All the world’s a cage, and we’re all just prisoners trapped within it. She had forever been Jonna. Sometimes Jonna Turner, Jonna Smith and now, Jonna Pruitt… but always Jonna. The only name someone else had ever given to her. She had been Jonna for 241 long years, uninterrupted. And this was the first time she had managed to get herself arrested. This last year of her sentence would be the longest. Years could go by faster than days, sometimes.
Her incarceration had begun some 74 years ago. It took twenty years for them to realize she hadn’t aged a day. It took them another twenty to realize she could go without eating. After that, they had stopped bringing her food and water altogether. She never cared really. A few decades without food wouldn’t hurt—three quarters of a century would feel like a fast in the scope of her lifetime.
What bothered her was the solitude. Sure, she was immortal—and sure, potentially, she could be dangerous, but prison would have been a blast had they let her mingle with the general population. After the first time she’d been stabbed, they realized how easily she could rise in the ranks as her body began healing itself—pulling together cells and reconnecting blood vessels and patching together new skin like silly putty. Sometimes they took her to see the sun, in handcuffs she could literally break her wrists to get out of, with four guards at her flanks. They only took her out at sunrise, when other inmates were eating breakfast she would have time to pace the yard and feel the sun remind her skin of warmth.
But mostly she was alone.
While she was a prisoner, they told her she had no rights. She belonged to the system until her death—which they assumed would be before the end of her sentence. By year fifty, they started the tests. Trying to make sense of what she was, and how to make it something they could duplicate and market. When they took samples from her, they were barren of what the scientists sought; dead pieces of matter and empty vials of blood that held no life. But Jonna remained, her heart would still beat, her body would mend, and no matter how much they took from her, she was still alive...always alive. When there were no conclusions from their tests, they looked her in the eyes and simply asked her what she was.
She told them.
Why should he hide anymore when she was already discovered; after so many lifetimes of just…being as average as she could be as to not garner suspicions.
“I am immortal. Try to kill me I will not die. Grind me down to nothing, I’ll just regrow, like a weed through hard cement, I’ll flower anew.”
It left them with more questions, questions Jonna would not answer because, who were they? What could they do to her that they hadn’t already? But her answer did find its way to the judge that had sentenced her for her crimes. Surely this would change things. Should she be made to stay longer here, in prison? If her life is to last forever, shouldn’t her rehabilitation take longer? Three consecutive life sentences without the chance at parole changes tremendously when the prisoner in question could live forever...would live forever. But the judge refused as it would go against his ethics. While Jonna was not human by his standards, they could not justly sentence her to life when her crimes didn’t warrant the time.
Her crimes. The one time in almost three hundred years she’d actually done something out of line—and Jonna had lived through slavery! The one time she did something to change the world and she’d gotten arrested for it. Murder was still murder, and kidnapping was still kidnapping -- but the people she killed had deserved it. But all that was a story for another time.
Now… now Jonna had one year left, and she had so many plans of what to do with her newfound freedom. For the first time in her life, she didn’t care about hiding anymore. For the first time in her life… she would do whatever the hell she wanted to.