"Kit Reed - On The Penal Colony" - читать интересную книгу автора (Reed Kit)

profit."

If you find this. When you read this. Know this. Everything I've done I did for
Joanna. And Quiven. Because of what happened to them when the only wrong thing
they did was fall in love.

See, when the screws turn us out of the rack and march the work details out four
hours before Old Arkham Village opens, nobody cares who walks next to who in the
double line. Hard-timers, all of us, groggy from the pills, belching oatmeal and
miserable in our pointed shoes and scratchy linsey woolsey period costumes,
shambling like the dead.

The screws are zoned out on these grim mornings; hung over from the orgy and
bitter about being stuck on the predawn shift. Nobody notices if you're marching
with guys from your tier or sidling closer to the women in the foggy dawn, and
if you do collide with her -- Oh, Gemma...if Quiven collides with Joanna! -- if
you mutter to each other under cover of the guards' shouting and get to know
each other, everybody thinks what you to say to each other leads to zilch. The
vise of a maximum security prison is too tight for love.

But Quiven got close to Joanna and fell in love anyway.

"Mommy, that lady doesn't like me."

"Of course she does, dear. It's her job."

"Then why is she crying?"

"Shut up. Shut up and eat your horehound drops."

I DIDN'T EVEN SEE IT happening; I was conditioned to march on, like Pavlov's
dogs or the chicken that dances on the electrified turntable, softshoe like
crazy to keep from getting shocked. Want to break and run? Want to kill and
burn? Light some weed or relieve yourself behind a tree? Forget it. We look free
to you, but we are not. Hidden by the costumes, there are the anklets, with an
extra added incentive for us. Under the shirts and leather jerkins, we wear the
belts.

Electronic control. Now and ever. Day and night. We prisoners are reined in
tight. We eat rotten meat and weevily bread and belch misery and resentment; we
crawl out of boxes on these dank mornings and break rocks before we don our
costumes for the Early American Card Shoppe or tickety-boo little Scrimshaw
Junction, folding our hands underneath leather aprons and putting on prim
Colonial smiles. But what do you tourists care?

We look all right to you.
"And to keep order we give them the illusion of rehabilitation. That they are
learning new careers. Movement is not action, but we make them think it is. A
true belief in movement can prevent action," Bullfinch Warden says.