Marsha Connley checked the gold band around her wrist. A small hologram appeared in blue and pink and hovered above the surface. It was a picture of her home and told her now was the time to move.

The bracelet was a "gift” from the guards in I-TEN of sector twelve. It wasn't anything special to them but it did have special powers, ones that even she was not aware of at this time. It had small round links with mirrored charms embedded under the curved face of the band where numerals appeared. The digits 11000110 were imprinted there now but they were always changing. Above the bracelet snap the small whispery face of an old man in a wizard's hat winked at her, it was time to go. She could not hear him speaking but saw his jaw moving like a thresher in slow, agonizing movements beneath his beard.

The face of the bracelet was always changing. One minute it was the face of a small women, the next it was a small boy, then it was the chalice she drank from when she made her first communion. Of course she didn't know how she remembered these things in her stressful state, the memories crept back into her mind slowly, but they never stopped. How could she even believe them? Then again, what was the point of believing anything if you knew about the Logic Q?

She did not know where the Logic Q kept all of these memories (was it a memory bank in some life-like synthetic brain?) or how they changed on the face of the bracelet when she wasn't looking. What power did it have over her anyway? What if she couldn't read the signs correctly? What if this bracelet was all she had left? The information in her mind was as good as anyone else's and anyone else thought she was as good as dead.

  The bracelet was made with a metallic compound that could be molded with small electric voltages. She had heard that in January a Swedish scientist had found a way to encode small bits of data on the ends of electric fields and had also found a way to manipulate those electric fields to create data. It was now also possible to place enough information on a single pulse of electricity to run four full operating systems powerful enough to run the largest servers on the planet. If that was true then there was no end to what they could do. They had found a way to carve a niche directly into one of your nerve roots and place an electric pulse or current in there forming a nerve ridge. This nerve ridge could then carry and displace data by factoring the biological signals it received. In turn they created thoughts on these "wires” of life. They were stealing your thoughts, using your body for a carnival of festive harmonic electricity salivating with the need to pulse. They grew their own tho   The guards in I-TEN were plenty sympathetic with her, not simply because she was an extremely good-looking woman but because she had balls, as they put it, actually struck a chord with them. They had seen the shallow ones pass through their prison and the godliness that they tried to pull off. Marsha had the look of an honest prisoner, one that didn't give a damn who tried to slice her arms open or take her into the shower stalls for a little one on one. It was that look in her eyes, those deadly, piercing eyes. Like stones sunk in the sand, polished smooth from ages of rushing water. There was a veil that hung about her day and night, one that let it be known who she was without ever being lifted. It billowed through the dirty, moss covered halls when she walked through them. It hollowed out shadows that lingered under her cheekbones and dirtied the spaces under her eyes.

When Jensen had raped her in the coat closet, she didn't scream, she didn't even cry. I wonder how hard must it have been, how it must have felt like someone was learning her secrets from the inside, wanting to steal them, learn them for a second, spit on them and then throw them away. Laughing about it later with their friends around a poker table, talking about how good a piece of meat she was, how nice her ass was and how she started moaning. It was her body then, just like they were her thoughts, that were being stolen and she had kept it sacred somehow. She had left it all alone. Forced the mental image of her breasts being fondled by his dirty hands, her torn panties, her hips being thrust against like a speed bag repeatedly as he raped her, tormented her; she forced these things out of her mind. She never thought about the worn out desk blotter or the clock on the wall like some rape victims do, the dust and coffee stains that were on there, anything to get the horror out of thei hing they had stolen.

Bradbury had watched it all from the doorway. Even though he should have stopped Jensen he didn't, he didn't do anything. He just stood there immobilized. His beady little eyes flew around the scene and his hand flew right to his nightstick but his body stood still. He had no need to get in the way of this. Fat and old he succumbed to the nerveless need to protect his own ass. He wouldn't even close the door so no one else could see her ass, being spoken for.

She heard him in the break room joking with the rest of the guards about her status as a real choice piece of meat, slapping his big hand down on Emerson's back. "She has a fender, got a few dents in it now though don't it?” and they all laughed. The next morning Bradbury took her out of her cell and hugged her, told her it was all right and kissed her soft cheek with his lips.

They could feel something in her after that morning. It was as if she had been reduced to nothing but a single digit in a dingy cell doing the time that someone had told her to do without any regard for her safety or sanity. She was an enemy now. The only women to be locked up in a men's prison. She had no self she was a number in a system, representing something that didn't exist and worst of all they stole it from her without her knowing it. What she had been doing was right all along.

The guards could feel it in her coarse voice when she spoke, in the hollowness around her cheekbones. A sad expression lingered on her face and the shallowness of it all showed through in her eyes. If she'd let you touch her you could feel it rippling through her muscled arms and in her long, bronzed, tightened thighs. Her breasts showed it as she staggered back and forth across her cell, they swayed from side to side like cement balls with a tender but hardened jiggle. She was no longer considered a "good women” but she kept her body tight and fit. It was a choice piece of real estate and she knew it. She represented everything that should have been good, back before the Logic Q came along. Before women were considered the perfect entity. As she always said, what good is the common good now? It makes you less of a visionary.

Now she just wanted to make the men on the outside a little jealous and the ones on the inside crazy. She was the only women prisoner in a male prison.

She walked up to the foot of her bed and made a promise, no more living in my tight little cell, no more walking like I have a stick in my ass and no more thinking of the logic Q.

The cross above her bed was a joke. Christians used mass means of torture. That is what she called the Logic Q and the guards knew this. They actually applauded her for it, in their minds just playing along with her little game and that is why they gave her the bracelet. Johnson told her the bracelet had magic powers and little did he know that it did. It changed every ten minutes or so. Giving her only a brief moment to divide from her worries and think about what little future she had left. The Logic had done this to her. She hoped that nothing would come of this little glitch in the system. Of course she was supposed to live long enough to tell her son she loved him. This would only be fair.

The Logic had only made her want to destroy it. It was too large, too malicious and she was too much of a control freak. It was the most complicated network of intangible and tangible pulses of electricity. It was so complex that even god couldn't explain it and god was the one who most people believed was responsible for it. In her Logic anyway, some blamed god and some blamed life. She blamed no one and that is why she came to be the first women prisoner in a male prison.

The Logic was built to tame and manipulate the strongest into thinking what it wanted them to think. You couldn't hear it, or see it; it was below and in between. It was the only enemy now, the reason she was in prison. Yet no one could believe her, it was just too impossible for her mind to work that way and it was only a vision, a thought and not reality. There was a time when she would have loved to be a part of it, to know it, to obey it like so many do, and not even have to think about it - but not now, in her cell.

The cold air ran down over the walls and slipped across her naked toes, she could feel the coolness leave the concrete as her feet began to warm the area they were standing on. This small cell housed the roaches leaving their feces in tiny piles in the corners and festering like scabs on the floor ravaging each other for her flakes of skin and crumbs that rolled off of her pants and shirt. A small stain that could be blood or urine, decorated the floor just beyond her bed, she only wondered why it was there, who had put it there and whether or not she was about to do more harm.

Marsha looked her face over in the mirror. It wasn't bruised badly the guards had been merciful with her. She pulled her sandy blonde hair into a ponytail that hung down the back of her neck. Then pulled back her lips and noticed her gums were still pink though a slight onset of gingivitis was inevitable. She inserted her finger into her mouth and removed her back two molars on the left side and placed them on the sink. She pulled down her pants and noticed her shapely hips in the mirror. Men used to drool she thought sardonically and laughed. "You make me drool...” she remembered her husband saying this before sex every night, with his robe hanging open, stinking of cigar smoke and potpourri, his chin brushing up against her jaw as his lips pursued her eyelashes, her nose, lips and finally her tongue.

She threw off her underwear and let it fall to her ankles. Maybe he was right, she thought glancing at herself in the mirror; I am sexy. She propped her ass in the air and laughed, she didn't know why she was doing this now, she had work to do but it formed a pleasing pear shaped droplet that she couldn't get over. The Logic is doing this, she thought, once I started taking a stand it would do this she heard herself repeating what Messing had said, her mentor.

Inside one of the false molars she had a small razor and a ratchet head. In the other was a tiny microchip programmed to disable the prison's central computer and lock down mechanisms. Jimmy, her guardian, lawyer and as of now her only friend had mailed her the teeth but they didn't make it past the mail sort. He then had to make a new pair and tried to get them past the guards in a box of brownies. He finally inserted them inside of a large pen and had Marsha sign a phony document. While she was chewing on the pen she removed the molars and shoved them into place. If you think that is difficult try pulling out two of your own molars with a pair of vice grips, which she did without the help of any alcohol or painkillers. She had a small aluminum handle to form a working ratchet with the ratchet head. Not bad for a girl who couldn't pump gas two years ago. Then she slid out the razor and laid it on the bed. She attached the ratchet head to its small bar and went to work on the bed frame Marsha remembered that she hadn't eaten in three days. Her wrists were thinned and even her cheeks had sunken in. She looked like a pale, shrunken version of herself. "This is what you get...” she said sarcastically, "This is what you get when you try and screw with me.” Marsha picked up the razor and sliced deep into her wrist cutting through the tissue and into the meat of her wrist.

She got half way to the bone when Johnson heard her screaming. She counted to ten and faced into the camera in the corner of her room screaming, pale and ashen. She held her hand on the wound to stop the blood from flowing and hid the wrought iron bedpost under her arm. She waited until the guards saw her on their screen. Johnson was the first one to do so. He called for a security team on level 1 and then dialed for a medic. The guards started gathering their riot gear and a silent alarm rang through the facility. Her cell door was unlocked and the guards poured into the room with their riot shields, masks and tear gas. Marsha looked at them covered in blood with a terrified expression on her face. The medic tried to push through the guards but they weren't moving.

The first guard fell with a thud. Marsha hit him above the temple and shattered both his helmet and the facemask. Plastic shards flew into his eyes and blood poured freely from the wound. She struck again and again and the wall of guards shattered like glass. They fell to their knees, dropped their riot shields, their night sticks clattering on the pavement. If they tried to make an effort to pull the tabs on their tear gas canisters Marsha made sure she stopped them dead, pummeling them with her bedpost. She smashed through their teeth and bone. She made them nothing but pulp, nothing but dead lifeless globs of meat.    A small and fat guard in a blue uniform was sitting in the main booth monitoring the situation, sweat dripping from his brow and soaking through his undershirt. His knuckles rattled against his nightstick as he checked to make sure it was still there. Bradbury was the final obstacle in Marsha's way.

Staring in disbelief at the monitor in front of him, Bradbury felt Marsha's eyes focus on him as if she were seeing him as she peered into the camera above the dead pile of guards. Her gaze snapped away from the camera and she ripped off a piece of her bed sheet to make a tourniquet. Walking out of her cell door towards the guard station she felt liberated. She had enjoyed hearing Emerson's bones snap and she was going to enjoy hearing Bradbury's do the same.  Marsha felt the faintness come and go as a cool breeze would on a hot August day. She knew she had very little time before the blood drained completely from her body.

She had walked these corridors a thousand times, in chains of course, with her head bent towards the floor. She wouldn't be surprised if no one even recognized after she was gone or if they saw her on the "outside”, anyway this was to her benefit. None of the other prisoners flinched as she walked past their cells, their dry and dingy lives clinging to them like mold on a crust of bread. Most of them had slept through the fiasco, choosing as always to become uninvolved in anything other than dinner and an occasional fight. It was the typical male reasoning that dominated the cells and dominated life on the outside as well. It didn't matter anyway, the logic had a hold of all of it.

Marsha pulled her ponytail tighter as she crept past Mecailen's cell. He was the one who had saved her life the first day she was incarcerated. He had pulled a dozen men off of her back, strong men too, each about the size of fullback, brick like arms and legs thicker than beer kegs. It wasn't that he was any superhuman strong man but he had the respect of the whole prison and no one was going to question his words or actions. This is what she respected about him. He was laid up in his bunk, his large stomach moving up and down slowly with his breathing. George was sitting below him working over a strand of rosary beads, his nose hooked downward and as his lips moved he whispered a rosary for ever one of his sins. He would do this all night, he had a great deal to amend.

Marsha realized her pulse was dropping. As the faintness would come and go the walls began to sway. Two hundred heart wrenching steps to the guard corridor and Marsha felt like she was pulling her bones along, she could no longer feel her own flesh, she was having heart flutters, her vision came and went. Blue lights flashed in front of her, her senses dulled and then lit like a Christmas tree, she was having a dream one moment and then the next the floor was racing up to meet her. Lights began to pop on in the cells as Marsha dragged her faint body towards the guard station.

Bradbury had been watching the whole scene on his monitor. His eyes quickly moved to the alarm and then back to Marsha who was laying in the middle of the floor, a pool of blood circling around her wrist. If he sounded the alarm she was finished, she would surely die in the time it would take for the guards to transport her to the hospital. They had no medical staff left on hand. As it was she was about to die anyway. He would wait, then sound the alarm, until every last drop of blood had pumped itself out of her small thin arms. If that is the way she wanted to die then let it be that way.

Marsha's eyes popped open. She looked down at her wrist and the gold bracelet twinkled in the light, it's powers were slightly diminishing with the blood loss and her cells no longer receiving those precious nutrients to fire the electrodes in the bracelet. The influence of the Logic Q was diminishing. If only someone would help her, reach out of their cell and give her something... a small hologram formed and a face appeared above her bracelet.

Marsha watched the hologram with intelligent care. It had a purple hue and just hovered. It was Brady sitting in the guard room, his fat belly hanging out over his pants undone at the fly. He was squatting and waiting like an animal. His piggish eyes darted back and forth like a pair of insects inside of their sockets. The clock on the wall said one thirty, and Brady was eating a donut, unaware that anything was about to happen – as far as he was concerned, Marsha was dying in the middle of the floor.

Brady wiped the frosting off of his lips and rose from his chair. Marsha opened her eyes and could see him now just as he could see her. She was a good hundred feet or so from the guard station and she could see Brady moving around in there. His blue uniform stuck out against the white walls and parched papers on the bulletin boards. He was watching her now, his eyes bolted from her legs to her head, like jacks thrown across the pavement. The alarm to the outside corridors was all that concerned her now, if he touched it she would die; it was a cruel little game he was playing, if that was what it was.

Marsha still had her own trump card though, the iron bed post that she had kept in her shirt as she made her way through the prison corridor. It felt even heavier now as she tested it's weight. It would make a good throwing weapon, wasn't that what she had decided? As soon as Brady saw her arm testing the steel of the heavy little weapon with her hands his eyes locked. It could have been a second or more that he focused on her, testing her over with his eyes, seeing if she would make a move like a trained gun fighter.

Brady wanted to make sure of what he was seeing, could it be that she was coming after him? Marsha saw him look down at the alarm and she slung the bed post harder than she had ever thrown anything in her life. It soared through the air like a javelin and struck Brady right in the soft spot on his temple. He crumbled instantly. She was home free. The alarm should be a snap, she would be out of here in no time...   *        *       *   The hall way was looking brighter, she felt her pulse return and quicken and she was back on the floor rolling in the blood soaked carpet.

Four nurses surrounded her in white uniforms, asking if everything was all right, she could watch TV soon, once they got her bandages on. Did she have another bad dream? They would make her a cup of tea later, when her pulse returned for good and in six weeks when her ligaments stitched back together she might write her mother a letter.

After she took her shots and laid down on the sofa to watch some TV with the other patients Marsha looked up at the clock, and then returned her gaze to the floor of the room. She felt the medicine oozing through her veins and looked up quickly, Brady focused on her with an infused grin, a hazel eye peering out at her from within it's shell. There was that secret they both shared, the closet trim, the desktop in the administrator's office. The door was always slightly propped open, like his eye. The hazel eye that peered out at her.