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Chapter or Story 
Chapter or Story
Part 2
“Freedom is not the right to live as we please, but the right to find out how we ought to live in order to fulfil our potential.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Remembering
April 2, 2000
Jarod lay on the bed, one hand over his eyes to block out the sunlight that streamed in through the window and onto his face. Three weeks. He was beginning to count down already. His mind traveled back to the courtroom.
The verdict.
Guilty.
The sentence.
One year.
That was all. It was a light sentence, considering the crime, but for a man who had not committed the crime, it was a weight he felt that he could never throw off.
One year.
Three hundred and sixty-five days.
Eight thousand, seven hundred and sixty hours.
Five hundred and twenty-five thousand, six hundred minutes. Roughly. But, with the time he’d already served, those long three weeks, that left only three hundred and forty-four days or eight thousand, two hundred and fifty-six hours or four hundred and ninety-five thousand, three hundred and sixty minutes. Give or take. The meaningless calculations took up some of the time, but not enough.
Jarod looked out through the bars to the sky, which was reddening as the late autumnal sun set. He was trapped again. Helpless and hopeless with amazingly less chance of escape than ever before. And only because he had been pretending to be someone else. He silently cursed the gift that had been given to him. Perhaps it was a wonderful to be able to help people, but what if you ended up in a place like this? Twice. Not just once, in a man-made hellhole and through no fault of his own, but now twice. And all because he had something that almost no one else in the world had. The ability to become those other people was what had been responsible, both times, for the situation he was currently in.
The rooms were a similar size and similar coloring, with the lack of any bright hues. The small camera in the corner completed the illusion that he was in the same place and it was only the lack of simulations that convinced him that he had not been returned to the Centre when he was unaware of it.
He moaned slightly and rolled over onto his side, facing towards the wall. A vain attempt to hide himself from camera, as he had done so often in the past.
April 23, 2000
A whole month. Miss Parker stared at the wall in her office, her arms folded as she leant back slightly in the chair. Her feelings of failure were intense and she could constantly feel them gnawing away at her. It was not only the month which had passed since Jarod had made any contact with anyone from the Centre, but also the fact that three and a half years had passed since he had first escaped and she was now no closer than she had ever been to capturing him.
Of course the Tower was demanding answers. But they could only push her as hard as she allowed them to. It was her own force, and her own pressure, that drove her onwards when everything else seemed hopeless.
Everything logical told her that he was gone, that something had finally caused him to break connections with them. With her. It was that which hurt most, although she hated to admit it, even to herself. She turned over in her hand the gift that Jarod had sent to both herself and Sydney, nearly six weeks earlier. A small mirror. The note had been so pointed, despite containing only two words.
’Know thyself’.
April 23, 2000
Broots glanced up from the computer as Miss Parker burst in through the door. It was, he though ruefully, becoming more than a daily occurrence and almost an hourly one. Now he looked up as he shoved a piece of paper under her nose. The paper itself and the words written on it were annoyingly familiar, as was the sentence she uttered.
“Find out for me where these come from. Trace their origin.”
As she left, he stopped her dead in the doorway. “I’ve already done it, Miss Parker. I’ve got the answers here.”
She turned and stared at him. The one word was like a drop in a still pond. “How?”
“Well, um...Sydney asked me to do it yesterday.”
Broots began to slide down in his seat until the computer screen hid Miss Parker from view, at which point he immediately felt better. It didn’t last. She moved around until she could both see and reach the card he held in his hand and which was identical to the one she had given him.
Her glance moved between the paper and the nervous technician for several more moments until finally she moved over to stand behind him while he deactivated the screensaver and showed her the results that he had found.
