My entry for #NaNoWriMo this year: The Devil’s Cradle

I’m already kind of behind, but since I have a flight early tomorrow morning, I should be able to catch up a lot.

A brief synopsis:

Years earlier, massive riots and protests nearly overthrew the government, and the nation has been living under martial law ever since. Since the prison population was overflowing, the government sent any and all new prisoners to Mars, which has proven difficult to terraform and generally unlivable on the surface. Many prisoners are able to broker deals on their sentences in exchange for hard labor in underground mines.

One prison, referred to informally as “The Devil’s Cradle”, is a maximum security prison located under the bottom of a crater in the Northeastern Martian Desert. A heavily-edited reality television show tops the charts of what people back on Earth want to watch. There are 15 million people living in the facility, which supports its own local language, currency, culture, and economy.

Prisoners are subjected to rigorous beatings from the guards, long periods of isolation, and constant “reprogramming” that creates mental associations between traumatic memories, violence, and sexuality. There’s something in the food, no one can maintain the slightest erection. There’s something in the water, everyone has difficulty remembering things. Everyone has an implant that makes them sicker and sicker the closer they get to the perimeter of the prison grounds. Get too close, and your vital organs start shutting off.

There was something different about David Cage, incarcerated for production and distribution of a myriad of psychedelic drugs. Something about his body reacted differently to his microchip and the chemicals the prison put in him. The reprogramming he was subjected to only made him more violent and angry. Instead of passively ignoring the prison around him, he grew more observant. He devises a way to escape; but he has to go deeper into the prison to get out in the first place.

#writing #ScienceFiction