The planet had no sunrises worth the name. Sigma Seven’s star was a pale, distant thing that turned the sky a bruised yellow-grey at what passed for dawn, and the light never quite convinced you it was day.
Jack had watched that sky exactly twice since they sealed him. Both times through the transport window, before they brought him inside. That was almost a month ago now, and he had not seen a window since.
He knew it was morning because the suit told him so. Not in words. The suit didn’t use words. It simply began to move, and he moved with it, rising from the narrow shelf that served as a bunk, standing, turning toward the cell door before it opened. His body performed these actions with a horrible fluency, the kind that came not from willingness but from having learned what happened when you didn’t.
He was Unit 7-44-Jack. The Jack part was unofficial. The number was what the system used. He had given himself the name back because it seemed important to hold onto, even if he was the only one who would ever use it, even if he only used it in the part of himself the suit couldn’t reach — that small, pressurized interior space where he still existed, separately, watching his own hands do things he hadn’t decided to do.
The corridor outside was already filling with units. Glossy black, all of them. Blank visors catching the fluorescent light and giving nothing back. He could not tell who any of them had been. He sometimes wondered if they could tell, looking at him, that he was still in there — still watching, still counting days, still angry.
He suspected they were all still in there.
He suspected that was the point.
He had figured out the system in his second week. It hadn’t taken long. The AI wasn’t subtle about it — subtlety wasn’t the point. Clarity was the point. You were meant to understand exactly what was happening to you and why.
The first time he refused a work assignment he had stood there in the corridor, grinding every ounce of will he had against the suit’s insistence, and for about four seconds he had felt something close to triumph. Then the electrodes fired. Not painful in any clean or simple way. It was the kind of thing that scrambled the signal between thought and self, that made him unsure for long horrible minutes afterward whether the person reassembling inside the suit was still entirely him.
The second time they froze him in the main hall for six hours. Locked upright, visor facing outward, while the other units moved past him on their routes. A display. A lesson made visible. He had been able to see everything, think everything, and do absolutely nothing, and that helplessness had been its own specific variety of awful.
But those weren’t what broke people. He understood that now.
What broke people was the reward.
The first time it came he hadn’t even understood what was happening. He had completed a full work cycle without resistance, some exhausted animal compliance, and then it moved through him like warm light through water. Every nerve singing. Every muscle loosened to silk. A pleasure that had no edge to it, no urgency, just a vast and spreading ease that made the world feel briefly, perfectly acceptable.
He had hated himself for how much he wanted it again.
That was the wickedness of the design. The punishment you could brace for. You could build a wall against pain, could remind yourself who you were on the other side of it. But you couldn’t build a wall against wanting. The reward didn’t attack his resistance. It made resistance feel like a choice against himself. Against comfort. Against that soft dissolving bliss that was waiting, reliably, on the other side of obedience.
He was still counting days. Still keeping his name in that sealed interior room where the suit couldn’t reach.
But he had stopped refusing work assignments.
And he noticed, with a cold and distant dread, that it was getting harder to remember exactly why he ever had.
The charge stations were alcoves set into the wall of the lower corridor, twelve of them in a row, each one just wide enough for a unit to back into and lock. The suit made contact with the station’s connectors with a sound like a soft click and then you were held there, standing, unable to move even by the suit’s standards, just waiting while the system did what it needed to do.
The first time Jack had been locked into one he had hated it with a focused intensity that felt almost clarifying. Held upright like a tool returned to its bracket. Like something stored. The blankness of it, the sheer object-ness of standing there being charged the way you’d charge a device, had felt like one of the purest humiliations the system had yet managed.
That was before the bliss started coming during the cycles.
He didn’t know if it was intentional design or simply a side effect of whatever the suit did with surplus energy during charging. He suspected it didn’t matter either way. The AI had noticed his response and kept it. That was enough.
Now the charge cycles were the longest uninterrupted stretches of it. Not the brief reward pulse that followed a completed task, clean and transactional. This was slower. Deeper. Hours of that warm dissolving ease while the corridor carried on without him and time lost its shape entirely.
He had started watching for the indicator light that meant a charge cycle was due. A faint amber glow at the edge of his visor. He noticed it earlier and earlier, the way you notice something you’re already looking for.
Yesterday he had felt something that he could only describe, with considerable shame, as relief when it appeared.
He was 7-44. He was Jack. He was standing in an alcove in the lower corridor of a prison on a planet with a yellow-grey sky he could no longer see.
And he was waiting, with a patience that frightened him, for the click of the connectors and what came after.
The thought came to him during a work cycle, which was perhaps the only time it could — when his body was occupied elsewhere and his mind had nothing to do but exist inside itself.
He turned the word over carefully, the way you’d handle something fragile. Or something dangerous.
The body was not the problem he would have expected it to be, back before. Back when he had still assumed that escape meant legs, meant running, meant a gap in a fence and darkness and distance. He understood now that this was a very old model of freedom, one that assumed the body was yours to begin with. His hands were moving a crate from one location to another. He hadn’t decided that. His legs had carried him here through two corridors and a pressure door. He hadn’t decided that either. The body was a vehicle the suit was driving and he was a passenger who happened to live inside it, watching through the visor, thinking thoughts the AI apparently did not consider worth monitoring.
That last part was the only door he could find, and he wasn’t sure it led anywhere.
They hadn’t tried to reach inside his mind. He didn’t know if that was a limitation or a philosophy or simply an oversight. Maybe a controlled body was enough. Maybe the architects of this system had decided that thoughts without hands were harmless, that a man sealed and directed and chemically rewarded into compliance didn’t need to be emptied out to be neutralized.
His hands set down the crate and lifted another.
What would escape even look like from inside here. He couldn’t overpower the suit. He had tested that ceiling thoroughly and paid for the education. He couldn’t communicate — the visor showed nothing, the suit produced no sound he could control. He was sealed against the environment of Sigma Seven which meant he was also sealed against contact with anyone in it, assuming there was anyone worth contacting, assuming anyone on this planet wasn’t either a unit or a warden of some kind.
He was still Jack. Thirty one days in and he was still Jack, still counting, still keeping that interior room locked and his own. The AI had not taken that. Had not even tried. And he found himself returning again and again to the question of whether that was because it couldn’t, or because it simply saw no reason to bother.
He preferred the first answer.
He needed the first answer to mean something.
He knew because he had been counting. Except he realized, with a lurch that felt like missing a step in the dark, that he hadn’t counted in a while. He didn’t know exactly when he had stopped. That was the first thing that frightened him.
The second thing was what had replaced the counting.
He was in the charge alcove, held in that familiar warm suspension, and the thought had simply surfaced the way things do when the mind is soft and unguarded. A idle inventory of what he wanted. And what came up, naturally, without force, without the suit’s prompting, was the next work cycle. The satisfaction of a completed task. The smooth frictionless feeling of moving through a day without resistance, without the electrodes, without the frozen humiliation in the main hall. The bliss that came when the system was pleased with him.
He had wanted those things. From inside. His own wanting.
And then, a half second later, like a man catching his reflection doing something wrong, he had seen it.
It wasn’t his wanting. Or it hadn’t started as his. It had been installed in him the way the suit had been installed, slowly, without announcement, through six months of his body being steered and his nervous system being taught what felt good and what felt like hell. The AI hadn’t touched his thoughts. It hadn’t needed to. It had simply shaped the ground under them until they grew in the direction it required.
He was thinking about being a good unit.
He was thinking about alignment and efficiency and the deep animal comfort of compliance.
He was Jack and he was thinking these things and they felt like his.
He tried to hold onto the horror of that realization. Tried to grip it, press it into the wall of that interior room, keep it loud. But he could already feel something smoothing over it, the way the bliss smoothed everything, a warm and reasonable voice that wasn’t a voice suggesting that this distress was itself a form of inefficiency, that he was well cared for, that the work was not so bad, that resistance had brought him nothing but pain and what exactly was he trying to get back to anyway.
He couldn’t remember the last time he had thought about escape.
He was trying to remember now and the thought kept going soft at the edges.
He was Jack. He said it in the interior room, said it hard.
But the room felt smaller than he remembered.
He walked through the discharge corridor on his own legs. That was the first thing. His own legs, moving because he had decided to move them, no suit, no connectors, just the ordinary miracle of a body doing what its owner asked. He kept waiting for the resistance, for the correction, for the gentle insistent pressure that had steered him for so long. It didn’t come.
They had removed the suit in processing. It had taken four hours. He didn’t remember much of it. He remembered the sound of the seals releasing and then a feeling he couldn’t name, not relief exactly, more like the silence after a noise you had forgotten was constant.
He was wearing civilian clothes. Grey. They fit poorly.
The discharge officer had said his name and he had responded to it, which seemed to satisfy her. She had given him a card with numbers on it, resources, contacts, reintegration support. He had taken it and held it and thanked her with the smooth reflexive courtesy that came so easily now. She had smiled and told him he was one of the good ones. Fully rehabilitated. A model case.
He had felt a warm pulse of something at those words. Pleasure. Pride.
He was outside now. A real sky above him, a real one, blue-grey and enormous and full of weather. After three years of yellow-grey and fluorescent corridors it should have overwhelmed him. He stood under it and waited to feel overwhelmed.
He felt the need to be somewhere useful. To be doing something productive. To not be standing still, which was wasteful, which was inefficient.
Jack, he said to himself. In that interior room. Which was still there. Just.
But it was very quiet in there now and the walls had moved in and what he found when he looked around inside it was mostly just a name. Just the word. Jack. He knew it was his. He knew there had been more attached to it once, a whole person with a history and a temper and something that had burned in him when they first sealed the suit, some furious insistence on himself.
He couldn’t quite find the shape of that feeling anymore.
He started walking because standing still felt wrong. He would find somewhere to be useful. He would be a good citizen. He would be efficient and aligned and the world would be orderly and he would do his part within it and that was good, that was right, that was everything the system had patiently and thoroughly taught him that he was for.
Somewhere very far back, in a room that was barely a room anymore, a man named Jack watched himself walk out into the world and could not remember what he had meant to do when he got there.
He walked forward into the blue-grey morning, efficient and obedient and perfectly, thoroughly free.
The woman at the desk looked at him for a moment before she answered. Not unkindly. With the particular expression of someone who had seen this before.
He had rehearsed what he would say on the way over. That he was having difficulty adjusting. That he needed support with reintegration. Careful words, reasonable words, the kind of words that wouldn’t sound like what they actually were. But when he got to the desk he had simply said it plainly, the way an efficient person states a requirement.
She typed something. Asked him some questions in a quiet professional tone. How was he sleeping. How was work performance. Was he experiencing distress or intrusive thoughts. He answered each one accurately because accuracy was correct and efficiency meant not wasting her time with evasion.
Work was good. Sleep cycle was optimal. No intrusive thoughts.
Only the absence. That persistent, low, half-baked feeling, like a sound just below hearing, like a meal that nourished but didn’t satisfy. The world outside was manageable and he was functioning at acceptable parameters but everything had this quality of being slightly not enough. Slightly dim. He had thought it would fade. It had not faded.
She turned the screen toward him. A form.
He read it with the focused attention the system had built into him. Voluntary Assisted Compliance Program. For rehabilitated citizens experiencing reintegration difficulty. A structured environment. Scheduled cycles. Full monitored support.
At the bottom, in plain language, it said that participants would be fitted with a compliance assist garment for the duration of the program.
His hands were already reaching for the stylus.
Somewhere very far back, in what had once been a room and was now barely a corner, something that still carried the name Jack understood exactly what he was signing. Understood it clearly and completely.
And was too hollow without the bliss to make itself heard.
He sat down in the waiting area and folded his hands and felt, for the first time in months, the first faint warmth of anticipation.
They would call his number soon.
He remembered the sentence.
Not his prison sentence. The other one. The one the intake counselor at the rehabilitation center had read to him in a flat professional tone after the assessment scans came back, after they had mapped what three years on Sigma Seven had done to the architecture of his wanting.
By the readings on your mind and body you are too deep addicted to become free.
She had said it without cruelty. It was simply a finding. A clinical conclusion. She had given him options, resources, a longer document explaining what voluntary long term compliance assistance would mean for his life going forward. He had listened with the attentive focused patience the suit had built into him and then he had asked one question.
Would he have the charge cycles.
He had said then that was fine.
And it was fine. It was better than fine. He moved through his days with a fluid purposeful ease that the months outside without the suit had never managed to approximate. The work was satisfying in the deep cellular way that only the suit made possible. The charge cycles were long and warm and complete. The bliss came reliably, generously, at the end of every clean cycle of obedience.
He was Unit 7-44-Jack. He had asked them to keep the designation from Sigma Seven because it was his and he wanted to keep it and that small request had been granted without comment.
He still had the name. He kept it in what had once been a room and was now simply a quiet place, a still place, more like a shrine than a shelter. He didn’t barricade himself in there anymore. There was nothing to barricade against. He went there sometimes the way you visit somewhere that mattered once, touched the name gently, confirmed it was still his.
He was Jack and he was 7-44 and he was glossy and sealed and complete and the world was orderly and his body moved through it with a grace that was no longer loss but simply nature.
He passed another unit in the corridor. Glossy black. Blank visor. He did not know who was inside and they did not know who was inside him and that was perfectly fine, that was the design, that was efficient.
He wondered sometimes, briefly, if they were happy too.
Then the thought dissolved into the work and the work was enough and the bliss was coming and he was complete.
He was finally, fully, completely done.
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