S Morden - One Way

He concentrated on running for a while, feeling the solid impact of each footfall, the way his body adjusted to the changes in contour and surface. Simply winning this race could mean he was condemning someone else to life in solitary. He wasn’t comfortable with that, either.

Yes, he’d shot a man. Yes, he’d done it deliberately, in a planned act of violence. He’d put him in the ground, and he’d had no qualms about it. Someone else might have continued looking for ways to solve the problem of his son’s addiction and his slow and inevitable enmeshment with dealing and criminality, but there’d been other things they’d both tried over the years, and none of them had worked.

Frank’s decision to put a bullet in the brain of his boy’s dealer had been coolly calculated and carefully weighed. They were all someone’s son, but he’d decided that his own was the one who mattered most. There’d been no innocent parties. Not the perp, not the victim. That, he’d come to terms with.

Sending someone to the Hole, though, just for being beaten to the punch by a determined, driven fifty-one-year-old? That wasn’t on the level. Another black mark in Panopticon’s ledger, making them fight each other for the limited spaces available. Were they running a sweepstake on it? Did bears shit in the wood? Someone, somewhere, was betting on him blowing up and failing.

The path started to flatten out. His feet hurt. His throat was raw. His shoulders ached. Why would they ache so much? Then he caught himself throwing his hands forwards and backwards, forwards and backwards, as a counterweight to balance his body. Every step, he swung. Could he do that more efficiently? Probably. As if there weren’t enough things to concentrate on already, there was now his form. He couldn’t afford to waste energy in exaggerated movements, because he had less of it. He had to be wise, and conserve it.

He couldn’t do anything about the others, he decided. They couldn’t do anything about him, either. He wasn’t going to slow down, stop, give up. So sorry, unknown person, even though they weren’t Frank’s enemy, and he wasn’t theirs. It was Panopticon, and this other company, this Xenosystems Operations, who owned them. It was the man who’d intimidated him on that first day here. Brack. He’d overheard that name. At least, that was what he thought he’d heard. Brack, the shaven-headed smirker who delighted in Frank’s struggles and went thin-lipped when he jumped another hurdle.

Frank wouldn’t try and take him on. He had excellent impulse control. Certainly compared to the average con. Someone else would try, though, even if it meant disappearing into the Hole.

He was on the flat. The beeps slowed slightly, but that just meant he had to take longer strides, go a little faster. Just not as punishing as the climb. They’d really pushed him on the ascent today. And still he’d made it, through willpower alone. That wasn’t going to show up on any medical chart, was it? Courage, fortitude, grit. He’d deliberately shot a man to save his son, knowing that he’d have to endure whatever sentence they handed down. He had courage by the bucketful. It was his aging body he was worried about.

He carried on, down the path, listening for the beeps, pre-empting them, and then into the long slow descent into the valley where the training base was. Squat concrete slabs as yet unbuilt on. Stainless steel pipework extruding from pressure vessels. Long, low hangars, large enough to swallow a jet. Blocks of identikit offices. Electric carts going from one to another, hauling trailers or people. Caverns in the side of the valley, with wide trackways leading to them. Some of the structures he’d been in. Most of them he hadn’t. Given that his every hour was dictated, there hadn’t been the opportunity to look around, let alone explore. Doors were locked, and opened only on a fingerprint. His finger worked only for the doors he was supposed to use, and no others.

His waking and sleeping, his resting and his activity, what he ate and drank and when, were all strictly timetabled. When he wasn’t tossing his cookies out on the trail, he was on the treadmill with a mask over his face, or making simple models out of building blocks from pictures on a screen, or watching yet another instructional video on Mars. The medics had spent longer than his wife—ex-wife—had staring into his eyes, and X-rayed him top to bottom.

And speaking of bottoms, they’d gone in with cameras: but at least they’d had the decency to lube up first.

Mental tests. Physical tests. Everything they could throw at him, they did. He had no idea if he’d passed or failed, but he was still there, so that had to count for something.

He reached the post. It was just that, a metal post in the ground, at the corner of two concrete paths, but it marked his beginning and end points. He knew better than to slow down for it. He slapped his hand on it as he passed—that did nothing, he just did it because he could—and then eased off. He felt a deep and abiding weariness steal over him as he stopped, and he wondered how long he could keep it up for. Long enough to get to Mars, for certain. There wasn’t an alternative.

The beeps ended, and a voice spoke. He had no idea if it was a computer-generated voice, or someone with such precise diction that it sounded like a computer. Either way, it never seemed to respond to his replies. “ Report to Building Six, Room Two-zero-five. Acknowledge .”

“Acknowledged,” said Frank. That was mostly all he ever said. It was mostly all he was required to say. Brack needed more, but encounters with him were usually only once every few days, which was more than enough.

Frank wiped his face with his top again, pressing the cloth against his skin, drawing it roughly down to his neck and letting go. Building Six was that one, over there. He wasn’t expected to run, but he wasn’t to dawdle, either. The staff used carts to get around, but they were print-activated too, and he didn’t have the authorization.

He’d named things, in the absence of being told their official names. He was currently stood in the Valley. The decaying, mine-ridden mountain was the Mountain. There was also the Wire, which confined him, and the Bunker, where he slept in Building Three. The medical center was officially Building Two, but he called it the Blood Bank, on account of what they did to him there.

He walked up the ramp to Building Six, pressed his finger to the glass plaque and waited for the door. There were people walking backwards and forwards inside the foyer, but he knew better than to engage with them, or tap on the frame to get them to let him in. It wasn’t going to happen.

The door’s lock clicked. He pushed against it, went through, and waited for it to shut behind him. He’d get a ticket if he didn’t. If he collected too many tickets? He didn’t know: he couldn’t ask anyone to find out. Not the medics. Not the other staff. Especially not Brack. But he could guess.

Room Two-zero-five was on the second floor. He pressed his finger against the lock, waited for it to cycle, and went in. He’d been expecting another training video—but not a roomful of cons as well.

That was what they all were, clearly. They’d arranged themselves in the room in a way that was instantly familiar to anyone from prison: the stronger, more confident ones asserting themselves by taking space, the weaker going to the corners. Six of them. They looked at him, stained with sweat, out of breath. The older, gray-haired woman with the cheekbones and the eyebrows, who’d taken center-stage on one side of the boardroom-length table, wrinkled her nose at him. The thin black kid and the curly-headed white boy—and he was just a boy—were down the far end. Opposite Grandma was another woman, coffee skin and spiral hair. A moon-faced man was right by the door, and the last member was… vast.