This is a 1,000 word Flash Fiction challenge piece born of a randomised title. I've just posted an excerpt here as it already exists online, so if you like it, please follow for the rest.
http://infinitegibbons.wordpress.com/short-stories/chaos-prison/
The fluorescent lights are a little too bright, the temperature of the room a little too low, the aluminium chair is a little too uncomfortable and the hum from the console a little too loud. Three weeks it had taken to get to Journey’s End and thus, I am already agitated, everything my senses can detect is irritating me even more. The hospitality here is far from overwhelming, it isn’t like they have many visitors I suppose. I smooth back my hair, knit my hands behind my head and sigh, long and deeply.
“Sentinel,” I say at the screen. Why do we do that? The microphone picking up my voice and the camera picking up every twitch of my facial muscles is hidden somewhere in the utilitarian plastic construction in front of me, and yet I still talk and look into the screen. “How many prisoners on the Penitence Deck?”
“Nine-hundred and ninety-nine,” comes the bland voice of Sentinel. It is designed to be calming, an analogue of a mother calming a baby. I hate it. I hate this whole place. It’s unnatural. The super-structure, built into the side of a massive asteroid, is shaped like a giant praying mantis, sinister and violent. The whole of the interior is burnished aluminium, clinical, cold, wipe-clean.
“And how many prisoners are there supposed to be?” I ask.
“One thousand is my manifest,” it replies.
“So why haven’t you alerted us sooner? You have a prisoner missing,” I am losing my patience.
“There are no prisoners missing,” says Sentinel. “Journey’s End has its full complement of prisoners accounted for.”
“You just said there were only nine-hundred and ninety nine,” I say. “Then you say there are a thousand on the station.”
“Correct,” Sentinel replies.
http://infinitegibbons.wordpress.com/short-stories/chaos-prison/
The fluorescent lights are a little too bright, the temperature of the room a little too low, the aluminium chair is a little too uncomfortable and the hum from the console a little too loud. Three weeks it had taken to get to Journey’s End and thus, I am already agitated, everything my senses can detect is irritating me even more. The hospitality here is far from overwhelming, it isn’t like they have many visitors I suppose. I smooth back my hair, knit my hands behind my head and sigh, long and deeply.
“Sentinel,” I say at the screen. Why do we do that? The microphone picking up my voice and the camera picking up every twitch of my facial muscles is hidden somewhere in the utilitarian plastic construction in front of me, and yet I still talk and look into the screen. “How many prisoners on the Penitence Deck?”
“Nine-hundred and ninety-nine,” comes the bland voice of Sentinel. It is designed to be calming, an analogue of a mother calming a baby. I hate it. I hate this whole place. It’s unnatural. The super-structure, built into the side of a massive asteroid, is shaped like a giant praying mantis, sinister and violent. The whole of the interior is burnished aluminium, clinical, cold, wipe-clean.
“And how many prisoners are there supposed to be?” I ask.
“One thousand is my manifest,” it replies.
“So why haven’t you alerted us sooner? You have a prisoner missing,” I am losing my patience.
“There are no prisoners missing,” says Sentinel. “Journey’s End has its full complement of prisoners accounted for.”
“You just said there were only nine-hundred and ninety nine,” I say. “Then you say there are a thousand on the station.”
“Correct,” Sentinel replies.
