Garbage Rock

"You can put your troubles in a box; that doesn’t mean they’ll stay there."

Interview #4766. Barrier System 13, Danisport: Scout City. “Clem Aballi; the seed seller.” Interviewed by Barnard Boss.

*Interviewer’s notes:

For reasons that will become apparent, the following interview was perhaps the most noteworthy of my survey of the Barrier systems. It was not unusual for me to interview an unscheduled participant in the Barrier Systems Oral Histories, but this almost always happened in the form of me noticing a person who looked interesting or was doing something noteworthy, such as a street performer or famous local athlete or artist. My presence in Scout City, though, became conspicuous when the local news service solicited an interview of me upon my arrival. The piece that ran on their news feed publicized my presence and discussed the importance of the historical project’s reach into the outer systems. So I was recognized several times over the four days I was in Scout City.

On the third day, I was sitting in the Aerodrome lounge after interviewing the city’s mayor when I was approached by a striking young man who had seen the news feed and recognized me. I remembered his appearance, because he had piercing eyes, distinct, dark eyebrows, and he seemed extremely intense and insistent. And I remembered his flight coat, which was dull red with a white stripe running down the sleeves. I thought it looked like a uniform flight coat for a freight shipping company.

The young man told me that if I wanted to interview someone I’d never forget, he could connect me with Clem Aballi, and when I asked the young man why Mr. Aballi would be such a fascinating interview, he informed me that Clem Aballi was the only person ever to “escape the rocks,” which was a term I’d never heard before, even having spent over a decade living in Dreeson’s system, where he claimed the “rocks” were located. The young man was shocked by my ignorance. But I was intrigued enough by his story to get his contact information. I told him I’d do some research and reach out if I was interested in interviewing Mr. Aballi. The young man smiled and extended a hand, which I shook and instantly regretted, for his was an unpleasant, cold, clammy hand, and sweaty, and I felt awkward until I could get to the washroom to cleanse my hands.

While briefly researching the matter afterward, I learned that everyone out here had heard of the rocks and knew the story of Clem Aballi’s escape. Outside the Battery systems, I came to find out, this was a popular folk-tale of sorts. I subsequently confirmed the reality of the “rocks” but wasn’t able to confirm any record of a Clem Aballi from the Athosian authorities; though I was unsure whether this was stonewalling on the government’s part or whether the name Clem Aballi was a fabrication to begin with. The Athosian correctional bureau would not confirm or deny whether there was a record of any inmate ever escaping their custody. I was sufficiently intrigued that I contacted the young man and had him set up a meeting so I could interview Clem Aballi.

Mr. Aballi told me he would only meet me in a public place, and he directed me to a fairly well-trafficked tram stop about a block from the Aerodrome and the city’s air field. I was sitting at the tram depot bench, drinking a coffee when Mr. Aballi approached. I was surprised by his appearance, because in my mind, I’d imagined a young, intimidating sort for a prison escapee; though I wasn’t afraid, because out here in the Barrier systems there was no danger of extradition, even if Mr. Aballi was some sort of fugitive from the Athosians. He couldn’t have been further from my image of him. He was old, nearly elderly, with a tan, wrinkled face and bright white hair. He seemed to carry a charismatic, care-free disposition, or perhaps it was the fearlessness I noticed in him. He certainly carried himself differently from most men I’d ever encountered. I assumed the connection between him and the young man was that they worked for the same company, because Aballi wore the same flight coat, which was how I identified him. He came over to me and introduced himself and asked me what he should call me. In order to keep the meeting as informal as possible, I invited him to sit and asked him to call me Bob. He didn’t sit, so I stood. He asked me the first question: what I thought of the Barrier systems. I told him I liked how free people seemed to live out here, even though I’d yet to come across a city quite as nice as any in the inner Battery.

I joked: It’s not like Athos out here.

And that began our interview.

Don’t let them fool you. Not everyone lives large on Athos. They have that image, but that’s just what it is—image, which is how something appears to the outside world. On the inside, all those people are just like everyone else, all us hustlers in the outer systems. Liston told me you wanted to hear about when I did time in Dreeson’s? I didn’t do as much time as I should have, not nearly as much as they gave me.

He told me you escaped from one of the rocks?

What do you want to hear about it? How I got out?

Sure.

I guess they’re not going to throw me back in prison again at my age. Plus, I haven’t been back in the Battery for over fifty years now. Things are better out here. People are real. The thing about people on Athos—it’s really something—they have this way of living on the benefit of others, and then they pretend they can’t see these other people who build and maintain their world for them. Or maybe they can’t see them. They just don’t exist.

They didn’t see you escaping, so maybe that’s good for you.

Ha. You’re funny. They didn’t see me, no. Not that day.

How did you escape?

How did I get off the rock? Don’t you want to know how I got on the rock in the first place?

Sure. Tell the whole story. Tell it how you remember everything. How’d you end up there in the first place?

Yeah, sure, sure. I was a trader. That’s a long story how I got into that, but that’s what I was doing when I got pinched.

Back then I was working for my uncle, trading in bots. They had billions of them in Dreeson’s. It was almost unbelievable how many bots there were on those rings, but once you see the size of those rings around Athos and Iophos with your own eyes, you have to imagine it took a billion steel-working units a thousand years to put them together. And when you have—I don’t know how many people it was back then—let’s say two trillion people living there, something like that, you have to regulate the bots. Strict licensing. This operating system could go in that unit, only so many AI per cohort, only so much operating speed, general intelligence, and so forth. And that’s how I got into trouble in the first place.

I was innocent. I was innocent. Don’t get me wrong. My uncle might have done some things, yeah, but me? I was clean.

But you sold some AIs you shouldn’t have?

That’s what I got accused of—cloning AIs and selling them to ordinary people. The business leaders and politicians, it was okay for them to have whatever AI they wanted. Managers, teachers, engineers and their assistants, regular citizens? They got what they were given. We had access. And those hard recycled units that were mostly left over from the construction era, they had pretty good capacity to run some sophisticated beings on them. It was a serious thing to get accused of. They sorta viewed it as a form of subversion, which it was. When they see their betters come down to them saying, “No, no, no. We can have this unit, but not you.” It kinda gave the game away. Put a truth to the lie about their little—well, their gigantic little false utopia there on Athos.

I thought you were innocent?

I never said I was innocent. I said I was clean. I never did nothing wrong.

But you ended up on one of the rocks?

Yeah, Frequency. Its call sign was Frequency, but everyone in there called it Garbage Rock, the prisoners, the guards. I don’t know how many rocks like it they had in Dreeson’s, but some sick politician got the idea to put all their prisoners in the asteroids. I guess they figured they didn’t want them to be seen, so they put them in a place they couldn’t ever get out of, never be seen again.

But you did.

Maybe I did, yeah. I don’t know if I was the only one ever, but nobody’d done it before. Probably somebody did it after. Maybe not.

How did you get out?

Well that was the only crime I did, really. I didn’t hurt nobody. Not really. Inconvenienced is probably the right word. Do you want to hear the whole story, or just how I got off the rock?

I’m not in any rush.

Neither am I. You get to be my age, you don’t rush anymore. Those days are over. Anyway.

So what was it like being in there?

You had to understand. It’s like anything else. People build up these ideas around them. Identities. Values. Stories. You have to understand the real from the fake. The whole thing was a production. Very theatrical. It’s real, yeah. The first time you go in on the transport ship, the bots perform their role. The human guards tell you, “So this is how it’s gonna be out here,” and so forth. And I guess I could see the unreality of it, how each guy was just playing out his role. I used to picture each guard as an eight-year-old, just trying to figure out which kid he was on the playground. Which ones grow up to be prison guards. Then they were just funny to me.

But the image. That first image when you get pulled off the ship. You’re inside this enormous cavern where the ships dock up. And they leave you there when the ship pulls away and the nanosheet goes up, and you’re looking out into the docking bay thousands of meters tall. And out there, it’s space. Stars. They want you to see it. No way out. Just emptiness out there, and you’re in here. No escape. They do it to break you.

But it didn’t break you?

It certainly made an impression. I’ll say that. Looking out from the center of an asteroid and they say to you, “You’re stuck in here till we say you get out,” and it looks like no way out. You’re stuck in there. It’s a tough moment, sure.  But, no, it didn’t break me. It woulda taken more than that.

How long was your sentence?

Seven years. They gave me seven years.

And how long—

Six months. I served six months. Yeah, from that moment they held us there in that room, it was exactly six months I got out. Most guys, they break right there. I could see. Looking around at those other guys. Then they turn around and pull you to the lift to bring you down to the cells.

They have spin gravity in there?

On the cell block and the work area. Yeah. The Athosians, say what you will about them, but they take human rights seriously, and keeping someone in low G that long, that’d break you down.

What were the cells like? Isolating?

Oh, no. They only put you in isolation as a last resort. They put you right in with another prisoner to get you acclimated.

What do you mean acclimated?

They want you in the system, mind and body. And the cellmate is the one that breaks you in. They tell you what’s what. The last thing they want is people in isolation, because then you can think for yourself. They want you in with another prisoner, because the first thing you find out is which one is going to be higher on the pecking order, usually the one that’s there first. It’s the cellmate that puts you in the hierarchy, and once you’re in the hierarchy, you’re a prisoner to it. You belong.

You don’t think it’s because they don’t have space?

Space?

Yeah, they only have to build half as many rooms.

You think there aren’t enough asteroids for all the prisoners on Athos?

It’s not cheaper?

Trust me. They don’t do it to save resources. It’s to keep the hierarchy all under the same thinking. If they allow you too much time alone, people can start thinking for themselves. One person thinking for himself can break an entire system. They want that hierarchy on you. That’s what gets you to behave. The crowd moves one way, everyone moves that way too. Humans are social creatures.

So you had a cellmate.

Yeah, Worm.

His name was Worm?

His last name was Warmeister and nobody but the guards knew his first name. The guards called him Warmeister, and he told me he always went by Worm, even as a kid.

What was that like, the first time you got put in a cell with him?

He was a huge guy.

He was?

Oh, yeah. He was a full head taller than me and built like an Etteran strike infantry model. And he walked me right up against the wall, told me I was on the top bunk, what I could touch and couldn’t touch, touch my bunk and I’ll beat your brains out. The whole thing. I think they paired me with him on purpose.

What did you say when he threatened you like that?

I sorta shrugged it off. You don’t want to challenge a guy like that, but you can’t show him you’re afraid either. I think I asked him why I would want to touch his bunk anyway. Initially, I was a little worried he wouldn’t warm up to me, but after a couple days, I won him over.

How’d you do that? Was it one thing, or just being stuck in a room together all the time?

Yeah, they had a soundcloud fixed to the wall so each guy could plug in to the reprogramming classes and lectures and all that. And I started listening to the anger management sessions because they were calming, helped me to sleep, and one night he says, Clem, if you start quoting that garbage to me, I’ll feed your liver to you. So I tell him, Worm, you sound like a man who hasn’t self-actualized and gotten in touch with his inner vulnerabilities. And he laughed his ass off. Clem, he says, you’re a funny guy. And from then on, he trusted me. Never threatened me again.

Did he know you were planning an escape?

At first, all I could tell him was that I was going to get him out of there, but I told him I couldn’t tell him how.

Did he believe you?

I’m not sure, but he didn’t have much to lose in acting like he did, or at least he didn’t think he had much to lose, but even someone with a life sentence still has that life to lose.

So tell me what it was like. What did you two do to plan your escape?

They made everyone work. They coulda trained their bots to clean up the system, but they used us prisoners to keep us busy.

Doing what,  exactly?

Are you from Athos, Bob?

Hellenia originally, but I lived on Athos for a while.

So maybe you don’t know about all the garbage out in the system. There’s a lot of junk floating out in Dreeson’s.

In space?

Where else? People don’t think about that, because the bots did almost all of the framing of both rings. And they’re good about safety compared to humans, but if you’ve got a billion bots that are 99.999% perfect, those mistakes add up over time at that scale. So in the course of building the rings, hundreds of thousands of pieces of metal, fittings, tools—all kinds of things—they just floated away. That’s the best kept secret in the system, that all that stuff is just floating around out there, and most of it will never crash into anything, but it happens, especially out in the cylinders. People get killed all the time, and they’re good at keeping it quiet, but every prisoner out on the rocks knows what’s going on, because that’s what they got us doing, recycling all that metal.

Wait. This is blowing my mind. I’d never heard that. It makes sense, though.

Yeah, you can’t build a planetary ring that spans a gas giant the size of Athos and not create a mountain’s worth of floaters. Everything out there moves at thousands of kilometers an hour. So they send out the rocks to pick up all that garbage before it hits a ship or something.

How do they reel it all in?

Each rock has a drone fleet that has mechanical arms, hooks, and magnets. They go out all day, bring stuff in, and the prisoners on all different shifts run a foundry and recycle all that metal for other purposes. Like I said, they could have bots do it, but it gets the guys out of the cells and gives them a purpose. And that’s the time the guards have to watch us, but they’re all complacent, or they were before I showed up anyway. The prisoners didn’t think anyone could ever escape, so the guards didn’t either. In a way it made it easier. They were only watching to make sure all the metal stayed accounted for. It was weighed and measured and if anything was off, everyone got scanned before they got sent back to the block.

How many human guards did they have in there?

Not a lot for the number of guys in the blocks, but they had strike bots to keep the peace. Even a guy like Worm didn’t want no part of an Athosian strike bot, so whatever problem guys had with one another, you got a short window to settle it, because once those bots come in the room, it’s over. Fastest, most vicious fights I ever seen.

Did you ever get put down by one of the bots?

Not me. No way. I know better than that. Some guys did though. Some guys can’t control their anger. Didn’t matter what the consequences were. I felt sorry for them. It was like there was nothing could be done to stop the eruption—except for the bots. Didn’t end so good for those guys most of the time. Those models weren’t programmed to be gentle with us convicts.

So you’d break down the metal all day and listen to the soundcloud when you’re not working, and that’s mostly your day?

Not much else in there, no. Grub. Sleep. Chess sometimes.

So at what point do you start plotting your escape?

Right away. I was figuring things out from minute one, day one. There’s no way I’m doing seven years.

How do you even begin to plan a prison escape from an asteroid?

Well, the first part is the real part, right? They tell you, there’s no way off the rock, but the guy telling you is on a three-day shift, and then he goes home to his family on Athos or the cylinders or wherever he’s from. So really, what they’re telling you in so many words is there’s no way off the rock for you prisoners. “Me? I’m going home in three days.” So the first question is how do you get home, Mr. Guard? Then, the next question is how do I hitch a ride. And then you gotta work back from there. So I had to convince Worm to do a lot of things, cause distractions, gather information, talk to guys, because you get one shot at it, and it’s right at the time security is highest, because that flight is the only way on or off for a human. Then you gotta start to learn the patterns of the guards, their personalities, their habits, when they come and go.

Three months or so in, I had my target. Young kid named Preski. Personable, dumb, wanted to be everyone’s friend, or acted like it anyway.

Why’d you choose him?

We were the same height. Plus, like I said, he was stupid. So Worm started charting out his movements, especially on the days he would get off shift. Then, we had to figure out all the procedure and protocol for guards getting off the rock. Most of it we could plan, other parts I would have to improvise on the fly. Preski’s shift would arrive in the morning, so we knew they changed shifts while we were asleep, which actually made things easier. We just had to figure out exactly when they left.

How’d you manage that if you were sleeping?

Worm asked Preski. Like I said, he was dumb, and he wanted to be friends with everyone. He had no idea Worm was feeding me information, and he figured Worm for an idiot, because he was, so Preski just thought they were making harmless banter, commiserating about working the night shift, and really, he was feeding me logistical information about when the shuttle arrived to bring the guy home—exactly when to make my move.

What did you do to Preski?

Like I said. He was inconvenienced.

And Worm?

Still incarcerated for all I know.

How did it all go down?

Day of, we worked our regular shift in the foundry, and my plan was to get everyone all amped up by starting a fight in the sorting room. So I get Worm to start taunting one of those guys who just can’t control himself, a guy about my size everyone called Switch. When he went off, nobody wanted to be near him. Even Worm was a little nervous—the guy was so angry. I can’t remember what Worm said to get him going. Called him stupid, maybe something about his mother—real dumb stuff. So Switch goes off and he and Worm start pounding on each other, and I jump in to make it seem like it’s an all-out brawl and three or four other guys jump in too, and in come the strikers, so I sneak out of the pile and put my hands up before those strikers start throwing bodies around.

Switch got the worst of it from Worm, but he got his punches in too. Then the strikers started pounding on both of them to set an example to the rest of us. The whole thing was over in less than a couple minutes, but a lot can happen in two minutes. It was the worst fight I seen the entire time I was in there.

Worm was all banged up, but he was smiling. He liked a good fight, plus he thought the plan was working. We all got separated and brought to different sorting stations, and they doubled up the guards and strikers on our detail for the rest of the afternoon.

Preski, who’d gotten pretty friendly with Worm, hung close to our block trying to calm everyone down. Worm got worse as the day went on. The strike bots banged him up in the chest pretty good. The plan was to fake a serious injury, but as the afternoon wore on and we were back in our cell, Worm started moaning for real down on the bottom bunk. He was determined, though, not to show any serious signs of trouble till the lights went out.

Preski came by twice in the evening to check on Worm. And he said he was okay, but he wasn’t. He was struggling. I could hear. I kept saying to him, you all right down there, big fella? “Even better when we get out of here, Clem,” he’d say back. Just a couple more hours, I told him.

We waited, and Worm fell asleep, and the plan was for Worm to make like he was struggling to breathe and I couldn’t wake him up. Then, when Preski came in to see what was going on, I’d jump down, choke him out, and walk out wearing his uniform.

Preski came into your cell by himself?

No. With two strike bots. Always. That was protocol.

Didn’t the bots take you out?

What did I tell you I went in for?

Illegal AIs.

I know a few things about how to manipulate bots.

With no tech?

Who said I didn’t have any tech?

Didn’t they scan you going in?

Of course they did, but you can’t scan for tech you don’t know exists, can you?

What about the other guards though? Couldn’t they tell that Preski was missing?

He wasn’t.

I don’t understand.

I walked right onto that shuttle with the other five guards from Preski’s shift, sat down, and pretended to drift off to sleep so nobody would talk to me. When the shuttle landed at Athos, one of the other guards tapped me on the shoulder, I pretended to wake up, and got up and walked off the shuttle and disappeared into the crowd on the ring. I snuck off Athos in a pillbox in the freight container on a friend’s cargo ship. Two days later I got outta the pillbox on Atalanta, and I never went back to the Battery since.

Okay, so wait. How do they not recognize that you’re not Preski? He’s not your long-lost twin brother or anything.

He didn’t look anything like me.

Then how did you get off the rock?

Like I said, right off with the guards. The thing you don’t get is that the eyes can’t see what they see until the brain sees it too. If the brain sees Preski, it doesn’t matter what the eyes see. The brain is a hamburger with a pulse, Bob. There’s tech in this galaxy that can make it see anything, just like it can make a dumb AI act like a smart one and make a smart one mistake a prisoner for a guard.

Tech like that can’t be legal.

You joking?

I don’t know. I’ve never heard anything like that before.

That’s the thing about you Battery folks. You think there are rules out here? Before humanity split, there were no constrictions on AI. They created beings in sealed boxes with no moral limitations, no ethical constraints, technologically perfect psychopaths. Some of the things those AIs thought of gives me chills. Just like the asteroid, Bob, you can put your troubles in a box; that doesn’t mean they’ll stay there.

How was Worm supposed to get off the rock, Clem?

He wasn’t. I told him I would get another uniform for him and be back in an hour. He was so dumb he thought I was coming back for him.

He could be dead for all you know.

Could be him and Preski are dead. What do I care? Both those guys belong on Garbage Rock, alive or dead.

What kind of AIs were you trafficking on Athos, Clem?

What do you think, Bob?

I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking.

Let me ask you something, sport. Did you feel better about yourself, about your big pretty rings before you talked to me? So confident. Just like the rest of them. So proud. They used to say pride comes before a fall. How far do you think you people from the Battery have to fall?

I shook my head at Clem and shrugged, as I didn’t have a proper answer.

You can’t even conceive of it. You. Falling. What did I sell on Athos? I sold seeds. You can sleep well at night knowing how many of my seeds got planted. I’m done talking. I hope you were listening good. Tell them all back home to listen good.

*Interviewer’s notes (continued):

I didn’t thank Clem Aballi or shake his hand as I’d done in all the thousands of interviews I’d conducted among the outer systems. He merely walked away, seemingly disgusted with me; by what exactly, I still am not sure.

Normally, I let a person’s words stand alone in an interview, but given the nature of what Clem Aballi reported to me during his interview, I cannot leave the following occurrence out of the account:

When he’d finished talking, Clem walked away with his back turned, and I followed him with my eyes as he left. His flight coat was distinct—that dull red with that white stripe running all the way from the shoulders down the sleeves to his wrists, where he’d rolled the cuffs back. It was impossible to mistake him from anyone else, even in that crowd. Clem walked about thirty meters toward the Aerodrome that housed the shuttle between the city and the air field. As he turned the corner, the wearer of that distinct coat suddenly no longer appeared to be “Clem Aballi,” or at least that person whose face I’d accepted as belonging to that name. I could clearly see the same striking dark eyebrows of the man I’d seen in the Aerodrome lounge who’d recommend I talk to Clem Aballi in the first place. With him moving away from me and shortly disappearing behind a building thereafter, what little else I could discern of his face at that distance was turned down in a sharp, nefarious smile. I struggled for some time to think of a way he could have manipulated my mind so convincingly without ever having come into contact with him, until I remembered the handshake, that clammy hand. Still I have no sense for what he could have passed through my skin with a simple handshake, and the several scans I’ve undergone to answer that mystery haven’t unearthed a thing.

Among the billions of good-hearted, pioneering people of the Barrier systems, Clem Aballi, the seed seller, walked free, sowing wild tales I hoped were nothing more than fiction, though judgement tells me what I encountered here was real. Whatever else Clem Aballi was sowing out here apart from stories, I hope the good people of Athos will never come to know.