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Somewhere, someone is screaming. It’s a jarring, sudden noise, painful to the ears. The voice is male. Probably. It is hard to tell. The scream is primal, primitive, a throwback to an age clouded over in the haze of memory. It is a scream of absolute fear. Not the cathartic release of energy that accompanies a scream of pain, but an instinctive reaction, freed from inhibition.
The scream has stopped.
The noise itself was nerve-shredding, but the way it finished is enough to paralyse the strongest will. It simply ended, like someone had turned the power off, removed a plug from the socket. There was no trailing off, no muffling. The scream simply ended.
The silence that follows is complete and suffocating. It is almost impossible for a human to imagine total silence. Wherever you go on Earth, there is always some sound – birds singing, the rustle of trees in the wind, the sound of your clothes moving. This is total silence. There is no external sound, nothing to indicate any kind of life outside of the cell. It is an ominous, ambiguously threatening soundless atmosphere.
The cell is small, cramped. It is not possible to extend my arms fully, though there is just about enough room to stand up. There are no lights inside, no windows. The only light inside the cell is the flickering of the pictures from the television screens. The entire ceiling is made up of one giant screen, a square of flickering motion four feet along the sides. The floor is the same, whilst the walls are divided into multiple smaller screens, set in rows of seven. Four rows to each wall, apart from the door, which is made of cold inert metal. Above the door is an inscription, in is Italian, maybe Spanish. I can’t tell the difference between the two – I only ever learnt French, and that was at school, a long time back.
I am not a bad person. Sure, I’ve been in a few fights, not paid parking fines occasionally, lied about my age when I was a teenager. But I’m not a bad person. I’m not intrinsically evil, not a raving psychopath intent on murder and death. I’ve done bad things, but no more than anyone else, not by a long way. I mean, I’m one of the most honest people I know.