In Containment 7, spinning around Saturn, Ramona Quiñones misses pupusas.
She has not eaten solid food in over a year, and yet, she can taste them again, the masa rolling over her tongue, the sharpness of the pickled carrots bringing her to salivation. It lasts half a minute before she feels the electro-baton on her spine.
“Are you daydreaming, 981?”
A number. Not a name. A number. She sits up straight. “Just reading, Wilpers,” she says, then points to the message on the holoscreen. “You know how Warden Treymond can be. A little wordy.”
Wilpers nods, and Ramona turns and notices that he’s had a haircut recently. Must have been another guard who gave it. Her thick black hair has grown halfway down her back. She would enjoy it more if she had chosen to let it grown long.
“Well, you’ve got an hour left, 981,” says Wilpers, removing the baton, and relief floods Ramona. “I need these communications and invoices organized and sent for execution for tomorrow’s shift.”
She wants to say
“I know, puta, because we do the same thing every day.”
or perhaps
“Why don’t you do it yourself, baboso?”
But she doesn’t because she has seen what happens then. She would rather be alive.
(Though she doesn’t know what it means to be alive anymore.)
He steps out, his boots sharply echoing off the metal floor, and that’s when it arrives.
The message.
She knows it is different. It doesn’t look right; the font is too large and bolded. The timestamp confuses her. It says it was sent sixty days ago, yet it appears at the top of the inbox.
There is a subject line: THIS IS OUR MANIFESTO
No one talks like that in these messages.
She should report it. That might grant her some reprieve from Wilpers, as he’s done in the past. He might look the other way while she and Teresa push their bodies together, relish in the thrill of human touch, and then make another invasive comment about how much he wants to watch. She’s heard stories of him doing so.
And she definitely believes them.
Her cortical implant can’t look away from the message. It is like it is speaking to her, begging her to open it. And what harm will there be? At the end of the shift, Wilpers will wipe her memory of what she’s done. She’s a prisoner. She doesn’t get to know things.
She touches it.
It springs to life.
There is a voice-over coming from the electronic delivery system.
There is a voice in her head.
And before she can stop it, before she can disconnect the system and begin to formulate a story so that Wilpers and the others do not shower her with batons and fists, the message plays.
This is our manifesto.
If you are reading this—
If you are listening to this—
If this has been downloaded to a cortical device and the words are flowing through your body—
you need to know who we are.
It doesn’t matter who I am. What my crime was. What my journey consisted of. How I have suffered.
What matters is
Us.
We are the children you tried to throw away.
It never mattered whether justice was served.
Whether we were innocent or guilty.
Whether our lives had any value outside of this system.
(And we do not mean monetary value, for we are not a product to be sold, a means to an end, a price on a digitag.)
You have convinced yourself of this illusion of justice and fairness as you vote for the politicians who tell you that the Galaxy Incarceration Program is making the world a better place. That your neighborhoods are safer. That with each ship sent away—Earth approaches perfection: a life without crime. And that you trust the program that finds us, that identifies how each of us has violated the Planetary Code, that refuses to see complexity or exception or humanity within its analysis.
It’s sad, really. You were all able to imagine a beautiful world, one that is technologically advanced. Implants that regulate and heal. Mods and tweaks for a prosthesis. Instant communication within a heartbeat to any human on the planet. You reversed the climate disaster that nearly destroyed us all in 2045. We could go on and on and on.
And yet.
And yet.
You could not imagine a world without prisons.
Technically, we are not quite correct. You did imagine a world without them: by shoving them all out into the solar system, spread among the moons and satellites of Saturn and Jupiter. The Galaxy Incarceration Program meant to catch those children who were prone to breaking the law, who were prone to acting out, who were prone to being …
Well.
Human.
Did you know why we were on those moons? Did you know why Herman McConnell chose such distant locations? You probably don’t, but it is one of the first things we learn in this place.
We are shown a video after we are processed. Herman is laughing. All of those men … they’re laughing. Herman sips something out of a small glass and then gestures toward one of the service bots, which whisks over to refill it. “Thank you for the kind words, gentlemen,” he says, and the camera pans out to show that he is on a stage, that he is surrounded by innovators and chairmen and the greatest scientists in their respective fields, all of whom have undoubtedly changed the world for the better. “But you can’t replace poetry,” he continues, then takes another sip. “When they look outside of their containment units, they will see, if they are lucky, the swirling gases of Saturn or the dust ring of Jupiter.”
The men nod.
They look upon him with veneration.
“But most of the time, they will see the endless expanse of space, a reminder that their behavior is small, infinitesimal, and meaningless.”
He laughs.
They laugh.
“They will never see Earth again.”
Who are “they”?
Who are We?
Well.
We are the prisoners of Gee-Eye-Pee Containment 1, located on Dione, a moon of Saturn. There is nothing else on this moon; it is just us. Seventeen prisoners, forty guards. More than two guards for each prisoner.
We are considered the worst.
We are the activists who tried to free the West Oakland 12.
We are the hackers who erased four decades of e-credit debt in fifteen seconds.
We are the students who fought back as your racist AI was installed in our high school.
We are the accused, all of us from what used to be the San Francisco Bay, but is now an occupied zone. You took our home from us, labeled us the Oakland Terrorist Collective, and then you kidnapped us, one by one, charging us with every possible crime you could make stick.
We are everything you think is unnecessary, that was “solved” by world peace and technological advancement. “Latinx is useless,” you told us. “Why must you call yourselves Black? Color doesn’t matter anymore.”
All those words:
Queer.
Disabled.
Not you.
You say there is no need for labels.
We are evidence to the contrary.
We are the children you tried to destroy.
Did you know we are sent to these containment units upon ships that are not fit for long-term space travel? Most of us die on the way to these moons.
Recuérdalos.
Timoteo Sánchez, who tried to stop a guard from suffocating one of us.
Rosalie Miller, who developed space rot and was ignored by the ship medic.
Kasper Nilsen, who died of a broken heart after they were separated from their boyfriend.
Recuérdalos.
Because we began our journey with forty strong, and only seventeen arrived. Their names are in this message, and soon, you will be unable to forget them.
Because this is your fault.
We are the children you tried to diminish.
It did not matter what we had done or that the AI bots had mistakenly grabbed other kids as part of our “collective” when we had never met them before in our lives. Jesús Alvarez, fifteen years old, ripped from his family, all because his skateboard had a sticker on it:
Free the West Oakland 12.
He was wrongly arrested for protesting a group of activists who were …
… wrongly arrested.
There is no room for error in your computations. There is no possibility of a mistake.
We are evidence to the contrary.
But then there is me. No necesita saber mi nombre. It’s not important. But I was not wrongly arrested.
I entered the line of code that disrupted your databases.
I deleted hundreds upon thousands upon millions of lines of records.
I liberated people from a lifetime of servitude to debt.
I would do it again.
And yet, it doesn’t matter what we did. We arrive at these moons, and we are assigned a public defender.
This defender is not a person.
It is barely a machine.
It is one AI in conversation with another. We stand in a room of four metal walls behind a plexiplastic screen as we are scanned and analyzed. Our case details are fed into the system, and they are precise and exact and uncaring. Our defender appears on the screen, and it is not lost on us that they are designed to be comforting—
a tall white man with blond hair and a big smile
—to you.
Even though you will never come here.
Our defenders make our case to the projected AI judge.
Both of them are made by you.
There are no people
no witnesses
no hope
because we can’t speak, unless we want to feel an ungodly pain through our bodies and clutch ourselves, crying on the floor as two artificial intelligent bots debate the merits of theft
or sedition
or “potential criminal proclivities.”
They argue about us.
Never for us.
We are the children you tried to exploit.
No one is ever acquitted. They don’t tell you that. Not one case out of our seventeen ends up with anything other than a conviction. Our records are in your mind now, too. Every charge. Every verdict. What we’ve done while in the Galaxy Incarceration for the last year. Read them. Feel them. Commit them to memory.
We spend eight hours of each Earth day—even out here, we cannot escape Earth and its standards and rules—in solitary confinement. Our containment pods are state of the art: everything is monitored. Our nutrient levels. Our oxygen intake. How long we are in REM sleep in our cots. The right drugs, the right vitamin inductions, all of them are doled out in exact measurements thanks to the all-seeing eye of the system that watches over us.
We have not eaten a single piece of solid food since we left Earth.
We spend eight hours a day working. It does not matter what skill set we came equipped with. I excel at computers, but I am forbidden from ever touching one. Each morning, after a dose of nutrients, we are brought to a large room full of artificial sunlight meant to boost our emotional state.
But you didn’t account for what it would feel like to sit in one spot for ten hours; no amount of sunshine can liberate a heart like that.
We sit in silence as the day’s task is downloaded to our cortical devices, along with the requisite knowledge to complete it. We have no questions to ask because we know everything about what we are to build.
And we build.
Everything.
The clothes you wear that turn sunlight into nutrients.
The security nodules you install in your homes.
The air filters you place over your nose and mouth to allow you to breathe in the areas that are still recovering from climate damage.
The wearable infoswatch that provides you with a constant feed of news and entertainment.
And we do it all while basking in a light that warms but doesn’t penetrate, in a silence interrupted only by tools clanking, parts clicking, fabric tearing.
Because we are not allowed to talk.
Some of us learn it the hard way. Through well-timed swings of a baton, through flashes of e-tasers and brainstuns, and, more often than not, from the force of a human fist.
At the end of our shift, we are fed more nutrients through induction, and then we return to our pods. We are allowed six hours to do as we please, or at least this is what the guards tell us. But we cannot do as we please because there is nothing to do. We have no possessions, no entertainment, no access to one another.
What are we?
The irony is that we are surrounded by technology that can do things indistinguishable from magic.
But you use us.
We are the solution to your problems.
And in a few weeks, when the ships return to Earth, they will be loaded with cargo that will enrich your lives, will make you feel fulfilled, will keep you safe.
And you will never know the cost we paid to give it to you.
We never got to say goodbye.
We are the children you forgot.
This is enough to ruin a spirit, to grind hope to dust. An endless repetition, acted out so that you can feel safe at home, assured that the bad seeds and the nasty spirits have been properly excised from your communities. You are told that we are taken to be reeducated.
To be turned into better members of society.
And that someday, we would be allowed to come home, and you would all see the benefits of this experience.
This is the story you are sold, with images of us working peacefully and happily alongside our fellow captives, attending school, learning where we went wrong and how we will do better. It is precisely why you all voted for the Extant Incarceration Initiative, the law that opened the door for this program’s creation. Because prison would no longer be inhumane, would no longer be punitive, would no longer be the cruel institution of decades past.
We know you are sold this story because we make it.
Ah, maybe you were counting. Maybe you figured out that my total was short a couple of hours.
You are right.
Because for two hours a day, we are ordered to shower.
Apply makeup to hide our bruises and cuts and the swelling, whatever the guards decide to give us that day.
And we create the films you watch, ensuring you that what you voted for is what you got.
We sell you the lie because it’s so very easy when you
when we
are so very far away.
But.
But.
We are the children of the reckoning.
You tried to send us away. You tried to destroy us. You tried to diminish us. You tried to forget us.
This means you never believed what we were capable of doing.
Such as when Jesús realized that one of the components we were assembling was the control for our containment pods.
Or when Raquel pocketed an infoswatch, which she used to sync the locks across the station.
Or when Miles placed a piece of nutrient cloth under his tongue every day for seven months. This fabric, this beautiful technology, binds to living cells, growing with whatever organism it is in contact with. Miles was so smart; he would wait until the final minutes of his shift, cut off the largest section he could without detection, and within months, he had enough to pass them to others so they could bind it to their skin.
When the time was right.
There were our hours and hours of silence each day, which were a chance for Wayne and Cecilia to teach us a modified form of sign language, something your surveillance AIs were not programmed to read.
And then we spent the last forty-five days slowly taking over Gee-Eye-Pee Containment 1, first by sabotaging the AI systems.
I did that. The code was rough but elegant, as vicious as a hammer, but fine as a needle, written underneath my cot with the tiniest shard of metal that I pocketed during a work shift. You will never know the joy I felt plugged into a computer after over a year without one. You will never know the elation as the memorized code left my cortical implant and rushed into the system, as it changed line after line, as it evolved the system to recognize us as the arbiters of power—of change.
The guards’ weapons ceased to work after we pushed an update to their internal software.
The guards’ screams weren’t heard as the door to the airlock opened, and their bodies floated away.
Why are we telling you this?
Why have we revealed to you all of your flaws, all the ways you have failed to consider that we, the children you wrote off as criminals, have power in numbers? Surely it is a foolish thing to do, to spell out our sabotage in excruciating detail, to allow you to course-correct and snuff us out.
If you are reading this—
If you are listening to this—
This has been downloaded to your cortical device, and the words are flowing through your body.
Know that this message was sent from Tethys, the ice moon.
Know that this message was composed by all of us, even though I coded it into the proper format.
Know that we transmitted it sixty days after the liberation of Containment 1.
Know that we transmitted it forty-seven days after the liberation of Containment 6.
Know that there are now fourteen empty Gee-Eye-Pee Containment facilities spread across the moons of Saturn and Jupiter.
Know that we have repaired your ships.
Know that we have repurposed your propaganda machines.
Know that
You have no idea how many Containment facilities are left under your control.
How many lies have you been fed?
You won’t know.
How long will it take you to respond properly, with an equal or greater amount of force?
You won’t know.
How will you know which Containment facility is next?
You won’t know.
There is one thing we—the abandoned, the diminished, the harmed, the forgotten—want you to know.
We will dismantle them all.
And when we do
we
are
coming
home
This is our manifesto.
And you’d better be fucking afraid.
The door bursts open.
Ramona’s heart is racing, but not out of fear.
She can hear Wilpers screaming at her, asking how she allowed that message in, but it doesn’t matter. There is a smile on her face, one she can see reflected on the screen in front of her.
She reaches down the front of her nutrient cloth jumpsuit and pulls out the weapon.
The sharpened holodisk she stole weeks and weeks ago.
When she rises and faces Wilpers, his pale face is now red, and his eyes go wide when he sees what she is wielding. His hands shoot for his baton.
He doesn’t make it.
Because he never saw Prisoner 522 behind him.
Teresa kicks his body aside.
They kiss. It is a kiss of revolution.
And then the prisoners of GIP Containment 7 decide that it is the last day they will ever be prisoners again.