DEAR DIARY,
I said last time I wrote to you that they sent me to the Castle, which is the end of this story, but probably not the end of my homework. And I know this is the part that Preston and everyone else really wants to know more about, but I don't think I can talk about all the things they want me to talk about.
At least, not in the kind of detail they want. I don't want to name any names or write anything about specific incidents. I figure if I manage to make whoever's reading this understand just a little bit about why I am NEVER going to go back there, then I did this the right way.
I've heard from Jim that you can see the Castle when you're making an approach on the nearest airport, but I just have to take his word for that, because the only plane I've ever been on was the one they used to transport me out from California, and I spent almost all of that trip tranquilized and strapped into a chair inside a drainer tank. Not that there are any windows in the prisoner section of the transport plane anyway.
The weather was so bad when they transported me that the plane ended up landing nearly two hours behind schedule. There were some other delays with the van, and in the end they didn't actually get me to the Castle until around 8pm. Coming there that late meant that they couldn't process me right away, so I spent the night in an observation cell in the infirmary until dawn.
That first night was the best night I ever had in the Castle, because from 8pm to dawn I wasn't around any of the other inmates.
Of course, after that, it got a lot worse. I spent four hours in processing, which I guess isn't that long considering all the things they have to do. But you spend the whole time standing up, and by the time it's all finished you feel like you've been marched around the whole prison about a dozen times. They fill out the same paperwork that was already filled out when the sentence was handed down, they do another cavity search even though they did one before they put you on the transport plane and again before they put you on the van, they ask you the same questions about medical conditions and all that, and at the end of all of it they've picked out what security level you belong at. Supposedly it's based on how much of a threat you are, but really it's mostly just by how many years you're going to have to serve, plus maybe a little higher if you're younger or otherwise considered "unstable."
And lucky me, being only 18 years old with all those consecutive sentences, I was stuck in the upper end of what the Castle considers medium security. At least, that's what I think it was; it's what they said it would be, if that actually means anything.
It was around the second hour of processing that a guard told me two things she said I'd need to know. First, she said, you don't fuck with the guards: if they tell you to do something, you do it, because no one cares what happens to anyone in the Castle. Second, you do your own time: because, again, no one cares what happens to anyone in the Castle, and especially not the other inmates. So you keep your head down, you don't ask other people about their problems and you don't talk about your own. She said anyone who learned those two things and lived by them wouldn't have any trouble serving out their whole sentence.
Which is funny, because just after she told me this, she read me my E.P.R.D., my Earliest Possible Release Date, which was 31 years away. Yeah, because thirty-one years wouldn't be any trouble at all as long as I knew those two rules. Thanks, officer! This'll be easy!
I didn't say that, of course. I took her at her word, because what other choice did I have? The drainers in the LA County Jail, the drainer tanks I'd been stuck in, those are absolutely nothing compared to the system they're running in the Castle. In a weak drainer field, I can just barely use my powers: not enough to really do anything impressive, but at least enough to protect myself a little bit.
Not in the Castle. I can't do anything at all in there. In the Castle, I'm totally defenseless. I can't read anyone around me, I can't move anything, I don't even think I heal as quickly. So basically, the only thing that shows that I'm actually a mutant when I'm in there is that I look even worse under those sickly green lights than anyone else does. In every other respect, I'm just a scrawny teenager who can't put up much of a fight.
And that's not true of everyone in there, not by a long shot. The security block they put me in had all kinds of people, basically all of whom were bigger and tougher than I was. And eager to prove it, too.
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"...no one cares what happens to anyone in there." |
Which only sort of worked. No one took any particular notice of me, but the casual attention I got was bad enough. I think in that first month I got beat up about once every two days, which from what I saw is about average for a new inmate who doesn't get into a gang early on. After that month, most everyone had decided that since I hardly ever said anything and spent most of my time sitting or standing by myself, I was basically harmless.
So after a month, the only inmates who would go after me were the ones who just liked hurting people and figured out that I was a safe target. Not only was it basically impossible to tell if I'd just been beaten up under all the scars and bruises I already had, I still healed faster than most people and everyone figured that I couldn't complain to the guards because I was too brain-damaged to talk (with the scars, that made sense). So basically I'd just get hurt once every three or four days.
Most of the beatings I took were casual, they were afterthought kind of things. I'd be climbing the stairs to my tier and whoever was behind me would push me into the rail, sometimes over it. I'd try to sit at a table in the cafeteria and someone would shove me into a wall and kick me until I went somewhere else. And I kept telling myself that this was better than the alternative, it was better than anyone else in there knowing any real information about me, it was better than having to be in one of the gangs or worrying about making real enemies.
I only blew it that one time, and it was just to a doctor who'd come in to try and do an evaluation of me. I don't even know why this guy set me off so badly that time, because it was the same thing they'd done twice before. They had me in a room in the library, sitting across a table from him, and he wanted me to take these IQ and general aptitude tests. Usually I would just sit there quietly and not participate, because anything you do in prison tends to get back to the other inmates and the last thing I needed was to give them a reason to notice me again. But this doctor wouldn't let up, he kept nagging at me and nagging at me and finally I just snapped and did the stupid tests, which were not actually all that difficult.
And while I did them, I yelled at this guy and let him know just what I thought about him. Then I tried throwing the pencil at him, but I missed. Real tough girl, huh, dear diary? Oh, I'm a real terror. I can't even hit an overweight middle-aged guy with a pencil from four feet away.
In retrospect, I guess it was lucky for me that this happened, because apparently it was my score and my time on those tests that got my file bumped higher on the Tenebrous watchlist, but at the time all I could think was that now the prison gossips would have a reason to talk about me, and some people were going to think that I was spying on them for the guards.
Which it did, and they did, and the consequences of that went on for a while. I just took it quietly, let them do whatever, figuring if I didn't say anything and didn't complain, eventually they'd just decide that someone had lied to them about me not really being brain-dead and they'd go back to leaving me alone.
It wasn't like I had any real alternatives. I'd looked at the rules, and I watched the way some of them were enforced, so I knew that they don't shift you down to a lower security block once they've assigned you to one (and anyway, I've heard that the lower security wings are actually worse). That left two other options for getting away from the other inmates.
The first was PS, Protective Segregation. That's where they take you out of the prison population and stick you in the secure housing unit, aka Solitary or the Hole, for your own safety. The only inmates I saw get PS were ones who got caught doing something and sold out someone else, usually in another gang; they'd go to the Hole for a few weeks before coming back. And then usually a week later someone would get revenge on them anyway. And I saw one woman go into PS but no one knew why, and she nearly got her neck broken when she came back, just for all the things she MIGHT have said about other people. So PS was basically out, because I didn't have anyone to snitch on and even if they let me in there anyway, I'd still get my ass kicked when they took me out.
You could also get into the hole through A-Seg, Administrative Segregation. This was the whole "you break a rule, you spend a night in the Hole" thing. I saw people get A-Seg for dealing, fighting, and so on, but as easy as it is to break a rule, they don't make it that easy to be taken out of the general population. Usually people went to A-Seg after visiting the Infirmary first, and not always because another inmate had put them there. Worst of all, getting into the Hole that way always trashed your parole chances; you might get away with one tiny incident, a couple days of solitary, but more than that and you were going to serve your whole term. Maybe there's not much difference between getting out at 49 and getting out at 64 if you're already spending your adulthood behind bars, but it doesn't feel like it to me.
And I'm trying really hard to make it sound like I was a good, tough little inmate and knew all the angles, but the fact is I was scared to death every second I was in the Castle, even when I was sleeping, because it's true: no one cares what happens to anyone in there. At some point I even tried to stop caring what would happen to myself.
I did get PS'd twice, for about a month total, and while it was maddening in its own way (you get a solitary 6'x8' cell that you spend about 22 hours a day in, with maybe 30-45 minutes every other day in the exercise room, and you don't get to work or anything like that), it was at least a break from having to worry about someone killing you. First time was after I'd passed out and they had me on IV nutrients for a while, and after they took me out of solitary they put me on a different meal shift and made me sit at the table closest to the guard station. Second time was because one of the mental health guys who would try to talk to me noticed that I had a broken arm, and made enough waves to land me in the infirmary and on a suicide watch, and that was just before the CIA showed up and offered me Tenebrous.
There was a moment just after they told me about Tenebrous where I thought that maybe I'd really gone crazy, or that they were just lying to me, and I seriously thought about sticking with the say-nothing, do-nothing act so they would leave me alone. That's what just a year of the Castle had done to me. But I managed to realize pretty quickly that when it came right down to it, any offer that got me out of there was an offer I had to take. Thirty more years of that and I'd be lucky if I was dead at the end of it. I can't do those thirty years. I won't.
I guess I shouldn't write that sort of thing, since it'll raise all kinds of red flags in Spook Central and make them think I'm going to run out on Tenebrous, and that's not good for me, right? But I was asked to be honest, and so I'm going to hope that my honesty is actually worth something here: I don't plan on running, because I don't know that there's any way I can run that won't land me back in the Castle eventually. If they can offer me freedom, a real life, all that sort of thing, I'll take it. I'll take it and I won't throw it away, I promise.