Carry Me to the Water
The world celebrates great prison breaks. The French territories still commemorate the day in which the dreaded Bastille burst open before the righteous fury of the peasantry and disgorged into the light of day the innocent, the aggrieved, the tortured and the oppressed.
They forget that every time a prison is opened, it also disgorges, amid the righteous and innocent, the con artists, the rapists, the murderers and the monsters.
Monsters like me.
My name is Lucius Dante Maximilian Keeva, Luce to my friends, though I killed the last one of those fourteen years ago.
I was born the son of Good Man Keeva, one of fifty men who control the immense territory and wealth of Earth between them, and have for the last three hundred years. As good as a prince.
But for the last fourteen years, my domain had been a cell, six by ten, with a cot attached to the wall, a fresher in the opposite corner that served to have a sort of vibro-wash and clean one’s clothes, and to take care of the other necessities of the body, all in one. At the foot of my bed there was a dispenser through which a self-opening can of food and a container of drink came through every so often. I thought it happened three times a day, but I couldn’t swear to it.
I couldn’t see daylight from my cell. But cans arrived three times for each period they kept my lights turned on, so I considered that a day. And I kept count by saving one of the cans and scratching it on the side with the lid. Three hundred and sixty five days made a year with the usual adjustment. And I had fourteen of those to the day when freedom came, unexpected and terrible.
It wasn’t strictly true that I hadn’t seen another human being in fourteen years, not after a couple of days or so of questioning after arriving here. Once, in the middle of the second year, I’d got very ill. Who knows how, unless the food was contaminated. I’d caught an infection that wouldn’t let go and wouldn’t be cured by any of the usual means. They transferred me to a secure hospital ward for two weeks. A very secure ward, with robots as caretakers and doctors who saw me only remotely, at least after I regained consciousness. I retained a vague memory of having been touched while only semiconscious. Touched by human hands.
But after I became conscious only mechanicals touched me. Still through the window, made of transparent dimatough—I know, I tried to break it—I could see people coming and going. Men and women walking around, free, under the sun or the rain. I remembered them very clearly, each of their expressions, their clothes, their movements. I’d spent years remembering and making sure I didn’t forget that there were real, live people out there. Even if I was as good as buried alive.
Twice more I’d been hospitalized, when I’d tried to commit suicide. And one of those times I’d been attended by humans, while they sewed the open cut on my face, from having got the cot to drop on my head. I remembered that touch too. Because down here, in the artificial light or the dark, it was easy to imagine there was nothing else. Nothing but me, all alone in the world forever.
A world and a monster. Forever.
Fourteen years after my arrival in Never-Never, I was exercising. I’d found that just lying around and sleeping made it difficult to sleep and all too easy to stay up all through the time my lights were off, thinking of ghosts. I’d tried that for three years. Now I exercised.
I partitioned my day, so that in the morning—or right after the lights went on and I ate the first can of food—I cleaned myself, removed my beard with the cream provided, vibroed my one, faded yellow body suit, thrice replaced, but still much worn and now tight, and put it on, because it gave me the illusion I was still part of the world of living humans, and that someone, somehow, might see me and care how I looked.
Then I sat down and used the gem reader some kind soul had slipped into my cell through the food dispenser almost at the beginning of my captivity. I used it through gems totaling about five hours, and then the second food ration was dispensed. And then I exercised.
Back when I was the pampered heir of Olympus Seacity, I’d been provided with exercise machines, and hired trainers. Turned out you could do just as good a job, or perhaps better, using your body as a counter weight and resistance. If you had five hours and nothing else to do.
Oh, I used my bed in exercises too. It used to fold up, but since I’d almost managed to kill myself by getting the bed to fall on my upturned face, they’d fixed it so it was permanently attached to the wall, permanently down, and couldn’t fall. Not even when a man who must be six seven and close to three hundred pounds—I had no way of weighing or measuring myself—pushed himself up from it by the force of his arms, over and over and over again.
I had my palms spread flat on the bed—at about the level of my pelvis—and was using my arm strength to push down on it and pull myself up, while bending my knees, till my feet left the floor completely for a count of twenty, then down, then up again. I was on my hundredth rep of the day, counting aloud: fifteen, sixteen, seventeen—
Boom.
Boom is not the way to write it down. It was like a boom, a crash and a whoosh all in one, deafeningly loud.
I let go and found myself cowering under my bunk, my back flat against the cold, smooth wall, my head bent, my arms around my knees. Instinctive. It is instinct to try to make yourself small and unobtrusive. Not that I was ever either.
My mind ran through what could have caused the boom.
The first thought was that it was impossible. Had to be. There was no way—no possible way—that there could be that type of explosion anywhere near me.
The prison which had been my home for so long was called Never-Never because it was the safest, best guarded and most absolutely secure prison in the history of mankind. It was impossible there had been an explosion there. And if there were, it would do nothing but drown all the prisoners, because as I remembered from when I’d been transported here in the dark of night, Never-Never was underwater, sealed into the base of a seacity. Most people didn’t even know it existed.
Yet there were other noises from outside. Noises I wasn’t used to hearing. Normal prison noises—cherished as random diversions from an otherwise monotonously ordered day—were distant conversations, too distant to hear the words, and sometimes the sound of muffled footsteps walking by, outside my door. Sometimes, rarely, there was a scream, perhaps as a new victim was dragged down to this antiseptic isolation. Unlike prisoners of an older era, we didn’t even have rats as consolation.
Now the screams came one after the other. There were drumbeats of running feet. An odd sound scared me, for a moment, until I realized it was laughter. And then there was…singing?
My mind raced, making my heart race, and not all the will power in the world could bring me out from under my cot. Until I saw the water.
At first it showed as a filmy sheen under my door. I blinked at it. Sweat stung my eyes, and I was sure that it was a mirage. Although Never-Never was under the ocean, I hadn’t seen water except in my drink dispenser for fourteen years. The fresher was strictly vibration only. At a guess, long before I’d been brought here, some clever soul had filled up the waste disposal hole with cans, by keeping five or ten of them, stopped up the space under the door, perhaps with the blanket—then filled the cell with fresher water.
Now the only way to commit suicide by drowning would have been to block the hole, stop up the crevice under the door, then piss enough. Supposing drink hadn’t been controlled, I didn’t think even I could muster enough desperation for that.
So when the water first came in, it took me moments to believe it—dozens of minutes of my staring in disbelief, while it crept under the door, in increasing quantities, till it lapped at my bare feet, cold and wet. I put out a finger, dipped it in the water and tasted it. Saltwater. There was a hole in the prison. A hole that let in seawater. I reacted.
Or rather, my body reacted, which means it did something stupid, as bodies will when you’re not paying attention to them. I jumped up, cracking my head—hard—on the cot, then bent again and scrambled out from under the cot, on my hands and knees, splashing in what had to be, now, two inches of water.
My heart beat hard, and my throat was trying to close in panic. Never-Never was completely under water, even if the entrance was up above the water line, a narrow, well-guarded hole on a seacity floor. The explosion could not have been at the main entrance or no water would be coming in. That meant it had to be in an underwater wall, somewhere.
Never-Never had seven levels. Seven circles of hell. I was on the sixth down. If I understood the organization properly, and it was entirely possible I didn’t, this level housed the most dangerous prisoners. The level below me contained only torture cells.
I’d been taken to them for two days when I’d first come to Never-Never. I’d never understood what exactly they wanted to know or what they thought torture would accomplish. Maybe they just liked hearing me scream.
I tried to remember exactly how long it had been from boom to water under my door. The water was now up to my ankles, and I couldn’t think clearly. It felt like the explosion had simultaneously taken place several years ago and only a heartbeat away. But the water was now above my calves, which meant the hole had to be nearby.
Someone would come, I told myself, swallowing, imagining the cell filling with water to the ceiling, drowning me. They’d come before I was floating lifeless. They’d never let me commit suicide, and they weren’t about to let me die now.
Yes, I’d tried to commit suicide before, but you need to work yourself up to a certain pitch of despair for that. I wasn’t there now. I had a brand new data gem, slipped in yesterday’s otherwise empty mid-day food can. It claimed to be ancient novels from the twentieth century. Thirty of them. I hadn’t even looked at the gem at all. I’d been saving it, reading my old gems: history and science, music and language, and saving the new one like a rare treat. New ones came in seldom and irregularly. I’d gladly forego a meal a day for a gem, but I never got that. This was the first new gem in three months. And now I’d die without reading one word of it.
I lurched towards my cot again. I kept the gem reader—a cheap, tiny unit of the sort you used to be able to buy for a couple of cents anywhere—and the gems in the crevice between bed and wall. Not exactly hidden. Either the cell was wired for sound and sight—and it probably was or else how could they stop all my suicide attempts in time?—and they didn’t care I had it, or else it wasn’t and they didn’t know. No one ever came in to inspect, so no one would find it otherwise. But I kept it there so it wouldn’t fall and break. The gems were my only connection to other humans: to their words, their minds, their thoughts. If I lost them, I would quickly lose whatever grip I retained on reality.
Perhaps I had, I thought, as I grabbed the gems and the reader, and wrapped the whole thing, tightly, in my coverlet. Perhaps this was all a hallucination. The coverlet ripped easily but I’d found in the past, when I’d spilled drink on it, that it was completely impermeable. Like water proof paper. I was thinking that neither gems nor reader were designed to be exposed to salt water. And if I broke them, new ones might not be provided.
Though they had to come from someone within the system, they couldn’t be exactly official or else they’d not be sent inside otherwise empty food cans.
I wrapped the whole as tightly as I could, ripping the coverlet and tying it over itself. The torn strips weren’t sturdy enough to hang oneself with, but they worked for this. I slipped the packet inside my suit. The water was now up to my knees.
Splashing, I drew myself up to my cot and stood on it, my hands on the ceiling for balance. That would keep me safer longer and give someone time to rescue me.
They would come. They had to come. After all my clever attempts at killing myself, they weren’t going to let me die like this.
A voice screamed something outside the door. No, wait, sang. Then there was…
A flash of sound and light that glared through the hole in my door where the lock used to be. I blinked.
When I opened my eyes again, the door was open, and above the ripple caused by the door opening, standing on a broom—a little antigrav wand, forbidden for transportation in all civilized lands—was the most unlikely angel of deliverance I’d ever seen.