Damien’s Dream, Who’s the Boss?

(An incarcerated Damien Bell has this dream, quite some time after being interred, starved and tortured in San Quentin State Prison for Men)

Recently Damien dreamed of a future, some 64 million years from the present, where humans have evolved to be just 20 centimeters tall. This puts less stress on the environment, which is good; but they still have domestic animals of normal size, and that’s a problem. Sometimes, their kitty cats mistake them for prey, first playing with them and then eating them. That’s bad. But they don’t actually mean to eat them. Sometimes, they just maul people to death or bite their heads off when they get excited.

So, these future humans get together and try to figure out how to handle the situation. Their guns are no good—it’s like trying to take down a lion with a BB gun. They figure they can handle the situation better if they use old-fashioned spears instead. So they start making spears taller than they are—about 25 centimeters tall actually.

Soon, they discover that cats don’t like being poked with pointy spears. So, they go back to a more traditional relationship with their domestic animals, and now, there are people sleeping on cats’ tummies rather than the other way around. Still, every once in a while, they have to remind the cats who’s boss and stab them with their spears.

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Bruce M Firestone, Quantum Entity Trilogy

Postscript:

We sent copies of book 1 of the trilogy (Quantum Entity | we are all ONE) to San Quentin’s library after being given permission by one of their Ministers. Unfortunately, the administration sent them back as an “unauthorized donation”.

It says this in the book about a place nicknamed the Arena:

Damien is interred in San Quentin State Prison for men. It is 17.1 miles from the prison to the intersection of Market and 8^th Streets in downtown San Francisco to the south of him where Q-Computing America has its head office.

This is the prison about which the late great Johnny Cash, one of Nell’s favorite oldster artists, once said, “I hate every stone of you.”

It is the worst, most feared, prison in a nation with a prison community so large that if it was a separate country, it would rank among the top 70 biggest countries (by population) out of 242 nation-states.

There are more than 7,300 prisoners jammed into a space originally built for 3,000. Many of them are considered habitual offenders under vague statutes and laws and are jailed for life for crimes such as smoking a joint, shoplifting, or stealing less than ND$50. Almost none of the inmates ever had any significant personal resources—financial, educational or otherwise—in the outside world. In other words, this place is reserved exclusively for the poor.

In these times, U.S. jurisprudence is harsher than 18^th century Britain, which transported large numbers of convicts to its Australian penal colonies under the Bloody Code that cited 222 crimes—almost all of which were crimes against property. Cutting down a tree, stealing goods worth more than five shillings, or stealing a rabbit would get you exiled and jailed for life.

Damien is in the maw of a vicious U.S. justice system from which most do not escape.

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