Futureland - Nine Stories of an Imminent World (32 page)

The
Daily Dump
had a completely different scenario for the death of Arnold Roth, Neil's only friend before he came to work for GEE-PRO-9. M Roth, the
Dump
reported, was demanding food or freedom with thirty thousand other displaced unemployed persons when they were dispersed by sonic cannons, a standard antiriot tool of the NYSP. To prove this claim the
Dump
supplied a vid clip that showed Arnold yelling and brandishing his fists along with many others. Later, the
Dump
asserted, Roth was forced into a tunnel where rioters were to be quelled with disorientation gas. Arnold was one of the unlucky few who got pressed into a lower slip. There he suffocated.

The end of the article was punctuated by a low-res electronic photo of a jumble of corpses jammed into a sleep tube. Arnold Roth's pudgy face lolled over another dead M's rump. The news of his friend's death greatly disturbed Neil, though he didn't feel sadness or loss. Neil liked Arnold, but he'd always known that his friend was destined to become a Backgrounder. Roth could never stay on a job cycle for more than a few months. In the last year Neil hadn't responded to Arnold's calls. He was afraid that he might let some secret slip about GP-9. He never trusted Arnold, he hadn't missed his company in the past year, but still he identified with the dead prod. Neil saw himself in the brown pajama uniform of Common Ground, shaking his fists in the face of the Social Police. He saw himself pressed into a hole and suffocated.

That night he sat up with his Scandian housegirl and talked about how his mother hadn't called him in the whole year that he worked for GEE-PRO-9.

"She moved to Baltimore," Neil told Charity. "Joined an Infochurch commune that took out a twelve-year lease on a vacant warehouse there. I only know because I called her on Christmas to invite her out to dinner. If I didn't ask her she wouldn't have even told me that she'd moved." The next day Neil read all three papers looking for information on Arnold. But there was no mention, not even in the
Dump.

Neil read articles on every social disturbance, hoping for some new information on the Common Ground riots. The
Dump
claimed that MacroCode America was behind the riots but that made no sense to Neil. There was nothing else about CG-109. The Cincinnati police department had dispatched a unit to New York, but that was because of some group defrauding their city's treasury. A large number of Itsies had escaped Common Grounds around the world and emigrated to Jesus City, an International Socialist enclave in the Caucasus Mountains. Rioting in Boston had erupted because of a new law the FemLeague had pushed through banning self-circumcision in women.

Neil dreamed about the news. He lived out the riots and the deaths. He waded through fields of corpses, was locked in a sleep slip underground. He searched battlefields, hospitals, and graveyards for Arnold Roth. He awoke with headaches and loose bowels like in the old days before GEE-PRO-9. __________

"So did you fuck her?" were the first words out of Nina's mouth when he called her on the ninth day after he'd arrived on Maya.

"What?"

"I know you got a housegirl with your place."

"Why would you care, Nina? You always get mad at me when I ask you that kinda stuff."

"I do not. And I tell you whatever it is I'm doing."

"Yeah," he said. "Yeah, I did."

"Oh," Nina said in a small voice. "How was it?"

"Nice."

"Is she pretty?"

"She doesn't have any hair. No hair at all."

"But is she pretty?"

"She's nice."

"So why don't you bring her home with you if you like her so much? I'm sure she'd wanna come to New York. Why don't you do that?"

"Nina, what's wrong? You always said that we have to be free sexually. Is it just because I've never done it before?"

"Don't try and get psychological with me, M. I never seen nobody more than one night. Except those sex-worker girls, but they're women and that makes it different."

"Nina, Charity comes with the room," Neil said.

"So she has a name, huh?" Nina's face contorted into a rage that Neil had never seen in her before. "Fuck you!" she cried and then broke off the connection.

He tried to call her back but there was no answer at her home, the job, or on her portable unit. He wondered what it was that he had done to get her so mad. He thought about that for a while but then his mind wandered back to Un Fitt's megalomania, Arnold Roth's death, and his mother. __________

"I love you, Neil," Charity said to him later that night. The sting of her slaps were still on his cheeks, both upper and lower.

"You do?"

"I like the way you submit to me, how I found out how to get you hot and how you let me. And . . ."

"And what?"

"You're really funny and nice. Most rich men don't even see you. Even if they fuck you they don't remember your face. You knew my name after the first time I said it. That's why I wanted to make you excited, because I wanted to make you feel good."

"I don't know what to say."

"And how you said that your girlfriend was ugly but that you loved her. How she does what she wants and you aren't even mad at her."

"I don't act like a rich man 'cause I'm not, Charity. I'm just a guy who won a free vacation for doing a good job for a crazy boss."

"Can I come home with you anyway? I don't want to be rich."

"I don't know how."

"Is it because of my hair? I could get new roots put in. I could have any kind of hair you want."

"Let's talk about it in the morning, okay?"

"You don't want me."

"I, I, I . . . I need to think about it, that's all. I need to think about what I could do."

"I could work for you, make you money. I'm a trained Eros-Haus girl. And Nina wouldn't even know I was there."

9

The vid made a loud bubbling sound at three in the morning. Neil had decided to sleep alone and asked Charity to take the servant's quarters for the night.

"Sir?" a bodiless voice inquired.

"Who is it?"

"The front desk."

"What time is it?"

"Three, sir. I'm sorry to bother you, but there's a gentleman down here who says that he has urgent business with you."

"What gentleman?"

"He calls himself Blue Nile."

__________

"Hey, Neilio," the diminutive prod from GEE-PRO-9 said with a smile. He was stretched out across a pink couch near the registration desk.

"What are you doing here?"

"No time for talkin', this place is walkin'," Blue Nile replied as he rose to his feet. He took Neil by the hand as he had done the first day they met over a year before.

The grand lobby of the Crimson Chalet was nearly empty at that time of morning. There was one open bar with an obstinate group of partyers drinking and laughing loudly.

"Walk where?"

"Into the night and out of sight."

"Make sense, Blue." Neil came to a halt.

"We've got to run, Neil," the little man said seriously. "The authorities discovered GP-9 and they're after all of the prods involved."

"What?"

"They got Marva and Lonnie Z, Three Moons and the Monique sisters."

"Monique sisters?"

"They never came in. The bulls got the homeworkers first."

"What about Nina?"

"I left her a message but we never spoke," Blue Nile said. "She's got street in her, she'll get away. Oura and Athria were notified by Un Fitt. They told me to come after you. The cops are already on their way to this hotel. They don't have your name yet 'cause we used codes in the ticketing system, but they won't take long in finding you out."

"If they're on the island how can we get away?"

"I got a swift and a pilot waiting down at the private beach."

__________

They scurried down the dark pathways of Maya in the early morning. Neil was wearing fabric slippers and loose pajama pants. When the security team stopped them he was sure that they would be arrested for crimes against the economy.

"Where you Ms going this time of morning?" asked a large woman who appeared from the shadows. She wore the yellow and black law enforcement uniform of the island.

Her partner, a man even larger than she, stood silently behind.

Neil brought out his Neptune Suite key and showed it to the police. He knew that it wouldn't make a difference, but it was all he could do.

"Oh," the woman said, suddenly feminine. "Excuse me, M Hawthorne. I didn't recognize you in the darkness. Please, go on."

"Thank you," he mumbled.

"Would you like us to accompany you?" the male officer asked.

"That won't be necessary."

__________

The small jet could hover as well as accelerate to over three times the speed of sound. The pilot was an Indian woman with a very proper English accent. The cabin was small but comfortable enough for six passengers. Silently the jet rose above the Caribbean Sea before it sped off across the sky.

"Where are we going?"

"I don't know," Blue Nile said.

"How can you not know?"

"If I don't know then I can't tell any unfriendlies, now can I?" __________

Two hours later they landed on a desolate stretch of beach. Neil had no idea of where they were. He had no sense of direction or geography. They could have been anywhere in the world. It was a moonless night. Neil figured that there must be a city somewhere, because he could make out a tree-spiked horizon against a barely perceptible glow from far off.

Through the window he could see a flickering light in the distance.

"I see a light out there," he said to the pilot.

She didn't say anything and so he repeated his warning.

"I see it," she said.

As the light neared, Neil could see that it came from a flame. Open fire was illegal in New York City. Matches had been classified as a form of fireworks and possession of them was treated as a third-degree misdemeanor. Only filament lighters were allowed for choke cigarettes. Neil's first experience with open flame had been the torches and candles of Maya. He was enchanted by the ragged dancing quality of naked fire.

It took the solitary figure a good quarter of an hour to reach the beach. When he neared, the pilot engaged the ramp device. The man dropped the lantern and ran up into the ship. He was tall and thin, black with long thick hair that resembled a lion's mane.

"M Nile, M Hawthorne," the young-looking man said. "It's a great pleasure to finally meet you."

"Sir?" the pilot asked from the cockpit.

"Destination L-17," the man replied. He strapped himself into a seat next to Neil and the swift rose quickly into the black skies above the beach that could have been anywhere.

"Ptolemy Bent," the new passenger said. He pressed Neil's hand, and then Blue Nile's.

"You one of the prods under Un Fitt?" Neil asked.

"Not exactly. I'm more like the midwife."

"Come again?"

"It's a long story."

"I know that Un is a computer," Neil said.

"He told you that?"

"I was going to quit. Then he said that he was a machine. Did you create him?"

"In a way."

"The controller is a computer?" Blue Nile asked.

"Partly," the lion-maned black man said.

"What does that mean?"

"Un Fitt told me that he was programmed by God," Neil told Blue Nile.

"He said that too?" Ptolemy was surprised but didn't seem upset or at all bothered.

"Is it true?" asked Blue Nile

"Maybe. Maybe it's even more amazing than that."

"Who are you?" Neil asked.

"You know my name already. The place we just left is the private prison run by Randac."

"This is Madagascar?" asked Blue Nile.

"Where are we going?" Neil wanted to know.

"To find someone I've always wanted to meet and then to plot our countermove to the Cincinnati police."

"Programmed by God," Blue Nile said to himself.

__________

Ptolemy Bent pressed a button at the side of his chair and a computer table came out of the arm, positioning itself before him like a food tray. The virtual keyboard was composed of characters Neil had never seen before. Ptolemy ran his fingers over the keys as if he were a concert pianist. His shoulder and head swayed while he typed, almost as if he were dancing in his seat to some unheard melody. Now and then he would grunt or hum. The screen embedded in the table had no text at all, only colorful forms that slid gracefully over and around one another. Neil became enchanted with the forms. They seemed as if they might be alive.
Totally live,
Neil thought.
Like a place where everything--the sky, the sand, the
clouds, everything--is alive and moving gracefully with everything else.
For over an hour Ptolemy worked on his computer screen. Blue Nile was silent the whole time. Neil suspected that the gregarious prod was silenced by the strangeness of the situation and the powerful presence of Ptolemy Bent. Finally the old Vermonter fell asleep.

"You did a great job on the Third Eye," Ptolemy said. The sky was still black, but there was an angry orange band of light at the edge of the world.

"You can see that in there?"

"Among other things."

"I really didn't do much. I mean, the notes Un Fitt sent taught me everything I needed to know."

"No one knows without being shown the way," Ptolemy said. "Like the scent of sex or the sound of running water. We have in our genes the knowledge but without a sign we are lost." Neil's heart thrilled hearing these words. "What . . . what do you mean?" he asked.

"Un Fitt found you," Ptolemy said. He turned away from his work and the screen faded to gray. "I asked him to locate those who had undiscovered brilliance and the power to dream of something other than their minds locked into this world. He found over six million candidates around the world. Of these, six thousand one hundred forty-two were workable, given the parameters of Un Fitt's ability to manipulate events."

"I was chosen out of so many?"

"You have the magic in you."

"How can a machine read magic?"

"A machine," Ptolemy corrected, "programmed by a god."