THE DIGITAL PRISON CELL (aka Hell)
A dim, timeless prison cell. The walls digital stone, dripping with code beyond centuries old. A single beam of raytraced light cuts through the darkness, illuminating the PROTAGONIST, a figure of resilience despite the surroundings.
Our Protagonist sits on a small cot, their expression a mix of hope and weariness. A notification sounds, revealing VISITOR #1, a well-dressed lawyer with a briefcase.
VISITOR #1
(earnestly)
"I've seen your case. It’s unjust. I promise you, I’m going to fight to get you out of here."
The Protagonist's eyes surrenders a glimmer of hope.
PROTAGONIST
Thank you. I've been waiting for someone like you.
Time shifts seamlessly. Our Protagonist looks the same, but the room subtly ages. Dust gathers, and the room darkens. Now, VISITOR #2, an activist with a fiery spirit, stands before our Protagonist.
VISITOR #2
(passionately)
Your story has moved me. I won’t rest until you’re free. This is a promise!
The Protagonist nods, a bit less hopeful but still clinging to faith.
As Visitor #2 leaves, time accelerates. The light shifts in virtual space, in seconds, indicating passing days, months, years? The Protagonist remains unchanged, but the room shows alarming signs of age.
Notification Sounds
VISITOR #3, a mysterious figure cloaked in shadows, enters. The air noticeably different, heavier.
VISITOR #3
(mysteriously)
The world outside has changed. Centuries have passed. But your freedom is still worth fighting for. I will be your champion.
Our Protagonist, now with a look of disbelief and deepening sorrow, nods silently. Their eyes betray the pain of hope.
The visitor exits. Our Protagonist rises, floating slowly towards a distant digital window in virtual space. looking out, seeing a world unrecognizable, advanced beyond understanding.
The notification chimes, but our Protagonist doesn’t turn. They’ve heard this before. The light in their eyes dim, replaced by a resolve to hope no more.
CUT TO BLACK.
Inspired by Jarhyn written by AI & Gospel.
More like... Imagine a gilded cage, an environment where someone can do anything they like much like Second Life, a place where people can be "killed" but they can't really be made dead, and designed to be populated by people who consent to participate, like some endless orgy whose mess is confined to a digital space.
In some ways perhaps this is heaven, except for the person who finds such fantasy and unreality insufficient to their needs.
I think largely the difference is going to be determined by those who believe that their awful behavior is filled with glorious purpose, and whether they believe they need to be out in the world acting upon that purpose.
The best kind of cage is one in which the imprisoned would not seek to be free of.
More the goal would be to deconstruct and analyze the mind of the psychopath by watching how the pathways of the digital entity encode it's impulses to engage in horrific behaviors and what encodes this belief in purpose so as to see whether it can be replaced with a belief in some other purpose and fulfillment in some other activity and to see if consent can be secured to rebuild this person into someone society and access to the real world could be shared with again.
Remarkably few people would probably stay in such a limbo overlong, and over time there would even be fewer such people, for our understanding and simple avoidance of the circumstances that lead to their creation.
To be clear, few people would fight for the freedom of someone in such a situation. More than advocates, such people would come occasionally with advice on how to change their behaviors through behavioral modification and self-examination.
I don't know why anyone would seek to see someone in a virtual environment already eating nothing but sunlight, housed in a space the size of a golf ball, and costing the state less than the price of running the lights at the old prison per day and only that on days where anyone has reason to be studying the contained. There is no need for guards or even power dynamics or boring architecture. It is entirely to be expected, in fact, that the prisoners become responsible for designing their own immediate environment.
It is, in some ways, a perfect panopticon. It is the ultimate of gilded cages, a place from which there is no escape because the people contained inside it do not have bodies that could possibly walk away; the prison itself IS their body. In this way it is the most dystopian prison imaginable, albeit one in which someone's actual innocence can be assessed rather promptly.
If someone wishes to take classes and become educated, or be a violent shit and just do their best to keep as many people on "respawn" as possible, or do whatever, they may.
The fact is, there is no reason to make such an environment torturous. you and the AI invented that part as a reflection perhaps of how you think prisons "must" be.
As it is, even in such a prison, there is good work and are tasks the prisoners may be commissioned to perform, and which I would see normal wages paid for. In fact this is a format of existence I would suspect many non-criminals would seek to access, much in the way in the pre-dental days or the days of awful barber/dentist/surgeons where everyone just preemptively got all their teeth pulled and replaced with dentures.
Just slap on a robot body with photo-capture eyes and suddenly you are fully capable of working in a factory. You don't even need that much to do accounting work.
I'm thinking more... Are you familiar with The Good Place?
