Jailer Blok

CZ: that’s what my jailer Blok calls me. He always lingers over the ‘C’ when he pronounces my name, a long open vowel sound: ‘Cee-Zed’. I’ve grown quite fond of his deep-throated voice echoing outside my cell door each day. It’s about the only proof I have that I exist and that I am still part of the human race. Blok doesn’t like long words or long conversations. It only took him a few seconds to shorten my official prisoner identification tag “CZS1815” (“Captive Zeb Solitanu 1815”), to something more manageable. “CZ” is easier to remember.

Since I have been locked up, jailer Blok has become an essential and irreplaceable part of my existence. I don’t think that I could have survived without him. It’s not just because he regularly provides me with food and water. An android could quite easily have performed that task. The real reason why Blok is so important is that he speaks to me twice a day, first thing in the morning and then later in the evening. These fleeting conversations, despite their utter banality and intellectual vacuousness, are the only means that I possess of staying human. I think that I would literally have descended into madness without him. You cannot appreciate what it is like living alone in a society of androids until you have experienced it yourself. It is like being cut off from your inner soul. The absence of human conversation gradually destroys your sense of identity. Jailer Blok’s simplistic and often brutal words allowed me to cling by my fingernails to my humanity.

He is also by accident my only source of information about the outside world. Blok’s life is in truth hardly better than mine. He lives in his jailer’s quarters not far from my own cell. The only difference between me and him is that on certain days he is allowed to walk around the local area for exercise purposes. He is forced to wear an electronic tag, so he knows that any attempt to escape would be pointless. Were he to stray too far away, he would immediately be eliminated. These occasional excursions around the local vicinity give him an insight into what’s going on in SpirianA.

Blok doesn’t mince his words. He tells me exactly what he thinks about things. This is precisely what is so appealing about him. All the androids have been trained to speak in a politely colourless language. It’s their way of appearing civilised and friendly. Their language is always courteous and respectful. They do not raise their voice. They don’t get angry. They have been trained never to get excited about anything. It is a marvellously successful linguistic smokescreen that camouflages their real intent.

Jailer Blok brutally disrupts this endless flow of well-mannered and meaningless words with his explosive pent-up feelings. I find it so refreshing. What is strange though, is that I think that the authorities have tacitly encouraged him to do so. They are not worried about Blok. However agitated he becomes, they are confident that in the end he will toe the line. Ultimately, he is of little interest to them. They are much more concerned about my reaction to his words. It’s me that they’re monitoring closely, not Blok.

I had thought that my life was difficult enough in Globopolis when the Anticlocks were in charge.  Now that Spirian Altra has taken over and destroyed the Anticlockwise Empire, it’s much more extreme. A society controlled by artificial intelligence brooks no compromise. Efficiency drives everything. Any deviation from the norm is met with an iron fist. Death is commonplace. AIs have a very low opinion of human beings.

The world looks different when you’re locked up permanently behind four walls in solitary confinement. I finally understood what the word ‘prisoner’ meant. No access to the outside world changes your perspective on life. My entire universe comprises four walls, a bed, a wooden chair and table, a toilet and a wash hand basin. Blok has informed me how lucky I am though, compared to other prisoners. I have access to daylight. There is a small rectangular opening in the ceiling of my cell that opens up to the outside world. The light shines through during the day, the stars send shards of pale luminosity at night, the rain flows through the roof occasionally, and the muffled sounds of voices and motorised vehicles nourish my soul with disembodied vestiges of humanity. Other prisoners live in total darkness deprived of everything, removed from all sense of humanity. In these circumstances my mind and body would wither away and die.

Very early on, I realised that I needed to exercise my body regularly in order to survive. I’m not a fitness freak but I have always known that the only way to achieve a sound mind is through a healthy body. When Blok discovered that I was interested in keeping fit, he advised me on a whole range of exercises that I could carry out in my cell without any equipment. This shared interest in exercise created another bond between myself and Blok.

At the beginning of my imprisonment, I had prowled around like a caged animal. I’m calmer now, more in control of myself. Once I came to the conclusion that there was no hope of escape, a weight was lifted from my shoulders. That realisation took time to sink in. I had searched in every nook and cranny of my cell for a possible way out, but there was none. Blok had repeatedly growled at me one of his favourite catchphrases: ‘Robots don’t make mistakes.’ It wasn’t just that my physical environment was impenetrably watertight, fireproof and bulletproof. More telling was Blok’s insistence that there were countless hidden surveillance cameras that were watching my every move. There was no getting away from Spirian Altra’s relentless gaze. My physical presence could not bypass the security environment in which I was trapped.

I had to find another way of coming to terms with my predicament.

© Zeb Solitanu

Zeb Solitanu sketch by Jill

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