A New Australia (Patreon)

It's such a small device, barely the size of a pea, but it's what allows them to control this whole things with virtually no staff. A micro sized, short range, encrypted, digital audio receiver. No surprise it's the first thing they put in you when you arrive, barely dry after being hosed down, and not even finished with the medical check up. They just put the endoscope or whatever in one ear, then the other. You don't even feel any pain, not until later when the anesthetic wears off. Then someone tells you to turn left. Then they tell you to turn right. At first you don't even realize the sound is coming from within the ears. Then you are stuck.

Every single little deviation or misstep your get an earful, quite literally. Wake up! Get dressed! Turn right! Clear your plate! Everything controlled by a synthetic voice. Step out of line significantly and you'll get a head splitting sound until you assume the position, kneeling with hands behind your neck. But they've gone one step further to make the drones they want. I know they are speaking to you while you sleep, because I woke up too early one morning. The whispers cut short mid sentence, so I don't know what it was saying. After that there was a hum and hiss in my ears all day, making me feel completely exhausted by the end of it. 

They pushed the exercise program harder than usual for me that day as well. "Go to rack 5. Pick up dumb bell pair 14. Go to square 2:6. Do biceps curls, alternating hands. Up-and-hold-and-slowly-down. Up-and-hold-and-slowly-down." I never woke up too early after that again. I've never not woken up sore since either.

It's surprising to me that they can't just drug us any way they want. An oversight in their lobbying endeavors, I'm sure. They fuck with us the old fashioned way, by sourcing food with the right hormones and supplements to sidestep the issue. Even with all the lifting and running I'm forced to do, there is no way I could put on so much muscle in such a short time without any kind of extra sauce. I suppose they have to cheat to meet the shuttle schedule. Officially they need four months to prep someone for transfer, but it will only be three for me from entry processing to transfer. Two weeks from now.

"I want you to... erm.. co-colonize Mars" Fuck you Musk! Though despite what the conspiracy lunatics say, I'm sure you're plenty dead by now. Haven't stopped SpaceX from playing your commercial unaltered over and over for decades, like the fucking Hershey's kisses bell commercial. Turns out that Mars became the new Australia in less than 50 years. Barren, deadly and filled with criminals. I guess that's why the privatized prisons get away with abusing so many loop holes. They yeet all felons off the planet, even one with such a short sentence as mine, and house them out of sight and out of mind on a different planet. They know that since I don't even consider my "crime" a crime, I will never be able to register remorse in the MRI for appeals or commute. The politicians on their end know that once I've served my time in CoreCivic prison crater I'm released on Mars with no way back. Conveniently there is no law saying you have to be released on the same planet, and there is no rush to fix that. Only SpaceX colonizers get a free return ticket. Us excons are stranded, forced to take whatever salary MarsCo offers.

Obviously there is some under the table money exchanging hands. In theory there is a point in bulking up our muscles and strengthening our bones, since we get the slow cattle ride to Mars, but nowhere near to this degree. And to continue the workouts on Mars "for the return trip" is laughable at best. MarsCo requires laborer, and CoreCivic provides tailor made bulls.