“
Right then and there, in that dirty operating room, I felt more alone and helpless than ever before. Except perhaps during my first and only time ever in court. But back then, what seemed like several lifetimes ago, I felt younger and stronger, and, in spite of everything going on around me, I still had the confidence of my convictions. And I knew I was right!
Lea surveyed her new home, looking out over the broad expanse of dull, gray snow and wet black boulders between the compound and the sullen Chukchi Sea. Her heart was numb with despair. “What could I have possibly done to make these people do this to me?” she wondered. The slowly dripping finger of ice pointing toward the ground outside reminded Lea again of her ultimate resting place in this barren wasteland. The heavy sutures laced into the back of her neck burned and itched, like tiny red ants burrowing under her skin. Try as she might, Lea couldn’t keep from worrying them.
Probing gingerly, she could feel a metal ovoid buried under the skin of her crudely shaved neck, roughly at the base of her skull. Unless the matrons at the Newark Transit Prison had lied to her, that pellet was loosely attached to her spinal column, to discourage any clumsy attempts to remove it. Supposedly the device contained a high explosive charge as well as a compact computer mechanism designed to accurately determine its own location. What became known to Lea as the Execution Box received signals from one of the eyes in the sky hanging in high stationary orbit over the Northern Hemisphere not unlike many variations of mapping software.
Lea vaguely understood how the bomb in her head was supposed to work. As long as she didn’t stray too far from her place of confinement, the device would remain in hibernation. But if she crossed imaginary boundaries located some 5 kilometers beyond the shores of Penal Colony 627, it would hum loudly for about twenty seconds, then detonate sharply.”
