#prison-tech

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Prison-tech company bribed jails to ban in-person visits

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me in BOSTON with Randall "XKCD" Munroe (Apr 11), then PROVIDENCE (Apr 12), and beyond!

Beware of geeks bearing gifts. When prison-tech companies started offering "free" tablets to America's vast army of prisoners, it set off alarm-bells for prison reform advocates – but not for the law-enforcement agencies that manage the great American carceral enterprise.

The pitch from these prison-tech companies was that they could cut the costs of locking people up while making jails and prisons safer. Hell, they'd even make life better for prisoners. And they'd do it for free!

These prison tablets would give every prisoner their own phone and their own video-conferencing terminal. They'd supply email, of course, and all the world's books, music, movies and games. Prisoners could maintain connections with the outside world, from family to continuing education. Sounds too good to be true, huh?

Here's the catch: all of these services are blisteringly expensive. Prisoners are accustomed to being gouged on phone calls – for years, prisons have done deals with private telcos that charge a fortune for prisoners' calls and split the take with prison administrators – but even by those standards, the calls you make on a tablet are still a ripoff.

Sure, there are some prisoners for whom money is no object – wealthy people who screwed up so bad they can't get bail and are stewing in a county lockup, along with the odd rich murderer or scammer serving a long bid. But most prisoners are poor. They start poor – the cops are more likely to arrest poor people than rich people, even for the same crime, and the poorer you are, the more likely you are to get convicted or be suckered into a plea bargain with a long sentence. State legislatures are easy to whip up into a froth about minimum sentences for shoplifters who steal $7 deodorant sticks, but they are wildly indifferent to the store owner's rampant wage-theft. Wage theft is by far the most costly form of property crime in America and it is almost entirely ignored:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jun/15/wage-theft-us-workers-employees

So America's prisons are heaving with its poorest citizens, and they're certainly not getting any richer while they're inside. While many prisoners hold jobs – prisoners produce $2b/year in goods and $9b/year in services – the average prison wage is $0.52/hour:

https://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2024/0324bowman.html

(In six states, prisoners get nothing; North Carolina law bans paying prisoners more than $1/day, the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution explicitly permits slavery – forced labor without pay – for prisoners.)

Likewise, prisoners' families are poor. They start poor – being poor is a strong correlate of being an American prisoner – and then one of their breadwinners is put behind bars, taking their income with them. The family savings go to paying a lawyer.

Prison-tech is a bet that these poor people, locked up and paid $1/day or less; or their families, deprived of an earner and in debt to a lawyer; will somehow come up with cash to pay $13 for a 20-minute phone call, $3 for an MP3, or double the Kindle price for an ebook.

How do you convince a prisoner earning $0.52/hour to spend $13 on a phone-call?

Well, for Securus and Viapath (AKA Global Tellink) – a pair of private equity backed prison monopolists who have swallowed nearly all their competitors – the answer was simple: they bribed prison officials to get rid of the prison phones.

Not just the phones, either: a pair of Michigan suits brought by the Civil Rights Corps accuse sheriffs and the state Department of Corrections of ending in-person visits in exchange for kickbacks from the money that prisoners' families would pay once the only way to reach their loved ones was over the "free" tablets:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/03/jails-banned-family-visits-to-make-more-money-on-video-calls-lawsuits-claim/

These two cases are just the tip of the iceberg; Civil Rights Corps says there are hundreds of jails and prisons where Securus and Viapath have struck similar corrupt bargains:

https://civilrightscorps.org/case/port-huron-michigan-right2hug/

And it's not just visits and calls. Prison-tech companies have convinced jails and prisons to eliminate mail and parcels. Letters to prisoners are scanned and delivered their tablets, at a price. Prisoners – and their loved ones – have to buy virtual "postage stamps" and pay one stamp per "page" of email. Scanned letters (say, hand-drawn birthday cards from your kids) cost several stamps:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/14/minnesota-nice/#shitty-technology-adoption-curve

Prisons and jails have also been convinced to eliminate their libraries and continuing education programs, and to get rid of TVs and recreational equipment. That way, prisoners will pay vastly inflated prices for streaming videos and DRM-locked music.

The icing on the cake? If the prison changes providers, all that data is wiped out – a prisoner serving decades of time will lose their music library, their kids' letters, the books they love. They can get some of that back – by working for $1/day – but the personal stuff? It's just gone.

Readers of my novels know all this. A prison-tech scam just like the one described in the Civil Rights Corps suits is at the center of my latest novel The Bezzle:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865878/thebezzle

Prison-tech has haunted me for years. At first, it was just the normal horror anyone with a shred of empathy would feel for prisoners and their families, captive customers for sadistic "businesses" that have figured out how to get the poorest, most desperate people in the country to make them billions. In the novel, I call prison-tech "a machine":

a million-­armed robot whose every limb was tipped with a needle that sank itself into a different place on prisoners and their families and drew out a few more cc’s of blood.

But over time, that furious empathy gave way to dread. Prisoners are at the bottom of the shitty technology adoption curve. They endure the technological torments that haven't yet been sanded down on their bodies, normalized enough to impose them on people with a little more privilege and agency. I'm a long way up the curve from prisoners, but while the shitty technology curve may grind slow, it grinds fine:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/24/gwb-rumsfeld-monsters/#bossware

The future isn't here, it's just not evenly distributed. Prisoners are the ultimate early adopters of the technology that the richest, most powerful, most sadistic people in the country's corporate board-rooms would like to force us all to use.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/02/captive-customers/#guillotine-watch

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[here-comes-the-moose]

Crosshair: Do you think I’m going too far?

Tech: No no you went too far seven hours ago. Now you’re going to prison.

[laughhardrunfastbekindsblog]

(Not sure if this idea has been floated already, I'm relatively new to tumblr)

I'm convinced the finale is going to have plenty of callbacks to the Bad Batch's intro story in TCW (I mean, we've already gotten a few callbacks).

So...

Since Tech was the one who directly helped Rex find and retrieve Echo, and then carried Echo through the shafts...

What if Echo is the one to find Tech and carry him out of Tantiss???

[dontfindmeimscared]

what if Leo figured out Krang tech in the prison dimension?

[faceofpoe]

It's been 87 years and I'm still obsessed with the idea that this dude:

was meant to be a dark mirror of this dude:

whose personal 'dark mirror' experience is already his story from seasons 1 & 2

and despite the fact that all 3 standard CXs we meet are snipers:

but actually was also meant to foreshadow these fancy dudes:

despite his only unique traits from the first two operative dudes being... an arm band and an ankle pocket -

-and who we only discover 2/3 of the way through the season are on back order and that Hemlock is suddenly out of operatives after that one (1) who went after Senator Singh and CX-2 was sent to eliminate, who only then is apparently sent after Cid, despite the "notify all our operatives" line in 3.4 suggesting that multiple of these fuckers are going to be deployed in the hunt for Omega and Crosshair.

[relaxedstyles]

[nerfpuncher]

Hunter: Listen Tech, you should probably let Omega win one game of Mario Cart.

Tech:

[good-beanswrites]

My thoughts on how the Milgram mv machine works based on the evidence we have:

(I know there’s been discussion about where exactly the interrogations take place, but wherever they are,) the prisoners are made to sit in a specific chair near the wall that houses the machine.

It’s ordinarily hidden, but the wall panels shift aside to reveal it when the mechanical sounds play in the dramas. As well as the walls moving, the chair transforms to restrain the prisoner and attach whatever it takes to access their brain. The fact that none of the more frightened prisoners try to run or break it makes it seem like they physically cannot. This is why Fuuta sounds so panicked, and why Amane is suddenly helpless in front of Es in their T1 vds.

(My mind conjures very classic sci-fi mad scientist machines with wires, pipes, lights, nodes, needles, etc, but I’d love to hear how other people visualize it.)

In some vds (maybe all? I’d need to check,) you can hear Es take some steps right before their iconic line -- it would make sense that for safety reasons, the power mechanism is placed across the room. Once again it could be anything, but the sound effect makes me think of one of those giant wall-mounted levers you have to pull down.

The voice dramas don’t really provide the type of crime details that an actual interrogation would reveal, and it’s odd that they’re placed before the extraction rather than after Es gets to see the new details. This leads me to believe the machine functions with priming. All Es needs to do is get them talking about their murder, so it’s on their mind.

The video produced is much like a (non-lucid) dream. Even if the prisoners figure out that this is how it works, they can’t control it just by thinking really hard about something else. The murders produce the strongest emotional affect, and that’s what it picks up on. If someone else used the machine, it would default to whatever gave them the strongest emotional reaction in the ~15 minutes beforehand, hence why Es’ video focuses on their daunting task ahead. (The Undercover theory is still a bit loose, though, given the private shots that Es wouldn't have known about). It’s why the videos are usually closely linked to the vd topics/beats. I also like to think that the reason their prisoner colors appear so much is because they’re looking at those colors on their uniform 24/7.

The bell rings to inform Es that it’s the optimal time to use the machine -- the prisoner has been thinking about things for long enough that the video will be about their crime, and if the conversation lasts much longer they’ll start thinking of other things. It’s at a different time for each prisoner because it’s based on the specific conversation. I guess Jackalope is listening in to the interrogation, timing it perfectly. (The only one that kind of messes with this theory is Yonah, because they just keep talking afterwards lol, but it could just show that the interrogation is still in Es’ control.)

Their “Sing your sins” is the final priming nudge to get them to think of their actions as a sin, revealing their guilt.

Once activated, the prisoner enters a sort of trance/sleeping state. It’s very much like REM sleep, with the machine forcibly activating neurons and recording the output. The prisoners have asked Es what they saw, meaning they don’t remember the mvs. I like to think the prisoners do experience the mv in real time, acting as the major version of themself that appears, but can’t remember it afterwards. It’s when you experience a dream, but as soon as you wake up you’re just left with fleeting emotions and memories right on the tip of your tongue.

The video plays immediately upon extraction -- whether on a huge projection or little screen depends on which room it’s in. It simultaneously saves the memory so that Es can rewatch it later (on those old TVs in the jailbreak mix). The machine downloads the song and video together, but requires special parts to retrieve them. The technology is pretty new and fragile, so if one is broken, there might be a delay between when Es can hear the extracted song and see it with the video. (That’s my justification for Kotoko’s delays -- after 9 prisoners the parts wear out, or maybe Mikoto himself overheats it with his complex situation.)

Based on the lack of conversation we get afterwards, I picture Es leaving before the prisoner wakes from the trance. The machine adjusts their brain back to normal before they awaken, restraints freed and able to return to the rest of the prison.

It’s very much like a dream, so it’s not harmful despite the amnesia/head injuries the prisoners have. It does, however, exhaust them. Brain activity alone takes a lot of energy, so forced brain activity with added emotional strain would cause them to feel pretty drained the rest of the day.

[goodbirb]

Isn't it fucked up Warren accepted to be cyro frozen With the risk of memory loss because he didn't want to be responsible for his life. And when he did lose his memory he still wanted the same thing... It's like the only way to get rid of your problems is to face them

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Prison-tech is a scam - and a harbinger of your future

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/14/minnesota-nice/#shitty-technology-adoption-curve

Here's how the shitty technology adoption curve works: when you want to roll out a new, abusive technology, look for a group of vulnerable people whose complaints are roundly ignored and subject them to your bad idea. Sand the rough edges off on their bodies and lives. Normalize the technological abuse you seek to inflict.

Next: work your way up the privilege gradient. Maybe you start with prisoners, then work your way up to asylum seekers, parolees and mental patients. Then try it on kids and gig workers. Now, college students and blue collar workers. Climb that curve, bit by bit, until you've reached its apex and everyone is living with your shitty technology:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/24/gwb-rumsfeld-monsters/#bossware

Prisoners, asylum seekers, drug addicts and other marginalized people are the involuntary early adopters of every form of disciplinary technology. They are the leading indicators of the ways that technology will be ruining your life in the future. They are the harbingers of all our technological doom.

Which brings me to Minnesota.

Minnesota is one of the first states make prison phone-calls free. This is a big deal, because prison phone-calls are a big business. Prisoners are literally a captive audience, and the telecommunications sector is populated by sociopaths, bred and trained to spot and exploit abusive monopoly opportunities. As states across America locked up more and more people for longer and longer terms, the cost of operating prisons skyrocketed, even as states slashed taxes on the rich and turned a blind eye to tax evasion.

This presented telco predators with an unbeatable opportunity: they approached state prison operators and offered them a bargain: "Let us take over the telephone service to your carceral facility and we will levy eye-watering per-minute charges on the most desperate people in the world. Their families – struggling with one breadwinner behind bars – will find the money to pay this ransom, and we'll split the profits with you, the cash-strapped, incarceration-happy state government."

This was the opening salvo, and it turned into a fantastic little money-spinner. Prison telco companies and state prison operators were the public-private partnership from hell. Prison-tech companies openly funneled money to state coffers in the form of kickbacks, even as they secretly bribed prison officials to let them gouge their inmates and inmates' families:

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/02/mississippi-corrections-corruption-bribery-private-prison-hustle/

As digital technology got cheaper and prison-tech companies got greedier, the low end of the shitty tech adoption curve got a lot more crowded. Prison-tech companies started handing out "free" cheap Android tablets to prisoners, laying the groundwork for the next phase of the scam. Once prisoners had tablets, prisons could get rid of phones altogether and charge prisoners – and their families – even higher rates to place calls right to the prisoner's cell.

Then, prisons could end in-person visits and replace them with sub-skype, postage-stamp-sized videoconferencing, at rates even higher than the voice-call rates. Combine that with a ban on mailing letters to and from prisoners – replaced with a service that charged even higher rates to scan mail sent to prisoners, and then charged prisoners to download the scans – and prison-tech companies could claim to be at the vanguard of prison safety, ending the smuggling of dope-impregnated letters and other contraband into the prison system.

Prison-tech invented some wild shit, like the "digital stamp," a mainstay of industry giant Jpay, which requires prisoners to pay for "stamps" to send or receive a "page" of email. If you're keeping score, you've realized that this is a system where prisoners and their families have to pay for calls, "in-person" visits, handwritten letters, and email.

It goes on: prisons shuttered their libraries and replaced them with ebook stores that charged 2-4 times the prices you'd pay for books on the outside. Prisoners were sold digital music at 200-300% markups relative to, say, iTunes.

Remember, these are prisoners: locked up for years or decades, decades during which their families scraped by with a breadwinner behind bars. Prisoners can earn money, sure – as much as $0.89/hour, doing forced labor for companies that contract with prisons for their workforce:

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2017/04/10/wages/

Of course, there's the odd chance for prisoners to make really big bucks – $2-5/day. All they have to do is "volunteer" to fight raging wildfires:

https://www.hcn.org/articles/climate-desk-wildfire-california-incarcerated-firefighters-face-dangerous-work-low-pay-and-covid19/

So those $3 digital music tracks are being bought by people earning as little as $0.10/hour. Which makes it especially galling when prisons change prison-tech suppliers, whereupon all that digital music is deleted, wiping prisoners' media collection out – forever (literally, for prisoners serving life terms):

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/08/captive-audience-how-floridas-prisons-and-drm-made-113m-worth-prisoners-music

Let's recap: America goes on a prison rampage, locking up ever-larger numbers of people for ever-longer sentences. Once inside, prisoners had their access to friends and family rationed, along with access to books, music, education and communities outside. This is very bad for prisoners – strong ties to people outside is closely tied to successful reentry – but it's great for state budgets, and for wardens, thanks to kickbacks:

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2021/12/21/family_contact/

Back to Minnesota: when Minnesota became the fourth state in the USA where the state, not prisoners, would pay for prison calls, it seemed like they were finally breaking the vicious cycle in which every dollar ripped off of prisoners' family paid 40 cents to the state treasury:

https://www.kaaltv.com/news/no-cost-phone-calls-for-those-incarcerated-in-minnesota/

But – as Katya Schwenk writes for The Lever – what happened next is "a case study in how prison communication companies and their private equity owners have managed to preserve their symbiotic relationship with state corrections agencies despite reforms — at the major expense of incarcerated people and their families":

https://www.levernews.com/wall-streets-new-prison-scam/

Immediately after the state ended the ransoming of prisoners' phone calls, the private-equity backed prison-tech companies that had dug their mouth-parts into the state's prison jacked up the price of all their other digital services. For example, the price of a digital song in a Minnesota prison just jumped from $1.99 to $2.36 (for prisoners earning as little as $0.25/hour).

As Paul Wright from the Human Rights Defense Center told Schwenk, "The ideal world for the private equity owners of these companies is every prisoner has one of their tablets, and every one of those tablets is hooked up to the bank account of someone outside of prison that they can just drain."

The state's new prison-tech supplier promises to double the amount of kickbacks it pays the state each year, thanks to an aggressive expansion into games, money transfers, and other "services." The perverse incentive isn't hard to spot: the more these prison-tech companies charge, the more kickbacks they pay to the prisons.

The primary prison-tech company for Minnesota's prisons is Viapath (nee Global Tel Link), which pioneered price-gouging on in-prison phone calls. Viapath has spent the past two decades being bought and sold by different private equity firms: Goldman Sachs, Veritas Capital, and now the $46b/year American Securities.

Viapath competes with another private equity-backed prison-tech giant: Aventiv (Securus, Jpay), owned by Platinum Equity. Together, Viapath and Aventiv control 90% of the prison-tech market. These companies have a rap-sheet as long as your arm: bribing wardens, stealing from prisoners and their families, and recording prisoner-attorney calls. But these are the kinds of crimes the state punishes with fines and settlements – not by terminating its contracts with these predators.

These companies continue to flout the law. Minnesota's new free-calls system bans prison-tech companies from paying kickbacks to prisons and prison-officials for telcoms services, so the prison-tech companies have rebranded ebooks, music, and money-transfers as non-communications products, and the kickbacks are bigger than ever.

This is the bottom end of the shitty technology adoption curve. Long before Ubisoft started deleting games that you'd bought a "perpetual license" for, prisoners were having their media ganked by an uncaring corporation that knew it was untouchable:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIqyvquTEVU

Revoking your media, charging by the byte for messaging, confiscating things in the name of security and then selling them back to you – these are all tactics that were developed in the prison system, refined, normalized, and then worked up the privilege gradient. Prisoners are living in your technology future. It's just not evenly distributed – yet.

As it happens, prison-tech is at the heart of my next novel, The Bezzle, which comes out on Feb 20. This is a followup to last year's bestselling Red Team Blues, which introduced the world to Marty Hench, a two-fisted, hard-bitten, high-tech forensic accountant who's spent 40 years busting Silicon Valley finance scams:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865878/thebezzle

In The Bezzle, we travel with Marty back to the mid 2000s (Hench is a kind of tech-scam Zelig and every book is a standalone tale of high-tech ripoffs from a different time and place). Marty's trying to help his old pal Scott Warms, a once-high-flying founder who's fallen prey to California's three-strikes law and is now facing decades in a state pen. As bad as things are, they get worse when the prison starts handing out "free" tablet and closing down the visitation room, the library, and the payphones.

This is an entry to the thing I love most about the Hench novels: the opportunity to turn all this dry, financial skullduggery into high-intensity, high-stakes technothriller plot. For me, Marty Hench is a tool for flensing the scam economy of all its layers of respectability bullshit and exposing the rot at the core.

It's not a coincidence that I've got a book coming out in a week that's about something that's in the news right now. I didn't "predict" this current turn – I observed it. The world comes at you fast and technology news flutters past before you can register it. Luckily, I have a method for capturing this stuff as it happens:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/09/the-memex-method/

Writing about tech issues that are long-simmering but still in the periphery is a technique I call "predicting the present." It's the technique I used when I wrote Little Brother, about out-of-control state surveillance of the internet. When Snowden revealed the extent of NSA spying in 2013, people acted as though I'd "predicted" the Snowden revelations:

https://www.wired.com/story/his-writing-radicalized-young-hackers-now-he-wants-to-redeem-them/

But Little Brother and Snowden's own heroic decision have a common origin: the brave whistleblower Mark Klein, who walked into EFF's offices in 2006 and revealed that he'd been ordered by his boss at AT&T to install a beam-splitter into the main fiber trunk so that the NSA could illegally wiretap the entire internet:

https://www.eff.org/document/public-unredacted-klein-declaration

Mark Klein inspired me to write Little Brother – but despite national press attention, the Klein revelations didn't put a stop to NSA spying. The NSA was still conducting its lawless surveillance campaign in 2013, when Snowden, disgusted with NSA leadership for lying to Congress under oath, decided to blow the whistle again:

https://apnews.com/article/business-33a88feb083ea35515de3c73e3d854ad

The assumption that let the NSA get away with mass surveillance was that it would only be weaponized against the people at the bottom of the shitty technology adoption curve: brown people, mostly in other countries. The Snowden revelations made it clear that these were just the beginning, and sure enough, more than a decade later, we have data-brokers sucking up billions in cop kickbacks to enable warrantless surveillance, while virtually following people to abortion clinics, churches, and protests. Mass surveillance is chugging its way up the shitty tech adoption curve with no sign of stopping.

Like Little Brother, The Bezzle is intended as a kind of virtual flythrough of what life is like further down on that curve – a way for readers who have too much agency to be in the crosshairs of a company like Viapath or Avently right now to wake up before that kind of technology comes for them, and to inspire them to take up the cause of the people further down the curve who are mired in it.

The Bezzle is an intense book, but it's also a very fun story – just like Little Brother. It's a book that lays bare the internal technical workings of so many scams, from multi-level marketing to real-estate investment trusts, from music royalty theft to prison-tech, in the course of an ice-cold revenge plot that keeps twisting to the very last page.

It'll drop in six days. I hope you'll check it out:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865878/thebezzle

[turtleblogatlast]

Love when people make the Prison Dimension essentially Rise Leo’s version of 2007 Leo’s jungle

[deargravity]

one of the many things that bothers me about goku luck is the fact that they have kenta (a minor) in a penitentiary full of adult convicts. where was the juvenile welfare officer and why are they not doing their job. hope they’re fired

[rotisseries]

there was literally no reason for the government to stick dazai in mersault actually, like the only thing his ability does is nullify others. they could have stuck him in any old 6 by 8. in fact I think he'd have been in there longer if they'd done that

[tangents-within-tangents]

I see your ‘Tech’s alive bc the show knows how to explicitly confirm deaths and gave us multiple on screen examples of that’ and raise you one ‘Tech’s death wasn’t meaningless, insignificant, or just for stakes and shock value bc the show gave us multiple on screen examples of what that actually looks like’

[dangraccoon]

Lost and Found

Day 16 ~ shivering ~ (alt. prompt)

Reader Echo/Reader

Word Count: 2039 Content: fem!reader (she/her pronouns, minimally described), references to human trafficking, being hunted, survival, escape, temporary non-verbal, exhaustion, prisoner of war, something similar to Leia's slave bikini; Horrible implications and references; 18+ Only; Minors DNI

Mando'a sarad - flower

The ground beneath your feet seemed to shift, rising and falling like a breathing chest as the sound of the hunting party and the beating of your own heart filled your ears.

A root rose to trip you and you stumbled, catching yourself in a particularly prickly bramble.

“Kriff,” you swore under your breath; you were certain that anything louder would alert those who wished you dead.

Hissing at the pain of pulling yourself free, grimacing as the brush tore the thin, minimal clothing they’d dressed you in. You picked up your pace.

“Think she went this way!” you heard, far too close behind you.

You were tired. You were so tired. But you knew you couldn’t stop. No, the deep drive within you that screamed at you to escape and survive wouldn’t allow it.

So, you kept running. What you hadn’t anticipated, however, was that while running away from that hunting party, you’d run into another encampment.

Three blasters snapped towards you as you crashed into the small clearing.

You stumbled as your body came to a screeching halt, falling into the mud that covered most of your body.

You coughed violently as you fought to catch your breath, but your body still moved, scrambling up to stand, your open palms facing them in front of you. You tried to keep your eyes on the people before you, knowing they were the more present threat, yet you couldn’t help but steal glances behind you.

Something about the three armor-clad individuals whispered “safe” in your ears, though with the adrenaline coursing through your veins, you were having a difficult time putting the feeling into words.

Your face must have been betraying your emotions as one of the figures lowered their blaster and waved off the other two to do the same.

“Easy,” a deep, rough voice emanated from the dark helmet. “We’re not gonna hurt you.”

You were smart, you were educated. You knew every single one of those words. Yet the sentence seemed to make no sense. You hazarded a glance over your shoulder again.

“What’s out there?” another, sharper voice asked.

You looked between them, the fear that kept you silent as you ran still encircling your throat.

“It’s alright; we just want to help,” the third said. 

That voice. You knew that voice. Your eyes shot up to the man.

“Cl-clones?” you breathed, your voice barely a whisper.

The second and third men looked at the first. He pulled his helmet from his head, tossing it to the second man. You’d expected a familiar face and were met with it, along with longer hair held back by a strip of red cloth and a skull tattoo.

“Yeah, we’re clones. My name’s Hunter. There are two more of us on our ship across the lake. We, uh, we look a little different, but we’re clones,” he said. You watched him remove a piece of armor on his shoulder. He showed you the embroidered fabric under it. It was that familiar cog that for so long had been a symbol of safety and freedom for your people. “See? We’re GAR.”

You felt tears start to drip down your face and the cool rush of relief extinguished the fire of panic. 

“Echo,” the clone called. The third man that spoke–Echo, you supposed–closed the few yards between you just in time to catch you as your legs finally caved against the pressure of the last few weeks. 

“I gotcha,” he said as the world spun around you. “You’re safe now.”

The sob that tore through your body was almost painful as your lungs balked at the concept of drawing in more air. Instinctively, you wrapped your arms around Echo’s neck.

“Maker,” Echo hissed as he held you. “Hunter, there’s barely a stitch on her.”

“Let’s get her on the ship,” Hunter said. “Crosshair, keep watch. I’ll send Wrecker out with you. Make sure that… whatever was tracking her doesn’t get close.”

Crosshair nodded, tossing back Hunter’s helmet–bucket you remembered the clones calling them–and Echo looped an arm under your knees and carried you towards their attack shuttle. 

The final two men Hunter had mentioned met him at the stairs as he jogged ahead to meet them. You were sure they were asking questions and Hunter hadn’t had a chance to get the answers for them.

“Like Hunter said, I’m Echo,” he said, drawing your attention back. “What’s your name?”

Your mouth opened, lips just shaping into the syllable, but nothing came out. They pressed closed again, a frown pulling down along with your brow. 

“That’s alright,” he hummed. “Your voice’ll come back as you start to relax. It’s nice to meet you, though I wish it were under different circumstances.”

You wanted to tell him that you’d met clones before. You wanted to tell him everything that happened to you. You wanted to tell him thank you for the comfort and protection they offered you.

“I, um, I know it doesn’t work for mud as well as water would,” Echo said somewhat awkwardly. “But we’ve got a sonic on board. You can get cleaned up if you want?”

You looked down at your body. You could describe yourself as filthy head to toe, but that would be an understatement. Your eyes met his visor and you nodded, emphatically.

Echo chuckled a little. It was such a nice sound and it had been quite some time since you’d heard it. “Are you hurt?”

You nodded again, easily recalling every nick, scrape, scratch, and cut you’d accumulated since you were taken from your home. 

“Alright,” Echo said, his voice steady and sure now. “Sonic shower and then we’ll patch you up.”

You think you smiled, but with the way your face felt frozen–like it might be stuck in a perpetual state of fear–you couldn’t be sure.

“If you can’t tell me your name yet, we should probably think of something to call you until you can,” Echo hummed. “I’d offer to guess, but I’m truly terrible at it.”

You huffed a little and he looked down at you. “Sarad sound okay?”

You watched that emotionless helmet with curiosity, nodding a little.

As Echo brought you closer to their ship, you could see the other two clones, but you were starting to question if any of these guys actually were clones. The structure of Hunter’s face was too similar to what you remembered, and you realized now that pieces of their armor struck you as familiar when you’d first seen them. Echo sounded like the men you’d spent so much time with on your home planet, but you’d just begun to realize that one of his arms had been replaced with a cybernetic. You could see the end of it sticking out from beneath your shaking legs.

The other two were something else, however. You could barely see the trace of that endlessly replicated DNA in either of their faces. One was tall and lanky, like Crosshair out in the clearing. His hair was lighter and yellow-tinted lenses covered his eyes. 

The other, however, was huge. He towered over Hunter and the bespectacled clone, his bulky frame nearly twice that of the others. A scar spiderwebbed over the left side of his head, but as he looked past Hunter towards you, his lips pulled in a wide grin as he waved. 

Hunter got his attention once more, clearly instructing him to keep watch with Crosshair. He nodded, retrieving a large helmet with a painted face and a blaster from a nearby crate.

He nodded as he jogged past you and Echo. 

“That’s Wrecker,” Echo informed you. “He looks all big and intimidating, but he’s a big softie.” Echo tilted his helmet forward as if to point with it. “That one’s Tech. Genius in most things, but social cues aren’t one of ‘em,” Echo sighed with an exasperation you could tell emanated from his core. It almost made you laugh.

As you approached the ship, Hunter came to Echo’s side. “How are you doing?” he asked you.

You looked up at Echo, pleading with glassy eyes to help you explain.

“She’s having trouble with talking right now,” he said. Hunter nodded, his eyes warm with sympathy. 

Echo brought you inside, taking you directly to the refresher. He finally put you back down on your feet, holding onto you until you seemed steady enough. “Just, ah– knock if you need anything, okay Sarad?”

You nodded your thanks to him, stepping into the fresher, the door sliding closed between you.

You looked at your reflection in the small mirror and gasped. Your face was gaunt, eyes sunken in with dark bags beneath them betraying your exhaustion. You were practically coated in the mud you’d fallen into, and you knew beneath that was a layer of dust, dirt, and grime from your time imprisoned by your captors. Your body, typically covered by a healthy layer of fat, seemed to be missing that. 

Another sob dropped from your lips, but it was softer, quieter, less violent.

You reached behind your neck and back, untying that torn cloth that covered your breasts, the minuscule, mud-soaked fabric falling to the floor with a wet splat.

Next was the “skirt”. There was more volume to this item; it reached down to your ankles, but it was hardly more than two thin strips of fabric–one in front of you and one in back–attached to another scrap tied around your waist. 

You took a deep, shaky breath, letting it out slowly. 

As you reached for the shower knob, a voice from the other side of the door caught your ear. “Echo, we can’t just–”

“Why not? You saw her Hunter! Covered in dirt and blood, barely wearing a thing, sprinting through the woods on bare feet? Maker, Hunter, she hasn’t stopped shivering since we first saw her!” His voice dropped low, his tone almost mournful. “I know you know what happened to her.”

Hunter sighed. “I do, but we are here to–”

“Are we not soldiers of the Republic? Don’t we have a duty to its citizens? You saw how she looked when she saw the cog–when she found out we were clones! Sarad needs our help and we can’t just–”

“Echo,” Hunter growled, silencing the other man immediately. “I never said we wouldn’t help her. But we can’t forget we have a mission to complete before we can leave this hellhole of a moon.” Hunter sighed. “Alright, alright– just… stay here with her. We’ll… take care of it.”

By the time you’d stepped out of the shower, your skin finally warmed by the sonic vibrations, you were surprised to see a pile of black cloth sitting on the counter, with a scrap of flimsi sitting atop it. The script that adorned it was slanted and somewhat messy.

“You can wear these until we find something better. -Echo”

Once you’d dressed yourself in the surprisingly soft black undersuit, you pressed the button to open the door.

As it slid open, it alerted the man who had been pacing in front of the door. You recognized the rest of him, but you were somewhat surprised to see his face no longer hidden by the helmet.

A cyborg construct and deep scars wrapped around his head, the top of which was dotted with metal nodes. He looked up at you, a soft, warm smile on his face.

“Probably feels a lot better,” he said. You nodded. “I’ve got a medkit by the bunks. Hunter said we could use his for now.”

You followed him through the ship, your eyes flicking everywhere, but this time from curiosity rather than fear. 

Echo motioned for you to sit on one of the bunks while he opened the medkit, pulling various bandages and bacta out.

Still wordlessly, you showed him each of your injuries and watched in awe at how gentle and adept he was, despite being a soldier with one arm. 

“Anything else?” he asked, his voice soft as he finished wrapping your foot. 

You shook your head. Your jaw trembled slightly. “Th-thank you,” you mumbled.

Echo's eyes darted up to meet yours, his soft smile widening, and setting off a heat in your chest. “Of course, Sarad.”

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Thanks for reading! - River

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