Faraway

When the terrors of the twenty-first century -- including the fall of the capital and crimes greater in severity if not in frequency -- began to get too much for the staid societal mores of the average citizen, the United States Government conceived of a new kind of penal facility, one without any delusions of rehabilitation, one created to contain the worst products of modern life. Designed by Keniston Spaulding, former globe-trotting intelligence spook and all-around national security professional, it was constructed in the vastness of the Arizona deserts as a last resort, to save many state governments the burden of caretaking the truly lost, the truly degenerate, the wholly irredeemable. It stood as a final exasperated throwing up of the hands for the few remaining state legislatures that would not take human life, as well as the worst criminals the federal government could field.

What the powers-that-be didn't know -- couldn't know -- was that their time was drawing close to an end. At every corner the malcontents they'd bred at home and abroad plotted the downfall of the land of the free, the end of the home of the brave. For the first time, they were organized. Without precedent, they were of a singular mind. In a wholly unique fashion, they had a plan.

A plan exemplified in no greater way than in the form of Inmate XV4012287, a man known simply as Ishmael Damu.