Chapter Twenty-One

Dirty, silent and resigned, Lorraine and Flynn Beaman rode the long yellow bus to Chip Prison Ranch. They sat on padded seats with broken springs and stared out barred windows, packed alongside four dozen other enemies of the state.

The hippie mother and son had eluded the regulation patrol for nineteen days after fleeing the Santa Barbara Sanctuary, hiding out in the hills with other anti-chip activists, but unable to fully avoid sending signals that reported their location on the national grid.

Unfortunately, data pulled from the government satellite and Santa Barbara transmission towers placed them at the scene of the killing of Nash Wenzel, one of California’s leading compliance enforcers. The tracking system recorded their presence with Nash inside an old movie theater at the precise moment he died from shooting and bludgeoning. There was no need for a judge or jury; the chip analytics did not lie.

Lorraine and Flynn Beaman were immediately found guilty of murder and sentenced to live the rest of their days in a forced stupor on a large, barren plot of land in the Mojave Desert.

At the Chip Prison Ranch, inmates sluggishly roamed the dry soil like groggy herds of cattle, offered minimal shade, food and water in the grueling heat. Simple wire fences surrounded the prison yard, easy to penetrate except for one deciding factor: the chipped inmates were programmed to receive a vicious shock if they crossed the perimeter. They learned, by instinct, to stay within the designated confines. Prisoners also received a heavy cocktail of Obedience and Dim Bulb chipfeed signals, essentially rendering them slow and stupid, oblivious to even the notion of escape.

Lorraine and Flynn knew what to expect. They had been informed, in cruel and graphic detail, upon their arrest.

They understood that upon their arrival at the ranch, they would receive a download of nasty ingredients to neuter their brains. They would be lucky to still remember their names or relationship to one another.

Lorraine remembered hearing a horror story from one of her friends who told the tale of driving past a Chip Prison Ranch in Nevada and witnessing a sight that gave her nightmares for months afterward. “It was just this one big field with all these people…and they were just standing there…moving very slow…and they had those horrible blank expressions, like they were dead…but they weren’t, not physically anyway. It looked like a big pen of zombies. It was like they weren’t even human anymore. Just dead-eyed, slow-moving zombies. They stayed away from the fence, because they knew it would shock them…and they just milled around like cows.”

As the reality of her fate drew ever closer during the long bus ride, Lorraine remained stoic. She could no longer cry, she was all cried out. Her eyes felt like big, dark, sunken sockets. Her throat was raw. Her heart ached.

Flynn didn’t speak. Words could not express his terror. He was too scared to move. He stared at the other prisoners around him. They were equally glum and silent, chained at the ankles to prevent running.

When the sun was high in the sky, bright and blazing, the bus arrived at the Chip Prison Ranch. It was the most haunting, desolate, oppressive environment that Flynn or Lorraine had ever witnessed.

“Maybe if we’re lucky,” Lorraine said, “really, really lucky…we can step on a rattlesnake.”

Four rows ahead, there was a sudden eruption of screams. One of the prisoners, a Hispanic man, fell out of his seat and landed in the aisle. A steady stream of his blood moved down the center of the bus to pool in the back, passing Flynn and Lorraine.

Later, they heard the man had killed himself by tearing the chip out of his neck with his bare hands.