[This story was inspired by
The Twilight Zone
episode "The Lonely" which was broadcast on November 13, 1959. I imagined Lili Taylor, as she was in the 1990s, playing Alicia.]
"I am persuaded that those who designed this system do not know what it is they are doing . . . I hold that the slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain to be immeasurably worse than the torture of the body."
Charles Dickens, commenting on Philadelphia's Eastern State Penitentiary in 1842.
Corey Jamison was an inmate ending the second year of a four-year stretch of solitary confinement. That was the point when the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections gave him a female android for company. A psychologist on contract to the DOC determined that he was starting to mentally unravel - that wasn't the exact terminology used of course - and something had to be done or Jamison would likely lose his sanity before his stint was completed.
Actually Corey, who was twenty-eight-years old in this July of 2114, had solitude but not true confinement. He wasn't even in Pennsylvania at the time. Like about hundred other inmates he was on a planet in another solar system far from Earth. The prisoners - they were all male - were scattered around the planet and had no way of traveling any distance. In fact, none of them was aware of the existence of the others on their world.
These offenders - the exact number was 104 - were the first inmates ever to be subjects in an experiment know as Extraterrestrial Institutional Processing, or EIP. Pennsylvania had been an innovator in penal reform going back to what was considered the first modern prison, Philadelphia's Eastern State Penitentiary in 1829. Back then solitary confinement - known as the Pennsylvania System - had also been tried and it was eventually judged a failure.
Over the next 285 years trends, theories and fashions in penology came and went and by the early 22nd Century solitary confinement was being implemented again. Yet Penn-Doc tried to be innovative and this time an eventual modification to solitary was tried - in effect it was an experiment within an experiment. Corey was one of ten chosen for the Android Companionate / Conjugal Assistance Program (ACCAP, or "Ack-Cap"). He wasn't consulted or even told about his participation; it just became part of his life one surprising afternoon near the end of his second year of loneliness.
*****
Penn-Doc believed in using sticks as well as carrots to manage its incarcerated population and it had decided that solitary could be a useful tool to isolate and punish certain inmates as needed. There was an attempt at secrecy, but operational security slipped a bit and rumors went through the system soon after the first batch of men shipped out. The planet under the jurisdiction of Penn-Doc had been given a hybrid string of letters and numbers for identification. To the prisoners it was referred to variously as Prison Planet, Lonely Planet, Off-World, or simply "out there."
It was a very arid planet, and even though each cabin was energy self-sufficient through solar and wind power, supplies had to be shipped in about every four months. The ships that brought these in had crews although it would have been possible to automate the process. The DOC thought that this brief human contact was a bit of leeway it should provide to those within its extraterrestrial program. On every third trip a psychologist went along to conduct an examination.
Penn-Doc considered itself to be a firm yet enlightened penal system, and Corey was selected to be a one of the ten cases for ACCAP.
*****
Corey Jamison was hardly the toughest inmate in the system. He had been one of the many "mid-pack" people who try to do their time with the least amount of drama and hassles.
He had grown up in a modest old suburb northwest of Philadelphia called Norristown. When he was younger he seemed to have a relatively promising future and he even completed two years at Drexel University in downtown Philly.
Yet some kind of restlessness or defiance kept getting him into trouble. In his twenties he was recruited into the lower levels of an organized crime group. He wasn't that ambitious about rising up through the ranks yet he found it more satisfying than whatever straight life seemed to offer.
Eventually he got convicted on charges involving burglary, possession of stolen goods and other activities that landed him in the facility at Camp Hill outside of Harrisburg. He probably would have done all right there except that he joined a gang called the Visigoths.
The authorities identified the Visigoths as being "white supremacists" but that was of little interest to Corey. He had connected with them for his own protection and for the bit of status it gave him within the prison population. Unfortunately not everyone else was so sensible, and one day the gang started a melee than resulted in the death of two inmates and injuries to several guards.
Corey hadn't been directly involved in the violence but Penn-Doc decided to crack down on gangs. Old-timers noted that this had been going on periodically for as long as anyone could remember. In fact agency records showed gangs as being a fact of life in its facilities going back to the 19th Century. In any case Corey would up getting his sentence extended and then being sent off to Lonely Planet.
****
One afternoon Corey was sitting in a lawn chair outside his cabin with several crates that the ship earlier had been dropped off. There was an awning set up to keep the sun off his little patio. On orders from Captain Allenby he had delayed opening the biggest box until the ship had left.
That crate had been the one containing his new android. Now she sat on another box about three feet away from him. Corey thought she looked rather relaxed - certainly a lot more laid-back than Corey himself felt at the moment. She seemed a bit bemused by something; she also appeared quite comfortable on her crate as if had long been her favorite place to hang out.
There had been a very sparse four-page pamphlet attached to the upper lid of the crate. It had little to say beyond that the android had been created by the Zola Corporation, 27-101 Queens Plaza, Long Island City, New York, NY. Corey was familiar with Zola and he had even seen its headquarters once in New York. He knew its manufacturing facilities were spread all over the world. However he had no clue about the strides in artificial intelligence that it had made in recent years. Zola had kept the public in the dark about what it had accomplished.
The final line in the booklet informed him that the android "herself" would tell him anything else he needed to know. In the seven or eight minutes since he had opened the crate Corey had only dared glance a few times at whoever or whatever was sharing the patio with him.
Now he did look more closely and his perceptions failed him for a moment. The information coming through his eyes told him that he had to be with another human being.
Could this be some kind of trick, some gimmick being played on him?
But he had logical abilities, and he knew this couldn't possibly be a real person. He had seen the android open her eyes and "activate" or come to life when he had opened the sealed crate and air had entered the space. Then, while he had focused on the pamphlet, she had gracefully gotten herself out and found her perch on the box.
She said, "I thought I'd give you a moment to get your bearings. That pamphlet isn't very detailed, is it?" Again Corey's thought processes tripped him. She sounded so natural, as if she had been acquainted with him for quite a while. He may have been an inmate but his human socialization instinct made him respond to her voice.
"No, it's not very useful as an owner's manual if that what it's supposed to be."
That was kind of a ridiculous thing to say.
She replied, "Well, it does mention that I can tell you everything you need to know."
Is that so?
Now that the initial surprise was fading some darker thoughts were churning up. "Allenby didn't say anything about bringing me an android. He never asked me about it; he just dropped you here and left."
Four months: that's when he's coming back.
Corey caught his own tone of confusion and doubt but couldn't control himself. He added, "An android, that's what you are, right?"
Of course she is; another stupid comment on his part.
And yet he couldn't shake his sense of dissonance.
She smiled and replied, "Actually, I prefer the term 'artificial person.'"
She has preferences?
And yet there was something oddly familiar about her phrasing.
"Artificial person? I know I've heard that somewhere else."
"I don't doubt it. It was from a movie, a very old movie in fact."
"You've seen movies?"
"Not literally of course." She pointed to her own forehead, "They are, however, up here in my head."
"So how far back are we talking about here?"
