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The grey boots shuffle in a line, splattering up mud on torn pant legs. Sil watches from under an leanto of propped up branches and corregated metal. The rain is deafing against the metal, great sheets of water pound the red mud in front of him. Sil siezes up the new prisoners, wondering absent mindedly how many of them will survive, marveling that this has become only a passing thought. Too much death to count, not enough of it involving him, though as Scratch says, that's probably the secret to your longevity, you don't care, if you cared you be dead by now. Sil grunts, you don't care either I take it.
No, I do care. I'm just lucky.
One of the new men has a map. A crowd gathers on the floor of the main cell house. Half a dozen men pour over it the filthy wadded paper, trying to decipher it. Hope gets you killed murmurs Scratch from the bunk below Sil. Sil flicks his ash off the side in response. Finally Sil can't take it anymore and leaps off the top of the bunk landing in the middle of the crowd, knocking down several men before he rips the map from from a young man's hands and steps back out of the circle, map over his head. This shit, he says, will get you killed. He rips the map into tiny pieces and rubs them to nothing beneath the heel of his boot. It doesn't matter where you are. They have TK, they have nano to track you. You can't run, the sooner you accept that they better off you'll be. The men stare in silence. Sil climbs back up into the bunk and lies down again. Thanks a lot asshole, says a voice, Sil doesn't bother to turn his head and see which.
It's well past midnight when Sil sense the warmth of breath beside his pillow. His hand is already tight on his shiv when a hand taps his mattress. Sil doesn't move. Tomorrow, find me in theyard before we ship out. The breathe fades back into the darkness.
The next say an unassuming, but reasonably fit young man, perhaps five years younger than Sil, lean and muscular, but thin with sandy red hair and arms covered in freckles seems to appear out of nowhere standing next to Sil as they begin to form up for the day's duties. The mean line up, the soldiers in their exolegs march around, hurding the weak out of the line up, heading them off to domestic duties, after which you either recover or you die. Most never come back from the cleaning barracks.
You're Sil says the man.
Sil just stares a head, the man falls into line next to him.
I have something. I have something that can get us out of here. If you hadn't destroyed that map.
Sil turned his head to the side and looked the kid up and down.
It doesn't destroy the nano, the nano is still in you, but it can't broadcast
We can't use the river, too obvious, too easy to scan. But we follow the river. As best I can tell we are somewhere in the northern part of the territories. Which means we'd have just over a thousand miles to cover before we get out of the Protectorate.
Scratch rubbed the tubble on his chin. Well, it beats digging peat. And Sil here has been thinking about killing himself for the better part of a year now, so I don't see him objecting.
Fine. So how do we get out?
Scratch glanced at Sil.
Scratch sighed. When Sil first got here, like most of us, he entertained the notion that you could simply run through the fence. At full speed it would most likely just blow your ear drums
The men fall out, Sil a contingant of the rest are marched off to the back of the camp. the sonic fence meant that there was no tangible barrier, from time to time Sil was struck with the urge to simply run west, full speed until he hit the fense then splatter where he may. Thus far he had resisted, but he'd seen several others do it. The men file into a small half cylinder of the building where long rows of tables
Monkey pens Scratch called them. They were the lucky ones, no hard labor, just programming, most of which consisted of tweaking scripts to parse through encrypted text. First they ran scripts to test the crypto and then once that was cracked, script to find patterns in crypto, script to trace origins, scripts to run scripts all of it could have been automated ten years ago by a single AI agent, but the Protectorate outlawed AI. And it had a lot of prisoners so really, mused Sil staring at his reflection in the screen, why bother with AI? Too much that could go wrong, far easier to just track down your best hackers, send them off to the prison territories and watch the ciphers fall.
Scratch's group was marched out of the camp, through the fence and down toward the river
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