Prisioners Read online

  The Professor winced. “They have become an alien people, Sam.”

  “Alien, Professor?”

  “I no longer recognise my fellow humans. In just fifty years thy think differently to me. They behave differently. Their ways are strange to me. They have rejected the normal standards that once kept society strong - the bonds that come from neighbourliness and community. I am getting old but I fear for them. I fear for you, Sam. Once it would have been antisocial to deliberately make such a noise in such a confined area? There have always been minor disputes but there would still have been a mutually understood modicum of respect for others. But to deliberately force others to hear such noise? It’s not civilised, Sam. It’s deliberate aggression.”

  Sam stood alongside. “Aye. Someone’s probably turned up the volume to drown out a disturbance nearby. It’s safer than intervening but it could turn nasty.”

  The Professor looked at Sam with pity. How could he accept and dismiss it as if it was normal behaviour? But that is what it had become. It was a fact of life. In the cities, street violence and aggression had become normal It had started with unruly teenage gangs roaming the streets. Knife carrying and stabbings were a sign of juvenile power and influence. Guns were prized above all. Teenage and pre-teenage violence and disrespect had become normal and failure to understand and deal with it meant it had become normal behaviour amongst adults. The cause? It was confinement, the close proximity, the lack of easy access to open space, the impossibility of moving away. Mutual tolerance had become a thing of the past but, of course, the Professor had been castigated for comparing such behaviour to caged rats.

  “They are caged and fenced in like animals. They no longer breathe the air of freedom but the stench of proximity and confinement,” he had written.

  Sam, though, accepted it as normal. Sam had a room in the three-storey block that was the prison staff’s accommodation. Men and women together with all the modern facilities expected by those working for the public service – cheap, mass produced food and drink and cheap 2050-style, round the clock entertainment to distract them from reality.

  The Professor sighed. “Lead on, Sam.”

  They arrived at the administration block and Sam led the way to the visitor’s area. There, sitting in the corner, leaning over the arm of a small sofa with his head in his hands was the Professor’s visitor. “Over to you, Professor,” Sam said quietly. “Have a nice chat.”

  Carl didn’t seem to hear them but continued to sit, rubbing his eyes as if regretting he’d come. He was wearing a thin, grey, short-sleeved tee shirt. A black jacket hung over the back of the sofa. He sat upright and then stood as the Professor approached.

  He was a good-looking young man but with a build that showed, as was the tendency of his generation, he might one day become overweight. He looked pale and serious as if he didn’t get much exposure to sun. His hair was light brown and had been cut short at the sides in the modern way with a fashionable growth of soft stubble.

  There was a polite shaking of hands, some words from the Professor about the long time since they'd last met and a joke about how much he’d grown. Carl merely nodded faintly and looked nervous.

  “So, you decided to brave the prison gates to see me,” the Professor said trying to relieve the awkward, glances he was being given.

  Carl nodded again and said, "I have some questions, uncle."

  “Questions. I see. Shall we walk and talk outside? I do enough sitting down. A stroll around the perimeter fence, perhaps? I’m allowed an hour and a half if I’m lucky. I hope it’s not a long list of difficult questions.”

  There was a lengthy and thoughtful pause but no answer so the Professor tried to help. “Personal matters? Professional questions? Where do you live and work?”

  Carl looked at his feet. He was wearing grey, canvas trousers, the bottoms pushed inside a pair of army-style boots, glossy, jet black and currently fashionable, but he seemed uncertain, not just about his questions but his reason for coming. He pushed a hand through his hair.

  “Nice boots,” the Professor said as another distraction. “Made from recycled plastic, I believe. Are they comfortable?”

  “They’re OK.”

  “Good.”

  There was another pause. Carl fidgeted.

  “Is that your jacket? I suggest you put it on. They overheat this place by around ten degrees but it’s cold outside.”

  Carl retrieved his jacket and pulled it on as he followed the Professor to the door.

  “So, what questions?”

  Carl sniffed, nervously.

  “I might be a convict, Carl, but I won’t bite. If it makes you feel more at ease, I suppose you could even call me Uncle Harry. No-one’s ever called me that before. Do you want to tell me more about yourself? You were about two years old the last time we met.”

  Carl seemed uncertain whether he wanted to say anything about his life now. They were walking at snail pace, a speed that seemed to match Carl’s thinking time. He sniffed because sniffing was a habit whenever he was unsure or nervous about something.

  The Professor waited. Carl stopped walking, sniffed once more and then opened his mouth. "A long time ago….” he said slowly and quietly before stopping once again.

  “Yes?” the Professor said to encourage him.

  “A long time ago, when people were cold or hungry or sick or homeless or depressed who did they call on for help?"

  To others it might, perhaps, have been an unexpected first question. It sounded pre-planned, but it caused the Professor no apparent surprise. Neither did he need to consider a reply. He removed his glasses and pointed them at Carl. “Are you cold, hungry, sick, homeless or depressed, Carl?”

  “Not all of those,” Carl replied vaguely.

  “But perhaps some?”

  A faint sign of confidence emerged. He nodded. “It is some of those.”

  “Do you want advice? Help?”

  “I just want to understand.”

  “We all seek to understand, Carl. I’ve been trying for more than seventy years. What in particular do you want to understand?”

  “Everything, uncle. Where, for instance, did people of long ago go for help?”

  The Professor nodded. "The people of long ago relied on each other, Carl. Who else was there to call upon? They might have prayed to their mystical God for release from their problems but their lives were very short and very hard. Like all other animals, survival and reproduction was, just as it is now, their only real purpose.”

  Carl nodded as if that was the reply he’d wanted. The Professor waited, studying the serious, young face. “Why do you ask?”

  "But how could they suffer like that?"

  The Professor nodded to himself. This was no ordinary call for help or advice. It was the word ‘suffer’ that confirmed it. Dismissing human suffering as being mostly man-made had been one of those subjects that had got the Professor into trouble. Carl’s questions had already become provocative.

  "I am already thinking, Carl, that you are not visiting me out of a sense of family loyalty or because you feel I might be in need of a moment’s companionship,” he replied. “I think you’re here to provoke me into repeating the sort of things that once got me into such serious trouble that I eventually found myself in this place." He paused. “Am I right?”

  Carl’s worried face relaxed a little more and he smiled faintly as if caught out. "I’d still value your thoughts, uncle."

  "So why start with such a deeply searching question?"

  "I want to know why you once said it is necessary to suffer.”

  The Professor nodded. “If you know that I said that then you must also know why.”

  Carl seemed taken aback. “You were a Professor of Biology, uncle.” He sniffed. “A biologist is supposed to respect all life, all living creatures. How could you say such a thing?”

  The Professor took a few, slow steps before stopping. “What makes you thi
nk I lost my respect for life? Was it something you read about me? Something written by someone who had no wish to understand me?”

  Carl frowned.

  “It is precisely because I respect life that I said what I said and wrote what I wrote. I think you need to look more carefully at what I meant. What is now commonly defined as suffering was once the only way of life. There was no alternative. Even now, in 2050, there are still some remote tribes and societies that live as they did a thousand years ago. Would you say they are suffering? All animals, humans included, face a constant struggle to survive. Is that suffering or is that the way life is?”

  Carl, seemingly unsatisfied, kicked at a stone that lay beside the pathway. The Professor saw it for what it was.

  “During the last century,” he continued, “Our popularity-seeking politicians, desperate to get re-elected, decided they needed to show pity and to exhibit deep feelings of caring for those less fortunate than themselves. So, what did they do? They decided to describe the normal, daily struggle for survival as suffering. That is what I was pointing out.”

  "That is not all, uncle. You wrote much more than that about suffering."

  "Yes indeed,” he agreed. “I wrote and said a lot about the subject and I tried to redefine it because the word had lost its significance through overuse and misuse. Those politicians and religious leaders who, themselves, knew nothing about poverty or hardship had found that using words like suffering, poverty and destitution were useful for their purposes. They rolled easily off tongues, were widely understood, pulled at heart strings and could be made to illustrate, with all the emotion they could muster, that daily struggle and hardship was suffering. Suffering was therefore an unjust infliction on the powerless."

  "But what better word is there?"

  "For an individual whose life is not at risk but who is finding it difficult to contribute and pay his or her way, then a more appropriate, single word might be hardship. They are finding things difficult but they are not suffering. Struggling to overcome hard times is an essential part of what it means to stay alive. Struggle and hardship are what every living thing from an amoeba to a human must cope with in order to be strong and to stay alive. Removing the need to struggle will eventually remove the survival instinct. A creature that no longer has to struggle becomes weak and soft and vulnerable to outside changes. The outcome is death. The entire species is wiped out.”

  “But humans are different.”

  “Not at all, Carl. The controversy which you are trying to get me to discuss arose when I wrote that humans should not be made immune to suffering or they will become weak and unable to adapt. Humans, I wrote, should not be left bereft of the understanding that they are just another form of transient life like birds, animals and insects.

  “Hardship, Carl, is a positive thing. Without hardship, without the need to fight for survival, without sickness or risk of early death, what do animals do? They breed. They multiply. Their numbers increase so rapidly that they consume everything. They destroy the environment that sustains them and then they die out. Any that survive might be the fortunate ones or, more likely, the ones that adapted and changed their habits.

  “Struggle and hardship are quite natural, Carl. Human suffering, though, is mostly caused by man himself.”

  “That is not fair, uncle.”

  The Professor turned. “Fair? Fairness? Do you also want me to discuss fairness?”

  Carl seemed unsure.

  “Did our ancestors ever consider if their lives were fair or unfair? I don’t think so because they had little to compare it with. Did they think it was tough? Oh yes. Hard? Certainly. Risky and dangerous? Of course. But fairness to them was more about dividing up the limited food so everyone got their share.”

  “But their lives were different than ours,” Carl said.

  “I agree. They were remarkably different. But you were asking me about people of long, long ago and about suffering and fairness. Times change, but not always for the best.”

  Carl looked down. “Yes,” he said as if, at last, this was something he could agree with: that life now was not necessarily better now than a thousand years ago.

  The Professor pressed on. “Are you really referring to quality of life?” he asked.

  “I suppose so.”

  “So, are you content with the quality of your life, Carl?”

  The Professor interpreted Carl’s next sniff as getting closer to the problem.

  It was a common complaint amongst twenty first century youth that their lives lacked something, that the world had let them down, that it was all grossly unfair. But they often fell into a silent mood, unable to explain what was missing and why. Carl was no exception. He stayed silent.

  “Our ancestors experienced hardship,” the Professor said. “But they didn’t question it or rate the quality of their lives as you do now because they saw no alternatives and had no way of comparing their own lives with the lives of others. Their world, the patch of land that was their home, was small. They knew almost nothing of what life was like beyond the next hill or the next valley. They accepted life for what it was because that is what it meant to be alive and to survive.

  “But things changed, Carl. The human animal has a unique ability to think. It did not wait for the slow process of evolution. It looked ahead. It planned. It no longer instinctively sought out greener pastures but invented solutions to problems. It survived more easily. It changed even more rapidly with technology, transport, TV and the internet. The world became a smaller place. You could now see how other people lived. More importantly humans bred and rapidly increased in numbers just as any life form does with an abundance of food and no predators. It took humanity 200,000 years to reach one billion and only 250 years to reach ten billion.

  “In those 250 years humans were being kept alive for longer by technology. It was a recipe for the disaster that had been forecast by some for centuries. Thomas Malthus, back in 1798, forecast it. Nothing was done. Thirty years ago, my own hero, Paul Ehrlich at Stanford, was warning that overpopulation and overconsumption was driving not only humanity to extinction but the entire planet. People listened, but still nothing was done.

  Thomas Malthus – 1798, “An Essay on the Principle of Population.”

  “Despite all our technology the ability of humans to understand the fundamentals of biology has utterly failed to keep pace. In fact, I would say it is now worse than it was when the people of long ago were alive. Those people saw nature as it really is, in the raw. They had few possessions and very little health care but they had a far greater appreciation of the common-sense in Darwin's theory that in nature only the fittest, the most adaptable and the most able survive.”

  The Professor stopped talking and walking. “I make no apologies for talking, Carl, but am I making any sense?”

  Carl, who had been sauntering beside him looked at him. “Yes,” he said. “But you are still not answering my question about fairness.”

  The Professor sighed. “The selfishness of some means unfairness for others I’m afraid, Carl. You’ll just need to fight back. Fight for fairness by becoming more selfish. It’s nature’s game.”

  Carl was silent but the Professor knew he’d made a point. Street riots, fighting and mass demonstrations had become so common, so widespread, that Carl would understand.

  He went on. “That said, it’s a lot harder now. After all, there are ten billion others trying to do exactly the same.”

  With that he walked away leaving Carl sniffing and looking down at his black, shiny boots.

  Once upon a time the grey stone spire of a parish church had been visible from the spot where the Professor stopped to look over the perimeter fence. Now, if it was still there, then it was hidden amongst the distant high-rise apartments where a weak winter sun fought with low cloud and haze.

  With no purpose left except as an ancient symbol of two thousand years of Christianity, it had probably been dismantled
by a machine in a day to make way for more housing.

  The Professor thought about his childhood hero, Paul Ehrlich. Had Carl heard of him? He doubted it. Ehrlich had calculated an optimum global population of between one and a half and two billion. Thirty years ago, when Ehrlich was in his eighties, there were already eight billion. Like himself, Ehrlich, had also been dismissed as a pessimist, an irrepressible doomster and even a racist. No need to panic said some. Technology will solve everything. Indeed, escape to another planet would be possible for a fortunate few. But what would become of the rest?

  Was Thomas Malthus ever mentioned in history lessons these days or had the teaching of history become too tainted with the fear of facing facts and the shame of past events? He glanced back at Carl who seemed in no hurry to catch up.

  Carl had asked about human suffering, fairness and quality of life. Was he now pondering on his answers or already wishing he’d not come?

  There was a lot more the Professor could have said, of course. and it would have been easy to repeat things he’d written and spoken about in the past but, no longer meeting young people, he felt unsure about their sensitivities and whether truth, like history, had become too painful. He had his own sensitivities and painful memories of course. Was he now too old to have anything useful to pass on?

  He thought then about the collapsed civilisations of history that were always forgotten when humans were overindulging and enjoying themselves.

  Carl’s example, the poor people of long ago, had, out of necessity, looked to the future but in their case it was driven by the seasons. They planned and saved for it because with no state help, they had only themselves to rely on.

  Did Carl’s generation plan for the future? Or did they live for the moment because the future was so uncertain? It seemed to the Professor that Carl was looking at both the present and the future and not liking what he saw.

  Carl caught up and stood alongside.

  “Do you live somewhere over there?” the Professor asked, pointing towards the middle of the city.