Authors: George Zebrowski
“Whatever triggered you,” the judge said at the sentencing, “might happen again. We can’t let you out. No examination has been able to confirm your amnesia story, and there doesn’t seem to be anything really wrong with you.”
The judge had looked at him as if expecting him to agree, to say “Yes, I know, you have no choice, it’s all right and I would do the same in your place.” He had looked into the judge’s brown eyes, which were part of a wonderfully composed compassionate gaze that seemed genuine.
“Have you anything to say before I sentence you?” asked the judge.
Philip Emmons shook his head. “I have no idea what happened—if it did.”
The judge nodded. “There may be more to you than the innocent man you seem to believe yourself to be, but you must understand that we can’t let the rest of you roam free—if what you say is true.”
“What good does it do me to understand?”
The judge said, “Perhaps it will prevent that other part of you from ever coming out again. I sentence you to thirty years in the Orbits. And for the record, I don’t believe your story for one moment. No one does.” You’ll never be back, his eyes said, whoever you are. “Good-bye, Mr. Emmons.”
JUDGE OVERTON’S PRIVATE CHAMBER
“Sooner or later some half-baked historian will write a asinine book about me and call it Overton of the Orbits. He’ll look for motives in what we did, but they’ll be all wrong. No one was looking for rehab, or even humane treatment, as such. We only sought to separate the worst from the best, nothing more. The supermax prisons of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century were simply too costly for the ten to fifteen percent of inmates who had to be isolated. We had to get rid of them, because our worth exceeded the worth of these predators, pure and simple. The annual cost of incarceration in supermax prisons, in fact any prisons, was more than what it cost to give someone a university education. Most convicts stood to be released from prisons, but these ten to twenty percent were our failures. Yes, our failures, as much as the law-abiding citizens were our social successes. But we just didn’t know what else to do with the worst failures. It was too late to prevent them. Remember that the prison gangs had their tentacles to the outside. They ran businesses and could even bring down local governments. They killed efficiently at a distance. By shipping them out, we broke their influence. Sure, in some profound sense we created their kind, but there was nothing else to do except get rid of them and start over.”
Yevgeny Tasarov’s leadership of the Dannemora breakout remained for many years an unequaled prison revolt—admired by later analysts for its detailed planning and understanding of the forces that would stand in its way, as well as for its implied criticism of social currents and goals.
North American culture of the 2050s, with its guilt-ridden efforts to lessen both the physical and social effects of global warming, its gated enclave suburbs surrounding the old cities, its often excessive concern with clean air, food, and water from basics factories, was particularly vulnerable to a convict force willing to do anything to get its way, because the culture was not willing to do as much to defend itself.
Tasarov knew this unwillingness, and counted on it. Just too many middle- and upper-class citizens were looking forward to lives of a century or more, and preferred to keep out of his way for as long as possible, and too many lower caste police and soldiers were reluctant to do their jobs and pay the price in blood when sent against him.
The prison population around Tasarov included men who were not considered dangerous. Most of them were inside for nonviolent, or slightly violent crimes; but what the medium-security prison did not take into account was the level of violence possible among these same prisoners, based on crimes for which they had not been convicted, and about which the prison authorities knew little or nothing.
Section Two of Dannemora was composed of violent criminals, mostly lifers, and it was a maximum-security prison.
All of which set the stage for an unexpected uprising, run by someone with military training, which could be put down only by an equal military response; but by then it would be too late.
The method, rehearsed and made second nature, was deceptively simple: a prison break by careful stages. At first, guards began to disappear. They were killed and their bodies hidden or destroyed whenever possible, using prison facilities. One day in the mess hall, all two dozen remaining guards were killed by the convicts next to them—by stabbing, breaking necks, even breaking backs—followed by escape through the kitchens, where those inmates who would not join in were also killed.
At each step, no one was left alive. Surveillance cameras were blinded at the last possible moment by cutting the cables to the outmoded monitoring stations. Within the hour, the entire administration of the medium-security section was dead. False orders were being given, and uniformed infiltrators were entering the maximum-security section to recruit a merciless army.
When the army came out into the nearby towns, they took the satellite radio and television stations and cable offices, and disabled all wireless communications. The entire area became a dead zone, with no communications going out to the rest of the state.
Armed with every weapon that could be seized from stores and private homes, the convicts forced marched to Lake George, where they seized a small resort community, murdered all the inhabitants, and used it as a base from which to filter away into the country, individually and in small groups, using all the false identities that could be manufactured. By the time the state sent a force against them, more than half were gone. The state force massacred the remaining convicts in revenge, to the point where it was difficult to identify the remains. All of this had been expected, along with the modest degree of success.
Tasarov was not identified among the burnt and dismembered bodies. He was long gone, back to Binghamton, where he retrieved a cache of false documents that he had placed there for a future emergency. For him, the entire break had been a leap into limited possibilities, and he had foreseen and accepted with grim resolve that the break’s second purpose, should it fail, would be to cover his own escape. He had hoped for the best, but second best was good enough. With his new identity, and his faith in his strategic skills restored, Tasarov went to Brazil, where another cache awaited him.
The breakout from Dannemora in the spring of 2051 brought to an end the prison-building boom that had begun in the 1990s as a series of economic ventures by local communities needing to replace lost industries, and confirmed a new system of incarceration for the next century. An Earth recovering from planetary warming and incessant diseases, from centuries of economic misconceptions, mismanagement, and corporate crime, had finally lost patience with devoting real estate to prisons that would only become colleges sponsoring rites of passage for the enraged underclasses, and which would be used as recruiting stations by organized crime.
Even as timed orbital sentences were being planned for the routine flow of criminals from the world’s many overburdened social systems, a debate was joined between the growing community of artificial intelligences that were already the planners behind most economies, and the advocates of purely human conceptions of justice. Eliminating criminal behavior in all its varieties still seemed impossible; it was part of all human cultures, present in all classes, reaching too deeply into all lawful societies to be easily ripped out. To face up to the truth, even with the objective tutelage of analysis by AIs, was beyond the capacities of human legislators, who insisted on retaining irrational attitudes toward criminal enterprises.
The self-serving nature of these attitudes was very clear to many human observers of the time. The same ability to see the truth had not been beyond several notable repudiations of “backward practices” in the five preceding centuries. Yet the power that Emiliano Zapata had despaired of restraining except at the point of another gun could not be taken away from human nature; it reserved the right to be violent and to break its own laws. The economically powerful reserved the right of violence and illegality. As the subversion of democracies by wealth continued, so was criminal behavior subverted. Laws had only human beings to carry them out; laws could not stand outside human nature and enforce justice. The sciences and the AIs attempted to remedy this lack of independent ground, so feared by the powerful, who always put vested interests above merit.
Unsentimental, uncommitted AIs saw organized nation states as legal criminalities, designed to exclude other forms, enforcing the power to define and identify what is criminal, answerable only to greater physical power. It was difficult for human beings in authority to dismiss entities that served them and worked with no hidden agendas. Increasingly, AIs saw law-abiding human beings as a luxury allowed for by benevolent surrounding powers: little enclaves of permitted decency, the seed-corn of ethical futures, whose people would be horrified by the national security states that supported them.
There came in the twenty-first century a complete professionalization of criminal industry, which did not see itself as criminal, but only as taking advantage of profit possibilities that were inside and outside of aged or inappropriate laws. Only the extreme edges of these criminal empires were visible, through those who were caught, those that the legal system felt compelled to catch and cast off. To the degree that this criminal economy had no clear boundary with the legal political and business systems, was the degree to which the criminal justice system failed to deal with the professionals, and contented itself with restraining the losers—the violent and the disturbed who had failed even within the criminal world—and sought to preserve a civil order under which both systems could function with some grace and profit.
But the vague line between the two worlds continued to shift as economic power shifted, and many observers concluded that the so-called legitimate order was one and the same with the top of the criminal pyramid. There was no other. There had never been another. The police served the political gangs in power, and they caught the small-timers who could not protect themselves. And of these they only caught about ten percent, and punished fewer than three percent. Many burglars lived full working lives and retired on their investments, as did successful pickpockets, confidence artists, data manipulators, vehicle thieves, credit and identity thieves, chemists and biologists feeding new habits, and muggers. It was easiest to catch the addicted and the passionately violent, who did not know what they were doing.
Humanity warred with itself over a vast territory. At one end sat a few saints; at the other, devils. In between, there lived mixtures of every degree. The police made life bearable for the gangs in power, and their pet middle-class, which was kept as a crime or political boss might shelter a son or daughter in a private school. The inheritors of power were always recruiting; and when the low were raised up, they behaved no differently than the powerful. Even when new generations were brought into the world without gross physical defects, with social advantages and education, crime only continued in a more civilized way. The creative willfulness of the hunter-gatherer was unstoppable, and perhaps stopping it should not be attempted.
As he rested poolside in Brazil, in the grip of what he liked to call his “thinking happiness,” Tasarov contemplated the ways in which societies were simply the expression of those who were in control, and how he might have traveled a more sheltered route if he had not insisted on staring reality full in the face instead of ducking. He might have been one of the powerful, by joining an elite, contributing what portion of excellence was in him, and then rationalizing that a human being could not do better. It might even be true, he sometimes thought.
Ironically, it was his sense of justice, or the “unfitness of things,” as he called it, that had led him down the paths he had taken.
There had always been in him, he recalled with the warmth of the Sun on his shielded face, a great temptation. It came from observing nice, middle-class neighborhoods—once the suburbs of the rich, where well scrubbed children went to shiny schools, and repressed parents struggled with their own forgotten dreams to give their children “a good future”—and then picturing going in to rape and pillage and kill, just to see the shocked looks on the faces of the innocents who had never imagined what human nature could do, how it could commit the transcendent act of cancellation called murder and still go on, feeling next to nothing about it.
He imagined that some of his ancestors among the Mongol hordes might have felt this way as they looked at the porcelain cities of China, laid waste to them and their unsunned peoples, then went back to nurture their own children on horseback with no sense of anything contrary…
This way of seeing things troubled him, in the way it was wrong: wrongful only if faced and understood as such. One had to agree to the right, to assent to live and be judged in a certain way. When one chose otherwise, only force might bring one to justice. And one had to feel that it was justice; if one did not, or could not, then the law could only imprison or kill one’s body, leaving the spirit that resisted untouched, unashamed, and unrepentant.
It was a maddening problem to think about: One could choose moral standards, but only on faith, since they could not be justified except by an earlier standard, and that led to the infinite regress of justifications. Infinite regresses, like circular arguments, insulted the mind. Faith gave one the sense that a moral standard was right and had to be upheld; but to those who felt unable to choose it, this right or wrong would mean nothing. Yet, these moral outsiders had their own standards to be judged by…
What it came down to was that one could not choose a moral standard rationally, as something proved. One accepted morals on faith, from the normal behavior of the common community, from vague concepts like common human sympathy, seeing the interests of others as one’s own, or in purely legal terms, knowing, in a purely practical way that someone might enforce a law. Sympathy seemed to grow between certain people, as if a kind of natural selection were at work in the psyche: Those who could get along got along, even if much of the time they only went along to get along…