My name is C-6128, and I am a Bane.
Banished for some rampant mischief here and there, I volunteered to be locked inside a Bane suit for 36 hours. KelleyTech laboratories, led by the wonderful Marine Kelley herself (creator of the Real Restraint SecondLife viewer and many of the devices which utilise its amazing features) performed the initiation of my punishment, and ever since then I’ve felt more like a Bane than my former free-roaming human self.
That is not to say I’ve been a paradigm of what a Bane should be. Quite the opposite. As always I’ve been a rebellious, troublesome scamp. I intend to be much more obedient now, having tasted briefly what it would mean to return to being normal. It didn’t feel right. It felt awful. But let me explain what’s transpired so far to put my new feelings in a little perspective.
Day 1:
After a very professional roleplay of the processing session and subsequent dispersal out into the wide world as newly-created C-6128, I was quickly hit with three contact violations just from people teleporting my location, setting off punishments and alarms left and right. What rotten luck – at least I knew my Custodian was working and learned the tolerance distances for loitering around civilians and other Banes.
And what an amazing invention the KelleyTech Custodian is! So clever, so frustrating and so very much like the Custodian of the Eudaemon story. It must have taken an enormous effort of both genius and patience to script the device this thoughtfully and that makes me even more angry at the critics and griefers who have driven Dr. Kelley to suspend comments on her blog.
I really hope she realises that for every idiot there is trying to spitefully make her feel bad about herself, there are dozens of admirers and appreciative supporters!
After the initial silly violations, the rest of today wasn’t too bad. Some people were very kind and supportive, bending the rules of shunning Banes by offering a few words of encouragement. One person in particular was almost seductive in her kindness, describing my predicament in claustrophobia-inducing detail, speaking about how I was now more of a thing than a person, and should embrace my new status.
Embrace my status? What…was I to accept being a Bane? Wouldn’t that be dangerously close to slipping into suit-dependency?
For a moment, that person made me feel a little woozy. I fantasised briefly on the concept of Dominants who might desire their own personal Banes and so seduce such wandering prisoners into breaking all the rules to incur endless strings of violations. Those Banes would then be helpless, unable to escape their punishment. Held indefinitely, enraptured by an “owner” who would take care of them but never let the Bane achieve freedom, always adding more and more violations until their new pet’s spirit just snapped and they remained a Bane forever.
Thankfully that madness passed, and I tried to focus once again on “beating” my Custodian and the 36 hour timer.
I hoped to be a good Bane, and obey the rules. Unfortunately am naturally talkative, sociable and I spend much of my time trying to help other people who have little problems or confusions in SecondLife. Being unable to engage in any of these normal activities began to eat at me from the first moment I became a Bane, so originally all I wanted to do was serve my sentence without incident and get back to reality with a little extra pride under my belt.
Sadly, this was not meant to be. Like all Banes, one of the first things I did after a little exploration of Zhora was find a nice quiet spot that I enjoyed sitting in, and began to wait out my time. It mildly irritated me how so many of the other Banes were clearly AFK - I felt this was mocking the program, cheating the system just so one could say they had passed through the Banishment Program. I secretly suspected that some might even be using alts on another computer, having the time of their lives, while their main avatar sat around, silently just ticking over until their timer expired. I was starting to feel envious of that, even if it was just my imagination.
Then disaster struck. I received a message form my Custodian that maintenance was overdue – it was time to find a maintenance station to replenish the Custodian’s power reserves and clear myself of natural waste. Feeling more than a little humiliated, I stomped back across Zhora.
On the way I passed by a club, and noticed two people chatting inside. Curious, and clearly not yet adjusted to the terms of my banishment, I listened in.
That was a mistake. The two individuals playing around in the club are apparently well-known Bane-bullies, and after a few minutes one of them took it upon herself to chase me around.
It wasn’t too bad, I only received a single violation. I could of course have teleported away to avoid that, but I felt this was cheating and so instead only tried to run.
After the lady gave up her chase, she went back to the club. Still a little curious, and also needing to walk past the club again anyway in order to reach my new resting area, I cautiously followed the same path back after my brief maintenance period was over.
Ouch. I walked right into a very powerful cage that one of the club residents had set as a trap for me!
Oh dear. Unable to escape or fight back, all I could do was stand there, both furious and terrified as the mean lady came back to taunt me at point-blank range while my Custodian just kept stacking up more violations.
This was turning into a nightmare. Eventually, I was released and ran away as fast and far as I could. For a couple of hours everything went back to normal, but then one of the bullies returned and this time decided to make it her sole aim to cause me as much grief as humanly possible.
She chased me relentlessly, for over twenty minutes. Once or twice she stopped, taking a moment to speak to me but because of the Custodian’s punishments there was no way for me to hear anything she was saying.
Then something far worse happened. Something that made me so angry I almost switched over to a regular SL viewer in order to cage or orbit the bully.
She started to attack other Banes. Running up to them, whether they were AFK or not, to bump and push and generally cause violations and mayhem. I felt so helpless. The only thing I could do was charge her and try to push the bully away.
It didn’t quite work. Well, not for me, anyways. It just made her more angry and start chasing me again. Of course, at least I had distracted her away from the other Banes, so really I felt a little proud of myself and happy that I had been able to do a some good for the other prisoners.
Two hours later, and my first “weekly report” arrived form the Central Monitoring Network. In addition to my original 36 hour sentence, I had gained an additional 21 hours!
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