A middle-aged man in a prison uniform, sitting on the bed in a single-occupant cell.

I had a meeting with my case worker today. Tracey, her name is. Lots of piercings and tattoos, hair a different colour every time. Today it was half blue, half pink.

Anyway, she says have I decided what I'm going to do when I get out, and do I have anywhere to live? Janet's living in Bridlington now, but she doesn't want me back. She says it didn't do any good the first time except to make her family stop talking to her.

Any road, even if I had somewhere to live, I can't get a job if I tell the truth. And if I lie, I lose the job when I get found out. And there's always someone who recognises me.

Mr Parlane, my boss when I worked for the Parks Department, said he'd be happy to write a reference for me to work in an old people's home. 'Not as a carer, obviously. They'll have grandkids coming to visit, kids researching history projects. But you'd be safe working the kitchen and the laundry, and you're a fine hard worker, Wilfred, always were. Just don't lie this time.' But I wrote to every care home in West Yorkshire, telling them the truth, and the only reply I got was a drawing of how to hang myself.

I told Tracey about my plan to be a recluse on Nidderdale Moor, living in a shed with a big dog, maybe an Alsatian except kiddies aren't always frightened of those, so they might come up to pet the nice doggie. Maybe a Rottweiler. And I'd grow my own food, and trap rabbits for the dog.

Tracey says, 'That's a cool idea, Wilfred, but I'm not sure you'd get planning permission. Anyway, what if you needed a doctor? Or if you got lonely, with just the dog? Do you have any friends?'

I don't. Mr Kumar, who used to work in the park with me, came to visit whenever he had a day off, but when his wife had her first baby, she thought it was best if he stopped seeing me. Though she was only fifteen when he married her, so if it had been in England, he'd be as much a criminal as I am.

I thought Tracey was about to bring up the support group programme she's always on at me to join, only that's only for people who've done the therapy and rehab course, and the doctor stopped my sessions after a couple of months when I came in. He said I wouldn't 'engage', and if I didn't value his help, there were others who did. Just because he kept asking me about when I was a kid. None of his business. No use raking all that up.

But instead, she says, 'Only, if you want to work hard, there's this new project, for adult men only, living together and growing all your own food. The governor here says you've done a grand job with the prison garden. Didn't you used to be a park-keeper?'

I said, 'No,' before I remembered she knew I was, seeing as the park was where I got caught.

Tracey says, 'It's all right, you don't need to lie. Quite a few of the others are prison leavers, too. It's a way of getting a fresh start, somewhere you can't get into trouble. Not monsters, not the sort who'd kidnap a child, murder and eat it, but some of them will be people like you who can't get it into their head that just because a kiddie gives you a friendship bracelet and asks you to play pat-a-cake, it doesn't mean she wants you to stick your hand down her knickers.'

I said, 'It wasn't a friendship bracelet, it was a daffodil.'

Wilfred is in a singlet and shorts, standing by the edges of what looks like a giant, dome-shaped greenhouse. Inside are beds of vegetables, interspersed with beds of ferns, mother-in-law's tongue, lilies and daisies. Outside is desert, with other domes visible at a distance. It could be Arizona. It clearly isn't the Yorkshire moors.

We don't talk about before. Jose explained that to me, on my first day. He said, 'It doesn't matter if you've been in prison. This place is a test. It's a test to see if we could live on the moon or Mars someday. It's a test to see if we could live on Earth without trashing it. And it's a test to see if twelve ordinary guys from four different countries can learn to get along together, when they're locked in a place like this together.'

I said, 'They won't be filming this, will they? Like on Big Brother?'

Jose says no, they've got are security cameras in case anyone fights, but it's not going to be on telly. We've all got to talk to Hank, the supervisor, once a day by video link, but the rest of the time it's just Kyle, Chad, Jose, Laurent, Pascal, Fabrice, Takuya, Riku, Minoru, Terry, Leigh, and me. All in here together. All trying to grow food, trying to grow air, trying to stay alive.

It's a nice place, not like a park at all. No crisp packets blocking the drains, no spray-cans for graffiti, though that doesn't stop Minoru writing stuff in mud on the window-panes that only him and Riku and Takuya can read. At least it's easy to wash off. No dog muck, though there's ours of course, which all has to go in the composter. Pascal told me if I don't fancy Chad, sex here is playing with yourself, and I'm to do that in the privy too, as it's all got to be composted.

Takuya had me help him fix the water recycling yesterday. Says we all need to learn how to do everything, just in case. I said, 'In case what?' He said, 'In case we are no longer on Earth, with no Hank to call.'

It's a good place, by day. It looks like a jungle, but it doesn't feel like one, the way prison did. I don't talk much, but the others don't spit on me when I sit with them for meals.

Nights are the hard part. We're not supposed to waste electricity on reading or watching telly when it's too dark to work. So I lie on my bunk, and I think about Samantha, who must be twelve now, and wonder if her and her mum hate me for what I did. I think about Mr Kumar and Mrs Kumar, and wonder if their baby was a boy or a girl. Must be starting playgroup now. Might have a baby brother or sister. I think about Janet, and wonder if she gets to see Yvonne's twins more, now that she doesn't have me in tow. And then I have to clench my jaw so I don't howl like a dog.

Laurent says I howl in my sleep, sometimes. But he says I'm useful enough by day to make up for it.

Wilfred in a hospital gown, in a white, clinical-looking room.

They moved us out, once we'd got the dome running nicely for a few years with no loss of oxygen. The next step is to join up the domes and move families in, instead of just single men. A village of a thousand people, with a school and all. 'An exercise in sustainable community,' apparently.

The teams in some of the domes are staying. Teams of scientists, teams of farmers, teams of ordinary people. Some of the other convict teams didn't last long – fights, breaking up their dome, worse. And then there are the teams like us. The ones who are fine when it's just us, but parents don't want us near their kids. Not on the same planet, even.

Pascal reckoned we'd be going to the moon. Takuya reckoned they'd skip moon and go straight to Mars. Jose said it'd be a satellite, more likely.

Only we're all wrong, because it seems there's a planet about four light years away that the space agencies have their eye on colonising. Only problem is, it takes 70,000 years to get there. So we have to be frozen, until we land and start working on the new place.

Fabrice says that's a load of balls. He says if they wanted us to work on another planet, they'd have given us more training, and if they wanted to go to another star, they'd wait another ten years and invent a drive that could get us there in twenty years. He says if we agree to be frozen, we're just agreeing to be killed. Probably they won't bother shooting us into space, just freeze us and thaw us until they find out what kills us.

Kyle said, 'So? They don't want us to build any more twelve-man domes. We've got nowhere else to go. We've got no friends except each other. If they want to test making human popsicles on us, I say let'em. At least we might be helping someone go to Alpha Centauri, someday.'

Pascal said, 'Maybe they are freezing us because we have sick minds that they do not know how to cure. Maybe when they find a cure for us being us, they will wake us up.'

Anyway, the man at the centre said it was our choice what to do. We could agree to all be frozen together, or agree to all refuse, or agree to let the ones who didn't want to be frozen go. But we had to decide together, and not come out of our room until we'd made a decision.

We took a vote. Everyone voted for being frozen, even Fabrice. He says we're daft to trust them and we're all going to die, but he'd still rather do that than be alone again.

So would I.