Джеффри Томас - Red Cells

“Miss her already, friend?” asked the mutant seated next to Jeremy Stake in the transdimensional pod.

Stake had rolled up the sleeve of his candy red prison uniform to stare at the bared flesh of his arm. He had traced a finger on the underside of his forearm to summon a holograph, its image imprinted like a tattoo into his skin. A man and woman, cheek-against-cheek, grinning into the camera. The woman was striking: a blue-eyed albino black woman with her hair in dreadlocks. The man was himself. Or so it would seem. He shared the same features as the man in the holograph, at any rate. A thin face with a weak chin compensated for with a groomed goatee, his gelled dark hair buzzed close on the sides, and squinty eyes that sparkled with a kind of dark mischief.

He didn’t respond to the mutant shackled to the bench beside him, but the man went on nonetheless. “You better get used to missing that sweet thing, if you’re off to the Worm Hole. Can’t be no light sentence if you’re going there. What you get for time?”

Stake decided to play nice. “Six months. Possession with intent to sell. Purple vortex.” He didn’t need to ask what about you?

“Only six months for vortex? Lucky. Me, twenty-five years… armed robbery. Can you believe that? Didn’t even shoot nobody. Man, if I wasn’t a mutie I swear it would’ve been different.” The man’s shapeless, leathery, sprouting head put Stake in mind of a potato left too long in a cupboard.

What would his fellow prisoner think if he knew Stake was a mutant, too? Born and raised, no doubt like himself, in the Punktown slum called Tin Town? But Stake’s particular condition – which had a name, Caro turbida – was not immediately apparent, providing every so often he gazed long and hard at the holograph of that weasly face imprinted into his forearm. He couldn’t tell the mutant that it was this face, not the beautiful albino, he had been staring at.

“Hassan Billings,” the mutant said, offering his hand. “What’s yours, brother?”

Hassan? Didn’t that mean handsome? Stake winced inwardly but shook hands with the man and said, “Ed. Edwin Fetch.”

The final preparations were near completion; the ramp had been closed, and the pod was minutes away from disembarking from Punktown’s Theta Transport Station. Stake, Billings, and the men seated beside them on their bench faced another row of prisoners shackled to a bench directly opposite. This prison transport pod was nearly identical to the military shuttles that had once conveyed troops to the extradimensional world of Sinan, where Stake – now thirty-eight – had participated in the conflict called the Blue War, which had ended fifteen years ago. The anxiety he felt now was much the same as he had experienced then, facing his deployment to Sinan… though his stint as a soldier in the Colonial Forces had been a longer sentence: four years.

It was not into a naturally occurring other dimension that the pod would be sent, however, but into an artificially created pocket universe, which existed not so much in an alternate plane coterminous with Punktown as a kind of nowhere space between planes of existence. A hollow burrowed into nothingness, into which an entire prison had been sent, just like this pod, after its construction had been completed just two years earlier. The Trans-Paxton Penitentiary. Prisoners had nicknamed the facility, and the pocket it resided in like a model ship in a bottle, the Worm Hole.

Crime in the megalopolis of Paxton, on the Earth-colonized world of Oasis, was of legendary proportions, and this had been the Earth Colonies’ response to the dilemma of overcrowded prisons there. Paxton – universally dubbed Punktown – was so built up that it couldn’t accommodate yet another prison within its borders. The last one had been built below the city, but that project had met with much protest from the residents of the city’s Subtown sector. And thus, the opening of the pocket universe. Within that excavated bubble, its prisoners were actually no farther away from Punktown’s citizens than the man passing you in the street. And yet, at the same time, more distant than the farthest known star.

Two young men were seated facing Stake and Billings, and when they noticed Stake appraising them they both smiled. Stake looked away immediately. Not because he was afraid of the gangly youths, but because it was unwise for him to look too long at another person’s face… lest, against his will, he change .

Billings leaned against Stake’s shoulder and whispered, “Those are the Tin Town Maniacs… the wicked fucks. You hear about them, Ed?”

Stake couldn’t help but glance up at the youths again. He had in fact heard of them, and he’d had the misfortune of experiencing one of the VR vids they’d made and posted in the ultranet. The so-called Maniacs had killed a number of drug-addled homeless mutants in the Tin Town ghetto, making vids of their exploits, apparently simply for sport. Their parents were affluent, residing in the upscale neighborhood of Beaumonde Square, but their efforts to disprove their sons’ guilt had been in vain. Though the youths had refused truth scans and memory downloads, as was their legal right, both of them appeared clearly in their recordings. Watching that single vid, Stake had been filled with impotent rage as one of the young men (yes, that one, with jug ears and his blond hair cut in bangs) smashed in the face of a drunken mutant with a hammer. Until the face became no more than red pulp, it wore a look of bewildered fear and pain. Stake had been frustrated at how passive the victim was. He liked to believe that he would have been spitting his broken teeth in his killer’s eyes.

The boy with blond hair blew a kiss at Stake and batted his eyelids. Billings gave the youth a rude gesture, and hissed in Stake’s ear, “I’d love to snuff these two rich bastards myself, but I want to keep my nose clean. I’m hoping for an appeal.” He snorted. “Yeah, I know, a mutant getting an appeal. But dreaming is free. That’s the only thing about us that’s free, from here on out, huh?”

And then a vibration ran through the floor under their feet, the seats they sat upon, the walls against their backs. It was subtle enough but unmistakable, and the vibration carried into their very bodies. Stake felt like a humming tuning fork, and it was a nauseating sensation, though he knew the queasiness was more psychological than anything.

Two guards, uniformed entirely in black like “forcers” – law enforcers – right down to their ant-like full-head helmets, sat up front in the pod. Over his helmet mic, one of the guards remarked, “This is it, boys… we’re on our way. Kiss your reality goodbye.”

“You ever do time before?” Stake asked Billings as they pushed their plastic food trays along the runners in the cafeteria line. Despite Stake’s initial reluctance to make friends here, the two had remained close for moral support since their arrival and brief indoctrination, though they didn’t share a cell. Stake was in the prison’s Red Block, while Billings had been assigned the Green Block and accordingly wore crayon green shirt and pants.

“Not here,” the mutant replied, placing a carton of juice on his tray, “but yeah – three years in Paxton MSP.” That stood for Maximum Security Penitentiary. “Receiving stolen goods. You?”