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The Defense and Wellness Council controlled
everything in their orbital prisons, from the air to the food supply to the gravity itself. The only transmissions allowed in or out were those
that pinged Dr. Plugenpatch databases to pull down healing bio/logic
software. The officers who did the unloading in the dock were well
armed, and inoculated against the black code in the prisoners' dartguns
to boot. Suppose a group of prisoners did manage to overpower those
guards and take control of their ship, against all improbability. What
then? How could they fly a ship without proper authorization codes?
How would they deal with the battery of Council hoverbirds
patrolling the area? And where would they escape to anyway?

    Quell had soon realized that not only was escape impossible, but for
the unconnectible prisoners even planning to escape was fiendishly difficult. They belonged to a society that deactivated neural OCHRE bots
at birth. They depended on the accursed connectible collars to sense
projections on the multi network, and the Council had taken their connectible collars away. Who could say that the Council didn't have spies
in multi roaming the hallways and listening to their conversations?
Who among the unconnectibles was capable of detecting them?
    So they played this juvenile game the Council had set up. Studying
schematics of the prison, conducting raids on the enemy, shoring up
defenses, risking bio/logically enhanced torture to protect a square
kilometer of empty metal. Breaking the thumbs of their connectible
captives, because that was what the connectibles did to them. It really
was quite similar to those shoot-'em-ups from Quell's childhood. You
had two factions, limited resources, and violence waiting around every
corner, with an unseen CPU mindlessly hurling obstacle after obstacle
in your path until you died or time ended.
    In one of his more philosophical moments, lying in his bunk and
listening to Plithy prattle on about the Islander resistance, Quell had
decided that the game they played here was not unique. Wasn't it, in
fact, the same game the centralized government had been running
Earthside for generations? Connectibles versus unconnectibles; rebels
versus the establishment; the powerful versus the powerless. Artificial distinctions all. He had pictured the man responsible for this state of
affairs. Not a mindless CPU, but a perilously old man, bald as stone
and despised by about seventy-eight percent of the population,
according to the last polls Quell had seen.

    How could this grotesque game possibly benefit High Executive
Len Borda?
    Quell shook his head. He checked the action on his own dartrifle
now as he waited for the airlock to open and disgorge the new batch of
prisoners. It was pointless to speculate about the mind of Len Borda.
Pointless to anthropomorphize human reason and logic when the situation clearly lacked both.
    "I think the airlock's about to open," said Plithy in stage whisper
from his crevice, snapping Quell back to the present.
    Quell let out a scowl. "Quiet."
    "Crazy crazy crazy," muttered Rick Willets.
    A thought suddenly occurred to the Islander. Why had he never
heard about this place before? Borda couldn't keep the goings-on in
these orbital prisons shrouded in mystery forever. In a world where
thousands of drudges clambered over each other to report on Jeannie
Q. Christina's hairdo every day, there had to be at least a few people
drudging up the truth on the Defense and Wellness Council prison
system. Certainly one of them would have thought to interview a
paroled prisoner from one of these places by now ... unless there were
no paroled prisoners.
    Quell looked with sadness on the boy Plithy. The commander
whose eye he had bloodied must have had a lot of stripes on his uniform. Plithy must have seriously pissed someone off for the Council to
relegate him to this state of limbo, without trial, without purpose,
without end.
    How the