Futureland - Nine Stories of an Imminent World (18 page)

"We are allowed by law to administer a level-two pain injection if we believe that you are lying."

"Check my med files," Folio said.

"A Macso injunction against invasive interrogation,"
the female voice said. Folio doubted she'd meant him to hear those words.

"You got all bases covered, huh?" the man said.

"Enough to stay in the game."

__________

Folio got back to Hallwell's China Diner at eight fifteen in the morning. D'or was behind the counter. Three lady latenighters were eating fried rice and frogs' legs trying to garner enough strength to make it through the day without getting thrown off the cycle.

"Hey, Johnson," D'or said, and he knew there was trouble. D'or saying Johnson was a code meaning that his dick was exposed.

Folio looked around the small restaurant. The lavender-haired partygirls didn't seem to see a problem. D'or moved close enough to whisper, "She's downstairs. Spread out two meters just for an intro."

"Cash credit?"

"Yessir."

__________

The tiny underroom of China Diner was dark and damp, with a ceiling barely high enough for Folio to stand up straight. She was sitting in an ancient wooden chair looking as if she were receiving infection from every breath. She wore a gray dress of real wool and a light gray shawl that had to be silk. Folio placed her age at mid-forties, but with the recent advances in dermal surgery she could have been sixty and no one would know.

"You were looking for me, ma'am?" Folio asked.

He reached out in greeting. She clasped her hands together and moved her shoulders in a defensive manner.

"Are you the detective?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"I am Liliane Spellman."

"Charles Spellman's mother?"

"No. I'm Mylo's mother." There was no trace of tears or sorrow on her face, but her blood pressure was extremely high and her nervous system was playing a dirge.

"I'm sorry about your loss, ma'am."

"It's . . . It was a shock. He had always been sick. That was my fault. I infected him. When I was pregnant the doctors told me that he could live a normal life if he kept up a moderate health regimen."

"Lots of people live with the hive and worse today. It's not like back when we were kids."

"I know. I was heartbroken, of course, when I heard. But today the police called my husband and said that they were opening a file on Mylo, that he might have been murdered." Folio looked around for another chair. There was none.

"They said that you were hired by Charles, that he might also be dead."

"I don't think Charles is dead. His nine friends are, though. Some say it was accidental but I wouldn't bet on that."

"The police have claimed Mylo's body. They exhumed him from the royal cemetery in England--"

"He had a royal funeral?"

"Of course. His great-grandfather is Jason Randisi."

"CEO of Randac Corp.?"

"You didn't know?"

The chime of intuition rang in Folio's eye, but he had already made the leap. All of this information was stored in his eye but he skipped over biographical data, not thinking it important.

"Is that Charles's great-grandfather too?"

"Yes. Yes it is."

"Tell me, M Spellman, were Mylo and Charles wrapped into the Randac communications system?"

"Only for communication with the family," she replied. "You know public communication is so unreliable these days. It's perfectly legal."

"What did you want from me, ma'am?"

Liliane Spellman looked into Folio's eyes for a moment. She began to speak but then stopped herself. She raised her hand and clutched the throat of her woolen dress.

"Why don't you wear a lens?" she asked.

"What?"

"For that eye. It's very disconcerting."

"It has a crystal code covering," Folio said. "Data capture would be thrown off by a lens."

"Did I kill my son, M Johnson?"

"No, ma'am, you certainly did not. You gave him life and that life was taken. They used the hive but he would have lived if they had let him alone."

Folio had never seen a real person laugh and cry at the same time. He'd seen it in the movies, but never in life.

"I will pay you a million general credits for the arrest of the murderer," she said then.

"Ma'am, I've given you all I can."

"You won't help me have revenge?"

"Your son is dead, lady. He was killed by a big plan. A major design. If you try and get at it they won't hesitate to blank you too."

__________

Corridor 23-97 triple-G S I was paved in crumbling plaster that had once been painted coral pink. At the far end of the Common Ground hallway was head locker 512-419. Folio had to climb a forty-foot ladder to reach the octangular slip where Charles Spellman slept.

When Johnson popped the lid he saw Spellman and his guest. Her hands were at either side of his head, holding down the rope across his throat. They were both naked. She was riding his erection while he came and came near to death. Tana looked up, the grin of a satisfied orgasm on her lips. Folio hit her with his fist. When she fell the boy started coughing and choking. He was spitting blood and trying to pull away from the weight of his assassin.

"Stop it, kid!" Folio yelled. "You're okay!"

But Charles Spellman kept flailing and kicking until he finally pressed himself out of the sleep slip, knocking Folio to the side of the ladder. The young Itsie's body crashed forty feet below. Folio swung back on the ladder and looked in at the girl. She wasn't unconscious but neither was she aware. The detective descended the ladder, leaving her to moan in her victim's bed.

__________

At midnight he approached the Infochurch tabernacle on Middle Bowery. The Blue Abbot allowed him entrance when he mentioned a certain code given him by the splendid Doctor Kismet. He entered a private booth and knelt before the giant monitor, which instantly switched on. A tall man, even taller than Folio, with one shining silver eye and one normal gray orb, appeared on the screen.

"Hello, Folio."

"Ivan," the last detective said.

"I'm surprised it took you so long to find me. You must be slipping."

"I should have guessed when you gave Tana and her stepfather my protocols."

"I didn't give your access code away, Folio," the doctor said in a friendly voice. "I merely let them piggyback on a transmission from Home to you."

"Why?"

"Such a large question."

"I know most of the big stuff. You and the other corps had a thing working with the IS. You had a communications system that the Seekers stumbled onto without knowing it. IBC, Red Raven, MacroCode, and Randac. You killed the kids because somewhere in the trillion trillion trillion bits of data they downloaded for their afternoon talks there might have been some clue to your secret."

"Congratulations," Kismet said with a paternal smile.

"Why me?"

"Charles Spellman told Azuma Sherman on our own frequency that he was going to get in touch with you. When your name shows up on our system I am always contacted. I love you, Folio."

"So you sent the assassin after me?"

"Only to check you out, to find out where your client might have been. She fell for you, you know. Another unit from the Blue Zone had already engaged the sixer. She fought him to save your life."

"If you didn't give her my protocols how did she follow me?"

"In your right-hand front pocket."

Folio reached into his pants and came out with a tiny scrap of paper that had Tana Lynn's number on it.

"Micro-mitter?"

"No."

"Radioactive?"

"Nothing. Just what it appears to be, a simple piece of paper torn from a discarded instruction sheet."

"So? How do you track that?"

Real pleasure came into the madman's face. "We've made an amazing discovery, Folio. The most important discovery in the history of the world. Every atom, every electron, proton, and maybe all subatomic particles--they are all, each and every one of them, unique." A small subsystem in Folio's eye began transcribing the doctor's words.

"Unique? You mean you can tell one atom of oxygen from another one?"

"By submyrral variance mathematics we could give every electron on this planet a name."

"She put this paper in my pocket . . ."

". . . and we tracked it."

"Usin' submyyral whatever?"

Kismet grinned broadly. Folio knew how rare this was and he was afraid.

"What's all this got to do with the kids?"

"Nothing, really. It's just that they mistakenly downloaded a series of files in a secret intercorporate database."

"What files?"

"My Dominar and certain investigative branches of Randac, Red Raven, and IBC had run across a gene-testing project that the IS has been conducting in preparation for their so-called race war. We had entered into negotiations with the Aryan branch of the organization to prepare, financially, for any situations that might arise."

"Prepare what?"

"For whatever, my friend. Of course, these negotiations needed to be private. And even though we knew these children would be unlikely to break our codes, we had to take steps."

"So you killed ten human beings just on the off chance that they might read a file?"

"Ten lives," Kismet said on a sigh. "If the IS gets their way, billions will die. Billions."

"So in order to stop them you had to kill the kids?"

"First we need to understand the viability of a genetically run race war. Then we'll consider actions, if indeed there are actions to be taken."

"Race war? Genes? Man, are you sick?"

"Hardly, Officer Johnson. Hardly." Kismet's long face became downcast. "I'm sorry about the girl."

"Tana?"

"She had to die, you know. By the time I realized that you and she had something the poison was already in her. Her and that adopted stepfather of hers, the one who transmitted the Azuma killing to your eye." Folio resisted the urge to dive into the screen.

"You know I can't let this thing lie, Ivan."

"I know."

"You killed that woman. I owed her something. She was a killer but she saved my life. And I'll have to find these Itsies before they do something crazy."

"It will be a glorious time, won't it, old friend?"

"Why did you connect with me, Ivan?" Folio asked.

"It was fate, Folio. Kismet. Your name came up and I realized that this race war will be waged against you, your people. I included you to give you a chance to fight against the Aryan branch of the ISD. I'm giving you a chance to save your people."

"They're your people too, man," Folio sputtered. "Black people are your largest membership on three continents."

"One day everyone will be my devotee. You, Folio, you are one of my apostles. It is your job to save these people. It is my wish."

"You're crazy."

"Am I?"

Folio put his foot through the screen, then stormed out of the tabernacle and into the night.

Voices

1

Where am I?
The words were clear but they had no sound, no voice to communicate timbre or gender.
Where are my hands? What is that light? What's that? Why can't I look away? Where am I?

The voice had questions mainly. Sometimes, though, memories of strange feelings or half-formed images occurred in his mind. Foods that he never liked suddenly held the most wonderful flavor. He bought a bunch of carrots at a vegetable stand and ate them all in one sitting in the park. The voice wasn't always there. There were days at a time when he heard nothing at all. Days where he was almost the man he had been before the Pulse addiction.

Pulse. Wonder drug and death sentence all in one. On the first night he used the drug Leon had lived a whole life span riding at the side of the conqueror Hannibal. He'd ridden fantastic blue elephants across the Alps. After a few years the hyper-real fantasies degraded to washed-out memories with little direction or content. But the addiction was still strong because Pulse was the only thing that kept his brain from collapsing.

"Are you using again?" Dr. Bel-Nan asked at the Neurological Institute of Staten Island.

"No," said Professor Leon Jones, father of the congresswoman from the Bronx, the onetime UBA heavyweight champion of the world, Fera Jones. "I don't even want to hear that one voice. You think I want a crowd?"

Bel-Nan, a tall white man in his fifties, smiled. He was missing a lower front tooth. This one detail always disturbed Professor Jones, though there was much that could have disturbed him. Bel-Nan was one of the foremost brain specialists in the world. He was one of the founders of the mysterious Church of Life Everlasting. He had been sentenced to the MacroCode polar prison system for performing illegal brain transplantation operations. He had further developed his techniques in prison. The operation that Bel-Nan had performed on Leon was a more sophisticated version of the experiments that had put him in prison. Taking living brain tissue from an anonymous donor, the surgeon replaced certain regenerative tissue in Jones's cortex and frontal lobe. These cells stimulated the atrophied portion of his brain, allowing the onetime history professor to survive without taking Pulse.

"Sometimes there are vestigial memories, pieces of thoughts that the donor once might have had," Bel-Nan explained as he pushed the long and greasy blond hair away from his eyes.

"But, Doctor," Jones complained. "It's not just a word or a patch of color, something like that. There's questions and sometimes I have yens, desires for things I never wanted before." Bel-Nan smiled. His face was long and somehow crooked, as if maybe the man who knocked his tooth out had also broken his jaw. Jones had seen quite a few misshapen faces like that during the years he managed his daughter's boxing career.

"The brain is a mysterious thing, Professor Jones," Bel-Nan said. "It is the most volatile and creative material in the world, maybe even the universe. It can evolve without dying. It can conceive of itself. Its concepts are beyond the living cells that comprise it, so that life for us is defined by the faculty of thought rather than the ability to breathe. Breath, as magical as it is, is nothing compared to the reality of personality."