text: Twenty-three hundred days in hell is exactly what you’d think. Well, unless you anticipated screaming, and praying, and begging, and wailing and gnashing of teeth no...hell is nothing like the Old Testament. Hell is an eight-foot-tall, six-by-six cell. Three walls and a ceiling, all made of concrete. That fourth wall however, now I’m betting you anticipate “bars,” right? Seeing as I’ve described hell as a cell? Well here I am to burst your bubble ‘cause hell isn’t a cell per se. The fourth wall is just...open. Completely open to a four-story drop for me, even higher for the boys above me. And if you were to drop, you’d land and shatter your fucking femurs for one, but you’d land on the sandy bottom of a tall, dark, enclosed, circular building in the middle of goddamn nowhere. The floor of this place is about the size of a football field in all directions and in its center...in its heart. Is the Panopticon. I can still remember the metallic voice over the unseen speakers as we each awoke, drugged, in our cells. It started off with a factoid. The man who first proposed the idea of the Panopticon described it as “A mill for grinding rogues honest.” We were to be the, “First ever maximum-security inmates to be housed within the ULTIMATE STRUCTURE OF SURVEILLANCE!” Like we were supposed to be goddamn excited for it. Like they were selling us something that we should be chomping at the bit to buy. 360-degree view from the tower in the center with about 150 open cells surrounding. No human face though, scowling out at us from behind it’s dark, cold plexi-glass. No human faces EVER. See that was really the thing about hell. I hadn’t seen another human face since the moment that screeching, tinny, robotic voice woke me up to tell me what I’d won, twenty-three hundred days and counting, in hell. The point of the “open cell concept” as I like to call it, is this, we all assume we could be the one being monitored at any given time so now, we self-discipline. No need for bars when we’re met with a bone crushing fall and motion-activated machine guns mounted on every curve of that tower. No sir-e. We’ll be the good little boys our mechanical overlords know we’ll be, because we have no other fucking choice. Now how can a maximum-security prison operate without any human beings? Much like most things in this brave new, robotic world. Our three-square meals a day are delivered to us through a perfectly fucking sealed square hole in the wall and I know that it’s being delivered on a conveyor belt, assembled and maintained by machines because for the past 6 months my meals have been coming to me with the exact same mistakes, day-in-and day-out. If that doesn’t sound like a malfunctioning robot, electronic, or machine to you than you haven’t spent a lot of time depending on one. My breakfasts used to be nice and portioned off on the tray. The scrambled eggs had their square, the toast had his, and my orange slices had theirs. Now every single morning the eggs are no longer scrambled, they’re runny as hell and I hate runny. But what’s more is my orange slices are placed right in the center of that disgusting, thick soup o’ eggs. Like two orange, radioactive islands floating within a sea of yellow shit. And my dinners no longer include any meat, just the gravy for the meat. So, I’m just getting potatoes and steamed veggies every night for the past 6 months with nothing but the idea of meat. It used to be that once a month a palm-sized touch pad would come through the food slot and you could make selections on any malfunctions or problems you’d been experiencing under certain categories and then back through the slot it would go and within a day or so the problem would be resolved. So, once upon a time I could rectify these mistakes or at least be given the illusion of having a voice. But I haven’t seen a touch pad come through the wall in well over 3 years and I don’t expect I’ll be seeing one ever again. I mean my lunch no longer even comes at all but from the feedback I’ve gotten from the fine gentlemen around me, everybody’s lunch stopped coming about 2 years ago so a certain programed protocol has obviously kicked in. What we all want to know is what it means... Here’s what I think it means. The people running this place, the human beings meant to give mind to this machine of hell, are all gone. Something very, very bad happened out there in the world and we’re in here completely unsupervised, by man. But now we’re so dangerously supervised by the machines that this really is a hell, and we’ll all spending eternity in this place as more parts and pieces of it fall apart with no human beings coming to put it all back together again, and call the devil back to bed. Plus, the water has started to taste a little like battery acid. We figured out I want to say two-and-a-half years ago that we could call out to one another and have conversations without anything happening. The first guy to finally shriek out into the abyss was Bluie my neighbor. He’s a totally innocent man and one night right as I was finally beginning to drift off into my version of sleep, I hear the first human voice I’d heard since before my incarceration. It was Bluie. And Bluie yells out, “Aye, aye RoboCops! Why ain’t ya tuck us in no more!?” The silence that followed...whew! Could have heard the drip, drip, drip of a robot taking a gasoline piss a football field away. But then...nothing happened. I mean absolutely nothing happened for one minute, then two minutes, then seven. In the hour that followed the event that I’ve so affectionately named, “Bluie’s First Contact” it was truly as if we were in hell, yet this time, we were the demons. The screaming and shrieking, swearing and cursing, the absolute thunderous, bellowing shouts of rage and sound that erupted from all 150 inmates after Bluie’s First Contact was the most hell-ish thing I had ever known. Myself, I just yelled every horrible thing I had ever heard or thought of throughout the entire course of my life until I tasted blood in the back of my throat and no longer had any voice to speak with. But this ushered in great change. There were conversations for a few weeks. Men confessing, mostly men declaring innocence. Men sharing jokes, men telling stories of all the best and all the worst pussy they’d had before waking up in this place. We were a tribe. But with so many conversations happening all at once we couldn’t keep track of the fractures. The fissures, the silences. And soon there were indecipherable clicks with the tongue, and combinations of words which meant nothing. High and low shouts which gave away no inflection or intention. We all developed our own secret language to communicate with the men we really trusted. We’re split now, divided. Sound is all we have so we use it as secret forms of communication. The acoustics are fantastic in our Panopticon and so each level has developed their own secret means of communication so no other level can understand them. The highest level of cells, near the ceiling are rumored to still be receiving lunch, spring water to drink, and meat with dinner so of course it goes without saying that every level hates them. The bottom level, my level is rumored to have successfully gotten some of our boys out--escape. I know this is bullshit because several months back another guy, real quiet guy likes us to call him G, kicked his pillow right out the opening in his cell. You may have wondered how I knew the machine guns mounted on the Panopticon were motion-sensitive? At least three machine guns locked onto it and shot it as it was falling through the air, and completely eviscerated it once it hit ground. So began the escape rumors. We also know that if we come to close to the opening of our cells the machine guns lock onto us and follow our every move until we step back far enough. Once, I daggled a piece of cloth over the side and a machine gun fired and nearly blew my fucking hand off. What I’ve been trying to get my guys on this level to understand, is that there aren’t enough machine guns to handle all of us. If only we conducted more “experiments” really figured out the way they work, even if just one of us could escape that one could go find out what happened to the world. Bring help. But Bluie says this is part of the Panopticon. This is how we’re meant to be kept here, in hell. “Men built this,” he said, “men want this.” G thinks what I’m suggesting involves sacrificing one of “ours”. Even if we got the rest of the 147 inmates in on it everyone would scream the same thing: “The cocksuckers on the bottom have the lowest fall! They should be the ones to distract the guns while others try an escape!” I think G is probably right. But no one has spoken a real, human sentence in so long, I don’t intend to be the first to break the “silence” and find out. But what I haven’t told you, or told anyone for that matter, is that I’ve been pissing blood for the last 4 months. I got to get up and take a piss at least 12 times a night. I knew I was terminal before they condemned me to wake up here, but I think I must be getting to the end. Yesterday morning I woke up to blood in my underwear, which is new. Bluie’s also changed, he talks about God a lot now and what he’ll do in the Kingdom of Heaven when he finally goes “home.” G hasn’t spoken to us in over a week. I think he may be dead but it’s real hard to cut through the smell of myself and 149 other poorly washed prisoners to detect the scent of death. Plus, I never really knew what cell was his anyway, it’s not like I can crane my neck out with a, “Yooohoooo! Still alive in there?!” and find out. I wonder how hard it would be to convince Bluie to let his body drop to that warm, sandy floor...let him get on “home” then. Or me, what about me? Smear myself in my own dirty blood and go screaming over the side the same way I screamed my lungs out a few short years ago when I knew for certain that this, this was hell, this was going to be the place in which I became a demon. Because yes. This mill has finally ground me down. I am a demon of the Panopticon.