Apocalypse Redux

Chapter 297: The Big House

There were many, many depressing places in the world.

For example, mental wards, and hospitals, especially nowadays when the only people who had to stay at those places were the truly dire cases who were beyond immediate magical intervention.

But prisons were also up there. Even in Germany, which tried to ensure that people who only had short prison sentences had a good shot at reentering society, they sucked. Countless hours in a small cell were awful, even for people who had the run of the yard for most of the day.

And then there was the prison that had been built with the advent of the [System], with its location near Leipzig chosen specifically so that one specific prisoner did not need to be transported too far.

The prisoners in that prison weren’t necessarily the worst of the worst, just the most powerful dangerous criminals in Germany. As such, being allowed to just leave one’s cell was a rarity. Intra-prison communication was freely available to avoid the various issues that stemmed from extended isolation, even via illusions that simulated being in the same room together, but the needs of the prisoners needed to be balanced with the fact that most of those people could slaughter the population of a city in an afternoon.

Nowadays, most countries, as well as the Hague, had begun to once again use the death penalty. The requirements for when it could be imposed were incredibly arduous in the places where it had previously been illegal.

But between how much easier it was to get to the truth nowadays and the fact that the kinds of criminals who’d be subject to it could potentially even get out of jail cells that sucked up half the national budget, each, … practical considerations existed even in matters of life and death. So even though there was a case to be made that legal murder was still murder, executions were back on the table.

All that being said, there was a hard line where already sentenced criminals were concerned. Laws did not work retroactively, so no people would get executed for crimes that would have earned them a death sentence if they’d been committed five years later.

And then there was Arianne Krebs. Quite possibly, the serial killer with the biggest body count in human history. Direct kills, at least. Most dictators exceeded hers by a couple of orders of magnitude, but they rarely got their hands dirty.

Isaac had been there when she’d been arrested, only to later learn that her ability set was far greater than what she’d demonstrated thus far. Her ability to dive through other people’s subconsciousness while they slept had made her a dangerous information gatherer, information which she’d gleefully shared with him when he dropped by once a month.

Her first reaction to people putting the future of the world might have been murder first, mutilate corpse second, but she did want to make sure the Earth kept spinning.

Isaac sat down in a forest near the prison well clear of any sensory perimeter, set down a few alarms around himself, and went to sleep.

At his Level, he only needed to sleep for barely a second and could fall asleep just as quickly. All he had to do to contact Krebs was keep himself from waking up.

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He appeared in a white void, with a barely perceptible ground underfoot. A few meters across from him, Krebs was sitting on a pure white armchair that blended into the background almost perfectly, wearing a formal pantsuit that she would decidedly not have been allowed to wear in jail.

“I’m afraid I don’t have anything this month,” she said, sounding more upset than the situation would normally have justified.

But Isaac could understand her, perhaps more than he was entirely comfortable with. Not being able to do anything while the world was teetering on the edge of sliding into chaos sucked. It was her own fault, her own methods, that had put her in this position, but he could still understand her far too much to be entirely comfortable with the situation.

“I know,” Isaac said.

“Why?” she looked a little frustrated.

“You’ve helped a lot, and I’m grateful for that part, but I’m afraid, your fellow prisoners barely need to sleep anymore and you’ve fallen too far behind in terms of Levels to do too much more,” Isaac said bluntly, “I’m afraid this’ll be the last time we meet for at least thirty years. If you get out, I’ll be making sure you don’t get back up to old habits.”

“Old habits,” she said flatly, “If the world is still here, I won’t have to.”

“You’ve got two full Evolutions dedicated to killing people you see as being damaging. The temptation would be there,” Isaac said.

This would have been the point where he’d have gotten up if he’d sat down in the first place.

“I’m trying to make sure that once the world is stabilized, that people can live their lives without spilling blood. I hope you’ll be able to live a life of peace after all of this.”

And with that, he woke himself up. She had an oath ability, one meant to ensure that people could trust her, and she’d promised not to spill the beans about him.

It would have been easy to call him an asshole for his coldness towards her. But honestly, they’d been using each other from the start. She’d been using him to feel useful, and he’d been using her for information. She could no longer keep up her side of the deal, so he’d decided to stop using her and wasting time.

He’d meant everything he’d said. When she’d eventually served her sentence, he’d make sure she either stayed on the straight and narrow or went straight back into the slammer. No way in hell was he going to let her go right back to killing people.

Yet despite all the justifications, it still felt a little bad.

***

Isaac collapsed into his armchair, back in the conference room. The spare sitting in the corner, that was, as Artemis had claimed the one at the table. But after a few moments, he felt a hefty weight land in his lap, where Artemis curled up. She was a good deal bigger than a standard cat, but it wasn’t like Isaac would have had a problem even if she’d been full-grown.