CAPITAL INDUSTRY
“How long you been in here? Three, four?”
“Two.”
“And how much more is it?”
I just stared at his face like I was a dog. I actually think about dogs when I give this look. I figure nobody wants to spend too much time beating a dog.
“How much more it is then?”
All of them needle the prisoners like this. They wear you down with it.
“60 years.”
“That’s about the rest of your run. How about a drink?” He set down an unopened bottle of whiskey on the table. Set it down carefully, silently, like a moon landing.
“I’m Paul Leggit. Now, despite that damn stupid look on your face, I know what you did, I know what got you in here. You’re not a stupid man. Are you?”
This needling, all the time.
“Go on, have the bottle,” he said, using his index finger to push the bottle forward.
I bit at the plastic with my teeth, unscrewing the cap using all five fingers. The smell bloomed out of the bottle. With some encouragement from Leggit, I turned up the bottle and took down a full mouth of whiskey.
“Maybe you are stupid. I don’t have time to find out, so you just drink that bottle and I’ll make my offer, the offer the state would like me to make, and you can say yes or you can say no. While you’re in here, heavy isolation and zero privileges, great things are happening out there, great things. And you’re one lucky bastard because of it. Instantaneous holoprojections. They figured out the god damn hologram and the phone companies are about to unveil holochatting. That’s what they’re calling it. The projectors come with a body suit, uncomfortable material, filled with chips, tends to be hot as hell. They petitioned the government to let them implant the chips under the skin of a prisoner. 1,978 chips. Go ahead and get some of the whiskey. You’re gonna feel some pain.”
-
They put me in a larger, private cell, all white, with a real bed. Two whole weeks of recovery, paralyzed by isopropozol to ensure “the chips settle into the skin,” laying on that king size bed in that large room.
Officer Leggit stopped by daily to finish off the rest of the whiskey bottle and needle away at me, paralyzed, my eyes shifting in their sockets. “Just wait until they fire it up,” he said.
When they let me move, I could feel them all over my body, little triangular shards, one at the tip of each finger, long lines of chips driving up my arm, inner thigh, neck and face. They had a few shards in my lips and I took to biting at them, sitting around in the large cell, waiting.
-
“You ready for this shit? Some of your fellow prisoners envy you. I think that’s a little short sighted,” Leggit said.
Her image came in all at once, perfected technology, not even a flicker. Her mouth moved stiffly, unnaturally, and her voice appeared in my ear, not from her projection but from some speaker installed in my ear drum.
“Can we have a minute?” I asked looking at her.
“You can have a lot more than that,” Leggit said and left the room.
-
When I woke her body hung suspended against the wall, boneless and melted. It was like a nightmare and then I knew she’d gotten hot and taken off the suit, hung it up. But where was she now? Next to my body sleeping or had she left our bedroom?
Three weeks later her mouth moved naturally. I asked her if she’d gotten chips implanted but she said no. Men had installed hundreds of minuscule cameras in the ceiling and on all four walls and with these hundreds of points, her image was traced perfectly and projected solidly into my cell.
-
We tried fucking but she couldn’t see my cock. They had not installed chips everywhere apparently. She would spread out on the bed and I would get above her, my cock a nonexistent haze for her, but it was real to me and I would fuck the air while she talked dirty and fingered herself. Her projection would give me head and I could look down through her scalp and see my cock, my actual hand breaking the plane of her cheek to masturbate myself and it looked like my fist was bashing around in her skull.
-
“You both been up to some nastiness,” Leggit said.
“As much as a projection allows.”
I had opened up to Leggit recently. After all: I was the experiment. If I could stay connected to the outside world through science I might as well be a good patient about it. And I was grateful.
Leggit kept bringing me whiskey, which he certainly didn’t have to do.
“I wake up in the night and we’ve shifted, and I can see it. Our bodies are overlapping. It’s pretty terrifying. The whole thing is like a nightmare.”
-
And then one night her image never appeared. I stayed awake, peering out the small slit of a window in the cell door as if she would actually come down the empty hallway. She said she’d fallen asleep on the couch and I got angry like I used to get angry. I flipped the bed over, the mattress slicing through her body and she remained unmoved by my display, laying comfortably, as she had been, floating, and it infuriated me. I called her all the names I used to call her and wished there was something in the cell I could destroy, something that she would see me destroy. She shifted off the bed, the bed I had removed from under her, and started to gather items on something like a dresser. She sat down on an invisible chair and told me she could turn me off. They’d given her some kind of switch. I approached her, lowering my face to hers and there was fear in her eyes. I reached up for her throat. Her cheeks flushed with blood but then when my hands should have tightened around her skin, crushed her throat, she took a deep, deep breath. Her image passed through mine and, on the dresser, she touched something and I could tell I was no longer in her room. It took her awhile to calm down, a good long time for her to really forget I was prowling around her, my image circling her image in anger.
-
“You moved the bed? Didn’t even want to sleep next to my image? You’d better ask them to install a switch for you. You’re not going to want to see what happens in this bedroom, you piece of shit.”
-
“Now come on now. You know the answer to that question,” Legitt said.
-
It made it tolerable that I could never see the men, it truly helped. I could even imagine it was me, paying attention to the twist of her hip, waiting for a change of position so I could pretend to orchestrate it.
If I finished first it was terrible. I would try to focus on something else, try not to listen to her moaning in my ear.
-
During those first years, I thought I would catch quick looks when I turned my back. I believe she flipped the switch and let me exist in her bedroom but never allowed me to know. If I got the feeling I was present in her room I would curl up on the bed beside her, hoping she could sense how sorry I was.
Coming to realize you deserve to be tortured; that is the longest road.
-
For a month, her image failed to appear and it was a wonderful month. Leggit stopped by more frequently, as if he knew, and we talked about the technology. They were now building a holorooms. Family members would each build an exact replica of the same room in each of their houses, across the world, and when they entered the room they could spend time with any other member also in their holoroom. Families all over the world were eating dinner together. It was as if they had invented teleporting, just one simple step away.
-
I had bitten hard and ripped it through the skin, expunging the chip with a flow of blood from my mouth. I removed all six from my bottom lip. They were small and yellow, sharp and shiny once I had sucked the blood off. I kept them cupped in my hand but I couldn’t sleep knowing they were no longer safe in my body and eventually I reinserted them into the bottom of my right foot, sharp point first, and stayed in bed until the skin healed over them.
-
“She cancelled the program. She remarried. I’m sorry. I really am sorry for you.”
Leggit passed the whiskey. We always pulled from the bottle. It did a lot towards putting us on the same level.
It took twenty bottles of convincing but after another year he turned her back on. She looked happier, right away happier, and older. I sat in the corner, terrified of disturbing her happiness. I moved the bed to the far side to give the couple space and I could tell in the night how his skin pressed up against hers.
I started to pick at them, and on average I would remove one a day. They had set deep and usually they brought plenty of blood with them. But that was ok. Leggit would come and collect them. He told me he was keeping them for me, which was nice. I passed out trying to dislodge a chip from my throat and he brought me a small pen knife. To help me along, he said.
After a year they stopped having sex. She would masturbate alone and I would sit beside her and cut at myself with the knife, popping out the chips efficiently.
-
“You sure you don’t want to keep it?”
“I’ve taken them all out.”
“You sure you don’t want to just hold on to it? Just in case you get tired?”
That was about the most compassionate offer I had ever received.
“Thing’s will get better after this,” he told me with surety. I had settled my account this run and things would be better for me soon, he assured me.
“Just keep it.It’s….
