I never understood why solitary confinement was so bad until I was in it myself. With nothing to occupy my mind I was stuck inside my small cell with nothing to do. I spent hours lying on my back staring up at the blank ceiling. I sang to myself but I don’t know that many songs. I tried engaging whoever it was on the outside in conversation but they quickly stopped responding. Three days went by like that and already I thought I was going to go crazy.

“Misha,” the voice said abruptly on the fourth day.

“Yes?” I sat up eagerly in my bed.

“It seems your little stunt with your dad has made enough noise that the powers that be have agreed to allow you to give a brief, and I mean brief, interview to show the outside world that you’re well and not being mistreated.”

“Solitary confinement doesn’t count as mistreatment?” I asked.

“You are to say that you’re being well taken care of,” they said. “The interview will be live streamed but there will be a five minute delay so if you say or do anything inappropriate, we’ll cut the transmission. Do you understand?”

“So you want me to lie?” I asked.

“You are to say that you’re being well taken care of. You are to admit to endangering the lives of your fellow soldiers. You will not discuss the matter of being coerced into the Protection Force.”

“You know they’re going to ask about that and if I refuse to answer it’s going to sound suspicious, right?”

“We’ll have something written up that you can use to help answer those questions,” they replied. “The point is, you need to behave yourself or else there will be consequences.”

“What, are you going to drop me into the ocean if I speak out of turn?” I was half joking but they never contradicted my worry.

“The interview will be tomorrow afternoon,” they finally said. “You’ll be allowed to shower and given a fresh set of clothes to wear for it.”

“How will they get in here?” I asked since I still hadn’t found anything that looked like a door in here.

“They won’t,” they said. “They will speak to you the same way I do. We will be able to see you, though, and they’ll be tapped into the camera feed for the broadcast.”

I slumped back down onto my bed. The brief excitement I’d had over seeing someone else fading.

“The interview will only last ten to fifteen minutes and then you can go back to your singing.” There was an edge of mockery to their voice, an odd deviation from their usual, emotionless inflection.

“Great,” I sighed, “I look forward to it.”

The conversation died there. I was looking forward to the interview. Anything to break up the monotony was good. I’d only been in here for a few days and already I was wearing thin. But what would I say in the interview? I was certain that the prepared answers I was going to be given would be not only untrue, but empty of any sort of real information.

As I lay there, I remembered an old documentary about some American prisoners of war who were given a chance to be interviewed like me, where they weren’t allowed to tell the truth about their situation so what they did was they blinked S.O.S. It was subtle enough that no one noticed until it was too late to stop the message from getting out. Could I do the same thing? Blinking might be a bit too obvious, although maybe not. I could pretend to have something in my eye. That might draw attention to what was doing though and spoil the whole thing, not to mention that it was likely the military leaders would know the same story and be able to pick up on what I’m doing right away. I’d have to think about it some more and make a plan for how I could tell them I wasn’t okay without it being too obvious.

I walked over to the hole in the ground and crouched down. I didn’t need to use it but I liked watching the waves below. So far no one had told me not to do it so it was my one form of entertainment. As I sat there, I began swaying back and forth to keep my knees from getting upset with me for squatting so long. Even though I was the strongest person alive and incredibly durable, my knees still didn’t like when I squatted for hours on end.

As I swayed, I noticed that if I moved far enough to the one side I could just make out a shadow on the water. I kept swaying but now I turned my attention to the shadow. It was hard to make out much detail against the surf but it looked like it was cast by a pillar, perhaps like one on an oil rig. If that was the case then my assumption about where I was was correct. It also meant that I knew which direction the main platform was in since I could follow the line of the shadow back towards the direction it was cast from.

If worse came to worse then at least I knew I’d need to go that way to find the rig. I had no idea how deep those supports went but the anchors had to be in the same direction. I hoped I wouldn’t need to ever use that knowledge but it was comforting to know it all the same. I returned to my bed and looked at the far wall where, on the other side, was the main platform. I wanted to stare at that wall and imagine what the platform looked like but instead forced myself to look away. I rolled over and closed my eyes. Sleep was the obvious method for passing time. I never thought it would be so easy to sleep away an entire day but with nothing else to do I found that frequent naps came naturally to me.

As I drifted off to sleep I let my worries fade into the back of my mind. I’d worry about them later. Right now I wanted to take a break from worrying.