Life Without Possibility

There was one accommodation that was made in favor of the prisoner. Embedded in the Morphoblast wall, next to the picture "window", were pressure sensitive buttons that would activate the release into the cell a colorless, odorless, tasteless, and lethal gas. In the event the condemned man wished to voluntarily terminate his imprisonment by executing his own death penalty, he could do so. The gas would terminate the life of the prisoner in a matter of a few painless minutes.

The signage and menu of directions were exact and unmistakable as to the purpose and function of this device in the cell. A precise sequence of several steps would be required of the prisoner to activate this process. The total sequence would have to be repeated tree times with each repetition spaced seventy-two hours apart. There would be no doubt that this is what the prisoner wanted and that his decision wasn't prompted by sudden and rash feelings. In fact, the activation sequence required that the prisoner respond to several questions as to his state of mind.

The "I-So-What", as it came to be known, was a state of the art isolation module. It was internally self-sufficient, tamper proof, humane to the extent that the prisoner deserved the comforts of humaneness, and offered the prisoner an avenue of "liberation".

The sentence came to be known as "Life Without Possibility", an apt term considering the prisoner's prospects. Of course, there were those who said that the inmate might experience some sort of spiritual awakening as a result of his solitary life. After all, history is replete with stories of castaways and hermits who became the beneficiaries of such epiphanies. This was all well and good, for one would hope that the sentence would produce some good change in the prisoner, if not spiritual elevation at least remorse of some sort. But, in any case, no one would know of this; the prisoner had no way of communicating it and no one to whom to tell it! Such was the character of the punishment of isolation.

I attended all of The Incinerator's preliminary hearings and indoctrination connected with his incarceration in the Morphoblast cell—no one had the temerity to call it the "I So What" on the record. I was present when he was removed from his medical confinement where he lost his hair, nails, and teeth. And I was present on that barren landscape when he was led into his cell. I watched the final treatment of the Morphoplast to permanently seal it from the world outside.

As the confinement crew and I withdrew from the site, we passed in front of the outside of the transparent pane in the wall of the cell. We could see the Incinerator was standing there, arms folded across his naked chest, staring impassively at our small column of human beings receding from his view, the last human beings he would see in his lifetime. One could only wonder what his thoughts might have been.

I caught a glimpse of my own reflection in the shiny surface of that window. I haven't yet become accustomed to looking at my own image since that car fire turned my face into a melted candle of scar tissue. It was small consolation to me that my face may have been the final human image that The Incinerator may ever see.

Riding back to the city, I talked with one of the Morphoplast technicians about the cell. He said that, while the theory had obviously never been tested, their staff of psychologists speculated that a prisoner in that environment would likely execute his own death sentence after ninety days of confinement, certainly no more than six months.

The Incinerator survived eight months and died by his own hand.