Page 7 - An Evening with Maxwell's Daemons

The Space Hulk

prisoners, with minimal inputs from sporadic resupply missions
from Earth. A system of locks would assure contact-free and
uncontaminated transactions with authorized visitors from the
shadowy agency running the show. Satellites would serve as outer
prison walls, warning off or shooting down unwanted visitors.
Obviously the prisoners would have no communications gear. For
something to happen, it would have to be from the outside, right?
Or not? It’s like a sealed-room mystery turned inside-out: the
criminals have to find the impossible means of egress before the
crime is committed.”
“Well,” interjected Rutger Schlager, “the trope you are
depending on is the prison-break movie of the past eighty or ninety
years. The audience—or readership, in this case—will come to it
with expectations: are you going to turn those inside-out, as well?”
“I’m coming to that,” said Mauker, as yet unannoyed. “What I’ve
described is like a ripe piece of fruit. The tree might try to hold on
to it, but gravity and a host of birds, mammals and insects are
working against it. Obviously, once the setting is created—along
with some characters of interest, both within the hulk and on the
ground—I need to set up a crisis for dramatic interest. Here is what
I came up with: a cross between the Nazi concentration-camp
doctors and the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. The prisoners are a cross-
section of humanity living at low gravity for an extended period.
Unknown to them, their metabolic and medical conditions are
being monitored by sensors in the hulk. Thus they are unwitting
participants in the research to determine the effects of life in space
on human beings.”
“Not much of a life,” commented Perversity Tinderstack.
Mauker spread his hands. “Brutality and exploitation are
ubiquitous: they simply aren’t always obvious to the public.
Occasionally the veil is lifted or ripped off, and people are horrified
at what their fellow-citizens are capable of doing to outsiders—or
insiders, for that matter. Obviously, the situation on the hulk has
dehumanizing effects on the prisoners; complementarily, their
captors and torturers are subject to the usual corruptions of ethics
and morality.”

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