Brute Orbits

It is the twenty-first century. Suffering from global warming and overpopulation, Earth is opening the solar system to industrialization. One of the largest growth industries—"corrections"—capitalizes on the opportunity, sending convicts to mine asteroids diverted into near-Earth orbits. Like the condemned digging their own graves, the convicts hollow out their own prisons, as the mined-out shells become deep-space cell blocks. Then an administrative genius realizes that the asteroid prisons can be inserted into solar orbits, timed to return to near-Earth space when terms run out. This not only adds further security, it removes the problem of abuse by guards, since they are no longer needed.

The orbits grow longer, tending to run out the inmates' lives in the vast swing beyond the solar system and back. Ambitious administrators soon discover that small "errors" in boost velocity can rid them of selected groups altogether, whether sentenced to life or not. Political prisoners can be easily included in these planned mistakes, along with the hopelessly violent and mentally defective: The mix of felons—both male and female—makes few distinctions.

In time the abyss in every direction from Earth is dotted with receding prisons. Human rejects endure the black vise of inter--stellar space-time—soft bodies in hard shells, surviving along open orbits, free to live and reproduce as they wish, to seek what law they can amongst themselves, never to return....