[ WP ] As a captured rebel in an Orwellian dystopia you are sentenced to menial labor without your memories along with the rest of the broken army . The timeless monotony is broken in a flash by a face that saved your life countless times coming into the labor camp wearing manacles and a grin .

My feet were bare and uncomfortably cold in the mire. I trudged to my corner with my plastic tools and started working. I had only ever existed to dig out this river. I knew nothing but my cell, the worksite and the dreary path that linked them. When I looked in the mirror, I saw a tall man with a shaved head, always wearing the same grey uniform. He had a small scar beneath his left eye, and several barely healed wounds on his abdomen. They called this man Spade - they called me Spade. But I could never dispel the feeling that I had once been called something else. 
 
 Though they were now callused and covered with cuts, my hands had once been unblemished. I remembered looking down at them one day at the worksite and seeing smooth skin and well-kept nails. My whole body had ached that day. My skin burned and bled. My legs could hardly carry me on the way to my cell. The days became easier and easier. Yet I wondered, if I had only ever dug, my hands would have never looked like that. 
 
 There were other signs as well. Sometimes when I worked images flashed across my mind, visions of places that looked nothing like my cell or the worksite, visions of people without uniforms or shaved heads. I knew things I could never have learned had I always worked at the river. It was mostly information I did not understand, on topics I did not recognise. The words were foreign to me, yet they lingered in my head with strange persistence. A male lion weighs three hundred to five hundred pounds. Nitroglycerine explodes in response to heat. Rick Dall sells STF armour. 
 
 I started carving a notch into my cell wall every time I was awoken by the bell. But sometimes we awoke to the sun's light, other times there was still darkness. The passage of time, and the length of our days, was skewed. 
 
 On the day when I scratched the twenty-fifth line on my wall, someone new was brought to the camp. He was tall, taller than even I was. His hands were chained in front of him and his walk was hindered by the manacles around his ankles. There was a large smile on his face, which grew even wider when his eyes met mine. They were a startling blue, and held the same fire as that first day we met, when we were both boys and he had pulled me from beneath the rubble. They called him Mud. I had once called him something else. 
 
 Mud's manacles were removed, and he was given equipment and directed to dig not too far from where I was shifting rocks. He worked energetically, and when the bell rang to signal the end of the day's work, he passed by me to return his tools. 
 It was the merest whisper. 
 
 
 *'' Hello again, old friend. I've come to take you away. `` * 
 
 

