I
She was like a pressure gauge for fear.
The instant terror fully entered her, the red measure of it seemed to rise inside her body and burst out through the mouth she had forced open as wide as it could go. I know that was not what I expected. I had only stabbed her once in the chest. I had not even pulled the knife back out before she began to convulse beyond her own control. Her eyes rolled white and downward, fixed on me. She wanted to speak, but her mouth was already clogged with blood surging out of her like a fountain. Her final words dissolved into droplets and struck my face. I tried to wipe them away, but each drop felt as if it were trying to reassemble itself on my skin into the sentence she had screamed with all her strength.
In one instant my role changed from victim to offender. She changed from traitor to the loyal woman I had slaughtered. I have always believed there is some strange law in the world, a formula already written into the structure between one person and another. If the unfaithful one is killed, then the curse of betrayal passes to the killer. No one escapes that arithmetic.
She tried to brace herself on the table and stand, but the floor was slick with her blood. She slipped again and again, spilling more of it each time. At last she could only writhe on the sticky ground, like a lungfish struggling through mud before the storm breaks. The rain outside had been a perfect deception, just like the affair she had staged so carefully, thinking I would never discover it. That false rain seemed to gather around her into a pool as thick as swamp water. She twisted, trying to drag one last thread of air into herself, but her hair had already glued itself into the blood and pinned her head down. Then her skirt darkened into a heavy red, fixing her limbs in place until she could no longer move.
I raised the knife again and crouched slowly. Just as I was about to drive in the second blow, she opened her eyes and whispered, miserably:
“Stop. You still have a chance.”
I am no longer afraid of that image. The suffocating feeling remains, but the fear itself has gone numb. So I end the dream where it always begins to repeat, and prop myself up in bed, wiping the sweat from my forehead with the sour-smelling coverlet.
The dream is always the same dream, yet each time some small detail changes. The woman I kill inside it drifts farther and farther from the way she originally looked. I can no longer remember whether, five years ago, she really vomited blood the way she does in my nightmares. In reality I stabbed her again, and again, and again—second, third, fourth… seventeenth. That number became the adjective attached to my life. Seventeen knife wounds defined my crime, and they also defined the twenty-five years I was sentenced to spend here.
In the dark I found the sink by habit and turned on the tap, gulping water straight down. Night sweats from the nightmare had wrung most of the moisture out of me. I know exactly how my body reacts, and when. In a place this small, there is not much to do except learn yourself in savage detail and maintain your own self-surveillance index above the danger threshold. If it drops too low, privileges are revoked. One of those privileges is the notebook computer I was granted, the machine I use to record what the prison calls my repentance.
So I went back to the desk by the bed and opened it.
It is such a stripped-down computer that, outside this place, anyone would call it useless. It saves text and drawings. It cannot communicate. It can also display the rules for living here—rules you would probably never need. But you do not live in a prison. I do. For me it is the only hope I have left in the twenty years still ahead of me. Through it I can at least record my thoughts and keep pursuing a single question: what does it mean to stay alive?
What else do I have that can be preserved besides my dreams?
I closed the laptop again. I had not felt that kind of despair in a long time. By then my eyes had fully adjusted to the room, and I realized there was a full moon outside. Maybe that was why everything felt enlarged.
Then I heard it: a faint alarm beyond my door.
I have become good at judging distance by sound. It is one of the tiny amusements available here. This time the source was close. The beeping echoed through the hollow ring of the building and grew louder and louder. It had taken me a full year to uproot the original terror that sound planted in me. Red warning light flashed through the slats and spilled across my floor. It reminded me of blood from the dream. Soon enough there would be the scream that always follows.
I felt a little sorry for whoever had triggered the alarm. Before long he would be dropped by an electric shock. Instinctively I folded my arms around myself. Inside these thick walls is a mechanism always ready to fire an electrified restraint net. I had no desire to test its limit again.
At last the alarm stopped, only after the scream. Whispering noises spread through the center of the circular block. Tomorrow, I thought, someone would complain that another inmate had ruined everyone’s sleep by setting it off so late. The thought drifted away, and the next thing I knew it was breakfast.
While collecting my tray, I checked the digital board beside the slot one more time:
Saturday, April 25, 2026. Rest day. Today’s schedule:
7:00–7:45 Breakfast
7:45–11:25 Rest in cell
11:25–12:10 Lunch
12:10–14:20 Nap
14:20–16:30 Outdoor exercise
…
A rest day is not much of a rest in a room like this. Such a narrow space compresses thought and perception until the mind becomes a singularity, throwing off strange ideas that are hard to catch hold of. That is why I applied for the laptop—to have someone to talk to during the twenty years I still had to survive in this cell. That someone could only be myself. And I could feel that self sinking into despair the moment it thought of twenty more years.
My plan for the day was to continue the unfinished novel stored on the machine. The voice in me reminded me that no one would ever want to read it, because I was a criminal, and my life already carried a permanent adjective. I ignored him, finished breakfast, and opened the computer.
Supreme National Circular Prison System
Waiting to boot…
Before I was brought here, I used to examine its logo with professional attention. The habit remained even after my old profession did not. The emblem was made of three fan-shaped petals, each seemingly hollowed out by wormholes, lined with neat rows of circular openings—the long cells where we live. At the center was a round core. It was meant to resemble a flower’s pistil, but I knew better. It was the observation tower viewed from above, the central organ that controls the secrets and crimes of everyone here. In that sense it was a pistil after all: pollination, gestation, fruiting, rebirth. From that center, three rays extended outward like lighthouse beams, crossing the gaps between the petals and stretching beyond them. At the end of each beam was an oval shape like an eye. I never fully understood that part, except as a warning: the core that stands for the observation tower—and for the law itself—can see farther than we can.
The computer had finished booting long ago, but I was still standing by the window thinking about this place they call the Supreme Circular Prison System. It contains the most ironic philosophy in the world. Each narrow cell has two windows: one faces outward, toward the world beyond, and stands for freedom; the other is a one-way blind through which the observation tower can inspect every room. Call it a cocoon, or one chamber in a hive. If you want freedom, you must purify your guilt inside this cramped compartment first.
Everyone here is defined by something. I am defined by seventeen knife wounds. That modifier has swallowed my life whole. It names my crime and fixes the price I must pay.
I was almost excited by the sentence. It sounded good enough to become an epigraph when I publish my book after release. This prison has taught me to think about life differently, and I had already decided that when I got out, I would publish what I wrote here as a continuation of my repentance.
Then a voice cut through everything.
“Fire! Help! Fire!”
I snapped back into the white reality of the room.
I had never heard anyone scream like that in this building before. Sound bounced so wildly through the structure that I could not tell where it came from. Only when the smell of burnt wiring began to seep into my room did I realize the fire had to be next door.
“Press the emergency button!” I shouted through the meal slot.
Only then did I realize there was no building-wide alarm, because no one had actually pressed it. I crouched there and shouted again, but the man kept yelling “Fire!” without doing what I said. His voice reminded me of the woman’s final provocation five years ago: Go on, then. Kill me if you can. I do not know why that particular tone of contempt returned to me then.
He kept shouting. I meant to press the alarm for him, but my hand froze in midair when I remembered the rule:
No inmate may press the emergency button arbitrarily. It may be used only in a genuine emergency. Assisting, substituting, or acting on another’s behalf is prohibited. If the party involved is found to have violated regulations, any helper or substitute shall be treated as an accomplice.
My body remembered the pain of the electric net. I pulled my hand back.
He went on shouting. It sounded less like someone burning alive than like someone testing a boundary. I pressed myself against the wall of the room on fire, but no heat came through. No one could see into the corridor from these one-way windows. Everyone, like me, was afraid to move.
At last I heard footsteps. Through the slot I saw shadows rushing past, then a harsh voice:
“What happened? Why didn’t you press the emergency button?”
“S-sorry. I panicked and forgot!”
His tone changed instantly. I could not see his face, but I was sure it had to be a sly one. Only that kind of person can switch selves so fast.
“What exactly caught fire?”
“The… the computer…”
I glanced at my own laptop still lying on the bed, willing my mind to make something of this. It gave me nothing.
“Evacuate inmates from R02-28 immediately!” another voice ordered.
A second later I heard the lock on my own door click open. I flinched. Everything was happening too quickly, and the only word I could find for it was unnatural. No—more than that. It felt arranged.
“Inmates in R02-28, evacuate through Exit R02!”
I pulled open the steel door. The observation tower rose through the center of the prison like a pillar climbing into the clouds. Every time I saw it, it looked monstrous, as if that gray column were covered in closed eyelids ready to open at any moment and watch us all. The chaos around it was almost laughable. This was not the kind of disorder a massive prison complex was supposed to produce. Two guards were inspecting the cell beside mine. Another was far off at Exit R02, guiding evacuees with a fluorescent baton. Yet no one dared do anything beyond the prescribed motions, because the tower was supposed to be watching all the time. That was how a handful of guards could manage five thousand cells.
I had barely stepped out when another inmate slammed into me from the opposite direction. He must have run the wrong way in panic. We crashed and fell together, and my head struck the floor hard enough to scrape.
“What are you doing? Evacuate that way!” a guard barked.
The other prisoner recovered first. He jumped up, apologized, then reached down to help me.
“Sorry, sorry.”
As he hauled me to my feet, smiling, he leaned close and whispered into my ear:
“I left something under your bed.”
Then he signaled for me to wipe the shock off my face.
I knew him. On workdays we were often assigned to the same labor detail. He was the kind of man everyone instinctively reads as brilliant. The word attached to his life was three billion—a major financial criminal, from what I understood.
I had no idea what he meant. The whole event was too strange, too out of place in a prison built on order. Apparently I was the only one who felt that way. The rest of the evacuated inmates, lined up and counted in the corridor, wore the same blank expression they always wore. I copied it as best I could while trying to think about the sentence lodged in my head:
I left something under your bed.
After the disturbance, the guards announced that the fire had been caused by a failed capacitor in a computer. The blaze amounted to little more than a shorted power line burning a hole in a blanket. The inmate who had shouted “Fire!” was punished with an afternoon in solitary for forgetting to hit the emergency alarm in a genuine crisis. Then we were led back to our rooms in line.
He sidled up to me as we walked. I glanced at the guard at the front, then at the looming tower, and quickened my pace. He matched it.
“It’s fine,” he murmured. “No one will see me talking to you.”
“What do you want?” I whispered back. I barely dared move my face on the side nearest the tower.
“First, thank you for not reporting me. Second, because you didn’t report me, you’re my accomplice now. The details are in the computer under your bed.”
Then he fell back.
I wanted to tell him I had not stayed silent out of loyalty; I had simply suspected something else was happening. But by then the answer was obvious. The disturbance, his appearance, the laptop slid under my bed during the confusion—it had all been planned.
And somewhere inside me, something was beginning to come apart. I could not name it, or perhaps I did not dare. Yet I was also waiting for something now. I wanted to know what secret was hidden in the machine beneath my bed.
II
My life was reduced to a single modifier.
Five years ago I killed the woman everyone believed I loved most. Seventeen stab wounds. That was the final summary of me: reckless, ruined, unforgivable, a murderer.
What I am writing now belongs to my years in prison, though I do not know whether it will ever leave this place. Today, for the first time, I became aware that inside the so-called Supreme Circular Prison System there exists a shapeless conspiracy. And I understand something else as well: the moment that conspiracy takes on a visible outline, real death will arrive on schedule.
I added a prologue to the novel I have been writing. I had always saved the prologue for the year of my release, as a ritual to remind myself that if I obeyed the rules long enough, I might earn a genuine rebirth. But I began writing it today because, in any story of revenge or redemption, I had just been handed the first key to a concealed door.
That key was the laptop now sitting under my bed.
Its owner—the man known as three billion—was no ordinary inmate. On workdays and during exercise, while the rest of us behaved as though the tower above us could see every flicker of our faces, he traded information with a small circle of others. He was never punished. In a prison where imagination is supposed to die, clever was the only word available for a man like that, a man who radiated leadership.
Half an hour earlier I had called what happened strange, because I lacked a better term. Now it felt like the smallest flap in a butterfly effect. That flap had reached me. Hidden under my bed was an identical copy of my own state-issued computer.
I closed mine—R02-04257723. Every machine here carries a serial number tied to a room and its inmate; his would too. The tension made me think again of the woman I killed. When I murdered her, I inherited the curse of betrayal through her death and my guilt. Now, by taking possession of his computer, I was inheriting his criminal intention. I might even become essential to whatever plan he was building.
A word rose in my mind and filled me with fear and a thrill I could not admit: plan.
Yes, I know there has always been a criminal element inside me, restless, never extinguished. It was never satisfied by those seventeen wounds. It wanted more blood, more blades, more of that terrible artistry of torn flesh. In here I could only conceal it, perform the part of a man who had subdued or even destroyed that side of himself.
I could feel the fear in my body, yet all I could do was watch my own hands hide my official computer beneath the sheet, deliberately making it look as if it had slipped under the bed. Then, after checking that it was safe, I crawled under and took out the other one.
By the time I finished, my fear had shifted. I was no longer afraid of the object but of myself. The pessimistic self inside me was trembling, pleading with me not to go any further. But the other self—the one that had been sleeping all these years—had quietly awakened. It had complete control now. It made me open the machine, wait through the boot sequence, and move toward what it called the truth.
In that instant I understood the one part of the prison logo that had always eluded me. The three rays extending out from the central tower did not signify universal surveillance. They signified divisions of the self.
I remembered the old psychological model proposed by Freud: the ego, the id, the superego. Every human being contains all three. Evil emerges when they can no longer be reconciled. The prison’s emblem suddenly seemed to proclaim that its purpose was to force those divided selves back into harmony, so the prisoner might evolve and be reborn.
My left arm braced my knees and chin as I waited through the fifteen-second Prison Rules screen that could not be skipped. Only then did the desktop appear. Before I opened the notes, I could feel my pessimistic self abandoning the attempt to govern me. It retreated downward, leaving the criminal self to take command of the mind it had suppressed for five years.
The action happens tonight.
I had to check the timestamp twice. April 25, 2026.
An excitement I had not felt in years shot through me. It ran up my spine like electric current and numbed my scalp. My body seemed to protest that I had denied it this feeling for too long. I kept reading with the reverence of an archaeologist encountering a forgotten language, as if some abandoned god had left prophecy in these lines.
We have found the flaw in the circular prison. No—more precisely, we have found the fulcrum that overturns the paradox, the proof that the demon exists, the wheel that changes the speed of death’s roulette.
His way of writing made me ashamed of my own. If I had his command of metaphor, I would not spend pages circling the same thought. But that was irrelevant. What mattered was the flaw.
The previous experiments were all successful. So the test this morning should count as the final confirmation. I admit this may sound overconfident. I decided to leave this record behind before the experiment had fully succeeded, and to pass it on to one final person.
The final person had to be me.
I thought back to the faces in the corridor after the fire. Everyone had looked so numb it was as if personality itself had been drained from them. That explained why no one seemed to care. They had already accepted the plan for tonight.
There is something I need to tell you—
At that point the words on the screen seemed to detach themselves from the monitor. My focus narrowed until the room around me blurred. When I looked up again, I could almost see him there, leaning against the opposite wall, the shape of him supplied by my own mind. I smiled. This had happened before. In a prison this narrow, I could always manufacture a conversation partner out of myself to keep from disappearing altogether.
“The circular prison system is a lie,” he said.
“Why?”
He did not react to my interruption with irritation. Of course not. I had already cast him in my mind as a leader.
“Because the observation tower is mostly an empty shell.”
He stopped there and let me think. I had suspected as much. The vague sense of conspiracy that came over me that morning had been real after all. I looked toward the door and pictured the massive gray shaft outside, like a pillar from which countless blood-red eyes might open.
When I turned back, he was gone from the wall and speaking from the window instead, smoking. Since there was no real cigarette, my mind had to invent the smell for him. That seemed right. A cigarette is the kind of object that proves time is still moving when a person is thinking.
“You know Bentham’s panopticon, don’t you?”
“Jeremy Bentham, yes.”
“Yes, but not only that.”
Great men in the imagination always speak in ways that are slightly obscure. I let him continue, watching the next lines on the screen become dialogue in the room.
“Bentham created the panopticon as a prison design—a structure in which the few could supervise the many. Cells arranged in a ring, a central tower from which all cells are potentially visible, one-way blinds allowing the center to observe each inmate’s every move.”
I could almost smell the tobacco now. My mind sharpened.
“But the real significance of the panopticon is not prison architecture. It is the architecture of society. Build an institution of surveillance over everyone, make each individual fear that he is being watched, and eventually he will begin to watch himself. At that point the panopticon is complete.”
“So the tower doesn’t actually function the way we think. People follow the rules because we’ve all developed self-surveillance?”
“Not that it does nothing,” he said. “Only that its actual power is far smaller than we imagine.”
“So it isn’t watching us all the time.”
“Right. I started counting. New inmates arrive every quarter, usually placed together on the same level. And whenever a new group comes in, that’s when punishment alarms happen most often.”
“Yes.” I had noticed that myself. Newcomers require conditioning. That was why they hit the system’s boundaries so often.
“Exactly. This place is engaged in conditioning.”
The word on the screen—conditioning—made me absurdly excited. I had just thought it myself, and the coincidence gave me the thrill of mental communion.
“Every new prisoner goes through roughly three months of it,” he continued. “Long enough to make them internalize the existence of a godlike watcher who sees them constantly. Once that belief is in place, self-surveillance takes root.”
“They’re the samples,” I said, my voice overlapping with his.
That was where his entry ended.
I understood why he had cut it there. The text had stopped where the staged fire began. The new inmates were experimental samples, examples used to warn everyone else. Only those who could be conditioned into self-surveillance were retained in these cells. Layer sample over sample and eventually the whole population learns the only acceptable way to survive.
A sadness came over me so suddenly it felt physical. He had vanished again, though his imagined scent and radiance remained.
I scrambled the chronology and began reading from what was clearly an earlier entry.
He hanged himself. That alone surprised me. What shocked me even more was that no one noticed—not even the observation tower that claims to monitor us every second.
This time what appeared in my room was not the man but a corpse hanging in the middle of the cell. I studied it. It was him, or someone like him, suspended there without visible pain. I had once wondered whether the overhead sprinkler could somehow be used in a suicide. It had always seemed too high, too unreachable. Yet anyone determined to die can wring miracles from impossibility.
Then the hanging man spoke.
“He told me before that he wanted to kill himself,” the imagined voice said. “I told him it was impossible. Every movement here is observed. The instant he tried, he would be stopped and punished.”
“But he died anyway.”
“He died in his room. He killed himself right under the tower’s nose and triggered no intervention. That was the first impossibility. In this place, we are supposedly watched, classified, interrupted, punished.”
“How did you know he was dead?”
“He asked me for help while he was dying.”
Something fell onto the keyboard. Tears—his or mine, it made no difference.
“The night he died,” the voice continued after a pause, “perhaps he changed his mind too late. He was hanging there in the center of the room, kicking against the wall between us. I did not understand at first. Later I realized it was his signal. He wanted someone—anyone—to press the emergency button for him. But tell me: would you have dared?”
I touched the wall behind me, thinking of the hidden mechanisms embedded inside it.
“Why do you say no one knew?”
“Eventually the kicking stopped. I crouched by the meal slot and listened. A guard noticed something wrong because the wall was vibrating strangely.”
In my mind he was no longer hanging. He was crouched by the slot, replaying what he had heard.
“Is he dead?” one guard said.
“Yes. Don’t report it.”
“Why not?”
“Because that’s the rule. Just do as you’re told. Inform the prison doctor and administration.”
“…All right.”
“From that moment,” he said in his own voice again, cold and direct, “I knew there was a flaw.”
The observation tower—the essential central organ of the panopticon—is not truly operating at all. Its function is intimidation and exemplarity. New inmates are conditioned through fear until everyone here develops self-surveillance and the lie of the circular prison is complete. Bentham theorized the structure; modern society has turned it into a deception of enormous scale.
His ending hit hard. It sounded like the dead man kicking the wall for help, each thud more forceful than the last, until the wall and iron door should have shattered and exposed the fraud of the all-seeing tower.
And hidden inside my growing agitation, I discovered another feeling: resentment.
It was time, I thought, to expose everything.
III
Our conversation was interrupted when a drone delivered lunch.
Only then did I fully grasp how the impossible principle—few managing many—could actually work. Each level is serviced by a drone that distributes meals and necessities at fixed times, minimizing human involvement. The guards deal only with emergencies. Most of the prison’s authority is supposedly exercised by the tower itself.
But that myth was broken now. And once I saw the flaw, it looked larger and darker than I had imagined—like a black hole.
His experiments had all revolved around one question: is the tower truly functioning? The staged fire that morning had been one such test. Without someone pressing the emergency button, the tower did not detect it. That meant the weak point was the guard staff. The panopticon can only function perfectly if everyone accepts the rules without question. The moment someone proves the flaw exists, the whole system begins to collapse.
So all I needed was a chance to get near him during afternoon exercise. Then I could learn what tonight’s plan actually was and how they intended to force the prison into paradox.
That chance never came. A thunderclap woke me from my noon rest, and a notice flashed across the information panel: outdoor exercise canceled due to severe weather.
I sat up, furious, splashed water on my face, and stared at the rain. Its overlapping white-noise hiss soon buried my anger. Then I looked back at the hidden computer.
There was still more to read.
“What do you think order is?” he asked in another entry.
“A set of rules people obey.”
“And if the rules people obey are founded on something false, does that still deserve to be called order?”
If I had ever spoken to him face-to-face, I thought, he might have opened exactly that way. And now I was sure that day was close—very close. He was in the next cell, divided from me only by the architecture of the Supreme Circular Prison System. To exist here, each person has to obey the law of the panopticon: a central tower called the observation post, cells arranged in a ring around it, every cell with two windows—one toward the tower, one to the outside for light. By that arrangement, the observer in the center can easily inspect every inmate while remaining unseen.
That is the textbook version.
Now the false system was beginning to crack, which was why I knew we would meet soon. To be precise: tonight.
I was beginning to understand the purpose behind every experiment he had run. He was not seeking redemption. He wanted to prove his own existence by destroying the structure that was erasing it. Just as each prisoner here was nearing the point of losing the boundaries of self, he meant to tear the frame apart.
I am not very good at expressing the intensity of what I felt then. If this book ever reaches publication, perhaps I will revise these passages. But by slowly grasping what he really wanted, I also realized I had begun to merge with him. His thinking had become my thinking. His plan now required me too.
Before dinner, I read several more notes and our conversation resumed—not as question and answer this time, but as a shared discussion of the flaw, and of the central problem: how do you use that flaw to destroy a fortress that appears perfect?
“How many guards do you think actually control this massive prison?”
I liked the way he structured his notes around self-posed questions. It was as if he had always known someone else would one day read them.
“Fewer than ten,” I answered aloud to the blank wall, before reading the next line. “The whole point of this system is that the few control the many.”
Now that I knew the tower was largely a sham, I moved more freely in my room. On previous rest days I would crouch in the corner by the bed—where I imagined I was least visible—and write there. Now I had set the laptop down and was leaning against the steel door, speaking openly. In my mind he stood at the far end of the room by the barred window, looking outside and listening.
I glanced at the line that followed.
“Three,” he said.
Three.
I scratched the back of my head in embarrassment, and he went on, still facing away from me.
“That answer was revealed the night the man hanged himself. I heard only three voices, and only three people moving the body.”
I was stunned. Even my estimate of very few had failed to grasp the scale of it. Three people, for a prison built to hold five thousand cells.
He continued:
“There are five thousand cells in total. One hundred cells per circular level. But by my count, only five levels are actually in use. Fewer than five hundred prisoners are here. New arrivals come one whole level at a time every quarter—one hundred more every three months. Why?”
I answered before reading further.
“Because the circular prison is still an experiment. The more successful samples it produces, the more convincing the rules become.”
“Yes.”
He turned and pointed toward the iron door behind me.
“We are samples. And the collection of samples is itself the circular prison—one vast experiment testing whether Bentham was right, and whether this structure can be applied beyond prison.”
“To society as a whole?”
“Exactly. If this place proves that people can be conditioned, then the observation tower—the central structure that supposedly sees everything—can be transformed into anything placed inside society: cameras, facial recognition, biometric systems. They do not even need to function constantly. Five hundred prisoners are enough to simulate a society. Once everyone here accepts the rules and internalizes them, the group develops a collective value system. Self-surveillance becomes the condition of survival.”
“To live, you give up the self…”
He disappeared as I sank into thought.
As more prisoners arrive, the social shape becomes more complete. The deeper the shared values sink, the more every later arrival is forced to believe that such a terrifying law truly exists here. As long as the truth is never exposed, the people cycling endlessly through this place will sustain a perfect closed loop, like…
“...a perpetual motion machine.”
The irony of that phrase struck me like a blow.
Perhaps some future reader would dislike the way I render his notes as dialogue, too intimate for an outsider to enter. But I prefer this to merely reproducing his writing. This is how I can show my reverence for him. To me, he had become the light of hope moving toward the blackest darkness.
And I had to record it all: the anatomy of the fraud, and how we intended to destroy it. This would be one of the most disputed books ever written, and perhaps one of the most important. It would show how human beings took Bentham’s idea and built a machine designed to grind other human beings down.
I felt almost reborn.
For five years I had disciplined myself. I had submitted to conditioning. I had believed every movement I made was visible to that god-eyed tower. I had believed that if I could finally wipe out the dangerous self hidden inside me—the self capable of violence—I would one day leave this place renewed. I had talked myself into accepting that murdering that woman was a sin beyond measure.
Now it all looked different. Those were definitions imposed on me by others.
The circular prison was a colossal lie, or perhaps a grand act of human self-deception. Out of fear, people create mechanisms of self-surveillance. Then, inside those systems, they lose individuality and perception. Personal judgment is replaced by collective values, and together they construct a society in which everyone is standardized. Is that really anyone’s ideal society?
If I had to answer, I would borrow one of his lines from a note written four months earlier:
People are not merely accustomed to being ruled. A collective requires rule in order to operate more efficiently and move toward an ideal of perfection. To survive within the collective, individuals must give up their attachment to individuality and accept the correctness of collective values. And when the two conflict, they sacrifice their own judgment rather than risk exclusion.
And now, he was saying, you are being offered a chance to destroy that lie. Will you continue yielding to the collective and lose yourself more completely? Or will you oppose it, as I do, and help overturn a system that should never have existed? If everyone becomes a walking corpse ruled by a false god, does such a society deserve to exist at all?
I began reading my freshly written paragraphs aloud in the room. I would keep the earlier parts too—the confessions, the account of repentance and psychological reform—because that was also truly me. It was simply a version of me deceived and damaged by this lie. The world would need to see what kind of rot underlies a system that claims to remake a human being from the ground up.
Rain battered the windows until dusk deepened into blackness. I did not know whether my voice could travel through walls this thick, but I believed he was as exhilarated as I was. In darkness, even the idea of light gains meaning.
Then a voice asked me:
“Did you love her?”
I could not tell which inner voice this was. Perhaps it had risen because I had been rereading the parts of my manuscript where I repented over her.
“Before today,” I said, rubbing a finger under my nose in a gesture she used to notice and like, “I was certain that I did. But now I need to examine what that love really was.”
“Why?”
I closed both laptops. Side by side on the bed, they looked like twins containing opposite worlds.
“Because the man I used to be was a conditioned man,” I said after a while. “My love for her was only an accessory to repentance.”
“And now that your repentance itself has been overturned, love can’t survive either,” the voice finished for me.
I nodded and bit my finger, the way I often do when I am fighting the urge to smoke.
Then it pressed harder.
“So why did you kill her?”
“Because she betrayed me.”
“And because of that betrayal, you chose to kill her? Would killing her make betrayal disappear?”
At last I recognized who was speaking: the weak, pessimistic self that had controlled me until today and had now been driven down to the bottom of me. But what was the point of its resistance now? I had already decided to follow the other man and help bring this lie down.
“You loved her,” it said. “You learned of her betrayal, and the pain drove you to murder. Isn’t that true?”
I wanted to shout for it to shut up.
Instead I realized tears were running down my face. I covered it with both hands, trying to stop the contradiction spreading through me.
I understood why this question was tormenting me now, just before the plan began. Some part of me still wanted to stop, to choose another way of living, even if that way looked like surrender. But in this place surrender is the only official method of survival.
I soaked my monthly shorn head under cold water, trying to cool my thoughts, but there was no avoiding the real problem. If I denied the prison’s claim to have reformed me, then I also had to deny the origin of why I was here at all. Had I killed her out of love corrupted by betrayal? Or had I always been a murderer by nature, with her merely serving as the occasion?
That night the plan finally began.
Dinner was unusually quiet. Every night here is quiet, but this was the stillness before a flood. The storm stopped just before midnight, as if the weather itself had arranged favorable conditions for what was to come.
I could not see the corridor, so I curled by the meal slot and listened.
At 1:30, two hollow crashes rang through the circular void of the prison and echoed all around it. I guessed at once that someone had shoved laptops out through the meal slots. I even took one of mine from the bed and measured it against the opening to confirm the thought.
As expected, the observation tower detected nothing. It was merely a monumental prop.
Then how would they lure the guards in without touching the emergency system?
The answer came immediately. A dry automated voice began blaring through the hollow space—the prerecorded introduction to the Supreme National Circular Prison System itself. Of course. By sending the machines out while that audio played, they could create enough disturbance to bring the guards running without alerting central administration.
The protagonists of the next act entered on cue: two guards, from the sound of them, racing in opposite directions. If I understood his logic correctly, the laptops had been thrown from cells at opposite ends of a diameter in order to split the response.
The brittle institutional voice kept repeating through the void. Hearing it now was almost unbearable. Once, everyone here had treated those phrases as sacred scripture. Now the exposed words sounded ridiculous: self-surveillance, self-purification, rebirth, freedom. Soon I would know what real freedom felt like. Compared to the hypocrisy of this place, that was what human beings had always longed for.
“What are you doing?” a guard shouted nearby.
“My computer fell out,” someone answered.
Then came the metallic click of a cell door opening, sharp as a pistol slide.
“Hands up.”
A thud shook the floor beneath me, followed by a cry. The same silence fell, almost at once, from the far side of the ring. I knew what it meant. The prelude was over. The first movement had begun.
“Got it. The key for R08.”
The voice was exultant.
A second later an entire level woke at once to the collective sound of unlocking. The whole of R08 had been opened. My own lock changed from red to green, bathing the room in a light that looked almost unreal.
Then his voice came through the open doorway.
“What’s wrong? Not running?”
I was still sitting on the floor. From that angle he looked enormous, almost divine, larger even than the tower outside.
“Move.”
He pulled me up by the arm, just as he had that morning—no, yesterday morning, by then—the same gesture with which he had offered me a chance to go on living. My hands were shaking. Tears would not stop. He did not seem puzzled by them. His own face was wet too. I did not know what he was feeling, only that I could feel it in the pressure of his grip.
The fake observation tower did nothing at all. The third guard, who came running late, was subdued just as easily. He became the third key to the escape: one of his fingers was snapped off to preserve the print needed for access.
The column of escaping inmates moved like a mass of worms through the corridor. At the front were the minds clearing obstacles. At the rear were husks like me, no longer willing to think, simply moving toward freedom. The corridor was too narrow for anything else.
Then I realized something.
“Wait,” I told him. “I have to get my computers. I’m going to turn our conversations into a book and expose the hypocrisy of this world.”
He looked startled, then immediately satisfied—as if to say, I knew you would understand.
I ran back toward my room, still crying. Yes, I had to admit it now: there had always been a demon in me that rejected restraint. It should never have been destroyed. That was the true self.
I rushed inside and grabbed both laptops.
When I turned to leave, I slammed straight into the steel door.
The impact threw me backward into the middle of the room. My first thought was not why has the door shut? but where am I? The confusion cost me my chance. The green unlock light in front of me changed back to blood red, the same color as the nosebleed now running down my mouth.
I hurled myself at the door, trying to wrench it open, only to be thrown back again. I screamed through the meal slot for help—but at that exact moment even the slot slid shut and locked itself.
My eyes went to the emergency button on the wall.
The irony widened in my mind so quickly it felt like grief.
Then the sounds began.
Screaming. Running feet hammering the iron ring of the corridor. Bodies striking from high floors to lower ones. Pleas for help. The world beyond my door had become a separate universe I could not enter, and whatever was happening there was beyond my imagination.
I started shaking uncontrollably. The tears on my face had changed. A moment ago they had belonged to joy at the edge of freedom. Now they were sharp with fear, drying into stinging salt. The quieter the corridor became, the harder I shook, as if the two were linked by some inverse equation. My breathing grew fast and ragged, like a lungfish dying before rain.
I do not know how long it lasted.
At some point the ventilation system started up again. The sudden sound startled me so badly I dropped one of the laptops I had meant to carry away.
Then, unexpectedly, the door unlocked once more.
Cries and sobbing were rising now from every direction. I picked up the computer, tested the door, and stepped out.
The corridor was painfully bright. Once my eyes adjusted to the light after so long in darkness, I saw bodies strewn across the eighth level in every direction. I called them corpses at once; their faces were contorted, foam spilling from their mouths, their own fingernails having torn the flesh of their throats apart. It looked like some grotesque installation in a gallery, except the blood was real.
I waited for an explanation, because in my arms I still carried the key that could reveal everything.
Some inmates vomited at the sight of the floor. Others screamed and wept. Some hurried back into their own cells and slammed the doors behind them.
Then I saw him.
He lay not far away, his right arm stretched desperately toward his room, as if he had been trying to crawl back to it. His fingernails had peeled up from scraping across the floor, exposing the raw flesh beneath. I could not see his face, and I did not want to.
A terrible realization came over me, and I looked up at the massive observation tower, waiting for judgment.
Attention, members of the Supreme National Circular Prison System. We regret to inform you that an escape attempt occurred tonight in Sector R08 of the circular prison. In order to eliminate this severe violation to the greatest extent possible, the observation tower, upon fully confirming the offenders’ conduct, has carried out gas sanctions against all violators on Level R08 in accordance with prison regulations. It has now been confirmed that all offenders are dead. Let this serve as a warning. All inmates are required to strictly observe the laws and regulations of the circular prison.
My tears changed once again. I no longer knew what they meant.
I hurled the laptop in my hands toward the abyss-like center of the prison. It struck with a loud hollow crash. No one paid attention. Not even the tower, which continued repeating its cursed announcement. No one cared what I was doing. They all understood that this mass death had already served its purpose.
I retreated to my room. The door locked behind me.
Kneeling there, forehead pressed to the iron, I finally stopped sobbing. The root of despair is not endless crying. It is the point at which the body forgets how to make enough tears to express it.
I could feel him behind me, looming over me—not so much looking as accusing me with the face despair had twisted out of shape. I did not dare turn around. He belonged to the same category as the woman in my recurring nightmare: something I had no courage to face.
“Why didn’t you die with us?” he asked.
I said nothing.
“Now do you understand what the circular prison system really means?”
“Yes,” I answered at last. “Destroy every flawed sample, so that those who remain become perfectly reproducible samples.”
“How tragic,” he said. “You became one of the perfect samples too.”
I turned, meaning to answer, but he was already gone.
By then the daytime storm had fully withdrawn. Moonlight poured into the room—cold, merciless light. But even that was better than endless darkness.