although the length of the cell left a broad empty space between him and the screen on those rare circumstances when the screen would switch on. Prisoners were supposed to use that space to exercise, and the brig had a number of other features and articles of equipment that could be placed in the cells, but Cratch was eligible for none of them. And exercise really wasn’t his thing.
The wall behind Glomulus’s back was solid crete, the one opposite him – the one facing onto the corridor, naturally – dominated by a transparent flux observation panel set in a thick crete frame. The desk bore a single sheet of senso-flimsy that was Glomulus’s sole possession and sole entertainment. The distant wall-screen was inactive, operable only by outside command and, so far, only on very special and non-entertainment-related occasions. These occasions, as one might expect, were usually frighteningly dull.
General Moral Decay (Alcohol) stood on the other side of the broad transparent panel, conducting its – his , Glomulus corrected himself wryly – periodic between-meals inspection. Making sure the prisoner wasn’t stockpiling the mushy printed food supplements he was given or the flaky soluble plates and spoons he was given them on. The crew slipped a steaming, already-soggy plate through the metaflux three times a day, and that had been his diet for the past one thousand, eight hundred and eighteen days, give or take.
Not that it did much good to stockpile anything. The food dried up into a papery pat that Glomulus suspected was what the plates were made of, and it all dissolved and vanished into the waste run-off like everything else. You couldn’t cut someone with it, brain someone with it, and as for digging one’s way out with it? Laughable. The walls were reinforced crete, even with the technically porous incoming and outgoing feeds. And the observation plate was effectively the same stuff they made starship viewscreens out of, with a few fancy tweaks to enable bidirectional transparency and mono-directional permeability. You had to be careful not to push the plate too far in and get your fingers stuck, because there was no pulling back – many a time Glomulus reminisced happily about the early days after The Accident, when all the qualified corrections personnel but Sally were gone and almost every meal involved a full emergency lock-down while they pushed the hapless server the rest of the way through the panel and then opened the door to let him back out. Totally worth the cold meal and dissolving plate that invariably resulted … but as amusing as the observation screen was, there was also no digging through it.
“I like to explain it syllable by syllable,” Decay had confided in Glomulus once, while chatting about the metaflux after a particularly hilarious feeding-time incident, “and see how many syllables it takes before they interrupt me,” he’d laughed. “And then I say ‘let’s just call it metaflux ’,” he’d added, in tones suggesting this was the punchline.
Decay usually came during the night shifts and other irregular times. Because the poor sap didn’t need to sleep. If Glomulus had ever wondered what Molranoids did during the seven hours a day humans spent unconscious, he was at least reasonably sure ‘making up jokes’ didn’t top the list.
“Tell you again – you mean about the reality script?” the Blaran said now. “Well, it’s just something I’ve noticed that humans do particularly well. I’m learning to look at the positive side of things that I used to consider in a … perhaps over-negative light. And I found that when humans tell each other things, and tell themselves things, and most importantly when they write and read things, it imprints on what they believe is reality, and this in turn impacts their behaviour and their interaction with the universe.”
“Are humans the only species that alter their environment according to their perceptions, and their
The wall behind Glomulus’s back was solid crete, the one opposite him – the one facing onto the corridor, naturally – dominated by a transparent flux observation panel set in a thick crete frame. The desk bore a single sheet of senso-flimsy that was Glomulus’s sole possession and sole entertainment. The distant wall-screen was inactive, operable only by outside command and, so far, only on very special and non-entertainment-related occasions. These occasions, as one might expect, were usually frighteningly dull.
General Moral Decay (Alcohol) stood on the other side of the broad transparent panel, conducting its – his , Glomulus corrected himself wryly – periodic between-meals inspection. Making sure the prisoner wasn’t stockpiling the mushy printed food supplements he was given or the flaky soluble plates and spoons he was given them on. The crew slipped a steaming, already-soggy plate through the metaflux three times a day, and that had been his diet for the past one thousand, eight hundred and eighteen days, give or take.
Not that it did much good to stockpile anything. The food dried up into a papery pat that Glomulus suspected was what the plates were made of, and it all dissolved and vanished into the waste run-off like everything else. You couldn’t cut someone with it, brain someone with it, and as for digging one’s way out with it? Laughable. The walls were reinforced crete, even with the technically porous incoming and outgoing feeds. And the observation plate was effectively the same stuff they made starship viewscreens out of, with a few fancy tweaks to enable bidirectional transparency and mono-directional permeability. You had to be careful not to push the plate too far in and get your fingers stuck, because there was no pulling back – many a time Glomulus reminisced happily about the early days after The Accident, when all the qualified corrections personnel but Sally were gone and almost every meal involved a full emergency lock-down while they pushed the hapless server the rest of the way through the panel and then opened the door to let him back out. Totally worth the cold meal and dissolving plate that invariably resulted … but as amusing as the observation screen was, there was also no digging through it.
“I like to explain it syllable by syllable,” Decay had confided in Glomulus once, while chatting about the metaflux after a particularly hilarious feeding-time incident, “and see how many syllables it takes before they interrupt me,” he’d laughed. “And then I say ‘let’s just call it metaflux ’,” he’d added, in tones suggesting this was the punchline.
Decay usually came during the night shifts and other irregular times. Because the poor sap didn’t need to sleep. If Glomulus had ever wondered what Molranoids did during the seven hours a day humans spent unconscious, he was at least reasonably sure ‘making up jokes’ didn’t top the list.
“Tell you again – you mean about the reality script?” the Blaran said now. “Well, it’s just something I’ve noticed that humans do particularly well. I’m learning to look at the positive side of things that I used to consider in a … perhaps over-negative light. And I found that when humans tell each other things, and tell themselves things, and most importantly when they write and read things, it imprints on what they believe is reality, and this in turn impacts their behaviour and their interaction with the universe.”
“Are humans the only species that alter their environment according to their perceptions, and their
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