Pulling Hard Time by Harlan Ellison (F&SF, October-November 1995) opens with a short introductory passage about New Alcatraz, a prison that keeps its prisoners in zero-gee VR.
The story then cuts to Charlie, who kills four bikers attempting to rape his wife in the couple’s restaurant. After this he is imprisoned for their murders, and then he kills another prisoner and cripples a guard. He is transferred to New Alcatraz.
The penultimate section sees a Senator visiting the Warden, who explains to the politician what happens to the prisoners:
Well, they just float there till they die, but it’s in no way ‘cruel and unusual punishment’ because we do absolutely nothing to them. No corporal punishment, no denial of the basics to sustain life. We just leave them locked in their own heads, cortically tapped to relive one scene from their past, over and over.”
“And how is it, again, that you do that…?”
“The technicians call it a moebius memory [. . . we] select the one moment from their past that most frightens or horrifies or saddens them. Then, boom, into a null-g suite, with a proleptic copula imbedded in theirgliomas. It’s all like a dream. A very very bad dream that goes on forever. Punishment to fit the crime.”
“We are a nation in balance.”
“Kindlier. Gentler. More humane.” p. 142
The subsequent kicker scene (spoiler) sees Charlie as a boy, involved in a car accident and trapped with his dead mother for four days. The story finishes with the “nation in balance” refrain.
This is more a political opinion column than a short story, and one which makes the fairly obvious point that the cruel and unusual punishment of prisoners is a Bad Thing. A squib, not a story, and editor Rusch’s gushing introduction doesn’t improve matters.1
* (Mediocre). 1,800 words.
1.
I have an editorial confession to make: I stole this story.
Well I didn’t steal it exactly. You see, occasionally Harlan Ellison calls me to read a story he has just finished. He wants instant feedback, which I usually give him. Not this time. When he finished reading “Pulling Hard Time,” I couldn’t breathe. Literally. The story had knocked the wind from me.
As soon as my breath returned, I did my editorial duty. I begged, wheedled, pleaded and so sufficiently debased myself that Harlan sent the story to F&SF instead of the other magazine he had promised it to.
But Harlan said we could publish the story only on the condition that I confess. And now I have. Gleefully. p. 139