The Sphere

Prisoner 753 stared at the place from whom, she hoped, the food was going to come.

Over time, she had understood the geometry of her cell... it was a white sphere, internally coated with Teflon, rotating over bidirectional rollers, about five meters in diameter.

It was completely white, with led lighting inside its mass.

It looked like an infinite white space, and she couldn't find its limits in any way, as the sphere moved with her. Whatever she did, she was always at the bottom, in an apparently infinite white space.

Every now and then questions came from the walls. She answered all of them, as well as she could.

In a way, she felt that she earned to be a prisoner - her memory was full of atrocious things that she had done, any of which was punished with years of jail, life imprisonment or death, in most of Earth's countries.

From any legal point of view, however, her detention was arbitrary, and it was really  violating the very laws of the USA and the 2056 U.N. convention on human rights - not that the U.S. had deigned to sign it.

Agent Harmon was looking at the big show - as he called the special detention centre - with badly hidden disgust. In many ways, what he was seeing was the incarnation of the very reasons why he had joined the FBI - to catch who did this kind of things to others.

In a year, nothing had changed inside the cell... the woman known as Keisha Lawson hadn't tried to escape, had always been collaborative - as much as she could, Harmon noted drily - and she had never lost her mind.

- "And that is the most worrying factor, the very reason why we cannot release her."

Pedro Morales, PhD., M.D. concluded, before realizing that he had to delve more into the details.


- "Every precedent test subject had suffered a psychotic crisis, by the third day of solitary confinement inside the sphere. There are no clues, in her behaviour that suggest, that she is any less stable than she was when we placed her inside. Her body may be only mildly modified, but her mind is definitely not human."

Harmon looked at the scientist, with the cordiality of a mongoose meeting a cobra.

- "So, she's a though nut to crack, and you want to keep her there till she cracks, because as long as she does not crack and goes nut, she proves that she is not a she?"

- "If she is not human, she has no rights and her detention is entirely legal, Special Agent Harmon."

Harmon suspected that an entire galaxy of slightly different human forms, many arguably much more different from the human baseline than their prisoner, would probably object to this syllogism.

Unfortunately,USA and aliens had a contentious relationship ever since the times of president Trump, way before the galaxy gave the word its current context.

Harmon was here only to visit the girl, before going on to make his final report and recommendations to the Attorney General Office - he was not there to pick a fight with someone that had mastered the difficult combo of being a scientist and a bigot.

Everybody was free to spend their free time as they prefer, but Harmon was pretty sure that the mess had an ulterior purpose. The chiefs of Lawson, of whom she could really say very little, had led her to fall in the USA Government's hands.

As for why... the thing that made more sense was that, now they knew what it was going to be their likely treatment, their other operatives would disregard completely any suggested defection.

It was so obvious, that Harmon had difficulty believing that any of his superiors could fall for it, yet here she was, long after it had been virtually proven that she had nothing more to say.

Still imprisoned, without trial or even any intention of indicting her, as it could reveal the existence of yet another foreign secret agency, operating on the US soil, well beyond the control of the US government.

Which, of course, was a bad  idea, in a day and age where the American public was already questioning the value of a federal government that couldn't rein in the Alien invaders of Earth ,or their robotic puppets.

Let said public know that there was not one, but two more powers-  even more aliens than the E.T.- that operated virtually freely on US territory,would probably result in yet another tumultuous season of unleashed populist nationalism, that the country could hardly afford.

Even if the fact that said agencies had none of the qualms, in using violence, as the Anipos and their robots probably justified the panic.

A new right wing government would hardly change anything, of course... the scientists were adamant in their evaluations, two hundred years to close the technical gap with the Anipos technology - the one seen during the war, and embodied in the 'bots - maybe less, if the social environment changed and the talents that today went into programming social media - and stock market automatic tools - could be lured back to much needed, but low-income, activities like basic technological development and theoretical physics.

Until then, whatever the leaning of the President in charge, the US Government had to play ball. Like almost every country on Earth had to do with the US, after the fall of the Soviets, for about seventy years.

Harmon stopped at the sobering thought - this was how the operatives of half a century of rogue states had probably felt, angry and impotent at openly pursuing the real interests of their nations, because these infringed those of the world only hiperpower.

Forced to use crappy and unreliable surrogates, like financing terrorists or pursuing soft power approaches, financing cultural institutions.

He picked the microphone, and started interrogating the prisoner.

At the end of that day, its frustration was as hard and headache-inducing as it was the first time that he met her, her lapses infuriating for both.

He turned in his report, and was happy that, for other four weeks, he would be spared that pain.

One week later, his task group operated a sting, to catch an elusive network selling stim-records of what could only be called snuff-actions.

The technology was alien in origin, and allowed to memorize a subject's experience from his or her point of view. Two US senators had died of an heart attack, when they had switched from the assassin's to the victim's stimuli feed.

The technology hadn't been forbidden yet, though its near-narcotic and addictive characteristics were quite obvious, because of a powerful lobbying from the Hi-Tech transnational that had commercialized it.

The political implications of the deaths being complex enough, the best course of action was infiltrating the ring and RICO its components for the crimes committed producing the stim-records - the violation, brutal beating and final dismemberment if two young women.

Interpreting a wily snake of a would-be smuggler, Harmon was intimately happy, back at delivering to justice people that richly deserved to be arrested and charged for their crimes.

If the American dream had died with the middle class in the 4th industrial revolution, there was still truth, justice and the Apple Pie, worth fighting for.

His inner happiness died when he met the producer of the material.

- "Chief Special Agent Harmon, I suppose."

In front of him, stood an older and much colder Keisha Lawson - a sister, if the prisoner ever had one.

- "Clone?"

- "We all are. How does my sister go?"

Harmon reviewed all of it, under the light of this revelation...

- "Don't you know?" - he asked,his tone strongly implying incredulity.

- "Yes, I know, but I'd like a second point of view."

- "She is holding up all too well, considering."

- "They are ever going to free her?"

Harmon realized something that chilled him to his bones

- "Has she ever done something?"

- "Fifteen years as kindergarten teacher, then your marines killed our pacifist princess, and she was swamped by a flux of someone else's memories."

- "Kindergarten teacher?"

- "Yes, then, a technical glitch, and she believes to be an amnesiac operative... and some part of us wanted to see how things would turn out. It is proving... illuminating."

- "Are you going to kill me?"

- "Why? - You clearly believe in your work, you will try to get the poor innocent girl free. You will become an embarrassment for your superiors, that need that woman to be the most dangerous terrorist on Earth."

- "She is associated with your organization."

- "Associated by being born a slave. Nothing more."

- "Why? Why the cloning, the modifications, for a teacher?"

- "Genetics makes for just a rough sketch, then life refinishes it with large strokes of hazard. She proved incapable of suitable levels of violence, in-utilizable as an operative, so her black boxes were removed, leaving only what was needed to keep her under surveillance. A mistake, as it left her open to the glitch that sent her to Washington."

- "I am going to arrest you, and your colleagues." - Harmon meant it, with all his heart.

- "These records are made completely of simulated material, the two models are alive and well and ready to appear, if called to witness before a jury. The technology is perfectly legal, and I think it will stay legal for a long time, its potential for social disruption notwithstanding. Those two senators accepted to assume their risks, when the change point of view menu was prompted. The worst I can risk is some fine, and being sued by the families, if they do not mind exposing their beloved relatives as perverts that died,  for the pleasure of experiencing the brutal killings of two teenaged girls."

- "Not to mention, Marine - the last time a battalion of you met one of us that knew you were coming, it almost lost its battle flag."

The black woman started scribbling, on a small bloc that she took out of her purse. She continued for about a minute, before handing a sheet covered with minute scripts to the petrified - controlling its rage - Harmon.

- "These are the true identification data of the woman in that fish bowl. It should be easy for you, to demonstrate that she is, indeed, Kira Lawson of Canterbury , Connecticut, and that she has spent all her life as a teacher, there, with only one fine for entering a city centre on a bike - pedalling - as her rap sheet."

- "She was a green nut, never used a personal powered vehicle. Well, none of us does, really - but that's because we go by matter-energy direct conversion. Nuclear is underpowered, by that standard."

- "Why do you give me this?"

- "I thought that you needed some help self-destroying your career."

And, as that, she was gone. The memory of his hidden recorder was blank, and Harmon looked at the little paper with very mixed feelings.

He read,  and re-read it over the next few days, than he asked a meeting with his director.

It was not going to be the end of his career, but sure it was going to be one long hassle.

At the same time, knowing that his worst enemy thought that he would do the right thing, no matter what... if this was to be the end of his career, it was a good enough epitaph.