The Prisoner : Hotline Miami

The Prisoner

The prisoner sat in the middle of the bed in his small intimate cell, rolling a green super ball around his fingertips as he waited for the end to come. He had been here countless times before, and he would return as many more. It didn't matter to the prisoner, he had long since given up trying to change the world around him. He watched the green sphere of rubber roll across his knuckles before his fingers dexterously moved it back to where it had begun, only to begin the cycle again. He was no different. Any second now, there would be a wave of white light, a sudden impact and then... he would begin the cycle again.

He would wake back up in his apartment building, wearing his worn Letterman jacket. He'd wait for the phone to ring, just as aimless and lost as he was now. Nothing would change, because the prisoner didn't want anything to to change. Everything was so much easier when he became an empty vessel of fate, a slave to the wills of the universe. He had no part left to play, yet he had been instrumental to it all. That would be just fine for the prisoner, if he bothered giving it any thought at all.

The prisoner closed his eyes just before the wave of kinetic energy crashed against his body. He felt nothing. The atomic blast moved far quicker then the neurons in his brain could trigger a reaction. He relished the sensations that followed next. Nothingness. A blank canvas of existence stretched out before him. He was no longer alive, but neither was he truly dead. He was simply... waiting. Waiting for the reels to be replaced, for the tragedy to loop and start over once again.

The prisoner waited patiently, for the emptiness to shift and change back into reality. He would appear in his apartment once again, and once again, he would get a phone call from a man pretending to work at a bakery. The prisoner had known the man did not work at a bakery, even before he had relived the experience again and again. The man on the end of the phone had enunciated his words in such a way, that the prisoner instinctively knew, that he was speaking in code. He could have resisted the subtle influences, that the call had over him. He could have questioned what it was he was doing, or why, but he didn't. That was the moment he stopped questioning, stopped resisting, and embraced his vacuous new existence. That was the day he let himself die, and Jacket took his place.

Jacket opened his eyes. Something was wrong. Before him was a door, very similar to a door in his apartment building. A familiar shiver ran through his body, he recognized the door before him. The door was not of this world. He stood there, staring at the door for the longest time. He couldn't remember the last time he had to consciously make a decision. Even thinking about thinking was unnerving to him. This entire time, he had gone without thought, every action he took was a simple reaction. It was upsetting for Jacket, to be forced out of his simplistic nirvana.

Jacket reached foreword and twisted the doorknob, opening and stepping through the door. The room was bathed in three radiant lights, disorienting him as soon as he entered through the doorway. The three lights emanated from their origins on the far side of the room, bathing him in an eerie glow. The three lights shifted all around, as if fighting for dominance. They occasionally took turns enveloping jacket in their entirety, only to be later replaced by a different colored light.

In front of him, sitting in three black leather chairs, were three mysterious figures, the source of the lights. Jacket gave no reaction that he was surprised at seeing the three figures because he made no reaction whatsoever. Though alien and unknowable, Jacket had grown familiar with the supernatural beings before him.

Each was glowed with a different colored aura, but that was far from the only thing that differentiated them from each other. Each of their colored auras evoked a different emotional response from Jacket, flipping them on against his will at the mere exposure to the radiant light.