The Punishment for Treason
In the moments before the morning klaxons went off, I stared at the cement ceiling and thought about the hundreds of tons of rock above Block 12, keeping us trapped down here. I knew that if the red emergency lights in the hall turned off, the darkness would be absolute. Power outages down here were dress rehearsals for being buried. I hadn’t slept for more than an hour in two days. I sucked in a breath and braced for the klaxons.
When they went off, the lights snapped on, dazzling my eyes through closed lids. For a brief second, I imagined staying in my bunk until some guard came and dragged me down. I tucked that thought away like I had every morning for the past month and climbed down from my bunk with my eyes clamped shut, letting my habits take over.
I crawled into my grey numbered jumpsuit, trying to imagine this was just another day. Everyone else was doing the same. We were all ex-soldiers of some kind or another, and we still retained the habits trained into us by the Viridian-5 Liberation Army.
“What do you think it’s gonna be?” Songwon asked me as he put his shoes on. “It won’t be a straight execution. There’s no way. They would have done it already.” His eyes gleamed under the cheap, greenish lights. The light gave the fading bruises covering half of his face a lurid tint.
I looked away from him without answering, staring down at my own shoes. They were men’s, not in my size. The VLA wasn’t big on waste, or comfort. With no supply chains left from the rest of the settled planets, they couldn’t afford to be. We were all alone out here, burrowed deep into this lonely hunk of rock. Some way to fight a war.
I wondered who had worn these shoes before I’d been transferred here. I wondered who would wear them after me. I didn’t think I would need them after today. Unlike Songwon, I couldn’t bear to think about it. I took no comfort in picturing the possibilities. We’d all heard rumors, each worse than the last.
“I’ve heard it’s painless,” said Carter.
“Who told you that, Carter?” Songwon sneered. Carter blinked, both at the tone and at the use of his first name. We were all on a first-name basis here in Block 12, but even after a month in detention, Carter was still getting used to it. He’d been a swanky lieutenant before. “You ever met anybody after they’ve been sentenced and processed?” Songwon continued. “Cause if so, you’d better have their autograph.”
Carter shrugged, jaw tense. “Just something I heard. I heard a lot of things. I had clearance.” Unlike you, he seemed to silently add. In the artificial glow, Carter and Songwon’s faces looked stretched tight and waxy as they stared at each other, eyes lost in the shadows of their sunken faces. The other fifteen crammed into our group cell quieted down, watching. For a second I thought we were gonna break the tension that had been hanging over us since sentencing with a good old cell block fight.
I shook my head in warning at Songwon. Carter towered above him. Songwon had already been to the medical ward once, when the guards had broken his nose and beat him unconscious for his stupid fucking attitude. I was ready to duck for cover, but Songwon just laughed.
“Alright, Carter. But if it’s not painless, you owe me five cred.”
Cue collective sigh of relief. Nobody here wanted to fight today. I could see it all around me. Everyone was either trying to make small talk or just staying quiet. Nobody but Songwon was making eye contact. We’d each fought our last battle already. This was our afterlife, our Purgatory.
“Line up,” barked a guard from outside. “If anybody fucks around today, you will die right in this fucking hall. I sincerely hope you do, because it would make my day to bash one of your skulls in. Understood?”
“Sir, yes sir!” We barked back together. Even Songwon.
We went down the corridor single-file — we had to, as it was so narrow between the cells. Most things built in Viridian-5’s underground cities were designed to give an illusion of openness, of being under a real sky. Not this place. Here, in this unnamed detention facility, you could feel all the millions of tons of rock above and around you. The air barely circulated; the reek of body odor, bad breath, and neglected plumbing gathered and stagnated in the cells.
After a turn down the hall and passage through two open, guarded, hermetic doors, we arrived in the mess hall. After receiving our rations of sloppy plant byproduct, we took our seats at a table with more guards at either end.
“Breakfast of champions,” someone said, and we all charitably attempted to laugh. I looked around with sudden, intense nostalgia at these people I’d been sentenced with, that I’d spent a month here with, just waiting for processing. I knew all their stories: Carter, who’d tried to defect to the Federal Union with a drove of intel. Songwon, who’d been leaking troop positions since the earliest days of the war. Everyone had their own reason for doing it.
They knew my story, too. They didn’t hate me for it. Some of them were impressed, even. I wished I could feel the same way about it. I wanted to make peace with myself before I was processed, but I didn’t know how.
My throat ached as I tried to force down some more pulpy byproduct. I really hoped it was painless — not for me, but for Carter and Terez and Songwon and everyone else.
After breakfast, they marched us into a stripped-out maglev shuttle car. We were packed in with Blocks 11 and 13, and they looked just as shitty and broken-down as us. Nobody said much on the long ride to the VLA fertilizer plant.
Songwon and I had discussed at length the significance of us working there. Shipping us out each day cost the VLA more than letting us rot in our cells. There had to be some connection to the punishment we would undergo at the end of today. We’d run out of time to figure it out, I realized.
“You think this maglev is even on the books?” Songwon asked. I shook my head.
“There’s no way any of this is registered anywhere,” I told him. “We technically don’t exist. Reported as combat fatalities, no doubt.” We had this conversation on what felt like a daily basis, where we talked about what the VLA was doing to us. It made us feel more vindicated. I knew this was probably my last day, our last day. I struggled for anything else to say. For the four years I’d spent in the VLA, my life had been all about stifling my thoughts, making myself as speechless and invisible as possible. Now my last chance to talk had come, and I had no words left.
Thankfully, Songwon seemed to sense what I was thinking.
“This isn’t the best, but it could’ve been worse,” he told me. “A lot of people, they’re out there dying and suffering because they got conscripted and they’re too scared to question any of it. We’re dying for the right reason.”
I thought of all the bodies being bagged up as they came to arrest me back at my old base.
“I don’t know that it was the right reason,” I told him. “All you did was leak intelligence. What I did—”
“—What you did was what you had to do. The VLA does worse shit every day. They’re doing worse shit to us right now. Don’t worry about it. We’ve got to enjoy today.” The maglev shuddered, and we were all knocked against one another. A hand grabbed at my thigh, and I stepped on someone’s foot. The stink of unwashed bodies built as the maglev continued down the unlit tunnel, bringing us towards our last day of forced labor.
Once we were off the maglev, we filed through a better-lit, cleaner facility. Here, the air was sharp and antiseptic. It started to burn my nose a little as we were divided into our work groups and went deeper into the chem processing plant, where we’d been trained to work since our sentencing.
Songwon’s group headed a different way. The realization that I might never see him again jolted through me.
My group headed down to the distribution floor, where the finished fertilizers were bottled for distribution to the VLA’s many underground hydroponics farms. We were feeding the VLA’s soldiers — a fitting enough interim punishment for traitors.
None of us had jobs we could sabotage. The plant was mostly automated. They didn’t let us anywhere near volatile chemicals, and there were about as many guards as prisoners. My work group maintained the drainage ducts on the floor and cleaned up spills with enzyme powders. The machines doing most of the work were efficient but a little messy.
We patrolled the floor, scrubbing up the chemical spills as they occurred. It was simple, menial work. The fumes and the roaring machine noise slowly wore me down into a numbed-out stupor. It was easy to fall back into my own thoughts.
For the thousandth time I asked myself if it had been worth it. I was a murderer, and now I was pissing away my last hours as a slave, a cog in the machine I’d fought against. Maybe if I had stayed inside the VLA, it would have been better for everyone. Maybe I shouldn’t have fought back at all. All the damage I’d done was probably just a tiny glitch for a planet-sized war apparatus like the Viridian-5 Liberation Army. The people I’d killed were just conscripts like me. They hadn’t chosen to fight the Federal Union any more than I had.
“Hey,” Yaxi, my cellmate, shouted to me. “You okay?” Yaxi’s face was haggard and slick with sweat and grime. She was even younger than me at twenty-three. We were both probably going to die today.
“Yeah,” I shouted back over the noise. “Just tired.” God, was I ever tired.
There weren’t any breaks on the distribution floor. By the time we were done, my whole body hurt and my brain felt foggy and slow. My work group was led back through the labyrinth of the plant and back onto the maglev station. I
scanned around for Songwon and pushed my way over to him, limping a little. My knees didn’t hold up well to work on the production floor. Even during my stint as an enemy of the revolution, I had never worked this hard.
“We gotta figure this out,” he told me. Oh, give it up, I thought. “It doesn’t make sense. They have to guard us so heavily. Why use us for labor when we’re all so risky? Why not kill us or use us as organ mills or something?” Songwon looked at me intently, but his shoulders were sagging and his voice was hoarse. Working a twelve-hour shift wasn’t easy on any of us. I decided to play along one last time.
We loaded onto the maglev, a weary, filthy mass of stained grey jumpsuits.
“With meat grown on grids/ and machines of burden/ man’s left alone in the abattoir,” I recited. I hadn’t thought of that poem in years.
“What?” said Songwon.
“Vadeem Okorafor wrote that,” I explained. “She was a big-shot intellectual. I loved her in secondary school. She was one of the leaders in the Anti-Secession movement in the universities.”
“Name sounds familiar,” said Songwon, but I could tell he was lying. “What happened to her?”
“Oh, she disappeared after the VLA bombed the embassy and seceded.”
The maglev doors locked with a hiss, and the train started forward. A nervous murmur went up. Songwon and I looked at each other in surprise.
“We’re going the wrong way,” someone from Block 11 said. That set everyone off talking.
“Well,” Songwon said, “maybe we’ll meet Vadeem, wherever we’re going.”
“You’ve been a good friend,” I blurted out. “Thank you. I…” I trailed off, scrambling for words. We had so little time. I’d wasted so much of my life. “I thought I was going to die all alone. When I was sentenced. Before that, even. When the counterinsurgent cell contacted me. When I agreed to do what they wanted.” I realized I was starting to babble so I shut up. Songwon looked taken aback. My face flushed and my eyes burned. I’d managed to alienate the one person left in my life.
For a second we stood shoulder to shoulder in the crammed maglev car, listening to everyone talk and cry all around us.
Then, Songwon wriggled against the people packed in around us. For a second I thought he was trying to move away from me, but then he got his arm up and awkwardly put a hand on my shoulder.
“You’re good to talk to, Val. Only person who ever listened to me as much as you was the Federal Union handler I fed info to.”
Tears slid down my cheeks. “Oh, wow.” I said. “They hooked you up with a designated handler?” Songwon snorted.
“No,” he said. “I think they had an automated bot managing me.”
“Figures,” I said. “If the Feds really appreciated us, we wouldn’t be here.”
Even though the maglev car was insufferably hot within and humid, I still felt a chill when it shuddered to a stop. Everyone froze. After the door hissed open, the guards had to snarl at us before anyone stepped forward. Songwon’s hand slipped off my shoulder, and I tried to keep my breathing steady as the guards ordered us into a single file line and cuffed us together with hands behind our backs.
“Where’s the trust?” Songwon tutted. Someone further down the line behind me was openly sobbing. Nobody resisted. Those of us who’d survived detention knew better. We’d seen worse during our days as conscripts and officers. We’d all worn the same uniforms as these guards.
They led us into a clean, sterile complex with natural-sky ceiling panels. The feel of the artificial sunlight on my face put a little pang of nostalgia through me. I felt like I was back in my old life, maybe going to a doctor’s appointment. Or picking up my niece from daycare. I hoped my family thought I’d died in combat.
We caught glimpses of people in scrubs at the ends of other halls.
“Medical, but we’re not gonna be organ mills,” Songwon said. “They’ve had us marinating in fertilizers for a month…”
Through the cable connecting our handcuffs, I could feel him shaking.
We stopped in a hallway with a long metal rail down the side. One by one, the guards cuffed us onto it. The air was clean without being antiseptic. This place felt somehow gentler than a hospital. It didn’t feel like an execution site.
Nobody said anything, not even the guards. As we waited for something, anything, to happen, I tried to find something redeeming to fix my last thoughts on. I looked up and down the line of prisoners — a few others caught my eyes but didn’t say anything. Yaxi gave me a wobbly smile. A few others were crying. Guards. One of them tilted his head, listening to something on his earpiece.
And then they took the first of us. It was a woman from Block 13 that I didn’t know. They unclipped her cuffs from the rail, and two guards walked her to a room at the end of the hall. She dragged her feet, not stubbornly, but as if in a daze. The guards took her into the room and returned without her a moment later.
We all stared at that closed door, straining for any indication of what was going on inside.
Minutes dragged by. I drifted into fantasy, fabricating that suddenly, sirens would go off, and the Feds would come pouring in, and we’d all be rescued and the VLA would lose the war.
The guards uncuffed the next prisoner and took him down to the same room. No sound came from within. I kept hoping Songwon would say something about how this couldn’t be execution, how it didn’t add up, but he was staring straight ahead without speaking, face ashy pale.
We were close to the front of the line, so I knew it wouldn’t be too much longer before we went in.
Carter was ahead of us in line. When they unclipped his cuffs from the wall, he exploded forwards without warning, slamming a guard into the opposite wall. Someone screamed at him to stop. I said nothing — I was frozen with horror. Carter’s face was twisted into a joyous snarl.
Even after a month of shit rations, Carter was big, and he had military training from before the war. The skinny VLA guard, a few years younger than any of us, didn’t stand a chance. He went down when he hit the wall. Before the
others could react, Carter had landed three brutal kicks to his head and neck, and then the others were on him.
The first hit from the shock stick was enough to drop him, but they kept shocking him as the injured guard staggered up, gagging and gurgling, his nose gushing blood. I closed my eyes, but I couldn’t shield myself from the screaming or the smell of voided shit that followed. Carter stopped screaming shortly thereafter. I opened my eyes and saw him slumped on the floor. They didn’t take him into the room; more guards arrived with some people in scrubs, and he was loaded onto a gurney.
Now there was one less in the line, and they had the next guy in the room before they were done cleaning the floor. Then there were four before me, and then three. And then, I had one guard on each side of me as I was led down to the room.
I didn’t look back. I told myself that I would come back out and tell Songwon that it was no big deal, that it was painless. Just a slap on the wrist, really.
The door opened, and then I was inside an unmarked room in a facility with no name that existed on no map. There was a technician in a white coat inside, another guard beside her. They stood next to a white hospital bed with padded white restraints hanging from it. The room was unadorned save for some medical machinery I didn’t recognize. Suddenly my legs went out from under me. My heart hammered in my chest. A low moan was coming from my mouth. The two guards lifted me easily onto the bed and quickly tied down my ankles and waist, and then they took off the handcuffs and fastened my wrists.
One of them pushed my head back against the soft hospital linens and fastened another strap around my forehead. They worked without meeting my eyes. The technician was trying not to watch. I wondered what kind of life she’d had before the VLA took over.
The two guards left. I felt the strap around my waist pressing into me as I breathed. My sweat was soaking through my jumpsuit. I could barely turn my head enough to look at the technician as she started getting tools out.
“Hello, Valorie,” the technician said. Her voice was gentle and accommodating, like she was apologizing for inconveniencing me. “My name is Dr. Mendoza. We’re going to do this really quickly. If you get too upset, we’ll give you a little sedative to help you through.”
“Just shoot us,” I said without meaning to. “‘S’faster.” Dr. Mendoza barely skipped a beat.
“We’re not executing you,” she said. “Who told you that? You’re a traitor, Valorie. You’re a danger to yourself and others. Do you remember how many people you killed?” I glared at her as she brought out a tangle of wires connected to a slender VLA-issued tablet. I could smell her perfume as she leaned over me and started fastening the wires into place above my short-cropped hair.
“The VLA still believes in you, though,” she continued. “This is going to be a second chance for you. You weren’t sentenced to death. You were sentenced to rehabilitation.” My stomach churned. No amount of torture would ever turn me back into a VLA soldier, I told myself. I had committed treason for the higher purpose of helping to end the war. I would never capitulate. I would die a traitor.
Dr. Mendoza tapped away on her tablet.
“First,” she said, “we’ll run a few tests to make sure all is in order. Let’s get the sensors calibrated. What’s your name?”
I didn’t answer. I would make them kill me, I thought.
Dr. Mendoza grimaced. “A lot of your cellmates are out in the hall,” she observed. “I think they all deserve the chance that you’re getting right now, but they could all end up with former-Lieutenant Carter Chang in the crematorium, and it would make no real difference to my superiors. Maybe that doesn’t concern you, though. Your disregard for life is what got you here, after all.”
“My name is Valorie Hansen,” I said. My voice came out as a whisper. Dr. Mendoza gave me an encouraging smile.
“I know this is hard for you,” she said. “What was your rank, Valorie?”
“Logistics Specialist, Third-Class.”
“Where were you stationed at after conscription?”
“Infantry Base 14, callsign Waypoint.”
“Why were you convicted of treason?”
“I assisted a counter-revolutionary cell in stealing sensitive materials from a lab facility at Waypoint.”
“How?” she asked. I swallowed. I’d gone through enhanced interrogation already, before I’d been convicted. What was the point of this?
“I released a paralytic compound into the ventilation system to disable the base.”
“...leading to the deaths of some forty personnel. Your own colleagues, some of them,” Mendoza reminded me. As if I could ever forget. “Okay, that should do it. The system is calibrated. I’m getting nice, clean readings of your brain activity. Before we can continue, I need you tell me everything you’ve been trained to do at the fertilizer plant.”
I thought of Songwon, so determined to find out how it all fit together.
I told Mendoza everything I’d been trained do. Every time I was vague, she pressed for more detail. All the while she kept her eyes on the tablet connected to the sensors on my head. Finally, she was satisfied. She took the net of sensors off and started swabbing my arm just below the elbow. This is it, I thought. This has to be it.
Mendoza drew up a hypo full of a grey fluid. “This will just pinch a bit, and you’ll be all set.”
The injection didn’t burn more than any other I’d had. For a second, I felt fine, and then a stabbing pain started behind my eyes, drowning everything else out. The last thing I was aware of was the other door opening as someone came to remove me.
***
I woke up in a strange room. Everything felt alien; the lighting, the smell, even the feeling of clothes on my body. All of it seemed wrong. My joints felt stiff, and my head ached. When I reached a hand up to touch my head, my hair was different somehow. It seemed longer. There was a strange, disjointed feeling to my thoughts. My jumpsuit was gone; I was wearing plain white hospital clothes, and I had a wristband on.
I lifted my hand to look at it, but at that moment, a man came bustling into my room, making me jump. I didn’t recognize his clothes, though I knew most VLA uniforms and general-issue clothing. There weren’t any insignias on him, or anywhere else in the room. He drew up a seat next to my bed as I sat upright.
“Who are you?” I asked. “What happened back there?” He gave me a reassuring smile. This didn’t feel right at all.
“My name is Dr. Euler. You’re somewhere safe now. Valorie, do you know what year it is?”
“2205,” I said. Something in his face shifted when I said that. My feeling of disconnection grew. I was out of sync somehow, and I didn’t know how. I wasn’t restrained this time. I could jump this guy, maybe, but what would I even ask?
“You’ve been in recovery here in our neuro ward,” Dr. Euler told me. “We’ve been trying to reverse some damage done to the mammillary bodies of your brain.” I felt rising panic. None of this made sense.
“Valorie, can you tell me the last thing you remember?” Dr. Euler told me. It took me a moment longer than it should have to pull up the memory and respond.
“They took me into a room and gave me a shot,” I said. I struggled to pull it into focus. “Her name was Dr. Mendoza. She asked me some questions. Why don’t you get her? She can tell you.” Dr. Euler had that expression again, like he was listening to the ramblings of a crazy person.
“Dr. Mendoza isn’t here,” he told me. That gave me pause. How long had I been out after that injection? “You’re forming new memories for the first time in seven years, Valorie. Welcome back.”
Nothing he was saying made sense. I couldn’t process the meaning behind the sentences. Seven years? What did that mean?
Dr. Euler forged ahead. “Over the ten-year course of the war on Viridian-5, the VLA used nanomachine injections to selectively injure the brains of high-risk offenders. That’s a direct violation of the Kigali Accords, of course. You were recovered from a VLA factory during disarmament just over a year ago, with hundreds of others. You’d been working there for around six years according to their records.” I felt dizzy.
“The damage done was impressively precise, given the VLA’s level of technology,” Euler said. “The anterograde amnesia symptoms are pretty uniform across everyone we’ve recovered. Every five, the patient ‘resets’ to the memories they had before the nanomachine injection. No new memory is retained. It kept you stable enough to do menial, repetitive work. For now we’re referring to it as an induced Korsakov’s Syndrome.”
“What about the others?” I asked. “What about...” I broke off, struggling to find names. “Songwon… shit, his last name — Songwon Park. Yaxi…” Why couldn’t I remember names? I was with these people every day.
“We have a lot of others here at this rehab facility, but so far you’re the only one to undergo a successful restoration—”
“Where?” I demanded, staggering out of the bed. My knees gave stabs of pain as I stood. My body felt stiff and old. Dr. Euler tried to grab me, but I dodged and was out the door. I ducked past medical staff, eliciting shouts of surprise, and started look in the windows of the doors I passed. Each room housed a pale, haggard stranger.
I almost ran past one before stopping cold. There was a Korean man sitting up on the bed. He didn’t look right, but maybe it was the longer hair. How had he gotten so much thinner? His face wasn’t bruised, but he still had the crooked nose. I slipped inside before I was caught.
The man inside looked up at me with a vague, good-humored expression. “Are you the doctor here?” He asked. My stomach twisted. No, I thought. This old broken person couldn’t be Songwon. He yelped as I grabbed his arm and looked at his wristband: Songwon Park. M-YY. 32 years old. Recovered from VLA facility 12/1/2211. Anterograde amnesia and complications of chronic industrial chemical exposure, then back at his face, aged by almost a decade — and those eyes! Those blank, searching eyes!
“Do I know you?” he asked. “Do you know where they’re taking us? That shot gave me the worst headache.”
“It’s me,” I told him. “It’s me, It’s Val.” For a second, dark confusion clouded his face. He shook his head.
“Fuck off. Val’s my age,” he said. There was a hand mirror on the counter at the end of the room. I grabbed it and shoved it in front of his face. He blanched as he saw his reflection and then looked at me in naked bewilderment.
“What the fuck?!” he shouted at me. “Who are you?”
Dr. Euler burst into the room and snatched the mirror from me. “Don’t,” he said. “Come on, Valorie. You’re still recovering. I know it’s a lot to take in...”
All my attention was on Songwon. His outburst of fear quickly subsided, and his face went vague. Then, he looked up at us as if he’d just noticed us standing there.
“Are you the doctors?” he asked. “Do you know where they’re taking us? That shot gave me the worst headache.”
KAITLIN GOSSETT is a sophomore biology student who plans on studying animal behavior and cognition. She also writes and edits for the webcomic Romantically Apocalyptic.