Walter Mosley - Futureland - Nine Stories of an Imminent World

“I’d like the answer to both if you please, M Arnold,” Roger said politely.

“I don’t know.” Bits ground his teeth, expecting an explosive jolt of pain. But it did not come.

The warden seemed surprised.

“How can that be?”

“Hammerstein, the memory man.”

“No,” the warden was incredulous. “A scientist like you? The Ripper?”

“My blood for you,” Bits said looking directly into the warden’s eyes. “The process isn’t complete. I remember shreds and I’ve forgotten some things that had nothing to do with the virus. I forgot a whole episode with a girlfriend and many other minor details. But everything I just told you I read in Worldweek. Their science writer understands the system better than I do now.”

“Could you rebuild the system?”

“Given years and a lab, maybe. But I’m twenty-three now. Math is a young man’s game.”

“The Ripper,” the warden said shaking his head.

Karl Hammerstein was the Jack Kevorkian of the twenty-first century. He had developed a process that could erase whole sections of memory. Using radioactive dyes and a chemical targeting system much like the magic bullets developed in cancer cures, Hammerstein claimed that he could locate and erase entire episodes from memory. The process wasn’t exact, and other memories — even facets of a personality — could be lost. The Hammerstein Process had been outlawed in most of the world. Only his hometown, Berlin, allowed the neurosurgeon to ply his trade.

Bits Arnold smiled a sad smile. “My blood for you,” he said again, mouthing the anarchist slogan that he and his fellow revolutionaries had followed.

“Outside of this chamber,” Roger said, “you will find a purple-dotted yellow line. From now on that is your color scheme. It will lead you to your cell.”

“You didn’t answer one of my questions, Roger.”

“What was that?”

“How do I communicate with the prison staff if I never see them?”

“You,” the warden said and then paused for a moment, “don’t see us, but we see and hear everything that you do and say. Just whisper and we will know it.”

The choke plantation was in a large valley between two mountains on Angel’s Island in the East Indian Sea. For many miles the twenty-foot choke plants grew in rows, broad-leaved stalks that spread out from a huge silver and scarlet flower. This flower smelled like a sewer and shed a soft white pollen that was the base for cosmetics used by half the Orient.

All over the valley naked men armed with machetes hacked off the leaves, bound them with the tendrils that spread the root systems of the choke, and carried the bundles to robot-operated flatbed trucks that drove off automatically when their optimum load had been reached.

The sun hovered above the valley, red in the mist of morning. Bits followed his cell mates with an aluminum bucket gathering the silvery pollen bound for production lines in Tokyo, Seoul, and Hanoi. Even through the mask that he was allowed to wear Bits coughed mightily from irritant dust. Choke was named for its pollen’s effect on the respiratory system.

Gnats, black flies, mosquitoes, and fire ants infested the island, but after one bite the snake pack developed a serum based on the convict’s DNA that would make his skin anathema to that species’ bloodlust.

Loki and Moomja worked carrying the bales to the truck. They were young and powerful, enjoying the exertions of their muscles. Loki was an American born in Sweden to a white mother from a black soldier dad. He was thin, with the mischief of his namesake in his eyes, when the snake did not drug him for insubordinance. Moomja was a broad Samoan with murder in his gaze even when he was being drugged for some institutional slight. Jerry, the boy-Adonis, spotted the men with their loads while Needles, Darwin, and Stiles chopped down the five-foot-broad leaves and wrapped them with root.

Stiles was the sole white man. He kept to himself and spoke little. Darwin was the eldest, at forty-seven; he had killed his own mother and never shown remorse. Needles was a drug addict. He stayed up past curfew every night just to get the snake juice that put him in a stupor and sometimes to sleep.

“They can’t exceed the dosage,” Needles told Bits on his first night with the cell. “They changed my prescription six times already. I figure they got pure H in there now and I still got my eyes open till about a hour ’fore wake time.”

They crossed paths with workers from other cells at the robot trucks loading up and sometimes on the paths. This was one of the few times outside of eating periods that Bits had any contact with men from other cells.

The cells were isolated units on broad floors in the bowels of the island. There were twenty-five of these floors and on each one there were over a hundred cells.

A cell was a group of seven men who slept in close proximity and worked together. There were no bars to restrain them, as the snake pack and a circle of light proscribed their mobility. To set foot across the line of the sleep area resulted in a dosage of pain. To cross that line completely put you in a coma. After three comas you were not revived.

“Pretty day, eh?” Darwin said to Bits on the food break after four long hours of work.

“If I could breathe maybe it would be.”

“Yeah,” the elder convict said. “That powder’ll be comin’ up for days. But don’t worry, you’ll switch off with somebody after a week. They can’t let you work longer’n that. That shit’ll kill if you breathe in too much.”

“How long you been here, Darwin?”

“I don’t know.”

“Say what?”

“I don’t even know what day it is, man. Most the time I don’t know if it’s day or night less it’s harvest. Last time I was on the outside they just put a robot space station on the moon.”

“That was over twenty years ago,” Bits said. “You were my age when they put you in here.”

“I guess so,” Darwin said with a sigh. “Don’t matter. I’ma be here till the day I die. They ain’t never gonna let me be free again.”

“What if you go markless?”

“That’s not my sentence, brother. My mama had a red monkey on her shoulder an’ he kept tellin’ her to kill me so I took a shot at ’im. But Mama got in the way’a that monkey and she took the bullet meant for his green eyes.”

“But that’s crazy, man,” Bits said. He felt free to say anything because of the snake pack. The device was so accurate in reading the body’s chemistry that its quick response time made an act of violence almost impossible.

“They say it’s psychotic,” Darwin said with a nod. “That’s why they’re holdin’ me for so long.”

“Because you’re too dangerous to live in society?”

“Naw. ’Cause they testin’ me with the snake. It give me my dosage and I cain’t get it off. If it keep me from doin’ wrong, even thinkin’ wrong, then one day they’ll make it that all people who’s sick will have to wear a snake to be free.”

“Then one day we’ll all wear them,” Bits said with no irony.

“One day,” Darwin agreed.

On the ninth day of the harvest Jerry was stung by a giant tiger scorpion. The venom, faster even than the snake pack, drove the young man crazy with pain. He yelled at the top of his lungs and ran out of the perimeter that defined their harvesting activities. He jumped and hollered, rolled through the ferny underbrush to escape the pain.

Three prison guards appeared, from nowhere it seemed to Bits. When they approached Jerry he leapt at them, socking one in the jaw and pushing another to the ground. He raised a large rock against the third guard but by that time he’d gotten sluggish. Either the scorpion sting was killing him or the snake pack was slowing him down. He fell into the brush and the guards hurried to pick him up and carry him off. It was all over in less than a minute.