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fiction: serial fiction
faraway: chapter four
Damu and Summers stood side by side, repetitively inspecting and adjusting mechanically-placed components to Intel motherboards, then watching them slide them down the line for further work. It was difficult labor, hard on fingers and eyes, and the thin latex gloves and airtight safe suits were safety precautions for the stability of the chips, not the protection of the prisoners. It was, however, loud as hell amidst the grinding of conveyer belts and computer-guided soldering, making it easy for two co-conspiritors to discuss plans.
"We have more than two weeks of goods from the commissary for about 60 in case of wackiness," Summers said through his teeth. "As well, some of our brown friends came by with some ... party favors."
Damu actually almost stopped, looking over at Summers. "My kinda stuff?"
"Genuine article," Summers said quietly, never looking up. "We can bang on their level, high post."
Damu whistled appreciatively. "That's excellent! El Mysterioso must be the man! You got it locked down?"
"Funny pun," Summers replied drily, drawing out the word as he tweezed a chip's connecting wires into place. "Harata's boy Song showed me where. All down and ret' to git around."
"Keep up the collection plate steez," Damu nodded. "Two weeks is aight, but ..."
A thunderstorm of boots on concrete stomped in just then, and ran towards Damu. He rolled his arms like a paddleboat and Summers slid nonchalantly away from his friend. Damu turned quickly and executed a spin kick that took down the first two guards, knocking them back into two more. The five behind them literally grabbed Damu from the air and slammed him earthwards. At that point he went limp, limbs akimbo and dead weight. The guards pounded him for a moment, not realizing he had stopped resisting. They then lifted him as a mass and carried him off, as Summers cursed to himself and listened, his back to the whole thing.
• • •
"All collected as requested, Warden."
Simpson walked up to Spaulding, who was standing at one end of the long walkway overlooking the interrogation rooms. The insides were holographic projections of a dingy, dark chambers reminiscent of dungeons from the Spanish Inquisition, complete with shackles and chains. From this angle, they were seen for what they are -- a string of huge domes, transparent from the outside and perfectly formed with complete climate controls for maximum accuracy of the illusions they harbored, which could be as diverse as the depths of the ocean to the surface of the moon. This section was deep in the solitary wing, yet directly accesible via stairway from the staff portions of the prison.
Spaulding was at the top stair of the walkway, which split the two rows of ten identical domes like a spine. Seven guards were using one dome for recreation, playing anti-gravity dodge ball like children. Spaulding walked along with Simpson until he saw the three domes he was interested in.
Chained to identical chairs and only slightly roughed up, Anthony Harata, Ishmael Damu and James Thornton awaited their captors.
"Thornton last," Spaulding said thoughtfully, stroking the new growth of a Van Dyke on his chin. "No, make that second. Damu is the dangerous one, we should deal with him last. Yes."
Simpson nodded and handed a small rectangular remote control to Spaulding. "I have Hightower ready should we need him, sir."
Spaulding said nothing as he descended the steps towards Harata. As he opened the hermetically sealed door, the inside of the dome accomodated by creating the sound of rusty hinges turning, and the image of a massive metal door opening on a flood of light. Harata looked away as Simpson and Spaulding stepped in.
"Mister Harata," Spaulding said smoothly, his voice like fine silk on freshly bathed skin. "I would like you to answer some questions for me."
Harata spit out a curse in Mandarin, and one in Hawaiian just for good measure. Spaulding sighed and nodded to Simpson, who moved like fever and smashed the left side of Harata's face with his nightstick.
"Outta ... batteries ... Simpson?" Harata spat out.
"Mister Harata," Spaulding continued, nonplussed. "Where are the supplies you have been hoarding?"
"No hablo engles," Harata chuckled, punctuated by another lightning fast nightstick from Simpson."
"Mister Harata, what have you planned with Mister Damu and his African descended cohorts?"
Silence. Nod. Nightstick.
"Mister Harata. What did the guard William Korenak reveal to Thomas Chunpakven?"
Silence. Nod. Nightstick.
"Mister Harata," Spaulding said absently, as if discussing what he'd had for lunch, while peering upwards at some visual mote that enthralled his attention, "if you continue this pattern, your brains will be lying on the floor, and the stain of gray matter is notoriously difficult to clean. Now, surely you must have some gloat, some defiant statement, some manifesto to deliver ..."
Harata looked up at Spaulding and raised his voice to a strange pitch saying, "Life is lak a box uh chaw-klets."
Spaulding scrunched up his face for a moment and then smiled. "Ah, a reference to what your people so amusingly call 'Gump labs,' for splicing people's comments into more incriminating interpretations. Well, if not speaking for fear of being misquoted is your problem, may I share this with you ..."
Spaulding tapped two buttons and Harata's voice came through the room, clear and resonant. "My name is Onuma 'Anthony' Harata. I have conspired with Ishmael Damu and James Thornton to assassinate guards at the Faraway Penal Facility. I have engaged in deviant sexual behaviors with both men, and I have ..."
Harata laughed, and Spaulding switched the voice off. "Oh, the inflections are a little flat, and it's a bit too ... relaxed to be taken under duress. But we can work on that."
Harata merely stared at Spaulding. Silence. Nod. Nightstick.
Spaulding pulled his pistol from his pocket holster and aimed it at Harata's head. "I don't know what it must be like for you, staring down a barrel after all those years, aiming them at the enemies of your Yakuza masters. But your death blows on the wind, Anthony Harata, and it's coming closer."
"There is no wind in Faraway," Harata whispered. "You've seen to that."
Spaulding could only raise his eyebrows and nod at that. "I suppose I have ..." he said with some consideration. With that, he holstered the pistol, rose and stepped from the room, Simpson close behind.
Together, they walked into Thornton's room. Spaulding pulled up a chair, and sat backwards in it facing Thornton. Simpson stood just off to the left of the chained prisoner.
"I'm disappointed in you, James," Spaulding said quietly.
Thornton sat quietly, head down, staring intently at something on the floor.
"Working with Asians and Blacks," Spaudling said with a tsk-ing inflection. "Oh, the inhumanity ..."
"That little sample of Harata you piped in here was bullsh*t, man!" Thornton growled, his head popping up like a child's toy, face flushed with anger. "You're not takin' me down on the word of some g**k ..."
Spaulding waved his hand in a dismissive motion. "James ..."
"No, you listen to me, Warden!" Thornton growled. "You're holdin' back on us. We're just like you, man, and you haven't given us sh*t. Them ni**ers have enough info to know that we're cut off from the rest of the system, and that the Department of Corrections ain't comin' in on the white horse any time soon! Did you tell us, confide in the White Knights, who would have stood by your side in putting down any colored rebellion? Give us special treatment to keep us in your good graces? No! You gave us nothing, treated us like we were on the same level as those f**kin' slanty eyed, jungle bunny, wetback motherf**kers."
Spaulding looked quickly at Simpson, eyebrow arched, with a vague but amused expression before turning back to Thornton. "James, what makes you think they're right?"
"Come on, Spaulding, we know how to bribe guards just as well as they do!" Thornton growled. "We found out just like they did, through guards, that you're making cutbacks, tellin' 'em they're dead if they talk, yadda yadda yadda. Do you really think I'm stupid? I think I know why you treat me like I'm stupid, Spaulding. Just because I'm in jail, you think I'm an animal like them and not your white brother. Well, when those ni**ers get their sh*t together and attack you in a few months, the Knights aren't gonna lift a finger to help! You could have had over three thousand extra soldiers, but now all you have is yourself."
"But James," Spaulding purred, actually enjoying this. "You hate them all! You'd attack them the second a fight broke out!"
Thornton stuck out his chest with appreciable pride. "Nuh-uh! We got a deal -- we get the transports while the ni**ers and japs and spics fight you here. We leave them alone, and they leave us alone, just like it's been for years. We go home, and all you get is Showtime at the Apollo! If you don't wanna work with us, we'll be fine on our own, leaving you to rot with the lesser races!"
Spaulding chuckled a bit, and then Simpson joined in, until they were both laughing out loud. "What's so f**kin' funny?" Thornton bit out angrily.
"We have cameras everywhere," Spaulding began, still snickering, "shakedowns regularly, and even our own agents in the populace. Yet you've given us more information on what's happened here in the last few months than all of that put together, and with hardly a finger laid on you. Do you know I have a three hundred pound black guard outside, ready to sodomize you, as a means of last resort to get information from you, and you just ..." Spaulding sniggered, "gave it all up to me, and all I had to do was sit down!"
Thornton opened his mouth to issue another angry diatribe, but then shut it suddenly.
"Don't worry, I see we can be honest and straightforward with each other now," Spaulding said easily, wiping his eyes and settling down. "Simpson, untie this man and send him back. Have him receive extra rations and whatever other amenities are legal. Favor him. James, you'll double cross the others when they attack us and come down on them with righteous white fury."
"Just like that we're friends again?" Thornton snarled.
"The reason you were brought in here," Spaulding drawled, "was to inform you of what was going on. You resisted, so the guards got rough, a normal response. To be honest, the cutbacks are nothing more than system wide corner cutting. There is nothing wrong, and if we went as long as fifteen minutes without a regular radio check with the proper codes, an army of DOC troopers would be here within an hour. It was a test of loyalty, James. We leaked different kinds of misinformation to root out which guards were on the dole, and with your story we know exactly which ones to send back to Omaha. Come now! Of course I recognize you as my white brother. I'd never treat you like one of them."
Two guards walked in and began unsecuring Thornton, who looked at Spaulding warily. "You were gonna have some mandingo ni**er rape me?"
Spaulding chuckled, shaking his head. "Just go through the motions, to scare you and see if you were really working with them. If you were with them, you'd like it."
Thornton visibly shuddered, then smiled with a puppy dog innocence that belied the many, many men he had sent to their creator. "I guess I had you all wrong, Spaulding. I'm sorry."
"Ken, please," Spaulding smiled, watching the guards who would untie Thornton. "Tell you what -- let's have dinner in a day or so and see where we stand on some serious ni**er bashing!" Spaulding extended a hand to Thornton, who shook it amiably, as unnoticed, Spaulding tapped a button on the controller held behind his back.
"Yes, sir!" Thornton smiled. "You can count on the White Knights to stand by your side!"
The guards led the newly-happy Thornton out and Spaulding switched off the circuit which had relayed the last few sentences of the conversation to Damu and Harata's rooms.
"That went far better than I expected," Spaudling said thoughtfully. "His greatest vulnerability is his desire to believe. A few slurs and all of a sudden he thinks we're of one accord. Hm. Simpson, have an infiltrated Black guard stab Thornton to death in ... three weeks. Have the stabber quickly overtaken by guards, and rushed away for duty away from the prisoners. Oh, and get me the heads of Thornton's corrupted guards. Yes. Now, I believe, we're ready for Mister Damu."
Ishmael Damu was smiling when Spaulding and Simpson walked in. His left eye was swollen shut, and his black shirt was thick with his own dried blood. Yet he smiled as brightly as if he'd just won the lottery.
"Why good afternoon, Warden Spaulding!" he said brightly, "and to you too, Officer Simpson! It's so lovely to see you both again!"
Spaulding mirrored his entry into Thornton's space, and sat facing Damu, arms resting on the back of the chair.
"You," Spaulding said gravely, "have been betrayed."
"From Thor I expect betrayal -- I wouldn't know what to do if he weren't an enemy," Damu said calmly. "Anthony, however, sounds next to nothing like that badly done, 'run Forrest run' remix you piped in here a while ago."
"He has confessed," Spaulding said grimly.
"Fascinating!" Damu smiled. "I'll look forward to reading it."
"You still won't reveal what you know," Spaulding wondered.
"Tell you what, Ken," Damu said, his mad grin plastered on as he leaned forward for emphasis, "you tell me what you think you know and I'll tell you if you're right."
Spaulding glanced at Simpson, who struck down with his nightstick on Damu's left eye. Blood and fluid leaked openly on to the floor. Yet, when he raised his head again, he was still smiling, a toothy grin that showed no sign of insincerity nor fatigue.
"Where are you hoarding supplies?" Spaudling asked quietly, the holographic representations of rats squeaking in some imagined distance.
"In Simpson's apartment," Damu replied comically. "We have a whole year's worth of supplies, compressed tightly by the pressure of his butt, as well as a number of tactical nuclear weapons and ..."
Simpson's nightstick cut off the comment, a heavy blow to the back which made a sound like a brick wrapped in steaks hitting a sidewalk. Damu's neck snapped back and then hung forward like a willow.
"Ken," Damu whispered.
"There is no shortage," Spaulding said evenly. "This has all been an exercise in discipline, so I could root out disloyal guards, and ship them back to Omaha."
"Ken ..." Damu groaned quietly, his head still hanging low.
"I am in regular contact with the DOC," Spaudling continued, "who have suggested this as a sting operation to remove corruption at Faraway."
Damu sighed and looked up. "Thornton actually bought this line of malarky, didn't he? Anthony, more than likely, had next to nothing to say to you, but that knuckle dragging half wit fell for it. You must have been a Company man, because the FBI was never this slick."
Without acknowledging Damu's comment, Spaulding concluded, "This facility is completely under control, as it has always been and as it will always be."
In one movement, Damu's chair was empty, the shackles that held him laying open on the floor. Spaulding actually let slip a surprised gasp, and Simpson fell back, reaching for his pistol. Damu pushed himself back, bounced off the wall of the dome, then stood just in front of it, rubbing his wrists. By this time, Spaulding and Simpson both had pistols trained on him.
"If you're gonna interrogate me, we don't need this medieval hologram sh*t," Damu said evenly, keeping both hands in front of him and standing perfectly still. "Just bring me up to your office and we can talk."
"Freeze, or I'll blow you the f**k away!" Simpson growled.
"I haven't moved since I came over here, dickwad," Damu said tiredly, rubbing his wrists. "I wasn't in the mood for that chair anymore."
Spaulding squinted at Damu and then smiled, standing upright and holstering his pistol. "To attack us would be illogical ..." he began.
"... because there's nowhere to run," Damu finished. "Are you getting me yet, Ken? Did you ever consider that maybe I'm at Faraway on purpose? Did it ever cross your limited little mind that you're locked in here with me? I'm not going anywhere. I have no desire to mess with you nor even interact if I can avoid it. I do, however, have to show you that I'm at least as smart as you, and how far your 'control' extends, with parlor tricks like that, so you'll quit thinking those thirty year old gags you use on that idiot Thor will work on me."
Taking a breath, Damu said menacingly, "My superiority complex is not racially based. It's personal."
Spaulding actually laughed. "Then these ... displays actually encourage you to misbehave," Spaulding muttered. "Then why don't I just let Simpson kill you now?"
"Because you could be wrong," Damu said quietly, "and there could be someone behind me that I'm serving as a mouthpiece for. You don't know, your surveillance has turned up nothing, those pathetic infiltrators RB0937138 and AJ7239416 can't get me to tell them the right time of day much less anything important. Kill me and you'll lose your only source of information into a potentially dangerous cell of prisoners, pardon the pun, because you don't know who to follow. That's why you haven't killed me yet, and why I find chatting with you such a rare and unexpected joy."
Spaulding smirked, thought a moment, then pulled out a pair of cuffs from his belt, tossing them at Damu's feet. "Put those on. Simpson will take you back to your cell and you and I will more than likely never speak face to face again. If your purpose is to distract me you will not be given the opportunity. If you are the actual troublemaker I seek, and I believe you are, surveillance will be more effective than these tedious episodes."
Damu kicked the cuffs airborne and caught them without looking. "I am not the best of us, remember that." Sliding the cuffs on to the raw skin of his wrists, Damu commented, "I'll do the devil's labor, but I'm not playing with you." He stood quietly, waiting to see what was next.
Simpson looked over at Spaulding, who nodded, then walked over, secured the cuffs, and walked Damu out of the room.
Seven minutes later, Simpson returned to find Spaulding examining the bindings that had failed to hold Ishmael Damu.
"Do you want to know what he did to escape these?" Spaulding mused. "Using a yoga technique I read about in college, one that was supposedly lost, he actually tightened the bindings as he escaped them, dislocating and re-setting his own thumbs in the process. The environment that created him must have been extraordinary ..."
"I believe we should kill him, sir," Simpson said slowly. "I know you said I should not suggest and just trust you, but he will be a danger to us alive ..."
"... and a banner around which to rally if he's dead." Spaulding sighed. "He's played a careful game of chess with me, and cornered me into a certain number of moves. If I decide to execute him, it'll be the decision to execute all the prisoners, because without him to serve as a lightning rod of attention for both sides, this place will surely erupt. For now, he lives unmolested, yet under the tightest surveillance known to man. Did he say anything walking back to his cell?"
Simpson shook his head.
Spaulding stood thinking for a moment, then strode purposefully out of the room, the hologram fading, Simpson falling quickly in to step behind him.
• • •
"Ishmael," Jonesy said, sliding up behind Damu with a push broom the next day on the processor line, "Who's Johnny, rock five?"
Damu looked at him confusedly and said, "Fool, what you hollerin' bout?" As part of his sentence, Jonesy wasn't supposed to be anywhere near anything that was part of a computer, let alone a whole line of motherboards slated to head to suburban homes and schools. Whatever was on his mind must be important to have risked switching shifts with somebody just to deliver a message.
Damu turned back to his work and listened, recognizing the "rock five" signal for the beginning of a coded conversation. Until Jonesy said, "no doubt," every fifth word he said would be relevant to an internal sentence, the rest meaningless babble only occassionally used as context. It was enormously difficult to decipher for even the ones involved, but had not been broken in the twenty years since his father had developed it.
Jonesy began to babble. "Today in my food found this ickly ass thing way too ill odd looking for it to be edible. Us, meaning me and Mo, two times stepped back and used every bit of our prison bred ethnicity and good get back to trip. sh*t, free is still the cost, no doubt."
Damu struggled to contain his excitement. A way to use the prison to get free? It could only mean that the plans were coming to fruition. Jonesy had been assigned to hack the computers and facilitate any possible takeover digitally, so this news must mean ... hell, what could it mean?
Slowly, he remembered the code for continuing the conversation encrypted. "Ninja," Damu began, "yo ass is trippin. What kinda sh*t you on, no doubt?"
Jonesy grinned. He was great with codes, after spending years gazing at billions of lines of C++ and other programming languages to funnel funds away from their owners, and enjoyed this kind of thing as one of the small pleasures of his life. "Peep the steez, kid. You know how we told Harata that his ugly ass and us only ball because whoever made the game, or else, made sh*t happen said, 'Can y'all do that, naw, see?' It can't be real. Hide yo ugly ass, Harata, here comes mah boot all in yo' yellow backside, mofo! Prison makes you bust laughs, no doubt."
Hide in prison? Then ... there was a rumor that a series of passageways and conduits existed, built into the prison not by its designers but its work force, the first prisoners here, and this could only mean Jonesy had found the holy f**king grail.
"Um, I be askin when is dinner, no doubt?"
Jonesy chuckled. "Whenever, man," he said without code, the sweaty gleam off his almond shaped head as prominent as the smile on his face.
Ishmael crooned softly, "To-night is the nii-ght ..." and went feverishly back to pounding chips into place.
• • •
It was three AM by the time they all gathered there. The service corridors had indeed been built solely by prisoners, and it showed -- irregular spacing and seams, more by the lack of common design techniques than the irregular pieces of steel and alloy that comprised them. The space here was actually directly over the serving area of the main dining hall, separated by six feet of solid steel and several fans, funneling the scents of prison food out into the world beyond Faraway. Some of them wafted through this place, giving it a greasy atmosphere that couldn't be shaken.
A small glowtorch sat in between them, along with the shattered remains of their ankle bracelets -- Jonesy, Harata, the ultra quiet Munoz, the elder Collins and Damu. It didn't seem safe to have Damu and Harata in general populace anymore, so when Jonesy's revelation had come they took the opportunity to control events from beyond the control of Spaulding's eyes. Jonesy had insisted on coming, because with his techno mastery he could be their conduit to the outside -- speaking to prisoners through the digital clocks in their rooms, dropping edible notes into their food, looking through the same cameras the guards saw. Plus, he was too sloppy to be left unattended. Munoz was another of El Mysterioso's numerous representatives, a fifth story man who literally lived in silence -- his tongue cut out by White Knights when he was locked up on a "social studies crime," the polite word for political activism outside approved channels. Now he was so well skilled at silent entry and movement that he was catlike. Collins was an elder who had known Damu as a boy, one of Faraway's first residents, and an advisor to all parties wise enough to listen, so his input was worth the risk. Damu surmised that these five would be the perfect operations team to explore these lost tunnels and spearhead the takeover when the lights went out. I never actually believed Dad when he theorized these would be here, Damu had thought as they made their "escape." How did he know?
Aside from Jonesy now hearing and seeing with all the sophisticated surveillance equipment Faraway had to offer, they could also access literally any point in the prison ... with effort. The irregular passages were sometimes harder to get through than others -- the one leading to the medical center was nearly impassible due to a superhot bulkhead holding a water heating unit the size of a small home, and some of the ducts were too small for even Damu's svelte frame to make it through. But for the most part, Damu, Munoz and Harata could explore while Jonesy played voyeur and Collins kept him on task.
Preliminary walk arounds found safe places for the food and weapons Summers had sent with them -- about two weeks of hard rations and water, as well as several DOC issue knives, batons, and two actual handguns, one always held by Damu himself. They had just completed their patrols and were sitting down to break bread together before sleeping.
"This is almost as good as being home," Jonesy smiled, tapping away at the ancient iBook Munoz had brought, courtesy of the well-connected El Mysterioso.
"How long now, Ishmael?" Harata was even more cagey than normal, the dark, dank passageways bringing up some bad mojo he wasn't prepared to discuss.
Damu closed his eyes and thought for a moment. "This all started in July or so. It's December now. At full operating, the prison can go nine months without outside contact, with Simpson's rationing and ratpacking I'd say it could go 12 to 14. We're gonna be here a while -- to go back out is certain death."
"Who wants to go out there?" Jonesy smirked. "We have food and water -- we can reach the guards' supplies, let alone the prisoners' and never be caught, we can still control events outside, man I'd stay here even if we took over the whole place!"
"That's just because you're an anti-social asshole, Paul," Collins smiled, rubbing Jonesy's shaved head.
Jonesy said nothing, munching on an apple, until he gasped. "Oh my stars and hot wings ..."
Munoz looked over some rudimentary maps he had begun to make and glanced at Jonesy, as did Damu and Harata.
"There are women here," Jonesy whispered.
"The guards have women, sure," Harata nodded, "all at the top of the building, regular home lives and sh*t. What, you got cameras in there?"
"I found those cameras a half hour ago," Jonesy said snappishly. "No, I mean there are women prisoners here!"
Munoz' mouth dropped open, and Damu said, "Excuse me?"
"There's a subsection of cameras," Jonesy started, still tapping away. "They're all divided into geographic layers of the prison. There's a huge section that covers general populace, us, and a smaller bank to cover way more of the guards than I really wanted to see. But about the same size as the bank of cameras for the guards is one that's got a password, which I just hacked, an alphanumeric jobbie that's kept in with the housekeeping supplies. It's coded 'basement,' so I'm expecting trucks and sh*t, except I remember that's all in the 'garage' subsection of cameras on the guard or "attic" level. I turn on my permissions and ... well, c'mere and see for yourself."
The other four scooted over behind Jonesy and gaped at the tiny screen. Rows upon rows of women, each with the familiar ankle bracelet glowing around their right leg, stood naked in showers, washing up and obliviously ignoring the cameras in every corner of the room.
"I can zoom in, too!" Jonesy said theatrically, finding a huge breasted Black woman and then digitally closing in on her behind until it filled the screen.
"Stop that!" Collins growled, smacking Jonesy's head lightly. "What if the guards see you scrolling in like that?"
"The camera feeds a different view to every receiver -- and this one is secured, so they don't even know when it's on. I could scroll in on Spaulding picking his nose and no one would know."
"Guess we found a reason for Jonesy to come out of the caverns," Collins joked.
Damu stood up in the small space, his head, almost brushing the low ceiling. "Sleep. We need to sleep so we can wake up and work logically. You too, techno boy. Time for us to whack off to naked women tomorrow, after we find out everything we can about this prison."
Grumbling, Jonesy turned off the computer and closed it. They all hunkered down on bundles of loose clothes and grunted their goodnights.
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