New Taboos Read Online Free PDF Page A

trying to go to the head.”
    Rita checked her watch. “Shall we visit the meals department?”

    Several bored inmates were drinking coffee in a small room lined with white and chrome appliances.
    Faye, Gull, and Rita were standing near a gray metal door with
Subpod 17
stenciled under the wired window. She could see only corridor through the window—and the trustee she’d seen earlier, running his wet vacuum over the floor. Had he followed them here, somehow?
    She’d expected a big cafeteria space, an industrial-sized kitchen. But meals was a just a series of distribution counters, that opened in various parts of the prison pod at mealtimes, closed with steel shutters the rest of the time. There were no cooks, just a few personnel who did the microwaving. The food was prefab, each meal in its Styrofoam tray, brought to the pod on trucks once a week.The breakfasts were all the same, except on Sundays when they added pancakes; there were seven lunches and suppers, one for Monday, one for Tuesday …
    â€œIt’s true that the food is … kind of repetitive,” Rita said. “We’re working on offering more variety. But it’s nutritious, sprayed with vitamins, everything they need. Would you like to try today’s lunch? We have meat loaf, or, if you prefer, veggie loaf. It’s all kosher.”
    â€œNo thanks. Just the coffee …”
    â€œCoffee’s not bad, don’t you think?”
    â€œNo. Not bad.” It wasn’t bad. It wasn’t good. It wasn’t important.
    â€œShall we go to the printers?” Rita suggested.
    They went. Another long passage through many doors took them to a big hangar-like room where men in orange jumpsuits guided blocks of basic production plastic into 3-D printers. The inmates looked into monitors, made adjustments on a computer screen, and talked softly under the watchful eyes of four autoguards. A variety of car parts, printed three-dimensionally, were shunted out of the printer; workers checked them for symmetry and defects, then stacked them.
    â€œThose printers can make any shape,” Faye murmured. “Isn’t that kind of dangerous? Can’t they make weapons?”
    â€œWhat the printers can make is preprogrammed. The prisoners can’t program them here, not at all. This stuff can’t be hacked. Every last piece is closely monitored. Prisoners absolutely cannot make contraband forms. If anything’s missing, the mechanism knows it right away from the weight differential.”
    Faye pointed to the odor marked
Subpod 17.
“What’s through there?” she asked Gull.
    â€œThat’s high-security,” he said, glancing at Rita.
    â€œCan we have a look through it?”
    Rita slowly shook her head. “It’s not safe.”
    â€œThat’s kind of a contradiction in terms, high-security that’s not safe, isn’t it?”
    â€œNot if you know prisons,” Rita said, giving her a look of watered-down contempt.
    â€œThat’s just why I’m here,” Faye said. “Because I
don’t
know them—particularly this style of prison. This is the biggest prison in the world. It covers an entire state. I really need to be able to see it pretty extensively to get a sense …”
    Rita gave her a pitying frown. “It doesn’t actually cover the whole state. Arizona is still … Arizona.”
    â€œStatewide covers a little more than eighty percent of the state of Arizona,” Faye said. “That’s more than three-fourths of the state covered with thousands of buildings like this one …”
    â€œMs. Adullah. We can show you medium-security cell tiers, and one of the yards, and that will have to be it. You could spend months trying to see even half of Statewide—And you’d see the same thing over and over, though some pods contain men, some contain women—”
    The lights went out. All of them, just like