LJ Idol Week 11: Thomas

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The Prison, Licentian, The Gray Planet, October 2, year 2deltaQ

Number 51."

Warden Thomas's shout echoed through the prison hallways. Her footsteps were loud on the steel floors as she marched down the line of cells, glancing at the numbers on the brick walls next to the bar doors. There was a standard metal cot in each of the fifteen feet by fifteen feet cells, a toilet in the corner farthest from the cots, and a chair. Back when Thomas first started working in the prison on the gray planet, there were two prisoners per cell, but ever since the thief back in 1deltaP murdered the child abductor, the order changed to one prisoner per cell. There never seemed to be a problem with space and when a new prisoner came in, there was always an empty cell waiting. It had been that way ever since the beginning.

Thomas still remembered when the American astronauts discovered the little planet. A mass they thought had broken from Jupiter's moons, they had said on the news. It was a close thing because China was set to launch their spaceship the day before, but had to postpone when one of their astronauts caught the flu.

It's funny, Thomas thought. That a flu virus was the reason America got there first.

Planetary ownership wasn't a thing back then, even Thomas, as a fifteen-year-old knew that. But Licent Corp—the biggest electronics manufacturer in the world—not NASA, had been the one to launch the spaceship that discovered the planet. When the news came out, Thomas herself expected the company to hand the planet over. Instead, Cynthia Zhang, head of Licent Corp, had met with the President of the United States. After the meeting, Zhang had simply declared that her coporation owned the planet. Cynthia Zhang had written up the papers that said the planet was her company's, and as she was known for her magnanimous person, she had charitably offered to take the burden of overcrowded prisons off the country's back.

Zhang was in her late twenties back when she'd acquired The Gray Planet, at five foot five at most, but with a voice that carried through a crowd. When Cynthia Zhang spoke, the room listened. When she said that she was doing the country a great service by owning her own planet, Thomas wasn't the only one who believed her.

Cynthia Zhang was an attractive woman, but more than that, she was a shrewd, intelligent woman. Cynthia had straight, shoulder length, dark brown hair, and big brown eyes right above a straight nose. There were angles to her cheekbones, like people with a greater proportion of Native American genes tended to have. She had fascinating skin, freckled, pale, with warm undertones to it. Thomas had watched every show Zhang went to in the early days of her having acquired The Gray Planet. Thomas had copies of every speech Cynthia gave, the videos of her at dinner with important people. Through them all, there had been no mention of the new element, vismay.

When Thomas signed up to be a prison guard, at 20, no one had told her about the agreement between the prisoners and Licent Corp, either.

Thomas had been working in the prison for 14 years now. She was unmarried, hadn't seen Cynthia Zhang in person once as she'd originally hoped for when she applied for the job, and she believed the prisoners deserved what they got. There were and always would be murderers and thieves, and they deserved to work, deserved to suffer for a few years before they were let go back to Earth. It taught them discipline, would hopefully make them think twice before they ever broke the law again. It's why Thomas stayed despite knowing that the chances of her ever having a family were basically zero. She liked her job more than she liked the idea of settling down with a nice person and having children. She liked knowing that she could teach discipline, that she could be part of the reason that murderers became active citizens. She did believe in second chances, had been given her second chance once, and she'd promised to do her best to give these men and women their own.

The only thing about her job that Thomas didn’t like was waking up at 4 in the morning, after three hours of sleep. She had to escort the prisoner from cell 51 to the other side of the planet. The only reason she wasn't sending one of the new boys was because she knew David Mallory. He was a model prisoner, and Thomas had an easy friendship with him. She knew about his husband back on earth, how eager David always seemed to go back. It wasn't the same way with a lot of the prisoners. Most of the men and women lost hope around the half-year mark. It was hard to keep believing in someone when there was no way to communicate, Thomas supposed.

Still, David never seemed to stop hoping, and Thomas liked the guy. Mallory had come in at 28 years old, just two years younger than Thomas, accused of trying to divulge government secrets, had pleaded guilty in front of the court, and accepted his sentence. He was a good man, who'd made one mistake, and Thomas was glad to be the one to tell David that he was leaving.

"Mallory," she called out again, as she passed cell 49.

There was the sound of rustling sheets from the cells around Thomas, though she knew the prisoners well enough to know that they wouldn’t move from their beds. Sleep didn't usually come easy to the newer ones, and the older prisoners knew the value of a good night's rest. Even Thomas tended to avoid disturbing them as best as she could.

"Mallory," Thomas called out again, as she stood in front of cell 51. "Get up."

There was no answer.

"Fucking middle of the night," a woman's voice—probably Lena—from further down the hall called. "Just use your damn light, warden."

"Mind your own fucking business," Thomas called back.

But she was already digging out the standard issue flashlight from the hook on the back of her belt. She'd just turned on the flashlight when the lights in the entire hall blared to life. She blinked against the brightness, muttering under her breath about new recruits. The prisoners in the cells started complaining, and one of them threw a book at the cell door.

"Lena, if you throw one more thing at the door, I'm going to lock you in solitary," Thomas warned.

There was an answering grunt from cell 49, then silence. The rest of the prisoners were settling down, and Thomas took her time turning back to cell 51. David Malloy was sleeping, his black curls just visible above the sheet he had around him.

"Time to go, Mallory," Thomas said.

"Time to go where?" David asked from underneath his covers.

"You're going home."

Thomas watched as David sat up in bed, one hand going out automatically to touch the photograph on the wall next to his cot.

"I'm leaving?" David asked, standing up.

Thomas nodded, and waited as David gathered his things. There was only the orange jumpsuit he pulled on over his undershirt and boxers, and the work boots. David walked around the cell, looking under the bed to pick up things he might have missed. The photograph was last, and David peeled it off the wall with careful fingers.

"Are you ready?" Thomas asked.

David Mallory nodded, pulling out the white sack from under his pillow. It was one that all prisoners came with, just enough room for a few things. When David had come to the prison, he'd brought only the photograph with him. It was creased down the middle, as though he'd kept it folded most of the time. It was of his husband, Matthew, him and David both smiling in the photograph. The smile was a good look on David, and Thomas hoped Matthew had waited.

When David was ready, all the prisoners were back in bed, and the lights in the hallway were off. It was procedure to make the release of a prisoner as quiet an affair as possible. It reduced the chances of a potential outburst, and it was all much simpler the less people knew.

Thomas was quiet as she led David Mallory through the silent prison hallway. They got to the end of the hall, went down two flights of stairs to the ground floor. The ground floor had polished tan linoleum tiles, with a large desk in the center, directly in front of the stairs Thomas and Mallory had come down. There was a guard on duty, Rogers, with the thick blond curls, who'd almost been arrested for murder back on Earth.

Thomas nodded at Rogers as she and David walked out the sliding metal doors in front of the desk and into a large transparent bridge. The glass rose fifty feet above them on either side, one gigantic sheet of transparent wall that seemed to go on forever. The bridge was closed off at the top with the same see through glass, but the floor they walked on was black tile. The flat, gray landscape of the planet extended on either side of them, wide-open spaces that disappeared into darkness. A few miles out to Thomas's left were the mining machines that dug the holes the prisoners went into every morning. They'd dig in the tunnels that extended from where the mining machines were to thirty miles into the gray planet.

The deposits of vismay were concentrated enough within the first ten miles of tunnels, but Cynthia Zhang had ordered them to dig more. The order had come from the higher ups working at the control center midway between the prisoner release center and the prison cells. The idea was to spread out the prisoners, to keep them busy, and to ensure that there was something for everyone to do at all times.

It seemed an unnecessary precaution to Thomas, because there was nowhere to run on the planet and no way off. The prisoners did their work because there was nothing else to do. They listened for the most part, because there was no point in not doing so. They were as isolated as they could possibly be from humanity, so they clung to each other and to the guards on the gray planet. They built their own families, had their groups of friends, but were loyal to even those prisoners they never spoke too.

Thomas felt it too, with the other guards. Originally, there had been 10 guards for a little over 400 prisoners. Over the past 14 years, the number of guards had gone up to 50, and the number of prisoners had leveled out at about 1,500. There always seemed to be more prisoners coming, but the number never went up, and there was a steady release of prisoners every few days or so.

The guards didn't change as often, so they all knew each other. They'd eat together, do night watches with each other, and just sit together when they had the time. It was usually in the guard section of the prison, to the far right of the first floor. Their rooms and dining hall took up the lower level of the square prison, which was less glass and more solid brick, with windows that looked out over the planet. Thomas kept the ones in her room closed against the darkness, though she liked to open them when the planet's sun rose high enough to give the illusion of daylight. Most of the time, the planet seemed to be somewhere between a cloudy late summer afternoon and nighttime.

The general gloominess combined with the limited number of people on the planet made it easy to bond. There were no outsiders among the guards because they were all outsiders, confined to a planet thousands of miles away, weeks away if they managed to get a ride back with the cargo ship. They knew, as a collective, that once they got the job on the gray planet, this was their lives. It was what made Thomas take the job in the first place, aside from her desire to meet Cynthia Zhang. Thomas just wasn't made for families and relationships. She knew from the moment her parents fucked up their marriage that she wasn't going to do the same.

"Am I really leaving?" David asked, bringing Thomas out of her thoughts.

"You're leaving," Thomas nodded.

She stepped further into the bridge, the automatic lights coming on as she moved forward. David Mallory followed her, his footsteps echoing in the high ceiling of the bridge. The lights further up ahead would not turn on until Thomas and David walked by so that Thomas could only see the black tiles in front of her along the floor. It used to bother Thomas in the beginning, the way everything was so dark. Now, the darkness was like the absence of people, just another fact of living on the gray planet.

"Why?" David asked, as they walked.

Thomas shrugged. "Does it matter?" she asked. "You get to go home."

"It's just…I didn't think it'd be so soon," he confessed. "I was expecting at least ten years."

"You're the best behaved prisoner we have," Thomas told him. "Maybe the good word the guards put in for you helped."

David was silent as they walked. Thomas let him think, knew it would take time for David to get used to the idea that he was going home. They passed the midpoint of the bridge, where it split to the right and lead to the management offices. That was where the orders from Licent Corp came from. It was where Thomas heard news from Earth every morning, or just where she stopped to get a general report of what work the prisoners had to do that day. The actual building was a good half hour drive from the end of the rightmost arm of the glass bridge. It was well out of the way from the prisoners, and the tram that would take up to four people across the Gray Planet to the building required a key card and fingerprints.

Thomas didn’t let herself linger so as not to give David any ideas. It was best for him if he kept his head down until he was safely off the planet. Thomas had seen many men and women off to the release center, and though none of them returned, she would not put it past the bluecoats at the release center to send a prisoner back. The bluecoats had separated themselves from the other guards when they had all first come to the planet. They worked on their side of the planet, in their steel building, with the domed glass ceiling that set it apart from the other two buildings on the planet. It was more efficient to have three large buildings on one side of the planet than to scatter buildings across the whole planet. Licent Corp was not trying to build a civilization on the gray planet. It was a prison, and the sparse architecture showed just that.

"Will you do me a favor?" David said, as they finally made it to the end of the glass bridge.

"Only if I can," Thomas answered.

"Tell them I said goodbye."

Thomas smiled. "I will," she said, clasping David's hand. "If you remember to say hello to Matthew for me."

David grinned, the corner of his eyes wrinkling as he did. They stared at each other, and Thomas did her best to memorize David's face in the low light of the bridge. She was two years older than David was, and he'd been a good friend. She'd miss him, just as much as she'd miss any of the guards who worked with her.

"Good luck," she told him.

"Thank you," David said.

He nodded at her once, and then stepped through the metal doors and into the release center.




a small aside to my Week 9 post