Imprisonment

Mike stared sideways at the wall, hardly listening.

"Jervin may have formed the opinion that you would not be a threat but any thoughts he may have had on the matter he has taken with him."

The new social worker waited for any reaction from Mike. Annoyed, he closed the file.

"That's all I can do at the moment. Just hang on, maybe things will change." He waited again. Still no reaction.

"Well, goodbye Mr. Campbell." He reached for the switch, then paused. "Sorry."

The room vanished, Mike blinked as his own room reappeared. He stamped around a bit, trying to reassert some feeling of presence.

* * * *

It was six months before they met again. One day Sara appeared in Mike's room, like she had so many times before. Her smile seemed different though, he thought, less naturally happy.

She took him for a walk, arm in arm along the cliff tops of a reconstructed Brittany. She told him how good they were together, how she had thought of nothing else, how their relationship was a beautiful abstract thing so removed from the dirt of everyday life.

He walked. Hearing her associate their relationship with the inside left him cold, as if she believed he was just another part of it, a construct for her to fall in love with. But then really he saw her in a similar way, to him their relationship was his only link with the outside world, without it he would be adrift. To touch her, however simulated and fake, was to reach out of his cell and stick his fingers into damp soil. But he didn't say anything, it didn't sound right to him.

She told him what had happened to her since she left. About her rape, about the people she had robbed, about how she sold her body for the cash to get back inside. He felt numb, she was so determined to be happy about it all.

They sat, watching waves crash into rocks below. Sara took his hand.

"Mike, I can't come here any more." She watched the expression on his face.

"But..." he started to protest, then subsided. She seemed much stronger than before, while he had just got weaker.

"Listen, I want you to meet you outside. I've got it all worked out. We can take a tent, live out in the countryside, maybe find where you used to live. Just the two of us."

Mike stared at his feet in front of him. Her words carried over him.

"I can get a gun, we might find an abandoned house. I feel so much happier already, it makes so much sense." She gripped his hand and smiled at him.

He felt the bottom falling out of his world. Like being back at school, he thought, caught with a guilty secret.

"I can't," he said.

"Of course you can, we'll..."

"No, listen. I can't leave, I'm a prisoner here. They won't let me out."

Her face froze, she let his hand go.

"What?"

She looked away, tried to fathom the horizon. When she spoke again her voice was shaky. "I didn't know they did that."

He waited.

"What did you do?"

"Destroyed public VR centres. Over four years ago now. Killed eight people."

She digested this information. "Destroyed them. What the fuck for?" She was truly shocked, the public centres - and coming to see Mike inside - were the only thing that had made her life worth living for the last three years.

He stared out to sea. Waves crashed against stacks of rock.

He closed his eyes. When he looked round minutes later she was gone.

The breeze lifted his hair as he stood up, made it fly like tethered kites up into the air. He allowed himself to fall forwards, the numbness he felt in his head spreading to his whole body as he fell. He knew full well he wouldn't hurt himself, he didn't really know why he had done it.

Now at the bottom of the cliff, lying on his back on the rocks, he stared up at the sky. He was back in his childhood, lying in long grass on a summers day. He watched the clouds drift across the blue sky - they're so damn realistic, he thought. Probably in a few years time you won't be able to tell the inside from the outside. And then they'll have to set me free.