Solitary Century Game

There was a window of time where prisoners were eligible for release. It was half an hour long, at exactly one century from the start of the sentence. The game consisted of guessing that window, and came about because of certain advances in lifespan. A prisoner would guess by merely pressing a red button. Press too early, or too late, and another hundred years would get added. Hit the mark, and freedom would ring. Needless to say, Gabriel kept careful track of time.  

This concept should surprise no one. Wacky ideas from charismatic leaders are taken seriously, especially when stretched between the tension of rising population and lengthening lifespan. Turning a life sentence into a freedom game brought incarceration to a new level of agony, but the distraction and entertainment helped pass time for prisoner and free person alike. Punishment happens because of politics. Politics locks onto anything that takes a little something from both sides. Needless to say, Gabriel was a political prisoner. 

His cell consisted of a sink, a toilet, a shower head, a floor drain, a slab that served as a bed, protective padding, lots of cameras, and a locked door. And of course there was a finger-thin slice of a window for counting the days. There was that red button.  

Twice a day, food and drink came through an automatic drawer next to the door. Once a month a fresh box of crayons for playing the game came through. All of these routines helped with counting time, not counting possible trickery. 

Yes, tricks of timing had been programmed into the administrative AI system, as per the instructions of the law. Nothing too unfair happened, just little twists to make the game more interesting for the spectators.

Gabriel was not allowed clothing. He had zero contact with anyone. It beat the alternative, which for political crimes was terminal rehabilitation by neuro-torture. 

He finally reached the last day. He always marked his wall with utter care. He drew tiny, neat squares arrayed perfectly along the top half. Now, all but one square was filled with color-coded marks. Below were notes written in a tiny, perfect hand, also color-coded. There were cleanly worded speculations. He wrote about whether the assigned hour would be based on the (corrected) Gregorian calendar, or on the astronomical definition of a hundred orbits around the sun.

Leap years, orbital irregularities, the Earth’s wobble, etc, were noted with care. There were neat equations, based on the angle of the tiny ray of sunshine that sometimes made it through the slot. 

Gabriel was no gullible moron, which was probably why he was in jail in the first place. His academic field had been history. Specifically, he had studied the development of clocks and calendars. He had terminal degrees in astrophysics, history, mathematics, and fine art. He was the typical smart guy who went through his first decades with no direction. People with terminal degrees were a big target, back when the powerful felt threatened––although they hated wasting people who could have served them as engineers. He had a side gig making designer drugs. He never got caught for that, only for mocking the President. 

There were portraits of his family, also of one friend, all sketched in crayon with a longing and a brilliant hand. There were separate swatches of pure color near the door, both on the wall and on the floor under it, where crayons were sharpened and the tailings had to be cleared by hand.  

The persistence of his marks on the wall suggested a dark realism. Surely something might change over a century? Surely a second political climate (or a geophysical climate) might come? But to assume such a change would be the most foolish sort of optimism. Gabriel’s was the hard work of someone not expecting to be freed by regime change, especially in the case of an unfinished spectator sport. 

Separated from the rest of the notes was one circled like the answer on a final exam. It defined an overlap between all interpretations of the end of his hundred years. It offered a swatch of hope. The trick would be to hit the button during that brief overlap. Easily said, except that this final morning was mostly cloudy. The solution needed that ray of sunshine to align with a single thin crayon mark on the wall across from the window. 

Medication in the food kept Gabriel perfectly healthy and eternally young, physically. Medical science had reached that point long before his alleged crimes. Gabriel’s sanity was his own responsibility. His recent hard work, along with the focus of these final moments had paused the ticks and quirks that were otherwise obvious through the surveillance cameras, assuming that anyone was actually watching, let alone cared. 

The hour, as they say, was upon him. 

He moved quickly, getting down on all fours, checking the mark. He popped up, and scrutinized the window slit. Perhaps the morning clouds would burn off. It was his luck that the approximate time for pushing the button coincided with a short time when the sun penetrated into his cell. Not all prison cells had this fortunate exposure.

As if to distract him, his drawer opened abnormally early with his morning meal. He ignored it. 

A feeble, brief ray of sunshine flickered along the side of the window slit, still not aligned perfectly. Gabriel inhaled, and held that breath for a full minute. But then the clouds darkened again. He released his breath. 

He waited, crouched, squinting at the mark. At last, after quite some unknown time, the sun came back. This time the ray of light was just a hair past the mark, past perfection, although possibly good enough. Probably too late, but still in that half-hour span, more or less. Gabriel shot upright, and smacked the button. It would be a close call.  

He waited, relying on the hope created by a century of hard work. The clouds returned on and off. 

Eventually, his shoulders sagged. He went to his slab of a bed and sat, holding his face in his hands. The sun came out for good, and it still angled enough to beam into his cell, as if to mock him. 

But then... His door made a loud ringing snap, something it had not done in a century. After a game-show pause, as if there were still a viewing audience, the door swung open. He flinched, but collected himself before raising his head. There was a cramped vestibule outside the door, but no guard, mechanical or living. Gabriel stood. He went to the threshold, looking nervously this way and that. He saw the stairwell. 

But then he turned back. He closed his door enough to get to his breakfast, which was always packaged neatly. He crossed to the wall, and took his box of crayons from the floor.  He held the two items like a high school boy carrying his books. Even unclothed, he would not walk out empty-handed. He went out the unlocked door. 

Outside he took the two steps across to the stair landing. The stair went an undetermined number of steps in either direction. He went down, of course. He did not need to remember that he was in a tower.

Remembering what was out there so long ago had been impossible for him for decades. He feared something worse than prison awaited him now. The hell of a society that would make a jail like this certainly posed a threat. He had reason to fear what might follow. But victory brought a breathless triumph to his face. Freedom mattered. Maybe. But he had won.

A century of living in a little cage had left him weakened in spite of a regular regimen of exercise. It took many minutes for him to descend. He trudged down seventy-five flights, taking note that all he had done for the last century was count. On the way down, he also counted stairs, of which there were 975. The railings were metal, held up by 3,902 balusters. Finally, he reached the bottom floor, indicated by the extra, larger door. 

He had some self-awareness. It registered that his mental damage might make him a compulsive counter for the rest of his life.

 He crossed through the tiny vestibule. He opened the arched exterior door, and the actual outdoors took him with a gasp. 

He stood in an array of tall, skinny towers, topped with domes like igloos far, far up there, each tower with its own arched entrance, each containing slits to a hundred prison cells stacked vertically. The full extent of the complex was clearly newer than his confinement, but he needed no recollection to guess that the cells were identical to his. There were no tracks in the dust between the domes. He stopped counting at one hundred towers from east to west, and stopped at a hundred from north to south, but they went on in all directions, farther into the blowing dust than he could see. If there was a fence, or if there were guard towers, they were also too far away.

His mouth opened and his lungs worked as if to shout, but only a squeak came. He tried once more but the squeak faltered. A third try, and only a hiss of air came. In all of his planning, he had neglected to keep his vocal chords in working order. Nobody would hear him anyway. The towers were soundproof. That much he knew for sure. 

He turned. Desert sand and dust without any vegetation went in every direction. It had been a green expanse of wild prairie flowers when they put him in. He wondered if almost everyone everywhere lived in a prison cell. Even in a system where correction was administered entirely by artificial intelligence, this had to be stupidly expensive. The regular supply of food and water had to come from somewhere.

For a time he stood with his arms open, his mouth sagging, his eyes tracking toward insanity. He went to one of the armored window slits, down at ground level and slapped his hand against it.

Obviously, nobody could answer. The soundproofed walls were thicker than his arms were long. Maybe the occupant of this one noticed his shadow? 

But then his eyes focused again. To his left, visible in spite of the swelter and dust was a range of mountains. They had snow. He remembered that at dusk a century ago, the sparkling lights in the big houses there could be seen for almost a hundred miles. After he stood there watching, the sun cleared the clouds over those mountains, and he saw reflections. The windows out there looked like the windows from the expensive seats in a stadium. Even after regime change, key bits of spectator sport must have remained in place. Maybe he was a celebrity.

The rocks and dirt hurt his bare feet, but he had food, medication, crayons. He could walk for a day, at least. He wrote words of encouragement in the color "mango jango" on the slit that he had slapped.

Maybe someone could do something for his mental health, now that he was a free man. He considered, and wondered if this might be a bad thing, subject to someone else’s definition. 

Then he turned, tearing out chunks of his beard in frustration. He was a winner. Surely someone, or some machine, would meet him with clothes and a reward? No, that was stupid. But yes, he had resisted for a century, and he would not give up. He looked like a whispering madman. He began the long walk toward the mountains, toward the lights that made him hope, or at least persist.