cycle his breathing to the faint but steady hollowly-electric popping noise that accompanied the on and off of the red light. Seated alone on a rise of several steps between sections of the corridor that aside from the faint noise of the light and steady flow of quiet breathing were otherwise silent as a sealed tomb.

Throughout his incarceration, quite literally the majority of his life, his anger had bulged at his very eyeballs. A human body - all suppressed anger, twitching nerves, constant paranoia for life, reputation and bondage of every fiber of being. That was what prison had done to him. Things changed now though. Now he was free.

**

Ever since he had worked the Ice breaking on Teria he had stopped sleeping.

Frozen to the very core. That was the ultimate punishment bestowed upon the prisoners sentenced to that corporate venture. Constant, numbing, deadening, withering, cold.

There was no day or night to speak of, it was eternal twilight - faint enough to see, as if just before dusk. Work was done in three shifts of eight hours to maintain just enough balance in the human body. Prisoner 1065 suffered along with everyone. Shuffled, booted feet. A hot, strong caf that always gave the shits (salt in an open wound in that environment) but it was pumped through the body and was one of the few sources of constant heat. Frozen hair. Slick mud. Slick Ice. Falls. Accidents. The list was infinite.

Prisoner 1065 started working two shifts, sixteen hours. That wasn't uncommon. Plenty of prisoners would occasionally go sixteen hours straight, a more rare three shifts at times. It was a way to fight back. It was a way to toss the giant boiling cauldron of rage that consumed the heart into something and exhaust it. For others it was a matter of just keeping warm.

Prisoner 1065 did not stop. Two shifts. Three shifts. During the periods that the giant ice drills pounded away consistently everyone caught naps and so did Prisoner 1065. That was all though. Naps, if even they could be considered sleep under the massive and sweeping turbine engines that vibrated everything. It was impossibly deafening and grunted short-hand shouts and hand signals were the mode of communication. And he did not sleep.

**

He breathed with the light, syncopated. His hand were held out in front of him as objects of study on their own. Dark, thick liquid, small rivulets of blood, covered his palms. With a curiosity and awe he had touched the pools of blood that covered the hall outside his cell in the special Penal section of quarters.

He had wandered away from there quietly, studying the blood on his hands the entire time until he had come to sit here and reflect further.

The hands came down and his eyes looked about the corridor. Red light casting large shadows. And quiet. Absolute quiet. He was alone, this was his tomb. His afterlife. The prison cell of heaven.

There was no one to judge him or sentence him. No one with stun baton or tazer to keep him subdued. No guard. No walls but the ship. He was free.

He stood quietly, and began to walk.

[Prisoner D6DO1065]

Once he had woken up in the penal quarters it had taken him almost ten full minutes and eight dead bodies, or parts of bodies, or parts of parts of bodies, before he had found four packs of cigarettes stashed away in the cargo pocket of a leg of pants that covered a leg - nothing more. The stump wore the heavy black marine jackboot but rose to end in a stump, the femur protruded sharply, menacingly.

He had smoked an entire pack of them by now. Their pungent odor clung deftly to the corridors he had passed, settling at the flight of stairs he had sat on, before moving on.

**

The grim red light reminded him of the idea of 'Hell', or at least as it looked in the vivid colors and displays within the mountain of religious texts stacked in prison libraries. It was altogether quieter than he expected, if it was hell. Lonelier too.

Suddenly the walls of the ship itself began to feel all the more real, walls, floors, ceilings, all the more. A prison cell. A maze. A labyrinth. It crushed and suffocated while it squeezed and stretched the senses.

With a compulsion that hit like a brick he stopped at a small pool of blood that had begun to escape from underneath a closed hatch. His finger dipped into liquid that was cold, stronger than water, almost a gel. It felt thick with pure life.

He raised the tip of his finger to his face. His other hand plucked the cigarette from his lips and he had to rinse acrid saliva around his mouth to clear it of the tobacco taste. With a cleansed palette his tongue gingerly, yearningly crept out of his mouth, reaching to the tip of his finger. The tongue caressed the gel clotted blood.

It tasted clean. It tasted real.

He stood up, the cigarette went into the lips again. Smoke billowed out and disappeared. There was something eternal, forever, and completely inparticular about the ship.

**

Why was he here? In this moment?

Maybe Hell is where everyone around you dies and you are left alone on a ship in the middle of nothing with nothing on top and nothing on the bottom and you inside a ship inside all of that nothing on no particular night and no particular evening. The ultimate being/non-being.

Divine providence? A goal larger than himself?

Absolute nothingness? No divinity, no providence, a pure nothing. A nothing's nothingness.

He wasn't sure. Of anything. But the silence, the dead silence, felt profound.