Semple stared back at the guard from her side of the glass. Revulsion and slow-burning anger were a given, but she was all too well aware of the pointlessness of any demonstration. Confrontation with a system as convoluted and tangled as the Necropolis City Jail would amount to issuing an open invitation to institutional violence. Semple, once she was past the first shock of arrest and incarceration, had resolved to roll with the absurdities of the program until she had a handle on her new surroundings. After all, didn’t she preside over a place not dissimilar to this back home in her own environment? And wasn’t the primary operating rule that prisoners never be allowed to win a point?
It wasn’t as though she’d invented the concept for herself, either. She had discovered it during her mortal time on Earth. She had been arrested twice during her earthly sojourn; once in Bakersfield, California, for disturbing the peace, and once in Louisville, Kentucky, for lewd vagrancy. Each incarceration had been the unfortunate climax of a protracted debauch with the local Victrola cowboys. Whenever she managed to dislodge Aimee from the body for a few days, the sheer relief was more than enough to send her on a full-bore, gin-on-the-rocks razzle, and on this pair of occasions the razzle had waxed rowdy enough to attract the heat. The prisoner never wins, she learned that in those jails, and Semple could only conclude that all prisons operated in much the same manner on either side of the veil.
She had, however, observed that nothing operated very well in the Necropolis City Jail, and this gave her hope that she’d eventually be able to organize her way out. She had organized her way out before, in both Bakersfield and Louisville. The first time, in Bakersfield, she had initially thrown conscious control back to Aimee, but Aimee had proved totally useless. Her sibling had become so horrified by the experience of waking in a filthy drunk tank surrounded by prostitutes, shoplifters, and madwomen that she’d been effectively paralyzed. Semple had been forced to resume control and deal with it. In Kentucky, she hadn’t bothered to rouse Aimee, she’d simply gone ahead and coped. Of course, she’d had the not insubstantial cash resource of the Aimee Semple McPherson Ministry, Inc., at her disposal and found that cash made freedom reasonably accessible. All she had in Necropolis was wit, sex, and intelligence. On the other hand, in Bakersfield and Louisville she had to worry about keeping the entire incident hushed up. All she wanted here was out. They could write her up in the fucking Necropolis tabloid press and she wouldn’t care. She wouldn’t even be able to read it.
On each of the two occasions she’d been busted on Earth, she’d had the advantage of being emotionally buffered by a considerable quantity of alcohol. In Necropolis, she was without any such comfort cushion. When she was first brought in by the two helmet-head cops, she had been in a state of nervous disorientation. She had tried to calm herself, but her surroundings had rushed by her like an unreal and threatening blur, moving too fast for reflection or even a deep breath. As time passed, however, human adaptability kicked in, and when she was neither murdered nor gang-raped she began to regain her objectivity. Now, as she faced the guard behind the protective glass of the booth, she was able to look at the situation with almost dispassionate detachment.
She lifted up her cuffed wrist with the slow zombie resignation that was considered appropriate inmate behavior. A steel ID tag, stamped with a row of unreadable hieroglyphics, dangled from the narrow canvas strap that had been locked around her right wrist when she’d first been brought in. This tag was the key to her existence in the system. In many respects, it counted for more than her physical body. A second, similar band had also been locked around her left wrist, but that one carried no tag. All of the prisoners wore these wristbands. They seemed to serve a double purpose. They dog-tagged the inmates’ identity and they could be hooked together by their metal clasps, like instant manacles, whenever the guards decided that hands and arms needed to be immobilized. Right at that moment her hands were free, though, and she moved her wrist slightly so the ID tag swung like a hypnotist’s pendulum in front of the guard in the booth.
“This is all they gave me.”
The guard creaked around in her swivel chair and peered balefully at the postcard-sized monochrome screen of her pneumatic computer. “The tag has to be cross-indexed with your personal barcode before I can allow you to pass. That’s regulations.”
Semple sighed. She had been through this seemingly insurmountable paradox some six or seven times already. The jailhouse computers had no provision in their programming for an inmate with no barcode, and the human guards that tended them were apparently incapable of improvisation or intelligent flexibility. Each time the matter came up, the exchange quickly turned into a seemingly infinite loop. It would begin with Semple stating the obvious. “I already told you, I don’t have a barcode. I wouldn’t be here if I had a barcode. That was why I was arrested in the first place. Because I didn’t have a barcode.”
The guard would then take the position that the obvious was impossible. “You have to have a barcode. If your inmate ID can’t be cross-indexed with a barcode, the computer won’t issue the paperwork, and if I don’t have the paperwork, I can’t clear your transfer.”
“So don’t clear my transfer. I don’t care. Send me back to the lockup. It’s all the same to me.” Semple might have been biding her time, and handling the absurdities of the Necropolis bureaucracy with absolute passivity, but every now and then she allowed herself a slight exasperated edge. Small rebellions were vital to the retention of sanity.
The guard shook her head. “I can’t readmit you to population. Your transfer’s on the computer.”
“So what do we do? Am I supposed to stand here, holding up the line for the rest of time? Maybe you should just let me go, then I won’t be fouling up the system.”
Semple realized that this time she might have gone a little too far. The guard’s eyes narrowed dangerously, enough for hairline cracks to appear in her makeup. The woman wore the same daubed-on cosmetics as everyone else in Necropolis, except, of course, the inmates of its prisons, who were deprived of everything save the pair of wristbands and a short cotton kilt, stamped with the winged ankh symbol of Anubis. This particular guard was by far the ugliest that Semple had encountered since the start of her incarceration. Her Cleopatra paint job was so thick and clumsily applied that it turned her already near-bestial features into the face of a malignant and threatening clown. “Porcine” was not a word that Semple used too frequently, but in this woman’s case it was too apt to pass over.
The guard weighed easily four hundred pounds, and Semple judged that she couldn’t have stood more than five feet two in her sandaled feet. She had also, for some reason Semple didn’t care to imagine, completely shaved her head. The naked skull added an edge of perverse brutality to the mountainous flab, but in Semple’s estimation the most charmless features were the woman’s vast and pendulous breasts. For someone so grossly overweight, the universal Necropolis fashion of going topless was grotesquely unsuitable, and her tits hung well past the waistband of her uniform skirt. Where most of the inhabitants of Necropolis had smooth olive skin, the guard’s was pig-pink and blotchy, mottled with pimples and areas of chicken flesh. Semple could only assume that she was either some obese and unhappy construct or the result of an unfortunate misfire in the re-creation process.