The English Cafe

by Adrian Choong

This is part 2 of The Prisoners.

Hundreds of years passed. The missives and spare parts coming from the city became less frequent. Finally they stopped altogether; I was unperturbed as the current store would last for a few millenia; my simple gaoler’s programming was unconcerned with happenings beyond my immediate responsibilities.

But strangely apparelled human visitors began to appear at the vault entrance to plead for arbitration and judgement on their seemingly intractible problems. I think that my golden chassis and the badges of authority I wore attracted the pilgrims. I rarely entertained their requests. If, however, they caught me while I did my yearly rounds in the garden, I would respond by a simple search-match with the extensive case histories in my vault computer’s storage. This elementary act was always met with astonishment and great appreciation, as I had become the Chief Justice.

I counted down another group of centuries. Two things reduced : one was the group of human petitioners and two, the clearing of the garden. The vault systems started to wear out. One of the cells, the hammerhead’s, had a leaking liquid nitrogen valve which needed replacement. Requests to the city for spares went unheeded, so I set out once again in the fourth millenia of my watch.

Beyond comprehension was the complete disappearance of the city (when it fell, I couldn’t tell). The enormous orchard which I had carefully tended was the sole remaining feature in a barren landscape. A small human community had grown up around it, feeding on the sweet fruit from the trees, which by this time were massive, and tended extensive flora. They guarded the glade with weapons and fortifications that were primitive but dangerous nonetheless. This time the humans were in awe of my golden construction, badges and decorations, as though… The suggestion of my divinity seemed preposterous.

I could not be less concerned about them, my programming did not allow me to be sidetracked. I returned to the vault and repaired the nitrogen valve as best I could. It would continue to leak and necessitate a higher rate of maintenance than I was accustomed.

I began to wear out too. I no longer took hundred-year naps as scheduled, but sometimes I found myself unconscious, forced into standby mode out of the necessity of preserving my parts. I lacked conversation and my voice box rusted. My only other partner was the dumb vault computer, who I found was a poor conversationalist as he could only recite from memory and not from conjecture.

One century, I awoke to find the vault door had been knocked ajar by some massive impact. I wondered at this for it was designed to be impenetrable to prevent a jailbreak. Dusty brown leaves covered the floor of the vault. I had been asleep for over five hundred years, much more than normal. I realised the leaky nitrogen valve of the hammerhead’s cell had finally failed, and its unfortunate occupant was now dead, a dessicated fish-shaped husk of skin and bones. Whether my prolonged sleep and the failed cell were due to the massive impact, I did not know. The other occupants were none the worse for wear, although their sleeping pods were covered in a thick layer of dust. The external cameras were not working again. Opening the vault doors fully, I found a blasted landscape. Harsh sunlight, unfiltered by foliage, shone down on the brown, rocky vista. The Garden was gone, the holes in the ground bore indication that the millenia-old trees had either been razed or uprooted and carried off. The facade of the mausoleum was scarred, evidence of some primitive but terrible weaponry having been used in a battle nearby. The marble columns and blocks had all but disappeared, worn down into boulders that looked unremarkably like any other part of the landscape. Obviously some final war had occurred here, and now there was nothing left.

Returning to the jail-vault, my sole concern was how to sustain the other four occupants through the remaining one-and-a half millenia until the completion of their sentence. I cleaned the vault and welded its doors shut from the inside. I supposed that my duty to tend the Garden had been discharged since it no longer existed. I did my best to ensure the survival of the remaining four prisoners. Ironically the cell that broke down provided vital parts for the sustenance of the others. I resolved not to sleep lest another disaster occur, and kept myself occupied by talking to the dumb computer, which eventually developed a sense of sarcastic wit, although its conversation tended towards archaic stories. I called the computer Solomon, after an ancient judge in once of the computer’s preferred stories, and for want of a better name.

It was 7,103 years to the day when the prisoners were entombed. Their sentence was served, and I prepared the chamber for re-animation. I squeaked about the vault, turning on the lights and warming up the victuals that would be the ex-convicts’ first meal since their incarceration here. My multiple appendages had more or less failed, never having designed to endure more than a thousand years of continuous wakefulness, but my simpler arm-rods still worked and would suffice.

With a slithering thud, I shifted each occupant from its sleep chamber and into their land-suits. These suits allowed the once-vicious fish to move on land and would sustain them out of the water. The judges of old were nothing if not merciful – once you had served your sentence you would be supplied with everything you needed to function as members of society.

One by one, the sharks awoke. They stared at me with baleful eyes and I wondered whether seven thousand years of psychiatric treatment was sufficient to transform these killers. Opening my rusty voice box, I intoned, “as servant of the supreme court I am charged to inform you that your sentence is now served. I am charged to inform you that you are hereby released from this facility. And now a message from the Chief Justice: May you have come through this sentence changed and remorseful for your past misdeeds and I exhort you to obey the law henceforth”. Hearing no reply, I continued with my intonation as required by state law, “To facilitate your re-integration into society, you may approach any of our accomodation and employment offices”.

The sharks chuckled. The largest one, the mako shark, replied in a deep, gravelly voice, “Thank you for your faithful service, little one, although I would not presume that reintegration would be such a simple affair after some seven millenia”.

He looked to the empty cell on the right. “What has happened to our companion?” I explained meekly that through my negligence, the hammerhead had not survived.

“That is unfortunate, but nothing can be done now.” Mako said, “Open the doors and let us look upon this world in which we have earned our freedom”.

I opened the doors. Beyond the bright doorway was a shanty town, surrounded by a blasted, blighted landscape. A few strangely dressed humans, scrawny and furtive, scrambled away from the sudden movement of the door. They seemed little more than savages. The sharks strode out into the blazing sunlight, their land-suits gleaming, and humming with power as their mechanical legs carried them out of the cave. The four sharks looked around in silence, on a landscape at once desolate and yet brimming with potential. Mako looked back at me.

“What will you do now, little one?” he asked.

“My charge is completed,” I replied, “I will report to the Justice System for my next assignment.”

Mako looked around, and laughed. “Friend,” he chucked, “come and see. I think it wouldn’t be wrong to say, that YOU are all that remains of our civilisation, and hence you ARE the Justice System.”

This ends my record of the seven-thousand year purgatory of the five most dangerous criminals of my generation. Thus begins the History of the four Heroes, and of me, the Golden Judge of many marvels, who as it is variously claimed, dispensed justice and wisdom together with Solomon the Wise. We were preserved by a history which despised us and forgot about us, and reawakened as the new champions of a world in need. But as to our story from this point, it is recorded in a hundred different books that were written of our exploits. So ends this recount.

by Adrian Choong

This is part 1 of a short story contributed by the author to City College. He is a Staff Officer with Mindef, and is extremely creative with his time.

I was a small warden robot charged with carrying out the sentence of five notorious criminals. The criminals were intelligent, giant sharks of the most deadly varieties – three great whites, a mako and a hammerhead. They were charged with the most heinous, violent crimes : treason, manslaughter, felony theft, torture and blasphemy against the state. They were the most dangerous criminals of our generation, and for their crimes they were sentenced to seven thousand years in a cryogenic corrective penitentiary. Their one-of-a-kind prison would continually subject them to psychiatric therapy, a subliminal hypnosis to convict them of their crimes and re-shape their minds for the duration of their sentence. It was hoped this would make them repent of their ways.

In great fanfare and ceremony, they were wheeled into the underground cryogenic chamber on flat beds, sedated. I was charged with preparing them for cryogenic sleep, and to be their gaoler for the next seven millenia. As the criminals were wheeled in, I marveled at how large they were. I was smaller (foot-high) than their tail flukes, albeit with some useful appendages folded within me for the maintenance of the jail-vault. In their sedated state, they still looked powerful and dangerous, like quiescent, smoking volcanoes. To avoid accidental waking, I quickly set about the operation; connecting tubes of freezing fluid, cameras to computer screens and then the final buttons to activate the programme. I lowered myself into one of the sleep chambers, from which emanated a cool blue smoky glow. To my horror, I saw myself staring into a glazy, open eye of a female white shark. “Three, two, one…” I whispered as the valves kickstarted, and cold liquid sloshed in and a deep slumber deadened the chamber, they and me, an intermittent custodian that was programmed to watch.

The first thousand years passed quickly. I powered-down in between the maintenance periods but switched on every century to ensure the prisoners’ sleep-psychotraining continued unabated. Most of my time was spent on standby.

Midway through the second millenia, I felt something wrong at the first century watch. The activated prison doors opened with a mighty, struggling, shuddering creak to reveal overgrowth – vines, weeds – cleared through with my circular saw – and a lost cityscape that had been – opening now into an orchard, with tall, stately fruit trees – orderly rows, a field, tall grass. Behind me now is a small cave entrance snuggled in a jumble of broken marble columns and moss-covered blocks. With a beep from my remote, the vault doors locked and the last gleam from the cave disappeared, until I returned.

The Justice System was not far away, but the diminished towers of glass and gold suggested change. Over me, new, sleek police bots ran the skies and they too, marveled at the anachronistic wheels; at least my badge was familiar, and kept me recognised as a member. The Judge-King, a colossal robot set on a gilded throne, had to dig deep to find my record in their archives. He praised me for my faithfulness through the long years of service, and honoured me as a model servant despite my diminutive size. He pronounced me keeper of the Garden of Penitence, which was what my mausoleum and its orchard was now called. With that, plus a shiny new decoration and seal, I was sent back, exhorted to continue fulfilling my charge for the next four and a half thousand years. I sensed that I was the last of the Judge-King’s many concerns, and returned with little else save some spare parts for the jail vault.

As the keeper of the Garden I began to tend it, on top of my maintenance duties as warden. I mowed the lawn, and cleared the weeds yearly. The trees I did not touch. My circular saws wore out, which I replaced with diamond blades, courtesy of the city. Out of my own fancy, I started a small flower plot, for which I guiltily provided water from the vault’s condensers. I repaired the cameras and now had an external view of the vault. As for my prisoners, they were stable. I continued rotating their hypno-lessons, although how much they had been renewed by the continuous subliminal psycho-conditioning was indeterminate.