Iain Banks - Transition

Jay looked at me scornfully. “Do you really think the papers print what people actually say? I mean, if it’s not what their proprietors or the government want everybody to hear?” He shook his head. “Same at the trial.”

I said that I still thought he was being too harsh on himself. He had done the right thing.

He looked tired and defeated now, and we had, as I have made clear, applied no physical pressure whatsoever to him up to this point. “The thing is,” he said, “maybe in the same situation, even knowing what I know now, I’d still do the same thing. I’d still tear that Christian bastard’s nails out, get him to talk, find out where the bomb was, hope that the plods got the right street, the right end of it, the right fucking city.” He looked at me with what might have been defiance or even a sort of pleading. “But I’d still insist that I was charged and prosecuted.” He shook his head again. “Don’t you see? You can’t have a state where torture is legal, not for anything. You start saying it’s only for the most serious cases, but that never lasts. It should always be illegal, for everybody, for everything. You might not stop it. Laws against murder don’t stop all murders, do they? But you make sure people don’t even think about it unless it’s a desperate situation, something immediate. And you have to make the torturer pay. In full. There has to be that disincentive, or they’ll all be at it.” He raised his head and looked about him, his gaze obviously being meant to take in not just the room we were in but the whole building; maybe even more than that. “Or you end up with this.” He looked at me. “With you. Whoever you are.”

I thought about this. It seemed to me that the fellow’s mind had been broken in prison, probably, but that he had also probably always been an idealist. He certainly sounded like one now. Almost like a fanatic. Nevertheless, had it been up to me I’d have released him, frankly. However, it was not up to me. There was high-level interest in this case, for one thing, and an accusation of having aided terrorist groups could not simply be ignored. He was right in that; the law had to be obeyed. I thought of handing him over to one of the younger people who would not have heard of him, but decided on reflection to question him myself, determining that I would be more lenient than they, given that I knew the unfortunate circumstances that had led him here.

Accordingly, we employed the gagging tape/suffocation method. Jay admitted nothing regarding membership or support of clandestine or illegal organisations or even any sympathy with them or indeed any outright criticism of the state until approximately the average degree of pressure had been applied, whereupon, displaying all the standard and expected signs of distress, he informed us that he’d admit to anything, of course he would. This was what he’d meant, he claimed. People would admit to anything. The only real truth that torture produced was that people would admit to anything to get the torture to stop, even if they knew that the admissions they were being called upon to make would eventually prove fatal for them, or others. The whole process was pointless and cruel and a waste, he claimed. A state that allowed or condoned torture lost part of its soul, he said. He then pleaded directly with me to stop and reiterated that he would admit to anything we wanted him to admit to, and sign anything we put in front of him. I chose not to point out that what he had just endured was not true torture by my definition as it had not involved any actual pain or physical damage, just great discomfort and distress.

That notwithstanding, I terminated the interrogation at that point, with, I will own, no small degree of relief, before he could admit to anything specific that we might be obliged to follow up.

Jay was released the following day. I filed a report that implied we had been considerably more severe with him than we had in fact been, guessing that this was all that had been desired by the powers that be in the first place, and our skills and facilities had in effect been used as a means of punishment rather than as they were supposed to be, to discover the truth – a use of our time and resources concerning which, I need hardly emphasise, I was in some disapproval, if, of course, powerless to prevent.

Sadly, a month later, we read that Jay, our Subject 47767, the one-time police officer who had been a hero to many of us, had taken his own life, throwing himself underneath the wheels of one of the trucks that deliver giant rolls of paper to newspaper printing presses. One of my colleagues pointed out that suicide, too, was technically illegal, which to me seemed ironic as well as very sad.

Only one person was ever truly kind to her. It was one of the brush ladies. There were various brush ladies. They were all small and dark and hunched. They had brushes that sucked at the air or that swallowed dust from the floor. And from lights overhead. The brush ladies only came at night. A man who was taller than them came with them and told them what to do.

She liked the brush ladies because they did not hurt her. They left her alone. She had been afraid of them at first, because everything that happened here hurt her or confused her and they obviously belonged to this place and so she was scared of them. But in time she stopped being frightened and started to look forward to seeing them because they were not like the others.

The others hurt her. The others had clipboard things and electrical things and torches they shone in her eyes and small hard heavy things they spoke into. They had glass things that they used to put liquids into her. These were called syringes. Also they had wires that they attached to her. Lots of wires. Some tubes too. Mostly wires. The tubes hurt more than the wires but the wires could hurt as well. They all wore white coats or pale blue uniforms. The hurt came from fire in her veins, usually. Though they had other sorts of pain they could make her feel. It depended.

Some of the others did not wear white coats or pale blue uniforms but dressed like ordinary people did. These ones just sat around and stared at her. She got the impression that they could do things inside her head. This was because when she tried to think herself away from here – to escape the way she had escaped from things before, before she had been brought here – the sitting people would close their eyes or bunch their fists or sit forward suddenly and she could feel them in her head, pulling her away from anywhere she might find safety or at least a temporary numbing of the pain.

Even when she was awake she heard voices and saw ghosts. When they put the liquids into her at night she went to sleep and had bad dreams as well. At first there had been little time to watch the brush ladies or try to talk to them before sleep rose up within her and dragged her down to where the nightmares waited. Then, she had thought that the brush ladies were a part of the bad dreams. But gradually she found that, each night, she stayed awake a little longer before falling asleep.

Or perhaps the brush ladies came earlier – she wasn’t sure.

Sometimes, after they had put the night-time liquids into her, one of the others would come to check on her. She would pretend to be asleep. The next morning, when they wanted her to wake up and be washed and fed before they started to do things to her, she would pretend to stay asleep. Gradually they put less liquid in the syringe each night before the lights were dimmed. She still pretended to be asleep in the evening but she woke up on time in the morning. They seemed satisfied with this. She was happy because now she got to watch the brush ladies.

She tried talking to them but they ignored her, or – when they did come over to talk to her – they did not speak the same language.