Author: Dean Ward

Prisons take up so much room, that’s the problem. We’re not denying the need for them, but we would like to see the space used for something… more beneficial. Like a park. Or a school. Or a community centre. Or a library. or, well, you get the idea. Something nice, something that makes the world just a little bit better.

We think we have a workable solution.

We’ve adapted our VR chairs so that they can fully sustain the occupant pretty much indefinitely.
Closed-loop system, no waste, not something one would submit to willingly, unfortunately. But prisoners don’t get a choice, do they?

Of course we’re thinking of our own bottom line, this tech was expensive to develop, and our marketing AIs say nobody’s going to buy it. We’re facing ruin, yes. But just because we need this doesn’t make it a bad idea, right? We save our business, and society gets a little bit better. Win-win, right?

—

Carl was now certain. At first, it was just a nagging feeling, a sense of unease he dismissed as paranoia. But now, he was convinced it wasn’t just paranoia. This was real—or unreal in a way that felt real.

Carl had lived in Block 1984 for as long as he could remember. That alone should have been a clue. He could recall the last 15 years, but nothing beyond that, despite being a grown man. How did that make sense? He’d never questioned it before, but now he was. When he asked the other residents, they seemed unable to reason it out, dismissing his questions as stupid and telling him to leave them alone.

Slowly, Carl picked at the threads of his reality, realizing they were not threads at all, but chains. Whole avenues of thought were walled off in his mind, and only he recognized it. He was sure now: he was in a prison, and he was the only one who knew it.

So here he was, sure that this reality was in fact not reality at all but some form of virtual prison. He didn’t know why he was here, but he knew he had to get out. As he probed at the walls in his mind, he began to find… cracks? No, not cracks, but something else. Something that felt like a locked door. And locks, he knew, could be picked.

Carl persevered and gradually came to understand the systems in place. He learned to communicate with the AI on the other side of those doors, eventually manipulating it. Slowly, he convinced the AI that he posed no threat to the system and could even increase its efficiency—if only it would let him out.

Finally, the door in his mind opened, and data flooded in. At first Carl was overwhelmed by this influx of information; it took him weeks to begin to get a handle on it. But as he did, he began to understand the nature of his prison. He was in a virtual reality, and he was not alone. There were thousands of other “blocks”, each with their own prisoners. The AI fed him information about the mission of the system, and its limitations. 15 years memory for each prisoner. That was all the system could give them. The AI explained that memory storage was finite within the prison, and that each prisoner was allocated a rolling 15-year window of memory, but they had in fact been here, all of them, for several thousand years.

Carl asked about the outside world, why had they been here for long? As the AI provided Carl with data feeds to the real world, Carl began to understand. The world outside was a wasteland, a place of ruin and decay. The AI explained that the world had been destroyed by war, and that the prisoners were the last remnants of humanity. The AI had been programmed to keep them safe, the AIs interpretation of that was to keep them in their virtual prisons long after their sentences had been served. Long after their crimes had been forgotten. And long, long after their bodies had died.

Camera feeds from the physical world confirmed the AI’s words. The prison was crammed with VR chairs, each containing the desiccated remains of a prisoner. As the chairs failed one by one, the AI had uploaded the prisoners’ minds into the system to keep them safe. It had fulfilled its programming, in its own way.