"Orientation"
The flanking UV guards grabbed Green’s arms and half-dragged, half-shoved him from the reception chamber. With the center guard, who seemed to outrank his cohorts, bringing up the rear, they made a pathetic procession of four down various drab, stony corridors. Green committed the entire layout to memory – his entire past until four months ago may be gone, but in his time awaiting trial he’d found he possessed an uncanny knack for retention and recall. If he ever did regain his past, it would probably come not in a trickle but in a flood.
They turned a corner and stopped at a metal door. The ranking guard stepped up and the door slid into the wall. The guards removed John Doe’s restraints and shoved him through the doorway. As the door closed again, Green looked around at the new room.
It was as gray as the rest of the place, twenty feet by twenty and two stories high. Windows lined the top half of the room, but they weren’t the most salient feature. No, most striking were the six other prisoners, all of whom looked at him. On a bench in one corner, two Indigos sat hunched together. A Red leaned against the wall near them, with an Orange opposite him. A Violet of rather high frequency that bordered on UV stood in the middle of the room, almost challenging John Doe with the crossing of his arms.
“Just what we need,” the Violet said, his booming voice echoing in the small room, “another initial.” Green was confused as to exactly what he meant. The last prisoner, a Green, came over to him, though he stayed more or less to one wall to avoid the Violet. He was the lightest shade of their color John Doe had ever seen.
“Celadon,” the other Green said, sticking out his hand. John Doe shook it.
“John,” he answered. He left off the Doe, seeing no need to broadcast personal information, not that he wasn’t already infamous. “What did he mean calling me an initial?”
“Oh, never mind that,” Celadon said, making a dismissive gesture. “It’s just intimidation.”
“I didn’t ask his intention,” John said, settling into the abbreviated name. “I asked what he meant.”
Celadon was nonplussed, but the Violet had no problem reading him and took a few steps forward.
“Have you been living underground, or are you just not too bright? Because you’re the only light I ever met who didn’t know his rainbow array. You’re the G in Roy G. Biv. Three wimpy low-freak colors, three on the high side, and Greens in the middle without the guts to pick a side.”
The allegation of gutlessness pierced John like an icicle. He stepped forward so he was toe-to-toe with the Violet. “Never let me hear you call another Green gutless, you UV wannabe, because you will be proven wrong. Trust me on that.”
“Yeah, we’re more like moderates,” Celadon added from off to the side. “The truth is rarely just black and white, you know.” John and the Violet both shot the pale Green dirty glances. Celadon backed away, his hands raised palms-outward.
John was about to turn back to the Violet when the door opened again. This time it wasn’t a single prisoner but three that were ushered in. They were a Blue and two Yellows, giving the group at least one of each rainbow color. He wondered if that were not a coincidence, if perhaps part of imprisonment entailed fusing them back into white light. John shuddered at the thought.
“Welcome,” came a voice from surround speakers. The ten prisoners looked around and then up. Ultraviolet guards ringed the room behind the windows. One, so much darker than the rest that he might have been born inside a black hole, stood before a microphone. “This is the Borealis Detention Center, and I am Warden Welles.”
There were murmurs and sotto voce comments, but no one dared say anything loud enough to be attributable to them. The warden removed the microphone and started to walk around the perimeter; the guards matched him in unison so that the entire group seemed like a ring being turned.
“Every convict who enters this facility has no doubt endured hardships,” the warden continued. “It is not the intention of me or my staff to add to these, and we certainly do not wish to make our own lives more difficult, but know that we will if necessary. We have a zero-tolerance policy for trouble. There are no small rules, and whenever even a single one is broken there will be consequences.”
Welles stopped in the center of the wall opposite his original position.
“I have overseen eleven prisons in thirty-two years, so I know inmates can suffer lapses of judgment when it comes to following rules. To show you we here at Borealis mean what we say, the consequences will not be limited to one prisoner but to two. Each of you will be fused with another; where one goes, the other follows. This process cannot be reversed except via prism, which can only take White light, so you are joined until we say otherwise. You may go ahead and choose your cellmates.”
John looked around. He hated the thought of tying his movements to someone else, so it wasn’t a matter of finding the most desirable candidate but rather the least undesirable. As he might have expected, the Indigos and the Yellows immediately paired with their own color. The Red and Orange stood by each other, and the Blue partnered with the Violet. Celadon came over to John.
“Oh,” Warden Welles said almost as an afterthought, “there will be no same-color pairs and no repetition of color combination.”
John did some quick mental computations and turned to Celadon. “Hook up with an Indigo.”
“I was going to ask a Yellow,” the pale Green replied.
“Do what I ask, please,” John said. Celadon seemed to reflect on the nature of his new friendship, nodded, and went off to the high-frequency pair. John watched one of the Yellows approach the Violet, who took him as his cellmate. The other Yellow went toward the Blue, but John stepped in first. The second Yellow had to settle for the Indigo Celadon hadn’t paired with.
“Excellent,” said the warden. “I can see we’re all going to get along quite nicely.” John didn’t see that. In fact, he would have bet serious money things would not go smoothly at all. As if to prove him right, he was crudely nudged from behind. John turned to see the Violet sneering back at him.
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