There was no trial.
Just a room, gray as the inside of a coffin, where a man in a black jacket read from a clipboard while the others stared. Five on the board. One applicant. A fluorescent hum overhead. No camera crews. No applause. No one objecting.
Daniel Keane sat with his hands folded in his lap. He didn't fidget. He didn't blink much. The suit he wore was borrowed, slightly large in the shoulders, but clean. He spoke only when prompted.
"Mr. Keane, you're aware this is not a sentence. You are not being punished by the state."
"I understand."
"You are here of your own volition. To waive legal protections, forfeit release conditions, and enter Alcatraz Island under the Voluntary Penitence Program. You will be treated as a high-security inmate. There is no guarantee of psychological support, communication, or release. You will serve under indefinite solitary confinement. Do you still consent?"
"Yes, Sir."
"State your reason for entry."
Daniel looked up slowly. His voice was steady, even soft.
"Because I did something wrong. And I need to live inside the truth of that."
A pause. One of the women on the panel shifted in her seat.
"The courts exonerated you, Mr. Keane."
"And they were wrong."
He wasn't arrogant about it. There was no fire, no pleading. Just that same eerie calm. The quiet of someone who'd already built his own prison long before he asked for a cell.
---
The boat ride was silent.
Daniel sat at the back, beside two guards who didn't bother to speak to him. Alcatraz rose out of the fog like a relic, a jagged tooth in the sea. The Golden Gate glimmered far behind them, bright with the lives of people who had never been tempted to bury themselves alive.
The closer they came, the colder it felt.
He had dreamed of this. Stone, silence, steel. The stripping away of everything false. Somewhere in the bones of the island, he imagined, there would be a place where guilt could settle into something solid. Something he could carry, finally, without shaking.
The officer at the dock said nothing as they cuffed him and led him across the crumbling walkway. No welcome. No speech. Just the wind, and the sound of chains clinking against concrete.
Daniel didn't look back.
---
Inside the processing room, they took his name. His prints. His clothing. A man with dead eyes handed him a gray uniform and pointed to the corner.
Daniel undressed slowly. Deliberately.
The guard watched. Not with curiosity, but with that distant disinterest the system breeds. Just another man turning himself in for a crime that no one asked him to pay for.
"You're not like the others," the guard said flatly. "They scream their innocence. You came asking for pain."
Daniel pulled the shirt over his head.
"I came asking for silence."
The guard didn't answer. Just led him down the long hallway, past barred doors and echoes of old lives, toward a cell with no number.
The door slammed shut behind him. One slot for food. One bench. One toilet bolted to the wall. No mirror. No clock. No light switch.
Only stone.
He sat.
Closed his eyes.
And began to wait.