“A present?” I ask, peering through the hatch.
“It’s your birthday,” she replies, shrugging.
“I didn’t think …” I start, but I don’t finish my sentence; instead, I tear off the paper.
“It’s just another book,” she says, “but it’s a really good one.”
I turn the hardback over in my hands. The cover is green and depicts stems of grass in a field. I read the title: The Fellowship of the Ring.
“It’s the first in a trilogy,” she tells me. “I think you’ll really like it.”
“It’s amazing,” I say. “Thank you.”
“No problem.”
“I’ll get to it as soon as I finish this one.” I nod to the book on my bed. “Do you want any of these back?”
I gesture to the small mountain of books at the foot of my bed, and Wren shakes her head.
“You ask me that every day.” She laughs. “Keep them; I get ten for one Coin at Vintage.”
“Are you sure?” I ask.
Wren nods, and I realize—not for the first time—that these books, which seem like priceless treasures to me, are really nothing of worth to the outside world, where technology and complete immersion are king.
“I’m sure,” she says. “So, how have you been?”
Wren and I spend the next ten minutes talking about how my favorite skate team is doing in the outside world, any good movies she’s seen recently, her ambitions to become a virtual architect, and how she’s been studying code in her free time, and before long it’s time for her to go. She hands me a sandwich for my lunch and says goodbye.
And this is the saddest part of my day: the second the hatch closes and I know that I won’t see Wren for another twenty-four hours. It’s not even three in the afternoon, and I have nothing to do but read and wait for the energy harvest to begin.
Alone in the silence, I find myself thinking about how hard my time in prison would have been without Wren. Before Forrest retired, I had been imprisoned for almost a year, and I had felt the weight of the Loop pressing down on me. I felt every second of every hour stretching out into infinity, and I thought that I would lose my mind.
Then one day as the hatch opened and I lay on my bed waiting to hear the gruff voice of Forrest Hamlet, a voice that didn’t suit his aging but handsome Alt face, yelling government-approved questions at me, instead Wren said, “Hi, I’m Wren. I’m the new warden.”
I think I felt a moment of hope, a little spark in my chest when I sat up and saw her smiling at me, impossibly green eyes glowing bright the way Alts’ do, wide smile revealing perfect white teeth. I said hi back, and we talked—nothing particularly deep or meaningful, just friendly words. How are you? What’s your name? How long have you been in here? It felt like she cared.
I fell in love with her the first time she gave me a book. It was such a simple gesture. “Just something to pass the time,” she’d said, and then laughed as I stared at the black cover with a red silhouetted wolf howling to the sky. She said that I was looking at it like it was a cup of ice water in a desert, and I told her that it was. A pretty weak reply, but she smiled. The book was The Call of the Wild by Jack London, an ancient novel about a dog who joins a pack of wolves. I loved it and can still quote it from memory. I read it twice before she returned the next day with another book.
After that, Wren brought me a new book almost every day. She took time out of her life to go online, using her Lens to enter the Mall—a gigantic virtual shopping center with over four million stores—and go to one of the antique shops and choose a new book for me, a book that would be delivered by drone to her home within an hour of purchase. She was selfless, kind, nice. She was unlike any Alt I’d ever met.
Wren saved me from the insanity that infects a lot of the inmates in this place. I hear them during the exercise hour, babbling nonsense into the air, unable to adapt from their hyperstimulated life in the outside world to the agonizing solitude of the Loop.
I’m still staring at the hatch where Wren was five minutes before, smiling at my own good luck that she came along. I eat my sandwich and hold on to this good feeling for as long as I can.
* * *
At 5 p.m., the screen displays my dinner options, and I select soup and bread, which arrives through the panel a few seconds later. I eat, and then at 5:25 p.m., the screen tells me to stand in the circle of light that has appeared on the floor of my cell. I sigh; it’s time for the energy harvest.
In the moments leading up to the harvest, it’s not Happy’s voice that comes through the screen but Galen Rye’s.
“Please remove all items of clothing,” he says, the usual approachable tone gone from his voice.
Refusal is an option, but the punishment is drone poison. I pull the Velcro straps of my shoes loose (no laces allowed in the Loop) and kick them onto my bed. I pull apart the Velcro fastener of my plain white jumpsuit and slide it down my body. It joins my shoes on the bed, and I stand there, naked. Galen’s voice returns: “Keep your hands by your sides and legs together. Inmate, know that the energy harvest is part of your punishment. Know that criminality will not be tolerated. Know that your suffering will act as a deterrent to those outside prison who are considering a life of crime.”
“Shut the fuck up,” I mutter.
The great glass tube lowers from the ceiling. The harvest begins at 5:30 p.m.
It starts quickly.
Adrenaline dumps into my system; my heart goes from its resting rate to racing in one second, and every muscle in my body begins to tense, knotting and hardening until I’m sure they’re all going to tear at once. I fall forward, unable to control my spasming fibers, and my face slams against the glass of the tube. I want to cry out in pain, but my throat has locked. Next, microscopic nanobots are released into the tube. They push themselves through my skin and into the veins at my temples, riding the blood flow until they are in my brain, where they replicate and access fear centers in the neocortex and amygdala. They make me believe my life is in great danger, and I’m sure that I’m going to die. No matter how hard I try to assure myself that this is just the energy harvest, that this is just how they get the power they need to operate the Loop without the Alts having to pay more taxes for our imprisonment, I cannot shake off the certainty that this is the end of my life. I twist and convulse and claw at the glass, frantic for a way out.
I fall to the floor, find my voice, and scream.
The harvest goes on for six hours, but it feels like days.
When it finally does end, I’m physically and emotionally drained. I lie on the concrete, wet with the sweat that is pouring off my body, and then the water comes, acrid and infused with delousing agents, triglyceride, and a form of bleach.
Then the hot air blasts in, drying the water and the sweat to a grainy residue, and finally the tube lifts away.
I lie there, and after a few minutes I smile because tomorrow I will run again—I will run and run and drain myself of all my energy so they can’t have it.
I crawl to my bed and look at the clock. I count down the minutes until midnight.
When it comes, I stand at the window and watch the government-issue rain, which comes at midnight and lasts for thirty minutes, calculated to be just the right amount for the crops and the trees before tomorrow’s perfect amount of cloud cover to allow the perfect amount of sunlight to keep the inhabitants of this quadrant of Earth perfectly happy and healthy.