Wapato Re-Education Centre, Year 38 2025
A rumbling noise filled the cell as another plane flew low overhead on its approach to the airport. At the moment that the sound was loudest, the walls shook slightly, making Chuck’s mark to denote yet another day here wiggle slightly.
The guards regularly complained about the planes, but on balance seemed to view them as an appropriate additional inconvenience for the detainees, to go with the inadequate plumbing, the temperatures that veered between freezing cold and swelteringly hot depending on the time of year, the bland slop that passed for food in the canteen, and the regular interrogation sessions.
They were wrong, though. The planes were a primitive clock. No natural light penetrated to the centre of the complex where the “high value” detainees were incarcerated, and timepieces of any kind were banned – even the guards had to surrender their digital wristwatches at the start of each shift. Chuck still hasn’t worked out whether it was just meant to be another part of the psychological warfare tactics, or if they were genuinely worried that the mere sight of the numbers 1 to 12 would be enough to trigger a jailbreak.
But they couldn’t stop the planes flying overhead, and they didn’t fly at night. So it was still possible to keep track of how long he’d been here. That was how he still knew what year it was. That was how he knew exactly how long it was that Devon had been in here with him. He also knew that with each passing year, fewer and fewer planes were coming in and out. What he couldn’t tell was whether that was an issue with keeping the maintenance going or just the general economic downturn he’d always assumed must be gathering pace out there.
Chuck chuckled grimly to himself as he stood back from his tally of scratch marks on the wall. The plane’s rumble had made his latest mark end up slightly off from a perfect vertical, but the important thing was the spacing, and that was still how it needed to be. Since his latest cellmate, Devon, had arrived, he had become very methodical in the apparent randomness. He’d learned before being transferred here not to use a five bar tally chart, which was apparently too reminiscent of elementary school math lessons for those in charge to trust it, but the regime either tolerated, or just plain couldn’t see the significance of, a lot of individual scratches.
Chuck spent the next hour or so pacing around the cell. Another count he kept going in his head over the course of each day was the number of steps he walked – back in the old days, he’d aimed at 10,000 a day, for reasons that now seemed to escape him. He managed it most days inside, too. It helped that his endless pacing tended to make most people who ended up bunking with him demand to be transferred sooner rather than later, which generally suited Chuck. He liked to have time to be alone with his thoughts.
He didn’t mind Devon, though. And Devon didn’t seem to mind him. More importantly, he felt rather protective of Devon, which was probably a ridiculous thing to feel about someone two feet taller, three decades younger, and at least eighty pounds of muscle heavier. But Chuck had taught enough Devons in his time to know that physical strength didn’t mean invulnerability, and Devon was not coping well here. He hadn’t been coping well for a long time out in the world as it was now either, but the Purge Irrationality Act had made him snap, and his simple protest had landed him here, where all he knew how to do was continue it.
The cell door was shoved open and Devon was pushed through, groggy and stumbling. Chuck helped him to his bunk, checking his eyes – his pupils weren’t blown so they’d laid off the “medication” this time. “He needs water,” he said to one of the guards who’d dragged him here, who was now in the process of dragging the heavy door closed again.
“Why don’t you tell him the formula for it?” the guard sneered. “I’m sure that’ll sort him right out.”
“That’s chemistry, dumbass,” Chuck said under his breath to the now closed door, though truth be told the now-decades-long assault the government was making on the very existence of mathematics had had an entirely predictable effect on other fields as well.
He turned his attention to Devon. “Hey, big guy, you OK?”
“Three point one four one five nine … Hey, why aren’t you …?” He blinked, starting to come round as he realised that no punishment was coming. “Hey, professor. I think I’m gonna sleep now.”
“You do that, kid,” Chuck said.
“Still 49 years old, professor,” Devon said sleepily. “Did you know, the first time the digits 4 and 9 appear sequentially in the decimal expansion of pi is at the 57th and 58th decimal places.”
“You may have mentioned that a few times.”
“Few times a day, you mean.”
Chuck smiled. “You keep doing what you’re doing, Devon.”
“They can fight the truth, but they won’t win.” Devon was getting sleepier and sleepier.
That was what Chuck always told Devon, and what he still, on some abstract philosophical level, believed himself. To his way of thinking, mathematics had been discovered, not invented. There had been a time, once, when that had been the sort of thing you could start arguments about in certain company. But Chuck was and remained sure that even if there was no one there to think about them, each and every proof would still be true. But as the state kept grinding down everyone who did think about them, he began to doubt that it made much difference in the final analysis.
Once he was sure Devon was asleep — the loud snores filling the cell were a pretty big clue, after all — Chuck resumed his customary pacing. He’d only added a few hundred steps, though, before the door swung open again.
“He’s exhausted, let him be,” Chuck said immediately, registering only as he said it that the guards were accompanied by a man in the sort of nondescript black suit that screamed “clandestine government agency” by its very lack of personality or identifying markings.
“Not here for him this time,” the guard said with a menacing smile. “You’ve got a special visitor.”
The man in the suit smiled thinly. “We believe you have information that may be relevant to an ongoing enquiry, Professor Courts.”
“You’ve had me locked up for over a decade and a half,” Chuck shot back. “I sincerely doubt I can tell you anything that you don’t already know.”
“Nevertheless,” the man said.
“You’re assuming that I have any reason to co-operate,” Chuck said.
The man turned to the guard, and they had a whispered conversation that Chuck couldn’t quite make out. Eventually, the man in the suit spoke up “Get him to the hospital wing.” When the guard started to protest inarticulately, he added sternly, “Now.”
A few minutes of back and forth ensued as the guard tried to organise for his colleagues to stretcher Devon out of there. The reluctance to ever leave Chuck alone with the “special visitor” reminded him of the old puzzle with the fox, the chicken and the grain which all need to be transported across the river, although Chuck had never thought of “yell at everyone else to bring more boats” as a solution before now. Eventually, though, they figured it out, and Chuck found himself, hands cuffed in front of him, being taken along the familiar route to the “interrogation suite”.
Except that, just before the turn into the dingy basement corridor where WREC’s ersatz Torquemadas enacted their sadism, a door swung open that Chuck had only ever seen locked shut before, and he was marched into what looked and seemed like a conventional interview room, right down to the darkened mirror behind which who knew how many other people were watching. He managed to turn and give a little wave to whoever was there before he was pushed down into a hard plastic chair, not a million miles away from the ones that used to fill the classrooms Chuck once worked in.
“Uncuff him,” the man said, taking the seat opposite. He picked up a briefcase that had been left in the room in advance and put it to his side.
“Sir, WREC protocol–“
“Is overridden by several federal statues, the agreement of your warden, and your own sense of self-preservation when it comes to your career. Uncuff him, switch off any and all recording devices you have in this room, authorised or otherwise, and leave.” Putting a hand up to forestall the next series of objections, he went on, “You can post as many people outside as will placate your pathetic insecurity, but I need and will have complete privacy for my conversation with the professor.”
The guard looked mutinous, but all he said was, “You mean prisoner.” At the man in the suit’s glare, he managed one last bit of resistance. “He ain’t a professor no more, he’s just a prisoner.”
“I believe I’ve made myself clear.”
With extremely bad grace, the guard made his exit, ostentatiously disconnecting the plug for the tape recorder on the table from its socket.
Chuck smiled at the man. “You would have been better off interviewing me downstairs,” he said. “No recording devices there. They don’t want any trace of what they get up to left behind, just in case the wind ever changes and they find themselves being the ones locked up.”
“Nevertheless,” the man said. He opened the briefcase and took out a few files, revealing some sort of control panel mounted above what was presumably equipment that filled most of the space. He flicked a switch. Nothing visible or audible happened as a result, but his demeanour completely changed a moment later, becoming much more warm and open than anyone was expecting. “Professor Courts, we believe you may be able to help us with an ongoing enquiry.”
Chuck looked at the briefcase. “Some sort of jamming device?”
The man nodded. “You’re very astute,” he said. “But then, we expected that.”
“Who exactly do you work for?”
“I’m not at liberty to disclose that, I’m afraid.”
“Can at least tell me your name?”
The man’s mouth twitched, as though the ghost of a smile might once have crossed it many years ago. “Call me John Smith.”
Chuck rolled his eyes. “Nice to meet you, Mr Smith.”
“Likewise,” the man said. “If we can turn our attention to the matter at hand–” He reached for the files, clearly not just there as cover for the briefcase’s gadgetry.
“You’re rather assuming that I’m going to help you,” Chuck said. “Though I have to admit that I’m intrigued to learn you think I could have any useful information for any sort of enquiry, given how long I’ve been locked up.”
“I can see there’s no point trying to imply that I could end your incarceration, in an attempt to gain your co-operation.”
“You and I both know that the contents of my head are considered dangerous in and of themselves,” Chuck said. “I don’t have a sentence, I can’t be paroled or get time off for good behaviour. The only way I’m leaving here is in a coffin.”
The man who called himself “Smith” nodded, acknowledging the reality of the situation. “And what about your friend?”
“My friend?” Chuck was confused for a moment. “You mean Devon?”
“Is that his name? He’s on a lesser charge, right?”
Chuck stared daggers at him. “How does this work? Have you come here so prepared you know everything about everyone, or are you improvising based on what you saw when you arrived?”
“Either way, I’m not going to let you know what I know. So tell me.”
“He’s got a good memory, that’s his supposed crime. That’s the whole thing.” The man opposite said nothing, looking on impassively, letting the silence stretch out until it was awkward enough that Chuck felt compelled to fill it. “If he’d decided at the age of eight to memorise a bunch of dinosaur facts, he’d be fine. He’d probably have even got away with baseball statistics. But he’d heard about pi at school, and he thought it was kind of neat that it went on forever and ever, and thought he might try to learn as much of that infinity as he could.” Chuck leaned back; he could feel the old patterns of lecturing coming back to him, even after all this time — suck them in with the story and get them to learn something along the way if you were lucky. “So he made a bit of a splash in the local papers. Hell, if he’d been Westsylvanian I’d probably have met him back then, one way or another. But then a few years later when you vandals took over, those cute little newspaper articles about the clever local kid became grounds for suspicion.”
Chuck paused, trying to read Smith’s face, but there was no glimmer of recognition or particular interest, just a keen professional attentiveness. He leaned in, trying to unsettle, but his expression didn’t flicker even slightly. “I don’t even know if he’d have ended up as a good mathematician,” he said. “The curriculum got changed before he ever had a chance to find out. But that suspicion followed him for decades, in this insane world you’ve built. And then when you–” He broke off, laughing.
“What’s so funny?” Smith asked mildly.
“When I was teaching this stuff, I’d always include the bit about the state legislature that tried to fix the value of pi by law. Everyone laughed at those nineteenth century dumbasses. And now you’ve done it at federal level to … how many constants?”
“Technically, all of them,” Smith said. “The Purge Irrationality Act provides for all values to have the appropriate number of significant figures and no more.”
“Right, so when Devon, who’s been under a cloud f suspicion since before adolescence for some stuff he remembered for fun, found out about this, he went to protest. Not violent, not even loud. He just stood there outside Congress every day it was in session, reciting pi to however many decimal places it is he knows it to. And that’s what got him arrested and thrown in here.”
Smith did his not-a-smile again. “That’s a very long way round to tell me that yes, he’s on a lesser charge.”
“What does it matter that he is?”
“You’re right that the strings we can pull can’t get you out of here, but him, him we can. He’s not doing well, is he?”
Chuck fought back the tears forming in his eyes, looked down at the floor as he blinked them away. “No, he’s not.”
“You co-operate with us, he can be home with his family within 24 hours.” Smith tilted his head to catch Chuck’s eye. “We just want some information.”
“I want a guarantee.”
“That’s not how this sort of thing works, you know that. But you have my word.”
“You might not have figured this out yet,” Chuck said, “but I don’t exactly trust you.”
“Only guarantee you’ll get. But if that doesn’t work for you, look at it this way. One day, we might want to ask you some more questions. You’re not going to answer them if we’ve reneged on our agreement.”
“Careful, Mr Smith. Keep talking that way and they’ll throw you in here too for applying Game Theory.”
“I take it we have a deal.”
Chuck sighed. “Fine, whatever. I still don’t think I can tell you anything useful after sixteen years in one after another of these institutions.”
Smith picked up one of the beige folders from the briefcase and extracted a sheet. He put it on the desk and turned it around to face him. “Do you recognise this?”
“It’s a photograph of a perfectly ordinary high school textbook for students studying advanced mathematics topics,” Chuck said. He peered at the picture a bit closer. The top right corner of the cover was ripped off, and someone had coloured in the letters of the author’s names. “I imagine it went up in flames years ago like all the others.”
“You don’t recognise it?”
“It’s Fairchild and Snoop, I used to teach from it. Some of the exercises were a bit too repetitive — I used to tell the bright kids to only do a smattering of each — but the end of chapter assessments had some nice synoptic questions.”
“You don’t recognise this specific copy?”
Chuck looked up at him. “Back before the world turned mad, there were stacks upon stacks of these in every math department in Westsylvania, and doubtless whichever other states the publisher’s had got their hooks into the system. Do you really expect me to recognise a particular copy?”
“That’s not actually an answer to my question, Professor Courts.”
“It’s a very stupid question, Mr Smith.”
“All right, let’s take a step back. When was the last time you saw one of these textbooks?”
“I imagine that would be shortly before I was made redundant with prejudice.”
“So if asked, you would deny having smuggled a number of these books out of your classroom before your removal from school premises? And then distributing them on the black market at a later date?”
“It was never a black market,” Chuck said quietly. “It was a black library.”
“What was that?”
Chuck looked up, defeated and triumphant all at once. “We never took any money. Sharing the knowledge, that was what was important.”
“So you admit to stealing state property in the shape of textbooks, possession and distribution of contraband materials and … what else?”
“I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know, though, am I? And according to you people my own head is a weapon of math destruction all by itself.”
Smith tapped the photo. “Let’s go back to this specific copy. Was it one of the ones you misappropriated and then failed to turn in for destruction in a timely fashion?”
“I honestly don’t know,” Chuck said. “Enough of the books had had several careless owners down the years.”
“It doesn’t matter, we have an unimpeachable source that assures us it was. And also that it was indeed burnt at a later date, despite your best efforts.”
“I’m really struggling with why you need me,” Chuck said. “You seem to know all the answers already.”
Smith looked him straight in the eye. “This photograph was taken last week.”
“Then whoever burned it should be congratulated on having done a very poor job. Why don’t you promote them, put them in charge of all the wanton destruction of knowledge? That way there might still be some hope.”
Smith took the picture and slotted it back into its file. He extracted a dossier. Paperclipped to the front was another picture, a surveillance photograph of a woman with close-cropped hair, wearing all black. “Do you know who this is?”
Chuck made a show of reading the front page of the file. “It says here she’s Aletheia Voss.” He sighed. “Even in here, we’ve heard of public enemy number one.”
“We prefer to avoid that particular terminology,” Smith said coolly.
“So what is she? A high value target? Oh no, that’s a bit too potentially mathematical-sounding too, isn’t it?”
“We generally go with extremely dangerous terrorist,” Smith said.
Chuck snorted. “And why are you asking me about her?”
“She was one of your students, wasn’t she?”
Chuck leaned forward to read the file again. “Well, if this date of birth is accurate, I doubt it. I never taught pre-school, and according to this she was all of four years old when I lost my job.”
“You’re not as funny as you think you are,” Smith said.
“And you’re not the first person to tell me that. I taught high school, remember?”
“All right, let’s say she’s not a student. Was she ever a … borrower from the black library?”
“It was all a very long time ago,” Chuck said, as the memories that had irresistibly returned on seeing the photo were still turning themselves over in his mind.
“So she hasn’t been in contact with you recently?”
“You’re the first new person I’ve seen since they brought Devon into my cell. And I would hope that if a quote-unquote extremely dangerous terrorist had managed to find a way to get in here undetected, she’d have had the good grace to take us all out by the same means. Given that she clearly hasn’t done that, I think we can conclude that she hasn’t been here to see me, or anybody else for that matter.”
“You know you get a lot more long-winded when you’re avoiding answering a question,” Smith said.
“The only questions you don’t already know the answer to are ones I know nothing about either.”
“I’m not so sure about that. But I can see that we’re not going to get anything useful from continuing this conversation. I won’t waste any more of your time.” He started to pack up, collecting up the files to go back into the briefcase. He put his hand on the switch, hesitating before flipping it to the off position. “Are you sure you don’t have anything more to say that might best be conveyed in private?”
“Devon,” Chuck said immediately. “Are you going to … do whatever it was you implied you could do?”
“From what you’ve told me, he can walk out of here tomorrow. He just needs to tell them what they need to hear.”
There was only one question Devon ever got asked in the interrogation suite, over and over again: “What is the value of pi?”
Smith flicked the switch, put everything back into the briefcase and picked it up. He crossed to the door and knocked on it several times, hard. Eventually, the same guard who’d escorted them there opened it.
“Where is the book now?” Chuck asked as Smith was leaving.
“What book?” Smith said, and walked out.
“Come on, back to your cell,” the guard said. “And don’t think you’ll be getting no special treatment just because you’ve had fancy visitors from the Triple-X.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” Chuck said, biting back the desire to point out that the double negative meant he should be looking forward to at least a freshly turned bunk with a chocolate on the pillow every night.
“Best you don’t dream at all,” the guard said nonsensically.
He didn’t seem to have anything further to say as he took Chuck back to the cell, and Chuck wasn’t inclined to try to make small talk. He nodded minutely at a couple of other prisoners as they passed.
When they reached the cell, Devon was there, in much better shape than he had been. “Hey, professor. They fixed me up pretty good down in the hospital wing. Or at least they gave me some really good painkillers and shit.” He laughed.
“Good to see you looking so well,” Chuck said genuinely.
“No funny business,” the guard said as he closed the door on them.
As soon as they were alone, Chuck’s voice became a low, urgent whisper. “Listen, I don’t know exactly what’s going on, but you can … the man I just spoke to, he told me you can leave any time, you just need to give them the answer they want. Tell them that pi is 3.142 just one time and you can go back home.”
Devon narrowed his eyes. Even through the fog of whatever they’d given him, he remained sharp. “But it wouldn’t be true.”
“One lie, once, and it’s all over for you. You would still know the truth, you just wouldn’t let them know you know. It’s not– You really–” Chuck thought back to how easily he had found evading the questions and obfuscating the issues in his interview with Smith, but he hadn’t actually lied. He’d danced along the line without crossing it, but there was only one right answer to the question they would put to Devon before letting him out, and he’d have to give the wrong answer.
“They’ve got to you too, haven’t they?” Devon said. “Or maybe you were with them all along. Making me think you were helpful.”
“I am,” Chuck said. “But this is how you can best help yourself.”
“No, no, they have got to you, haven’t they?”
“Devon–” Chuck began, but he wasn’t listening any more. He’d gone to the door and started banging on it hard. “Guards! Guards! You’ve got to get me out of here. I can’t be in here with this guy any longer.”
“Devon, listen–“
“Guards!” Predictably enough, many of the other prisoners in their block had started pounding their doors as well, creating a cacophony.
The guard returned with a colleague. “What is it?” he said.
“You have to get me out of here, I can’t be in here with him any longer.”
“Another one, huh?” The guard leaned over to be able to talk to Chuck past Devon’s sequoia trunk of a torso. “Was it the pacing again?”
A few moments later, the door had closed shut behind them, and a few minutes after that, the last prisoner had given up on making a racket. Chuck was left alone with his thoughts, and they were not good company.
Had he encouraged Devon’s continuation of his protest here inside? Of course he had, adjusting his tally of days so that each set of scratch marks was in a set that gave each digit – a clump of three, one by itself, four in a row, another lone one, five together, a long series of nine … If Chuck had had Devon’s best interests at heart, he would have told him to tell the lie the very first time they met. Perhaps he would have listened, perhaps he wouldn’t. But the more Chuck had got to know Devon, the more he should have realised that reinforcing his beliefs was not going to do him any good, even if they were correct. Take too
Chuck resumed his pacing, feeling as though he was wearing away at the concrete beneath his feet. He started to estimate in his head how long it would take to dig an escape tunnel this way, and, on coming up with an answer of roughly thirty million years, decided that he didn’t have the time.
He broke off from his circuits of the lab, finding himself face to face with the section of wall he’d marked out as the digits of pi. It had been a pragmatic solution to Devon’s concern that be might start to forget, the longer he kept on being interrogated.
And now Devon thought Chuck had sold out, and wouldn’t do the simple thing that would get him home.
Chuck banged his fist hard against the wall bearing the marks. “Dammit!”