Free Prisoner 52 by S.T. Burkholder

wall of the long armory, and did so even as the cold metal clamped round his wrists and his ankles and lifted him from the earth. The air ceased to flow, and was not so cold anymore. Sweat ran down his side. The world closed in on him. It became something he must escape, but he did not know to where. There was nowhere to go but inward, puncturing a hole within oneself and watching oneself dissolve into it. Absent from the pressures that enclosed from everywhere.
    All the years spent in small spaces and amongst even smaller company rushed to meet him from where he had abandoned them. The many and miniature hands bore up the components of his exo-suit from the storage cylinder beneath and in their approach, slow and purposeful it seemed to him, he felt the urge to vomit up the nothing in his stomach. He saw in them the self-contained prison, the living to fight and fighting to live. No rest, no sleep. No taste of bread, nor water. The always of bloodshed, and pain known but not felt. The chemical horror that had released him in ruins.
    A tunnel came into his mind and all of it that was not a shadow was a blur, and so eschewed by him. It was the image at the end of it that he desired, a portal into a distant place that was only such as all things are in paralysis - one form or another. He saw through the bright frame of that else place and beyond his bed and upon his bed, his luggage. It was his comfort and he wanted to go there, but he couldn't. He wanted to struggle, but he could not. These dual worlds held him at their arms' length, considerable and the pull powerful. A fugue place took him into itself, held him in an oblivion of everything. A celestial body caught in the competition of its equal betters and moving only when they moved. Their energies, insurmountable of one another, demolishing him slow at his core. But then the mechanical limbs released him and he fell to his knees upon the dais and stood slowly.
    A rack ejected from the hardlight console's pedastal that stood before him and within it was a rifle. He took it and thus it was his, as all things are that are truly owned. There was a pinch in his left hand as he gripped the underbarrel of the gun and its display trilled at him, flashing rapidly from along the stock.
    "Biological sample taken," His helmet said to him. "Arbitronix Firearm 32-7785b registered to Enforcer Hotchkins. Please use responsibly and accurately; remember: haste makes waste."
    "Look at you," Leargam said and thumbed the key to retract his visor and placed another chem-stick between his lips. "Sleek, clean bad ass."
    "How long will that last. " Tezac said and looked at his gloved hands, the skeletal brackets of the enhancement overlay.
    "Ain't that the question. " Leargam said and started away toward the door. "Come on, let's not keep our guests waiting. Tram's on the floor below us."
    T hey waded from out of desolation and into abundance. The ghosts of the pre-dawn shifts streamed out of the return magrail lines and into the port by the hundreds and so swamped the massive second level of headquarters. He and the old man had found brief isolation, Tezac knew, and solitude and inside so short an interim. The human element of what had before seemed a wasteland of automation and its captive audience to the whole cruel play had then become apparent. And it unfolded across a dozen different sectors and in a dozen different quarters. Each dwarfed by the movements of those anthills which toiled beneath their hives. Of it all, he was only a small part and across time smaller still. Leargam took him by the arm.
    "What's the matter," He said. "This can't be any big deal after the war."
    "It wasn't like this. Not like now." He said and wanted to return to his room, where his luggage in his mind had been transmitted to his bed.
    "Well come on. Tram's over there, you see it? The one we came in on." Leargam said and pointed out the hulk of steel that idled behind the polymer windows on the far side of the