The Prisoner of Chillon

Hugo Award-winning author James Patrick Kelly’s cyberpunk science short story “The Prisoner of Chillon” was first published in the June 1986 issue of Asimov's Science Fiction magazine. The story is a sequel to the short story “Solstice,” which featured members of the Cage family – a family whose lives revolved around cutting edge technology and the criminal element that is engaged in either pirating or creating it. In “The Prisoner of Chillon,” a seasoned journalist thinks she is documenting a thrilling heist, until the plan goes off the rails and she is forced to seek protection from the mysterious inhabitant of Chillon Castle.

The story is written in the first person from the perspective of Wynne Cage, a child in Kelly’s story “Solstice,” who now works for a company called Infoline as a “spook journalist” – someone who embeds with criminals in order to later write about their exploits.

When the story begins, she is in the midst of an airborne getaway with a man whose codename is Django, and who is the lone survivor of a spectacular robbery. The shuttle they are flying is programmed to crash-land in Switzerland – a terrible plan B that had to be activated when the shuttle’s pilot, codenamed Yellowbaby, was killed mid-heist. Wynne explains that although the theft was amazing, neither she nor Django know exactly what WILDLIFE, the program they have stolen, actually does.



Wynne considers that she is an adrenaline junkie who seeks out terrifying situations in order to avoid thinking too much about her emotional and psychological damage. She thinks wistfully about Yellowbaby, her “sometime lover… a real all-nighter, handsome as surgical plastic can make a man and an artiste in bed.”

The shuttle approaches its landing destination, while Django and Wynne jump out of it on personal gliders. Wynne helps Django get the photonic email that is supposed to tell him where to find the man who hired them to steal WILDLIFE. The email is a snippet of The Prisoner of Chillon, an 1816 narrative poem by Lord Byron, which tells the story of the real-life imprisonment of a sixteenth-century monk, Francois Bonivard, in the Castle of Chillon. Wynne figures out that this means they should go to Chillon Castle.

The castle is bombed out – the result of the nuking of the city of Geneva in 2039. Inside, they meet a man who calls himself Francois Bonivard. His body has been dramatically mutilated: “Both of his legs had been amputated at the hip joint…The entire left side of Bonivard's torso was withered…The left arm dangled uselessly, the hand curled into a frozen claw.” Wynne finds him repulsive and attractive at the same time.



Bonivard explains that WILDLIFE is the structure for a “cognizor” – a human-equivalent AI. Django scoffs at the idea since everyone knows that kind of AI is impossible. When Bonivard offers him the agreed-on payment, Django decides to spend the night in the castle thinking things over. Wynne messages Infoline that she has most of the story ready to go and that she needs extraction. However, she immediately receives a pre-recorded reply from her boss Jerry Macmillan: the stolen goods are a super top secret weapons system, and now anyone who knows anything about it is considered dangerous by not only EU ops, but US feds, and private security forces as well. For this reason, Infoline has purged all knowledge of Wynne and she is on her own.

The next morning, Bonivard summons a mechanical spider into which his torso fits perfectly and which enables him to move and control its arm-like appendages. He explains that this spider is how he feels most comfortable. In the former armory, Bonivard has created a hydroponic garden. Wynne kisses Bonivard, with more pity than desire, but the moment is ruined when he matter-of-factly says that he is going to die soon.

Wynne and Django fall into a boring routine at the castle since Django doesn’t want to complete the WILDLIFE deal until he knows what the program actually does. In the meantime, Django constantly comes on to Wynne for sexual favors, which she rejects out of hand.



A few days later, Ego tells Wynne that Bonivard’s real name is "Carl Pfneudl." Wynne has sex dreams about Bonivard’s mutilated body and is horrified to discover that she isn’t at all disgusted by it.

Django makes secret copies of WILDLIFE. When Wynne asks him about Carl Pfneudl, Django tells her that he was a legendary criminal until ops caught him, tortured him, and killed him. Ops filmed all of this and distributed the video as a deterrent.

Wynne confronts Bonivard about really being Carl, but she instead finds herself spilling all her secrets to him: that she no longer works for Infoline, that Django is copying WILDLIFE, and even that she dreamt about him. Bonivard reveals that he manipulated events to get Wynne to the castle. He explains that he is no longer Carl – now he is nothing but the new prisoner of Chillon.



Wynne asks if he can make love to her, and they have sex.

The next day, Bonivard tells Django to leave. However, in a surprising move, Bonivard tells Django to unleash his copies of WILDLIFE everywhere rather than hiding it. Django leaves, excited to become a legend in criminal circles.

Bonivard shows Wynne an enormous rack of computers that are running an extremely sophisticated program that has “sensorium emulation, movement, language, logic, anticipation.” When Bonivard puts on a helmet and completes the program’s circuit, the program generates a lifelike simulacrum of Yellowbaby that can be seen, heard, and felt. Eventually, the program will be able to generate not just a human construct like this one, but anything. In short, it’s “the army of the future.”



Bonivard wants Django to release it everywhere since if everyone has access to the same technology, it is less effective as a weapon. Instead, it can be used benevolently for exploration or to help disabled people. Bonivard reveals that his true intention is to upload himself into WILDLIFE permanently so that he can let go of his disabled body for good. Pitying him, Wynne points out that this is probably impossible. Nevertheless, he tells her that since he only has a year or two to live anyway, there is no point not to die trying.

Wynne realizes that he will never let her leave the castle – he doesn’t want her to reveal any of this information.

Bonivard confesses that he loves Wynne and asks her to try to upload herself into WILDLIFE alongside him. Wynne is horrified. She was attracted to Bonivard because his physical mutilations reminded her of her emotional and mental ones, but now she sees that he is desperate. She is on the verge of running away when realizes that he would actually let her go despite the danger to himself. Seeing that he really does love her, she agrees to stay with him for at least two years.