Walter Mosley - Futureland - Nine Stories of an Imminent World

“What about my rights, M?” Bits asked, attempting and failing to get irony into his voice.

“You’re thousands of miles from the borders of the U.S.,” she said. “And you have been forsaken. Until you prove that you are rehabilitated your citizenship has been suspended.”

The supreme court had validated the constitutionality of citizenship suspension in 2022.

M Lamont returned then. He went about loosening Bits’s bonds. The young man fell to the floor when he was freed.

“Anything else, convict?” asked Sella, who was obviously the senior of the two.

“Yes,” Bits said as he rose on shaky feet. “I have two questions.”

“What?”

“As fast as these snakes’a yours might be I’m sure they can’t read minds. What keeps me from giving you a death claw to the throat at my fastest speed?”

“From this moment on,” Sella said as she poked at her palm screen, “you will receive a near lethal electric shock if any part of your body comes within eighteen inches of any nonconvict.”

Lamont grinned, undulating his three chins, and reached out a hand toward Bits, who leapt backward.

“You had another question, convict?” Sella asked.

“Yeah,” Bits said, standing straight and trying not to show how shaken he was. “How can black people be like this to other black people? How could you treat me like this?”

Bulky M Lamont chuckled to himself. Sella lifted one eyebrow and smiled.

She said, “You don’t have that to fall back on anymore, convict. Nobody made you break the laws. You’re not black or white, American, or even human, really. You are nothing and that’s how we see you. That’s how we all see you. Now go down this hall and out of the door you entered. You will see a bright blue line. Follow it. It will bring you to your next appointment. If you stray from the line you will receive a pain dosage. If you try to remove the snake pack you will be reduced to a coma. The third time you get a coma-dose you will not be revived.”

He went down the jet-black corridor, following a thin but bright blue line that ran along with red and lavender and green neonlike strings of light. Bits crossed paths with one other naked prisoner along the way. He was a bearded and tattooed white man with a large belly and big muscles. He was following the lavender and orange line that veered off down a different hallway. When they passed close to each other the white man made a silent salute. Bits returned the gesture but maintained the silence. He well remembered what had happened to Jerry and the pain that he felt after Sella’s treacherous embrace.

The blue line stopped at a doorway edged in blue light. The only indication that it was a doorway was the rectangular outline and the fact that the blue line stopped there.

Through the doorway Bits found himself in a bright, pure white expanse that seemed to go on, in all directions, forever. In the center of this expanse was a black desk. Behind the desk stood an elegant white man in a black andro-suit.

Bits looked from the man down to his feet. The illusion was that he stood on a clear glass floor that looked down upon an infinitely distant whiteness. He wasn’t sure how the illusion was maintained, but it was very disconcerting.

“M Arnold,” the tall man said in an official but not unfriendly tone. “Welcome to Angel’s Island.”

Bits felt dizzy. He was afraid to advance the twenty feet or so to the man in black, the spot in an infinite sky.

“Hey,” the convict said.

“I’m the warden here,” the white man said. “But you can call me Roger.”

“Okay.”

“I meet every prisoner when he arrives. I tell them the rules, answer any questions they might have, and then send them on their way. It’s all very civilized here. The guards are unarmed, there’s very little interaction between the staff and the convict population. Weeks might go by and you won’t see one of us.”

“What if I get sick or get mail or something?”

Roger walked around to the front of his desk. He was exceptionally thin but in no way brittle or fragile. He was cleanshaven, with patches of darkness under his eyes.

“There will be no communication with your old life, Vortex. That was forfeit with the suspension of your citizenship. There is no vid input here. No outside. There’s you and your cell mates. There’s me and my staff. There’s work if you want it, and nothing if you prefer. No books or writing pads or church or time. You have been sentenced to limbo and the only hope you have is if we can scientifically certify that you are no longer a threat to your country.”

“H-how do you do that?” Bits asked.

“I don’t do it, you do.”

“Yeah? How’s that?”

“It’s very simple,” Roger said, waving his left hand in the air. “I take it that Sella and M Lamont have explained the rudiments of the snake pack to you.”

In the far-off distance, to the right of Warden Roger, Bits saw something like a passing cloud. It was mostly white but there were pale blue fringes and shadows here and there to define it. He thought that this anomaly was the architect’s idea of art.

“Yeah,” Bits said. “It’s a high-tech shackle. Like my own personal guard.”

“Exactly,” Roger said. “Every time the snake has to discipline you there is a mark registered. If you have to be awakened or if you have to be put to sleep, if you break the sexual codes or talk while on duty. If you approach too close to a guard or stray from an assigned task. Each offense is a mark on the main computer file.”

“One mark no matter what you do?”

“Mostly.” Roger smiled.

“Why’s that?”

“Your freedom,” Roger said, “is a matter of you accruing no points in a span of three years. Follow the rather simple rules we have and you will not be here long.”

“Wake up on time and don’t jack off and I’m outta here in three?” Bits said.

Roger smiled. He tapped his glove screen a few times. “Why do they call you Bits?”

Bits felt the snake tighten almost imperceptibly when Roger made his entry. He knew that the needles were probing him for the truth.

“Computers are run on an eight-bit symbol system. I developed a virus that would force the operating system to reconfigure itself in RAM allowing an external OS to control it. That way, with the slightest window, I could take over almost any computer system by translating it into a code that no one else could read or decipher. I used a simple two-bit differential to offset the resident system. Because I added two bits my friends gave me Bits as a nickname.”

“But then all one had to do was pull the plug and reboot the system to get rid of your smart-virus,” the warden said.

“Yes. If they got to the program within one thousandth of a second. After that algorithms would have been placed in thousands of memory devices attached to the computer. The only way to get rid of it would be to purge all data in all files associated with the system.” Bits smiled. “It would cost trillions of dollars to abort me. No one was willing to pay that price.”

“So you destroyed the intercorporate council’s database of economic affairs because they wouldn’t pay you to ransom their computer?”

“No,” Bits said proudly. “I destroyed it because it was evil. Through that database they were systematically dismantling private property rights around the world.”

“I suppose you know my next question?”

Bits stared at the white emptiness behind the warden.

“I expect you to respond to my questions or else a pain dosage will be applied,” the warden said.

“I don’t know exactly what question you have, Roger. It probably has something to do with how you can obtain my virus or maybe who else knows anything about it.”