Dead Snupe Read online

  One day, while Carl wandered the halls during class time, he met up with one of the Boneys. Carl pretended like he was sick, doubled over, and moaned. Not that the Boney cared, but he walked over to Carl just the same. And when that guard bent over, Carl reached for the guard’s taser – they’ve since stopped carrying those – and he tased that guard good. When the bell rang and classes let out, there was Carl, swinging the toe of his shoe into that Boney’s crotch like he was trying to kick the winning field goal with five seconds left on the clock. It took five teachers to take Carl down. A short time later, that guard moved on – busted nuts and all – to who-knows-where, but I suspect he just retired or took a transfer. Carl? That was the last time anybody ever saw or heard of him again. Sometimes I think that boy had planned things to end like they did: that being dead was better than being in Long Wait. And I suppose he probably got his wish, though I like to think he may have had his regrets when he saw the big pipe in the basement.

  That’s why my nerves did the jig that day in the cafeteria when Bobby slipped beneath that salad bar island and re-emerged a minute later with a coiled up piece of wire. Everybody’d seen him take it, but everybody had looked the other way. Or maybe they hadn’t thought a thing of it. Maybe Bobby had gone after a cherry tomato. Maybe he’d dropped his fork. If April had been there that night, she would have been in his face like a mother after a child. Would have made one heck of a scene. But she wasn’t there. That’s just how things played out sometimes. Or maybe God was working his plan like he always did all the time. Me? I just let Bobby have that coil of wire. Don’t misunderstand me: it didn’t mean I didn’t care. I let him have it because a little voice suddenly whispered in my head that, whatever was waiting for Bobby at the end of the line, it sure wouldn’t be a hangman’s noose, in his room, in the wee hours of the morning. I just hoped that little voice in my head was telling me the right thing.

  It was on a Saturday morning, just after breakfast, that Bobby finally started speaking to me again. He and April had since parted ways – her choice, not his – and Elton Peacock and I were shooting the breeze about the new tablets about to be issued to all of the students-slash-prisoners. Seems like, out of nowhere, Administration had found a way to give us all a closed network at Long Wait. We’d be able to text each other, download music and movies, get news of the outside world – do just about anything kids out on the street could do. The only exception being there was no way on God’s green earth any kid here could send any information to anyone outside the walls, nor would they be able to get any information about their families. I thought the whole thing was a partial dream come true.

  “I’m not convinced,” Elton said, and he even got belligerent about it. “Given the advancements in infrared technology, I wouldn’t doubt those tablets can see and hear through walls. Don’t doubt me.” And he said it just like that.

  And that’s when Bobby sat down next to Elton and across from me. “And they’ll be able to know a lot of other things, too,” he said, and he smiled. Sort of. And it was right then that I knew Bobby had come back to the land of the living. He still had a trace of zombie about him, and who wouldn’t have after what he’d been through? But it was evident to me there’d been some stiff medicine at work. What it was, I didn’t know.

  “Finished with ECPAP/HIRAD yet?” I asked. “The bugs and all?”

  Bobby smiled. “Not by a long shot,” he said, and that smile of his got a bit bigger. “Override’s here. He let me into HIRAD, but it’s slow work. A little piece of code every now and then. Then he takes away a part of it. But that’s no secret around here. That’s how he does it. When you think you’re almost there, you find out you’re farther away than when you’d first started. He’s holding back. The trick is Administration thinks we’re – I’m – making progress.”

  “Any . . . any word of Jack?” I asked, though I knew I shouldn’t have. Three months ago, Jack Stranahan, my eyes and ears on the first floor, had up and vanished. I was ready for the worst, but I’d already accepted it. In fact, I had a candle nub to show for Jack’s funeral. But Bobby never heard me, and I let it go.

  “How’s April?” Bobby asked. “Is she okay?”

  April had taken up with Mario Kaepernick, one of the whiz kids working with DEAD – Drone Engineering and Development, you remember. Not only that, she’d started hanging around with the some of the girls in the Bitch Clique – and that by invitation. That was because all the pretty girls here at Long Wait Prison knew the only way to get to the best-looking guy, Mario, was through his girlfriend. I’d told April as much, that she wasn’t Bitch Clique material by any stretch of the imagination, and I warned her she’d get hurt soon enough. And when that happened, she’d come running back to Bobby and me.

  I nodded. “She’s not on kitchen duty anymore. But I see her from time to time. They got her up on seventh doing odds and ends. And I got eyes on her – every now and then.”

  “Well, see, that’s what I wanted to ask you and Elton about, Shorty,” Bobby whispered. And he glanced over at Elton Peacock, then back at me. “I need something from the seventh floor. I need schematics, math, research data – everything coming out of DEAD.”

  “Monitor-city, dude,” Elton said. “They’ll get eyes on us before we even make a move.”

  “And there isn’t a filet mignon tender enough to get our hooves through that door, Bobby,” I said. “And if you’re thinking about getting April involved —”

  “Why would you assume I’d drag April into this?” Bobby shot back.

  “Why would you want DEAD stuff anyway?” I asked. “I mean, if you need it for ECPAP – and I’m sure a genius like you can find a way to make that case – you could just ask for permission. So, I repeat my first question: Why do you want access to DEAD?”

  “Alright. I’ll just lay it all out. DEAD will be launching prototype droids in about two months. Nothing fancy. Just some janitorial devices. I need to know how they work.”

  Elton nodded like a donkey and rolled his hand forward over and over again. I watched him do it, thought he looked like an imbecile, and then I realized some things were going on behind that boy’s eyes he hadn’t told me about. Not that I expected to know everything around here. But I felt suddenly left out. “Elton?” I said. “You know about this?”

  “Like Bobby said,” Elton whispered, getting in real close to me. “Nothing fancy. I know about the Dust Robot, the Mobile Mopper, and the Clog Droid – you know, for the plumbing. All experimental at this stage.”

  So I humored the boy, and I leaned forward and whispered, “If you know anything else a container of Ben and Jerry’s wouldn’t help ice pick away from your apparent sub-zero brain freeze, I’d be glad to do business.” I knew Elton wasn’t the kind to play for favors and kickbacks – whatever reasons he had for getting into other people’s business was his business – but that’s how I operated around here. And he got the picture.

  “I don’t know everything,” he whispered. “But, as a member of SNUPE, I can tell you that—”

  “SNUPE?” I said. I could hardly believe it. Elton had been hiding stuff from me. But I reminded myself that that’s what people who snooped did, and I smiled. Surveillance Network Performance Engineering had arrived at Long Wait the same day DEAD had. And most of those guys and girls working up there on seventh pretty much kept to themselves. Okay, I got it.

  “Elton’s been with SNUPE the moment they set up shop here, Shorty,” Bobby whispered. “For a guy who prides himself on keeping his nose to the ground, you’ve sure missed this trail.”

  That caught Elton by surprise, and he looked at Bobby sideways and adjusted his overlong tie. “Well, I was going to tell you guys all about that, but—”

  “Can you get what I’m looking for?” Bobby whispered. “Schematics, research data – all that?”

  And if Elton Peacock wasn't serious enough already – you just have to know that a small kid like that made people laugh when he tried to act like an adult �
�� he went full tilt when he put his chin in the air and stroked the beard he might have in another ten years. And he whispered even quieter than normal, “SNUPE is all about trying to break into DEAD. That’s one of the games we play up there on the seventh floor. DEAD has got one heck of a firewall team fighting us. But, yes – I think I can double my efforts.”

  Elton was good to his word. He did double his efforts, working day and night trying to hack into DEAD’s databases. It cost me a small fortune in Ben and Jerry’s to keep him going. Bobby acted like he was hopeful, and Elton got the best dessert espionage could buy.

  But Elton Peacock, as bright and as intelligent as that kid was, never hacked his way into DEAD. Not that I ever found out. And Bobby never said another word about it. In fact, it struck me that he really didn’t give a crap one way or the other about Elton’s success.

  A long time after that little meeting, I found out something else, something that could have changed my relationship with Bobby Griffin forever. Bobby had a new tablet in his chest pocket that day, and Administration had seen and heard every word Elton, Bobby, and I had said to one another. I also learned that Bobby had known all along that Elton and SNUPE had been trying to hack into DEAD’s databases. How he found out remains a mystery to me. But I do know this: Bobby needed to earn the complete trust of Long Wait’s Administration, and earn it he did – and with flying colors. What I didn’t know was that, from that day forward, Administration kept their eyes on Elton and me and kept an even closer eye on everyone working on the DEAD SNUPE projects.

  I thank God that I didn’t find out until years later about what Bobby had done that day. Had I known at the time, religion or no religion, I would have poisoned that boy. And I would have taken a long time doing it. But I will say it here and now: Bobby had a danged good reason for doing what he did.

  Chapter Seven

  Maybe now is as good a time as any to tell you about the darker side of Long Wait which, to some, isn’t too terribly dark. But I guess your point of view about what goes on here in the half-light depends on whether you’re the one holding the flashlight or whether you’re the one standing in the dark. I’ll be honest. It’s not always easy to tell who’s doing who here at Long Wait Prison, and I’m not lying when I say that it’s not always the teachers who are to blame.

  I guess I’ve just gotten used to seeing it. Those fine-looking teenage girls on the prowl looking for those single male teachers who aren’t more than ten years older than they are. Maybe those girls are looking for better grades, favors, or maybe they’re looking for something to brag about. And then there are those athletic guys who find little sport in catching the attention of the older women, ladies in their thirties and forties with advanced skills in exercise, walking in stilettos, and wearing short skirts. Some of the older women are single, or they’ve been married too long. Or maybe their husbands just refuse to go the Nashville Male Medical Clinic because, after all, what man is going to admit he doesn’t have it anymore? Doesn’t matter. Teachers and kids get together, either in the forest in the terrarium, in a broom closet, sometimes under the teacher’s desk, or maybe there’s a rendezvous in one of the kids’ rooms after the teacher pays someone to look the other way. It’s consensual, and nobody really gives it a second thought. They all know what they’re doing.

  But then there’s the truly dark side of Long Wait. And that side of Long Wait came into dim light in 2037, three years after Bobby Griffin arrived. By that time, a lot of things had changed. First, everyone had tablets, tablets that did just about everything except let us communicate with anybody on the outside. Second, Bobby’s work on his Enhanced Crime Proclivity Assessment Program (ECPAP), had taken off unexpectedly due to the sudden intervention of Override. It seems that Override – whoever he was – allowed Bobby to upgrade ECPAP, but only partially so, to include health data on sexual activity, including averages of that data relative to normal and deviant patterns of sex. What did that mean in real life? It meant that ECPAP could know anything about anybody, everything from a dirty thought to sex with a lover to an act of rape. And given ECPAP’s GPS interface, not only could it name your partner and whether or not he or she was consenting, it could pinpoint the exact location the deed took place. You think that’s bad? Just wait until you read this.

  If you’d been fantasizing about a girl, and that girl knew it or even saw you ogling her, ECPAP knew it, too. Why? Because it knew all of the body data relative to feelings and body functions about sex and anything leading up to the commission of the act which included imaginative foreplay between two people. And ECPAP/HIRAD knew all that from compilations of data secretly taken from Americans and stored for the last thirty years. But Bobby’s program did something else, too. It interpreted the sex data – whether historical or live – with onscreen commentary, and it did so for the benefit of the person auditing the acts. If someone gasped, ECPAP said so. If someone breathed hard, became afraid of discovery, felt guilt, was drugged or drunk, was unconscious, screamed, moaned, had one or more real or fake orgasms, if someone enjoyed his or her encounter or hated it, ECPAP could tell the story. The program could do that because, if your cell phone or tablet had been on during your deed, ECPAP grabbed the audio and video. If your phone had been off during that time, ECPAP could turn it on. At least that’s what Bobby said. And get this: Bobby also told me that ECPAP would never let Bobby hear or see anything sensitive. I don’t know why, but it blocked him from seeing what it considered to be lewd and immoral. I know. I can’t figure that out, either. But that’s exactly what ECPAP told him.

  Quite an advancement for ECPAP. Now it could be used to detect sexual crime. But Bobby had also learned that Override controlled the government’s knowledge of ECPAP’s progress by sending false but hopeful reports of advancements and bugs – and that included the recent HIRAD sex data information dumps into ECPAP. Heady stuff at the time, all of this. But, as it turned out later, this was only a prelude of much bigger things to come. This new ECPAP upgrade wouldn’t have meant a thing to us if it hadn’t been for Elton Peacock. And this, I think, is one of the stranger things to have occurred here at Long Wait Prison up until this time.

  Elton, so he insisted, had happened upon the password for the in-house tablet network quite by accident. How he found it, he never said. When Bobby and I pressed him about it, he clammed up, preferring instead to keep that information to himself. But what he did tell us made Bobby nearly jump out of his skin. Me? I got the chills. Elton said he had gotten the password to the tablet network at exactly the same time Override had granted Bobby access to HIRAD’s sex data.

  I know. It makes my head spin, too. Let me just say that, after Override had decided to be generous with Bobby, all Bobby and Elton had to do was enter a person’s name into the program. In less than fifteen seconds, ECPAP would tell them everything they wanted to know about the very private affairs of anyone who’d been tablet monitored over the last three decades. If we wanted to know who, what, when, where, why, and for how long, we could find out. Why Bobby let me in on all of this, I hadn’t a clue. But I found out soon enough.

  I guess rape is rape any way you look at it. And that’s the dark side here at Long Wait I want to tell you about. This wasn’t about teachers and underage kids getting together because they were bored. Nothing like that. Until the day Elton told us about what was happening on the north end of the first floor – he’d been watching the construction of a third entrance without telling us – we had no idea.

  It was late one evening. We’d just finished a game of Farkle. Elton dropped all the dice into its little cup, stuck the thing into a cloth bag, and said, “Oooh,” and he looked at his tablet. “I wonder who’s visiting the prison tonight?” And he picked up his tablet. By now, Elton and SNUPE had eyes and ears on just about every part of the building except Administration. Elton had even hacked into the new Clog Droid, DEAD’s much-celebrated prototype plumber. Whatever that robot saw and heard, he saw and heard. Don’t ask me how Elton did
all that without Administration’s monitors catching on.

  “Who’s visiting?” I said. “Like, we’re a hotel now?”

  Elton tapped a few times on his tablet and said, “Yep. There he is. Congressman Bart Holman. Fifth time for that guy.”

  Bobby and I leaned over and looked. We could hardly believe it. Three well-dressed men, each carrying a small overnight bag, were being led down the hall by Boney Burlison. And we could hear them all talking.

  “What’s with the camera angle?” Bobby said. “Why am I watching this like I’m lying on the floor?”

  “Waist-level was as high as the Clog Droid could reach when he installed the mini micro cameras,” Elton said.

  “How were you able to —?” I started to ask.

  “Wasn’t hard,” Elton said. “The trick was getting the cameras into the wall just below the chair rail. Let’s see who these guys are sleeping with tonight.” He touched his tablet, brought up a camera interface, and had us looking down the other end of the hall. “Three girls from the Bitch Clique,” he said. “Tammy, Claire, and I don’t know the other one.”

  And that’s when my guts started to hurt. Three girls. Three terrible girls, all of them dressed in negligees and drugged out their minds, came wobbling down the hall with the help of three Boney guards. They lined up, Congressman Bart Holman gave each girl a grope of sorts, and they all disappeared into a room together.

  And then Elton Peacock, who seemed to know more about ECPAP than Bobby did at the moment, said, “Watch this.” And he brought up ECPAP on his tablet. “The congressman always puts his smartphone on the end table. A real thinker, this guy.” After a minute or two, the congressman’s smartphone ID’d everyone in the room. Then it analyzed everyone’s medical data but it went a step further. ECPAP read the drug fingerprint in the girls’ bodies, calculated the dosage, named the manufacturer, and identified the lot number to within thirty-nine percent accuracy. And it did it all based on a million and one variables taken from thirty years’ worth of analyzed data on the particular drug and the human responses relevant to the use of the drug in question.