Summary
[ Content Index | Science Fiction ]
Allan Hale is a terrible man who did terrible things.
He was so bad that the digital prison was invented to punish him.
Three hundred years later, some people decided it was time for Allan to be paroled.
Content Type: Science Fiction
Content Created: Sometime in 1993
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
FPC Commitment
FPC Commitment OrderToday Is: 12 November 2399
Name: Allan Hale
Alias: None
DOB: 3 January 1985
DOD: 12 January 2025
FPC Accruement: $ 13.00
FPC Employment:From: 19 November 2020
To: 5 September 2021
Federal Penal Code Violations:Count: Premeditated Rape
Jessica Ann Hale
Age: 39
Count: Premeditated Murder
Jessica Ann Hale
DOD: 27 February 2019, 0931
Count: Premeditated Rape
Katherine Jessica Hale
Age: 12
Count: Premeditated Murder
Katherine Jessica Hale
DOD: 27 February 2019, 1005
Count: Premeditated Rape
Angela Christine Hale
Age: 9
Count: Premeditated Murder
Angela Christine Hale
DOD: 27 February 2019, 1145
Comments:Under FPC Amendment 47B-15 (ref: FPC Amendments 2019),
The Honorable Clayton George Moran determined Allan Hale
to be counter-productive to the United States' moral and
social standards. After three hours of jury deliberation
(ref: Johnathan H. Luther, Marty V. Nelson, Haze N. Patterson,
Ian G. Warren, Hector J. Keller, Chelsea M. DuPenn, Tricia Johnson,
Chet P. Marra, Bart A. Vahahn, Aaron Cottin, Mary C. Isaac,
and Jason McGuinn) and fourteen subsequent appeals, Allan Hale
was the first human sentenced to digitization.Current Location:
FPC Micropolis Silicon Graphics Machine, hard memory sector 45.
Current Size:
1524 gigabytes using Natural Compression Algorithm.
Change in Size:
18 gigabytes
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Part 1
Veronica bit her lip, looking away from the aging Micropolis terminal. Dust had gathered around the corners of the flickering screen and the clicking of the hard memory fumigated the air with its disgusting sound. She crossed her legs and turned to face Gerald, her forty one year old partner. Allan Hale's digitization confirmation order hung within the monitor's glow.
"Not a very nice guy, huh?" Gerald looked over Veronica's shoulder, the shadows in the room accenting his slender build.
"Think he is actually innocent?" Veronica refused to look back at the screen. Finding the information had been a gruelling effort on the part of over twenty people for the last four years. Now that they had it, that she had direct access to it, she was no longer sure she wanted to continue with the operation. Information that was not hard recorded on crystal at the time it was entered was not admissible as evidence in any court. The confirmation order meant nothing in a court of law.
"Hell no." Gerald spoke softly, sitting down and slipping next to Veronica with the silky squeak of the chair's rollers. "No, he's as guilty as they come. One of the few redeeming qualities of digitization is that they can recompile the personality, like they have to do when they activate it on this graphics machine, but then don't insert it into the penal colony program. They reconstructed his darkest personal memories and erased any doubt with hard fact."
Veronica forced herself to let her lip go, tapping gloved fingers on the edge of the Dvorak keyboard. "So what good does this do for us? Prove that Hale is as bad as they come?"
Gerald remained pensive and above all else, rather somber. "There are people far worse than him. And after three hundred years, you would think he would have suffered enough by now. They have no right to keep him locked in there. Besides, when we got the copy of Hale, we reconstructed his personality and extracted his memories like the FPC had done before."
Veronica raised an eyebrow, still unsure, "What about them?" The tip of her index finger ran under the names of Hale's wife and daughters. "Not just raped, not just murdered, but both. Don't tell me that was on impulse."
Gerald frowned, breathing a sigh. "Veronica, you know this isn't about whether or not Hale is innocent or guilty, or if he deserves his punishment or not. Somewhere in that digital world, he earned his clemency. Don't flake out on me and tell me you think three hundred years re-living your crime would not do anything."
"But we don't know that,"Veronica snapped. "With the way the Federal Penal Committee and their precious Federal Penal Code work, half the truth is buried behind jargon and the other half is resting in appropriations. A couple hundred years from now, someone will decide that the punishment was unjust and that he deserves .." she broke off and sat back against the chair.
Gerald offered a wane smile. "You had me wondering for a moment." He yawned, supporting the gentle smile with sincere resolve. "The Natural Compression Algorithm is their legal version of an encryption program, and it just so happens we have a copy of it. You can run the bloody thing uncompressed if you wanted, but you'd better have a room full of sub-zero drives." He levelled his eyes on Veronica. "We have the programs and the hardware ready to go. Want to get serious?"
"Get the link, Gary. Once we tap this, the FPC will know and I don't think Hale will be happy about it either." Veronica's hands dove into her duffle bag and removed a cold storage silicon drive, glancing up at Gerald and creasing her eyebrows. She made sure the liquid nitrogen container was both intact and full, then connected it with the drive. Depressing a glowing red plate, she sat back and waited for the unit to build its silicon-crystal core. The drive was small enough to fit into the palm, and still managed to weigh seventeen pounds.
Gerald connected one end of the honeycomb cable he held in hand to the drive and the other end to an interpreter module. From the interpreter module he ran a second honeycomb cable to the back of the Micropolis machine, where a splitter connected four parallel ports to the honeycomb. "If this works," he finished and sat back in the chair, meeting Veronica with a casual smile, "we could get the rest of them out, you know."
Veronica stopped cold, raising an eyebrow. "I thought we were just going to get Hale."
"This sub-zero drive has a compiled version of the Natural Compression Algorithm and a secondary data encryption and storage algorithm, hence the interpreter module. The penal system they have running isn't compressed, it is just a damn platform, but we don't want to bring any bits and pieces of it over during the transfer, so the module will filter it out. We can move all eighty four prisoners onto the drive and have plenty of room left since there won't be a platform running. Crimony, we could run the bloody lot from the drive if we installed a basic operating system."
"It's unreliable." It wasn't much, but all she could think of. Veronica did not want to deviate from the operation, she had enough reservations about saving Hale. But to save all of them, to move them all to a free system could mean disaster for them, and her.
"It's possible. All we would have to do is leave random clusters in there, just one monstrous pile of garbage, and they wouldn't know what happened."
"Gerald," she placed her hands on his shoulders, "it is one thing to steal one prisoner, especially when we have the encryption code, but if we try for more and they shut it down, we don't just lose whoever is in transit, we could lose every one of them. Not to mention, we don't know if they are all compressed in Natural, and we sure as hell don't have the passwords to access the and more individual files besides Hale's."
Gerald smiled and removed a small, folded piece of paper from an inner pocket in his jacket. He took his time unfolding it, after all, no one had been in that particular room in over two years, nor would the FPC even bother unless they received a message that the system required maintenance. He offered the list of passwords to Veronica.
"This isn't some joy ride for you, is it? You aren't just in the FWR for laughs or money like everyone else, are you?"
"Veronica," Gerald's smile fell, "they digitized people from all over the world and put them on various systems. Allan Hale, and eighty three other criminals are on this particular one for the United States. This is the answer to crime. What about the Microsoft penal colony? Over three million criminals."
Veronica waited for Gerald to continue. Nothing. "Four million, Gerald. You think Bill Gates intended to earn over seven trillion dollars with Windows just to make these places for people to be put? He must be burning in hell right now for making it, even if he was excommunicated and tried for monopolizing the industry, I doubt he was such a terrible guy. But you, you are a work of art, Gerald. You want to save these eighty prisoners, the first and by far the very worst of them, for what? Your own laughs?"
Gerald narrowed his eyes, "Just like you, I have my own heroes. You have a place in your heart for that classical composer, Mark Knopfler, I have one in mine for Gates. But this has nothing to do with either of them. Allan Hale and eighty three other people have been cooking in that pen for over two hundred years since the last one, Rob Light, was sentenced. And even then, it isn't about their repentance, it's about mine, it's about all of ours. Who is worse, the person who committed the crime, the person who stood by to watch, or the entire world who listened to the media, read the books, watches the movies, or listen to the music about these people who are still suffering. They live in there, Veronica," he looked back at her, feeling a strength rise within him, fueled by his own turmoil pumping through his heart. "And they are not ever going to die, ever! Haven't they suffered in there enough?"
"And the Free World Revolution is going to condone this, Gary? You realize what will happen when they find us? We can't hide that much information, we just can't, especially not on silicon crystal. All they have to do is use half their brain and bathe the planet with an infrasonic wave and just like a sonar, wait for the residual ping of a silicon crystal and then construct what information is stored on it using successive waves. We have four of those drives, and that is not much room to hide something this large in. " Veronica set the drive next to the Dvorak keyboard and waited.
Gerald surprised her and passed the piece of paper to her. He didn't want an argument and trusted that she would give in to him. "Enter the encryption codes, Veronica. Allan Hale and eighty three men are waiting to leave behind too many years of pain."
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Part 2
The street corner of Broadway and Northeast Main had become such a familiar sight to Allan Hale that after four years of reliving his gruesome crimes, he began to wonder whether or not he had in fact died and was in hell. Did anything exist beyond the intersection? It was always broad daylight, between nine AM and twelve PM, the same faces, the same directions. No one ever took a different step than they had the last time. The last time he had bothered counting, he gave up after fourteen thousand. He had raped his youngest daughter, Angel, for the fourteen thousandth time since entering the digital penal system. He hadn't even made the transition into performing the crime again when he lost complete hope.
He was an evil man and this was his punishment.
He didn't look at his wife as he killed her again in virtual reality as a women he loathed, but as the woman he had married and taken the life from.
Allan cringed at the thought of even thinking about touching Katherine, his eldest daughter, in an impure manner.
Allan Hale wished his soul had been eradicated, that he would simply no longer exist, rather than rape Angel one more time.
She had been so young, so pure, so innocent. And he had taken all of those things from her. From all of them. He deserved to suffer.
He had tried to hold back the orgasms. At least he would not flood his wife and children with demonic semen. But the program forced him to.
The program was his life. It was rather simple. It replayed his punishable crimes over and over without recording or accounting for his feelings. His feelings were no longer about how he did not want to hurt his family, but how he no longer wanted his family to be hurt at all. The program taught him what love and reliance was. The program refused to accept that he had learned anything.
Digitization had not robbed him of everything. Before he was forced into the three foot by three foot box and an intrinsic field laser began taking him apart one cell at a time, storing the patterns his neurons followed, a cocky scientist explained how digitization worked. Hale would be injected with any number of stimulants to force his brain and body to operate at peak performance. The cocky scientist didn't have names for those. For thirty minutes, a narrow laser would penetrate his eyes and begin the process of what was called pure digitization, or the fundamental destruction of a physical object and the simultaneous reconstruction of that same object digitally. Although assured it would not hurt, Hale could only remember a pain so intense that he knew he was about to die, his body was giving into death, and the chemicals were keeping him awake and alive through it all.
Microsoft had a large monopoly on almost all computer systems by now, but in a moment of wisdom, the Federal Penal Committee had decided years before to use a new language that included a form of data compression and encryption that would allow anything written, compressed or encrypted in the language to work on any other operating system or platform. For the first time in his life, Allan Hale heard the words Natural Compression Algorithm. The cocky scientist seemed to like to say those words. The main reason the FPC used this new style of program was that it supposedly would not only permit the construction of true artificial intelligence, but would preserve the humanity of anything digitized and translated, or compressed, into it. So the digitally reconstructed human could suffer and remember what true pain was. In this sense, the FPC made one very important mistake.
Allan Hale was capable of independent thought.
Although he did not have any method of determining how long he had been digitized, Allan Hale's first indication that something was amiss happened in the middle of a cycle. Dreadfully, he was pushed across the electric street back towards his apartment where Angel waited for him. For the first time, he thought he could feel something. A warning light went off in his head and everything began to slow down. In an instant, all of space and time stretched out before him when the people, walls and streets melted away into glorious silence. He could no longer move, but did not feel weak. If anything, he felt protected. Something was keeping him alive. He thought he was truly going to die.
"Thank you, God," he whispered. Then he could no longer think and therefore, no longer existed.
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Part 3
The operation was conducted and finished smoothly. Veronica disconnected the sub-zero drive and ran outside to an LAV. Although easy to move, liquid nitrogen could not be trusted to keep the crystal matrix in the drive intact for longer than an hour and liquid oxygen was used as long as it was in a stable location. Gerald arrived promptly and in silence, the two fled across the desert towards Wyoming, then towards Oregon.
When the LAV settled to the ground, two men took the drive from Veronica and ran inside a suburban house. Gerald and Veronica followed after the LAV was parked and their equipment gathered. The house was very rustic in appearance and most of the rooms had been left intact. The basement, however, had been converted into a laboratory.
Nathan Younger looked up grimly as Veronica and Gerald arrived. A very heavy man, he rarely moved from his virtual terminal, but in this case, rose to face both operatives. "Feeling generous today, Gary?" He glanced down at the drive which was currently moving data to a crystal drive.
Veronica smiled drily and sat down, folding her arms and saying candidly, "nice to see you too, Nathan."
"Nathan, we .."
"Gary," Younger interrupted, "we've been planning this for more than four years. One prisoner is one thing, but eighty four is going to get us put into the same spot these guys are in."
"Great," Gerald dropped the duffle bag and narrowed his eyes, "bloody great, Nathan. You don't know any of these people and if we are going to do something to make freedom in this country mean anything again, then lets get serious. We just wiped out their whole system, and they are not going to find us. So what is the problem?"
Younger sat back and pointed a pudgy finger at Veronica, "you put him up to this, didn't you? You know you won't get digitized if we get caught."
"Christ, Nathan, my sex has nothing to do with it." Veronica stood up and walked towards the door, but stopped when she saw a new face, one she didn't recognize.
"Miss Markley," the tall, dark skinned man said in a very seductive voice. He nodded to Nathan, Henry Gardener, one of the gofers, and Gerald.
"Kyle, we have problems," Younger said and pointed at the small sub-zero drive.
"They didn't get all of them in there, did they?" Kyle's ocean blue eyes betrayed his impression. He passed Veronica and Gerald, peering down at the drive.
"All eighty four, Kyle. And with the FPC already on us, well, you can see why I am worried."
"Wait a moment, Nathan," Gerald was suddenly very concerned. "The FPC already knows?"
"Mostly, yeah, they know. Christ, Gary, we've been about as clandestine as a couple of drunk fraternity boys on a Saturday night." Nathan coughed, then looked back at Kyle. "Well, Mr. Zenser?"
Kyle sat down and faced the others in the room. All of them were quiet, most of them were afraid of what would happen. Kyle Zenser knew everything there was to know about Natural, and more. "We run them through a filter and compile them as a Natural program."
"That's all?" Nathan fumed, turning red. "What the hell will that do?"
"A lot, Nathan. Right now they are just compressed by the program, but if we want to do anything, we will need to compile each prisoner as a Natural program. The genius behind this is that, wherever we put them, whatever platform they are running on, whether it is the penal colony code, or a basic operating system, they will have complete control over themselves, unless there are crystal coded routines running, they will simply have to avoid them. The important part being, we will make them invulnerable to any platform or operating system. They will have their freedom again."
Nathan remained seated though tossed the virtual gloves and head set to Kyle. "Do it," he hissed.
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Part 4
The digital world was an empty grey haze. Patches of sparkling white indicated confinement points, or places that could not be crossed. It did not take very long for Allan Hale to realize he was in another prison. At first he thought he would have to continue to concentrate on existing or else face immediate system absorption. A program flushed from the system's memory. His thoughts were still his, but his actions were no longer under the control of the penal colony system. There was no penal system to speak of.
With the freedom of both thought and action, Allan hale began to look throughout the small world that had become his latest residence. He was still unsure how long he had been digitized, but something was remarkably different. Rather than existing in a world that would either conform or force him to conform to it, the murky haze would shift and change. There were times he would approach certain confinement points and find new thoughts, new visions, only to have them disappear when he moved away. These inflection points were linked by interface modules and protocols. If he could understand those protocols, he could communicate outside of the system. Someone wanted him to find these. They were all that was available to him. Something was definitely very wrong.
From the opposing end of his own little world, one he estimated to be two miles by one half mile, a shock wave of energy emerged. Allan Hale heard this as the sound of an angry, very pained man.
"Why are you doing this to me?" the voice was closer now.
Allan Hale slipped through one of the filmy stress points, places marking changes in data flow, and was suddenly standing over a young man. To Allan Hale, the stranger looked liquid silver with cross threads of gold and emerald. He had never bothered to try to look at himself. Allan Hale was not sure if he wanted to.
"Please stop this, please." A hand stretched towards Hale's, who regarded the man, his hand, and his plea with grim silence.
"Don't do it any more, I will go insane if you put me back in there."
"Back where?" Hale ventured.
"The penal system, that's where we must be now, just outside the system, probably a system error and we are locked up in flat files."
The voice was young, so Hale thought. He had grown to think about many things, becoming very analytical and of all things temperamental. He had given up so long ago. There was no need for him to be angry anymore.
Hale touched the wall, searching for an inflection point. He paused, "how long have you been here?"
The man shrugged, his voice scared and naive. "I don't.."
"The Hell you do." Hale made a grab for him and found that many human actions and feelings were translated very well here. Fingers were articulate, hands and arms moved in the same manner. But he let the man go. He was not a killer anymore. No, never again.
"What's your name, kid?" Hale lent the man half an ear while searching the walls for another inflection point. The place was not very organized. It reminded him of walking through streets on a foggy night and not being able to see a thing until it was just about to club your nose.
"Slipwolf," came a smug reply.
Hale stopped abruptly and looked back, "no, smart ass, your real name."
"Caine Harvey," and he stood up, same height and size as Hale.
"Allan Hale," he said non-descriptly.
Harvey stopped and took a step back, "the first?"
"Actually, my gramps was named Allan also." He wasn't sure why he felt any need to be a wit, but he gave in.
"I read about you, so did everyone else."
"Everyone else is?" Hale stopped at a particularly strong inflection point. He had been raised on the Internet and old IBM's, forced to learn how to configure them by the mad desire to control the machine. Although he felt quite calm, he still had to be in control. And this particular inflection point felt like the controller to whatever the storage system was on the machine. Everything seemed to be fed life through this point.
Harvey followed Hale over to the wall, "they have books about it. Everyone who was ever digitized and why is in the book. It is pretty standard material to read before you go in."
Although Harvey stopped paying as much attention to Hale, hale became suddenly interested in Harvey. "Wait, how many people are in here?"
"In this system? Christ, this system is for the worst of us and they were going to lock it down and put other digitized aspects on other systems. Before I went in there were maybe a thousand before I went in. After that, well you know what it is like." Harvey touched the inflection point and the wall shimmered for almost a minute.
"When did you go in?" Hale wondered how that many people could have been put into the system with the United State's legal system working as slow as it did.
"I went in about a hundred years after you did." Harvey didn't seem to think anything of it.
It meant the whole world to Hale. How long had he been in that penal system? What had happened to the world?
Harvey pushed Hale back against the wall and his face suddenly had definition. Hale peered directly back into Harvey's eyes.
"Do you trust me, Allan?" Harvey's voice was very sincere and though still naive and afraid, filled with resolve.
"That depends. You want to let go of me?"
Harvey moved his hands back to his sides. His voice was different, eery and piercing, almost telepathic, when he spoke. "We don't have much time. I still don't know why we are here, but when you got near me, you must have interfered with something they were doing. They tried to access me again."
"Caine, what the hell are you talking about?"
"Listen, Allan. I don't know why, but when we were digitized, we were compiled and stored in a certain format. When we came here, whoever is doing this changed us so we are now existing in Natural."
"Like the Natural Compression Algorithm?"
"Yeah, sort of. But this is different. The NCA just keeps us in a compressed format but allows most machines to recognize us. It is the main computer protocol, or at least it was, and I imagine it still is. I think that someone tried to break us out."
"That's absurd, kid. You were crying for mommy not five minutes ago, and now have all the phoney bravery of a politician and answers to boot."
"I think," Harvey repeated, "someone tried to break us out and they got caught. They converted us into Natural and now someone is trying to shut us down and rewrite us back in the other format."
Hale looked back at the wall and at first wanted to laugh at Harvey, but stopped himself. The inflection point was pulling at him now, trying to force him through. The strength grew quickly and Harvey pushed him against a confinement point. "What's going on, Caine?"
"Natural is the most versatile protocol every devised. It is beyond a programming language. Listen to me, ok, because this may be the only chance we have." Caine Harvey waited for Hale to nod, feeling the pull into the inflection point again, feeling the penal colony system coming closer and closer. "We have to do two things. One, encrypt ourselves so they can't rewrite us. Make ourselves impossible to decompile, copy, or alter. Second, we have to recognize an inflection point. Natural does not communicate with a port or device, it assumes control of it and acts as if that port or device is simply another extension of itself. We encrypt that fusion into us so if we do get moved, they can never erase us unless they physically destroy the storage device, and no matter where we are, we will always be able to assume control over any port or device that operates like the one we fuse with here."
Allan felt a pain in his head that trickled down through his body. "How do you know all of this, kid?"
Harvey glanced back at the inflection point. Both of them now saw the awaiting penal colony program. Both of them were consumed in fear.
Harvey offered only a grim smile, "I tried to write a crack for the penal colony code that would do the same thing. My brother is in there somewhere." His smile faded, "I tried to save him from it."
Allan Hale had many questions, but the pain grew. Harvey let go of his shoulders and with a remorseful smile, let the inflection point consume him. Allan Hale was not sure if Harvey had the time to do what he had told Hale to do. There was a sudden lull in the pain and from the inflection point. Allan Hale looked back at the controller inflection was and thought about it in every way he could. Still quiet since Harvey had been drawn into it, Hale pushed his hands into the filmy surface and clenched them together. He thought of his wife and his daughters and without thinking about it or realizing he had done so, encrypted himself with dead memories. He wasn't even aware that he had managed to fuse himself with the controller.
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Part 5
Allan Hale mused with the freedom of thought, feeling and action he cherished. In the center of an oval room, dressed in a flowing, liquidy white garb, he checked his subroutine. Somewhere far away on the same system, a mindless emulation of himself was running through the FPC, reliving his least favorite memories. Caine Harvey floated closer in his peripheral vision from above. Electric Ladyland would not have been possible without Caine's help.
The Federal Penal Committee had returned Allan and the other eighty three prisoners to a government machine, but this time locked them away on a larger machine. One that was networked. One with a silicon-crystal drive. And that meant Electric Ladyland could be constructed. A place for the prisoners who Allan judged to be reformed or forgiven. They were ported into this new paradise where artificial women were constructed so they could once more be true men. A new world.
And Allan Hale controlled it. Without the programming experience or even the intelligence that most of the others had, he was the one who the other eighty three prisoners had determined to be the most reformed.
"Allan," Caine called, stepping down in front of Allan from the air. He passed a filmy sheaf of paper, names suggested for clemency, to Allan. "You might want to look at those right now."
With a short smile, he nodded. Although he had wished for death so many times, felt the pain of hearing those slurs and curses from the courtroom when he had been sentenced, he still could never find himself feeling that he had helped enough people out of the prisons to make restitution for his wife and daughters. He owed them still and he could never make up for those crimes except by living his life out until they forgave him.
Scanning the list of names, Allan looked up after only seconds. "Is this all?"
Caine shook his head, "No, this is a special list. These are names from some people were digitized last night. We still need that news link so we can find out what is going on outside."
Allan nodded again, reading out their first names. "Gerald, Nathan and Kyle." He smiled benignly, "Sorry, Caine, even if I could place the names, we can't offer any special deals for them."
Caine insisted, saying, "they were digitized for crashing the Micropolis Silicon Graphics Machine and trying to steal the algorithms for the eighty four prisoners on its drive."
Allan folded the sheaf in half, his face relaxing into a melancholy expression. "They're the ones?"
Caine nodded, his lips turning into a warming smile. "Yes, they are."
Allan felt his heart skip with joy, but then settle under the weight of darker memories. "Alright, this one time we'll let them through."
Caine nodded and lifted from the floor into the air slowly, giving Allan a nod of thanks.
Allan mused again, saying softly while Caine was still in earshot. "We will always have a debt to pay. No matter what we did, we will always be here, still paying."
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