“Mr. Hay’s student record,” argued the Ivy Leaguers, “is that of a precocious and impressively developed mind, accompanied by an equally developed ego. He believes himself to be a superior sort of fellow in every respect, Your Honor, and he treats his peers as mere prey. Given his sophistication, he is no more a child, sir, than you are. He is an adult and should be sentenced as such.”
The pouf-haired attorney, to his credit, tried to say something about Ally Shepard and a long string of therapists, but the Ivy Leaguers had complicated reasons why this evidence should be disallowed.
Professor and Mrs. Hay sat in the front row, looking ashen and small.
“Unferth Prison,” pronounced the judge.
—
Falling through hyperspace, Milo reviewed his transformation.
My exquisite life as the Lord Byron of Bridger’s Planet, he thought, is over. Which bites, because it was going to be a pretty fine life.
His stomach gave a violent wrench, and he fought back tears.
Now I need to figure out how to stay alive in prison. That is my grim new truth.
Nonsense, insisted his deep soul. This is the truth: stars, time, Being, Nothingness. Your boa.
Okay, thought Milo, desperate for anything other than despair. He would let the truth flow around him like an ocean, where the waves moved through the water but the water itself was still. He would be like the water, like the still, black moat where that lying, pathological bitch had dumped him— Milo, said his deep soul.
I will be like the water, he thought, starting over.
—
The Unferth prison colony, he had learned online, was one of the most fearsome examples of spacefaring justice. Almost fourteen hundred years ago, when humans first left Earth and began living aboard ships and stations and other artificial environments, the problem of life support had become the guiding light for everything, including law. Down on Earth, they could afford to be warm and fuzzy and lenient. Violent criminals were freed to hurt people time after time. Greedy corporate moguls hoarded wealth and squandered resources under the protection of puppet governments. Everyone knew where that had gotten Earth, didn’t they? The moguls herded whole populations into debt slavery. Violent criminals made whole communities unfit to live in. Information and education were channeled so poorly that the planet lost its ability to look ahead, to think ahead, to plan. And so they drowned in their own polluted, shortsighted muck until Comet Marie put them out of their misery. All but a very few, spared and cultivated by the worst of the moguls.
Living in space had changed everything. On Earth, environments and communities had been vast, incomprehensible things. In space, the environment became something you could measure by looking at a gauge. The health of a community was something you could measure by glancing around a cafeteria. Air and water didn’t just come from the sky and the wind; they had to be processed, recycled, and monitored. Machines couldn’t just be ignored or argued about until they fell apart; you had to maintain them with knowledge and skill, or the monster hostilities of outer space would tear them apart and kill you. Quickly. Vacuum and gravity and radiation didn’t care about your beliefs or superstitions; the boa of outer space was strict and unforgiving. What mattered was what you did and how well and fast you could do it.
The elements of life support became, in a sense, as valuable as life itself. There was no room for bullshit and waste. If you were going to use oxygen and water, you had to be useful. There was no more room for people who killed, raped, hit, cheated, stole, bullied, or otherwise did harm. The wealthy criminals—those who manipulated the resources for profit—lasted longer than their poorer brethren, but the boa caught up with them, too, before long.
In the earliest days, right after the comet, harmful people were “spaced.” Authorities dragged them into an air lock and opened the outside door.
The result? Things got shipshape in a hurry.
When the OZ drive came along and opened up star travel, artificial environments gave way to planetary communities again. The reins of justice eased somewhat. Criminals weren’t necessarily executed. Room was found for them in out-of-the-way places, and they stayed there. Felons rarely came home.
Unferth was one of those out-of-the-way places. It was an asteroid, hauled into deep space, light-years from anything. The surface was a barren, cratered dead zone. The outer hatches led down into a warren of tunnels, and that was where the prisoners lived their lives. They could open air locks to eject waste, including their dead. But they rarely did. Nothing was provided from outside, so the population was under pressure to follow extreme recycling protocols. The inmates found a use for everything.
So it was thought, anyway. News didn’t really go in and out much.
“It’s an oubliette,” his father had said, by way of description, when they said their goodbyes. “A place of forgetting.”
It was his way of acknowledging that they’d never see each other again.
The professor wasn’t a dark lord anymore. He was a sack of clothes, tailored on a budget. A man who’d had all his illusions kicked out of him.
No one can live like that, thought Milo, crying, watching his parents shuffle away. Life in prison could take many forms.
—
Three days away from Bridger’s Planet, the cruiser dropped out of hyperspace at Unferth. A guard escorted Milo to an air lock.
Click! Clack! Boom!
A hissing of pressure and air.
The opposite hatch opened, and Milo found himself peering through into a kind of bare, rusty cube. A stale smell filled the shuttle.
Milo stepped through.
“Bye, kiddo,” called the guard. “Mind your cornhole.”
The hatch spun shut.
Click! Clack! Boom!
The cruiser warped away, leaving Milo in the rusty prison air lock, waiting.
—
He waited for five hours.
Finally there was a lot of clanking and the inner hatch scraped open.
A skinny old man greeted him, wearing burlap trousers, sandals, and a set of enormous homemade eyeglasses.
“Heh!” barked the old man. “Got one in the hole. You coming?”
Milo ducked through the hatch and entered the prison.
“Shut it behind you,” said the old man, coughing, and shuffled away into…dark.
“Hey!” yelled Milo. “Hey, um—” But the old man moved on, out of sight.
The court had warned him not to expect a welcome or any form of processing. His fish and its biocompatible wet-wiring had been stripped from him. He had not been assigned a number, and no record-keeping would follow him into the prison.
So where did he go? What did he do? He would need food and a place to sleep at some point. How did a prisoner procure these things? The courts had made it clear that this would be his problem.
The corridor was not, Milo found as his eyes adjusted, entirely dark. A set of softly glowing squares high on the wall provided enough illumination for him to discern roughly carved rock walls.