The warden told me the screaming boy’s name is Tyco Roth. The worst part about him wanting to kill me is that I have no idea who he is and no idea why he wants me dead.
Finally, the wall of my cell reaches the top of the ceiling, and I race out into the yard. I run as fast as I can, pushing myself to the limit. I watch the center pillar grow in my field of vision as I approach it, slowing myself enough to touch my palm against the cold concrete column before sprinting back to the entrance of my room. To the center and back takes less than twenty seconds, and I repeat the lap over and over and over until my breaths are coming in sharp painful gasps and my muscles are burning. I can feel the lactic acid in my legs building up, and I push harder, ignoring the pain. This is my act of rebellion; this is how I tell the government what I think of their torture chambers.
I run back to the middle. The walls that separate me from the yards on either side are close enough to touch, and I think about the empty area to my right; that cell has been unfilled for two days now. It used to belong to Maddox Fairfax, my best friend, a Regular who was three months away from being transferred to the Block. Maddox had ridden his luck through eleven Delays until his final one, a surgery; they took his eyes and replaced them with prototype prosthetics, a mixture of technology and laboratory-grown tissues. For a while, the new eyes worked. He was in agony when he returned to the Loop, the stitching and swelling still fresh, but he could tell me the exact dimensions of the yard just by looking from one wall to the other, he could immediately tell how many liters of water filled the harvest tube, and if a plane flew overhead, he’d tell me how high up it was, the exact direction of travel, and how fast it was going.
Then one day he wasn’t the same Maddox anymore. His body had begun to reject the prosthetics; the tissue became infected. They took him away on the Dark Train for observations, and he never came back.
That’s the risk we take when we accept the Delays. You pray for a nanotech trial, a vaccination, or a cosmetic injection that removes all body hair or changes your eye color, but every now and then an inmate is taken away for their Delay and when they return, and the back wall opens for exercise—you can hear them screaming in agony because the doctors took their legs or their lungs or their heart and replaced it with something new, something robotic.
The Delays are for the benefit of the Alts. The trials exist to test new products that make the lives of the wealthy better; all of us in the Loop, we’re just guinea pigs for the rich.
I think about Maddox, how he guided me through those first few weeks after the trial, after Happy had adjudged me morally aware of my actions and culpable for my crimes.
Maddox spoke to me on my fourth day in the Loop, the first day I had dared to set foot into the yard for more than a moment. We’d spoken about the Delays, how it made more sense to decline and accept our execution rather than bending to the government’s will, but we both knew that it was near impossible to refuse. Choosing death spits in the face of hope, and—despite how desperate things are—hope remains.
When my first real Delay (after the mandatory first surgery in which anti-escape technology is implanted) came six months later, I’d stared at the screen for a long time, knowing that one day I’d accept the Delay contract and it would be an amputation, a bone replacement, a new synthetic type of blood to replace my own, and it would fail and I’d die screaming in agony. The scientists at the Facility, where the Delays are administered, don’t do mercy kills. They bring the patient in for observation, then watch them 24/7 until they die. They don’t even offer pain relief—they study every second of footage from the cameras, watching as the body rejects the new limb, or the new pancreas malfunctions, or the reinforced veins split open. They record the patient’s levels of pain and how their body reacts to the failure of the experiment, and then they adjust the trial and run it again with another inmate.
They say it’s worse in the Block. They say Delays come every six weeks instead of every six months. The Block is a newer facility that they finished building seven years ago. Not much is known about what goes on in there, but there are rumors, horrifying rumors, about torture and pain and conditions far worse than the Loop. Inmates are sent to the Block when they turn eighteen. I have 730 days until it’s my turn.
I push down all thoughts of Delays and the Block and death sentences and Maddox, and just run. At last, I collapse against the dividing wall between my and what used to be Maddox’s exercise yards. I suck in the warm air, and I wonder what breathing must be like for the Alts; the Mechanized Oxygen Replenishment systems replace oxygen in the bloodstream seven times more efficiently than their original lungs, and the Automated Pulmonary Moderators where their hearts used to be clean and pump blood through their veins soundlessly.
The superhumans, the cyborgs, the Altered; the ones who look down on us Regulars like we’re nothing.
* * *
I’ve almost caught my breath when I hear a few words from a conversation a few exercise yards over to the left. I push myself to standing and move to the wall on the other side. Amid the singing and yells, beneath the sounds of Tyco Roth’s relentless screamed death threats, I catch snippets of a boy and a girl talking about something that’s going on in the outside world. I recognize the voices; it’s Alistair George and Emery Faith.
“They’re talking about unrest, as though the Regulars are going to rise up …” Alistair is saying, but his Irish accent blends into the chaos, and the end of the sentence is inaudible.
“How?” Emery replies. “How would that even work? It’s an unwinnable fight.”
“There’s talk of war. They’re saying that …” Again I lose track of Alistair’s voice.
“Alistair, there hasn’t been a war in a hundred years.”
“No, but what about all those people who have gone missing from the city? I heard they’re hiding in the Red Zones. What if they …”
I strain to hear more, try to catch a full sentence amid the cacophony of sound, but the conversation is interrupted by sirens wailing out over the yard followed by the voice of Happy, informing us that we have one minute to return to our rooms. Just to remind us of what will happen if we disobey the order, the drones that sit on top of the center pillar float up into the sky, weapons scanning from one inmate to another. I hear the last goodbyes, the last notes of Pander’s singing, and the last yells from Tyco as the inmates of the Loop make their way back to their cells for another day of silence and solitude.
I sit on my bed as the wall closes, and try to savor the sound of the breeze before the silence returns.
I think about the conversation between Emery and Alistair. They were talking about war in the outside world, but that’s impossible: The world is regulated by one government, and that government is counseled by Happy’s irrefutable logic. There’s another reason to dismiss the rumors—there’s no way that two inmates of the Loop would have information from the outside world anyway. There are no visiting hours, no television broadcasts, no Lenses, no LucidVision, not even VR, and although Happy is the operating system that all these devices use, there’s no way of accessing the information, even through the screen. The only face-to-face human contact we have is with the warden, Wren, whom the government requires to come around once a day to deliver the afternoon meal. This is considered an act of compassion from the authorities (advised, of course, by Happy) and keeps the people satisfied that criminals are not treated entirely like animals.