Futureland - Nine Stories of an Imminent World (30 page)

Nina kissed him on the lips, a fast-fireable infraction, and turned away quickly, returning to her station.
7

Neil threw himself fully into the Third Eye project after that. For the next year he worked twelve hours almost every day. He spent his leisure time with fellow workers and most of his nights with Nina. There were evenings that she would disappear with her hefty-men; on those evenings Neil would swear to himself that he would never see her again. But a day or two later they were back together. One night while Nina was out scrambling around, as she would say, Neil called Blue Nile and asked him if he would like to get together for a late dinner in Dark Town.

"That'd be great, Neilio," the little man said. He did a jig in the 3D vid arch. "Where to?"

"A place I go to sometimes," Neil said. "Hallwell's China Diner on Lower Thirty-third and Park."

"Hey, hey," Blue Nile said. "Sounds like an underground poet named her. And if that poet's also a cook . . . Well, you know, poetry's the only real soul food."

__________

They met at the front door of the hole-in-the-wall at just past twenty hours. The only other people there were a short woman dressed in a black T-shirt and a long brown skirt and a black man with a synthetic blue eye who sat in a corner considering the wall.

"Teriyaki frogs' legs over hominy with onion and chard," D'or Hallwell--proprietor, waitress, cook, and janitor of the China Diner--said. "Or grubsteak fresh from the rain forest of Brazil."

"I don't know," Blue Nile said. "I never ate a worm before." D'or walked up to the table and put a meaty fist on her hip. She had wiry gray-blond hair that stuck almost straight out from her head. "If you ever ate a prepared meal out of a plastic can chances are ten to one you ate a worm. And not no farm-certified worm like my grubsteak, neither. No sir. Canned worms are wild things. Maggots and larvae and carnivorous caterpillars."

"Oh," Blue Nile said. It was the first time Neil had ever seen his friend look somebody in the eye without smiling.

"Let him alone, D'or," the black man sitting in the corner said. "He just wants a meal, not the IDA report on canned foods."

"Hello, M Johnson," Neil said to the man.

"M Hawthorne," the Electric Eye replied.

"Well?" D'or asked Blue Nile. "What'll it be?"

"What about you, Neil?"

"He's a commie kid," D'or said. "The cheapest plate is always his favorite dish."

"Then grubsteak, please, ma'am," Blue Nile said.

D'or smiled and went away to get their meals.

"Nice place," Blue Nile said. "How long you been comin' here?"

"I always knew about it," Neil said. "For the first five years I came about once every year or so, to treat myself. I was saving up for my vacation so I didn't want to waste money on restaurant food. But after I started GP-9 I been comin' once or twice a week."

"Whatever happened to that vacation of yours?"

"I don't know. It didn't seem important anymore, I guess. I mean, a seventh-class room in a hotel that has ten thousand rooms sounded like work to me."

Blue Nile laughed and rocked in his rickety chair.

"You like the food here?" he asked.

"I like the place. It's privately owned you know."

"No."

"Yeah. M Hallwell's mother owned it and never had to turn it over during the corporate takeover days because the rest of the block was city owned back then. By the time the city sold out the laws had changed and D'or didn't have to sell it."

"A private business," Blue Nile said. "In New York. Wow." D'or returned with their dinners. Neil had frogs' legs over hominy and Blue Nile had a big grubsteak smothered in fried mushrooms, onions, and peas.

"I never seen you before, have I?" D'or asked Blue Nile.

"This is my first time in your fine establishment," Blue Nile said. "But you can be sure that it's not my last." The restaurant owner pulled a chair from a vacant table and sat down. Neil wasn't happy about this. He liked D'or but he wanted to talk to his friend about Nina. He wanted to ask about her history and family. Blue Nile had the file protocols to look up prod records. Neil could have requested access but he worried that Nina would get angry if she thought he was checking her background.

"You're cute," D'or was saying to Blue Nile.

"Thank you. You're a lovely woman."

"Neil," D'or said, "you should bring your friend around more often."

"I don't think he'll need me to bring him after he's tasted your grubsteak."

"The boy's right, there," Nile agreed.

"What's your name?" D'or asked.

"Blue Nile."

"No shit?"

"Straight as the hole down to Common Ground."

"Where you from, Blue Nile?"

"Vermont. Montpelier."

"Mm! That's some cold country up there."

"Not if you dig a hole and stay down in it for six months."

"What brought you down here?"

"My mother. She slipped into Simpson's Coma Disorder. I wanted to help her, but you know a country boy can't make a dime. She needed three kinds of drugs, so I sold my labor contract to MacCo. They bought forty years of my labor for her drugs and room and board for me."

"You sold your entire work life to MacroCode?" Neil was shocked.

"Lotsa people do it, kid," Blue Nile said. "How else can a prod afford to take care of his loved ones?

There's no more private property, hardly. All a prod's got is his labor."

"How long ago was that?" D'or asked.

"Let's see," Blue Nile said. "I'm fifty-five now, so it must be twenty-two years."

"Is your mother still alive?"

"No. She died three years after I came to MacCo."

"You poor thing," D'or Hallwell said.

"That's what they do to you," a man's voice said.

Neil and Blue Nile looked up at the towering figure of the black man with the artificial blue eye.

"Do you mind if I join you, M Hawthorne?" Folio Johnson asked.

"No, M Johnson. Of course not. This is my friend--M Blue Nile."

"Call me Blue," Nile said. He stood up and extended a hand to Folio.

"Can you beat that shit?" D'or asked the electric detective as he pulled up a chair. "Bought his whole life, just like he was an old-time slave."

Johnson nodded.

Neil was wondering why he had never asked about Blue Nile's family or his work contract with MacCo; why he'd never known that his friend lived in a labor dormitory or why he'd never been invited to call him Blue.

"It's not so bad," Blue Nile said. "Before I made the deal and got the nuclear drugs my mother was in a full-out coma. She came awake and smiled at me six hours after her first dose. We moved her down to Brooklyn and she stayed with my sister. I saw her every day for those three years. It was worth every minute I have to spend."

"Yeah," Folio said. "For you it was. For anybody. Life is worth almost any price you have to pay. But that doesn't mean they have to charge you for it."

"You're right about that," Blue Nile said. "And right is right." They talked all night and into the morning. Blue Nile had a flask of real brandy that D'or produced glasses for. Blue Nile and Folio and D'or did most of the talking. Neil just listened. It was rare that he was with a group of people who spoke openly and honestly about their feelings. For the first time in many weeks he forgot completely about Nina.

__________

Blue Nile became a regular at the China Diner. Neil would see him at the counter almost every time he went there. The older man was always talking to D'or or waiting for her to be finished so they could resume their conversation. One time Neil ran into Nile at breakfast wearing the same overalls he had on the day before.

Neil always sat alone to give D'or and Blue Nile their privacy. Every now and then Folio Johnson, another regular, would wave him over.

One day the detective seemed down and Neil took it on himself to pull up a chair.

"Something wrong, M Johnson?" Neil asked.

"Had a case didn't work out right."

"You failed?"

"I got the answers but my client died. He was murdered by a girl."

"Oh." Neil wondered how he could switch the subject.

"Don't worry, kid," Johnson said, as if he could read Neil's worried mind. "Cops know all about it. They know but they can't do a thing."

"Why not?"

"Same reason that it'd be a crime for Blue to quit his job. The corporations. The madmen who run 'em." Neil swallowed hard and sat very still.

"You know anything about the Itsies, kid?"

"No. Just that they believe that the Nazis back a hundred years ago were right: that there's a wedding of the scientific and the spiritual, like with Infochurch."

"Do you know any of them Itsies?"

"No sir. No."

"They wanna kill me."

"Why?"

" 'Cause I'm black. Can you believe that? In this world where the last thing you got to worry about is skin color and they still wanna kill me. That's some crazy shit."

__________

Neil didn't see Folio Johnson around the China Diner much after that night. He missed their talks but he was also busy, spending long days at GP-9. He designed seventeen micronic processors--wafer-thin microdots containing billions of hard gel circuits, sheathed in the multilayered silicon skins needed to perceive and encode sensory data and to transfer those translations into the nervous system code. The Third Eye would be able to perceive far more than human senses. A user could, Neil believed, close his eyes and plug his ears, wrap himself from head to toe in sense-dep clothes, and still be able to know more of what was going on around him than ten unaided human beings.

But as large as the micronic memory was, it was nowhere near the capacity needed to record these sensations for later use. At full capacity a human would be able to use the eye only one sense at a time. He could see clearly for miles distant, but his other senses would suffer. The only way to be aware of all senses would be to record them for later study. In order to record this data successfully, the table computer estimated a trillion trillion characters of memory per hour.

Creating a functioning device, Neil felt, was impossible. But he wasn't worried. His job was to develop the virtual prototype for the perceptor logic, and he had done that; at least, he had the general designs down. It would take another three or four years for him to locate and download all the routines that would fit in between the sheaths of the Third Eye.

Neil often thought about his old days on the prod lane, days when all he would do was look up one of the few hundred chips he used in product insertion. He never worked on a project for more than ninety minutes. He'd never known how anything turned out unless he happened to see the device in one of the leasing department store vid commercials.

"What you thinkin'?" Nina asked him one day. They were sitting side by side, looking out at the sky.

"Why don't more people do what we're doing here?" he asked.

"Because the corporations don't want 'em to."

"Why? The kind of work we're doing could change the way people live."

"You really think so?"

"Sure. With this device, when they finally figure out the memory, you could just go outside and see the planets, in a full spectrum of light."

"But prob'ly," Nina said wryly, "some dude'd just try and look inta somebody's windah an' see if they was fuckin'."

"Not everybody."

"Most of 'em."

"But that's not why the corporations have us doing little shit. They don't care if somebody's lookin' in a window."

"No. But why pay for expensive experiments and designs when you could just lease the same old clock radio, the same old chair? They got us where we pay for whatever they put out. Why design somethin'

might cost a million creds when you could just change its color or put a vid in it?"

"So we just stopped advancing? We just stagnate from now on?"

"No. They do research. Randac do it on Madagascar in their genius prison. Dr. Kismet do it in the Blue Zone on Home. But that shit ain't for the prods. They have what they have and we cain't get at it. That's why we live from minute to minute and they plannin' on what our children's children gonna live like."

"But that's not right. We should be making those decisions."

"How much you think it's gonna cost to make a hardware prototype'a your Eye thing?"

"I don't know."

"Ten million--credits not dollars. That's why you can't decide. It costs a lotta money to decide. And they only pay you enough to get fat and sloppy."

Neil wanted to talk more but a message came in from Un Fitt and Neil had been waiting for instructions.

"Sorry, Nina. I should read this."

"Okay, baby. See you later."

Hello, Neil,

I'm very happy with your work on this project. You have gone far past the expectations
General Specifix had for you. The design of the Third Eye, though not perfect, will allow others
to hone your ideas into a perfectly running unit. You're right when you say that memory is the
only real question. But other researchers in other GTs have come up with an interesting
solution. Your work has been exemplary and I am going to give you a paid holiday to Maya for
two ten-spans. All we need before you go is a comprehensive write-up of the protocols you feel
have yet to be set up and programmed.

Neil read the words with a growing sense of failure. He had believed that the Third Eye project was his, that he would be the only one to work on it. Now he was being told that he was still on a production lane, that he was only a nameless step in the creation of just another product. He tried to do the write-up he was asked for: he called up the beginnings of the macroflow he'd generated describing the logic units needed to fulfill the parameters of the Third Eye. For over an hour he stared at the boxes and circles used to exhibit the flow of data, the speed of perception in the various skins, and the protocols for translation into octal code. Neil looked at the screen but it didn't make any sense to him.

"I'm going home," he told Athria at just past noon.