The Bezzle by Cory Doctorow

Author:Cory Doctorow [Doctorow, Cory]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781804547786
Publisher: Head of Zeus

10

Something had changed with SCAR. It started with the food. It had always been bad. Now there wasn’t enough of it. I know, I know: The food here is terrible and the portions are so small. But from what Scott could figure, the prisoners were on 1,500 calories a day, or maybe less.

Everyone started to get hungry. Always. Cellies shared their commissary, or begged family for more money in their accounts. Other guys got irritable, and then mean, and then they started to eat other prisoners’ food. Mealtimes got ugly.

Commissary prices were up. Commissary portions were down. Somewhere, SCAR had found a contractor who would sell them a 4.32-ounce can of tuna that only had 3.9 ounces in it. They didn’t even bother to make up the extra space with water. Prisoners built balance scales out of string woven from sheet threads passed through either end of a toothbrush handle teetering on a table corner, and weighed the new tuna against the old.

There were fewer guards, too, which had a ripple effect through prison life. Head counts took longer and sometimes cut into yard time or meal time. Fights didn’t get broken up as quickly, or sometimes weren’t broken up at all. The prisoners did all the important work around the prison, but they had to be supervised by guards, whether they were manning the commissary or mopping the floors. If guards weren’t available, the work wasn’t done.

The tablets started to break. They’d always broken, but they’d been the one thing that SCAR could be relied on to replace quickly, since a broken tablet was a tablet that stopped producing revenue for SCAR. SCAR wouldn’t swap you a new tablet just because your screen was cracked or because the battery was so worn out that it only worked when it was plugged in, but once it was completely unusable, it would be sent to a depot for refurbishment and replaced with another refurb.

But one day, that stopped. A prisoner finally managed to snag one of the elusive guards and ask for a swap-out, and the guard took the old model but never came back with a new one. Days ticked by. A week. The prisoner caught up with the guard, who shrugged and said, “You’ll get it when you get it.”

Other tablets broke and disappeared. The tablets weren’t just the prisoners’ music, video, and book library, weren’t just their lifeline to mail and voice calls and video calls, they were also their interface to the commissary. Fifteen hundred calories a day and no commissary made things mean.

There were more fights. The guards stopped pretending they were breaking them up. There were fewer guards anyway. Scott heard two of them talking about taking a buyout package from the new owners.

SCAR had new owners.

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