Charbranch was a small prison at the very edge of Miller's Rest's suburbs. The staff were exclusively caterpillars, the inmates exclusively aphids. It was reputedly inescapable, although this was hard to prove, as the longest anyone had been kept there was two months. Charbranch resembled most prisons in most respects, except that within its perimeter fence was the end of a branch that had been struck by lightning from a malfunction in the space station's artificial weather system. The lightning had not been exceptionally strong, but the branch had been old and dry, and had burnt, in quite a literal fashion, like a dry twig. The people of Miller's Rest, who dumped their biodegradable rubbish, i.e. most of it, here, had sustained this fire for years, burning the rubbish to return excess Carbon Dioxide to the air. Cunningly positioned oxygen jets meant that the fire produced large amounts of CO2 and very little Carbon Monoxide, or normal carbon. The heat produced from this fire was used, through the careful re-routing of several of the xylem and phloem from several nearby branches, to sterilise and heat water for a large part of Miller's Rest. The prisoners throughout their short stay at Charbranch tended this fire, keeping the flames burning in the prison's grounds. The prisoners fed the fire with paper and waste, but also fed the fire in another, more morbid way. On the prisoner's last day in the prison, he or she was led to a room where they were told to sit on a metal chair, positioned at the centre of a large trap door. An aphid priest, referred to as a Judge Of The Balance, would bless the prisoner, declare him Equilibria Mentalis, or balanced of the mind, and the trap-door would open, dropping the prisoner into the hottest part of the fire. Death was instantaneous, but that fact did not detract from the sickness with which this institution was viewed, by caterpillars and aphids alike.
Copyright 1999 Ian Rennie, for Remiel Productions.