Walter Mosley - Futureland - Nine Stories of an Imminent World

“Just like ants,” Bits said to himself.

“Say what?” Stiles, the white man, spoke up.

“The chemical stimulation,” Bits said, still thinking. “Its immediate programmed response. I bet they got those guards wearin’ snake packs under their clothes too.”

“Why you say that?”

“To wake ’em up if they’re sleeping. To make them strong or alert in case of emergency. It’s the technology of production. One day everyone will wear them.”

“Maybe the nigs’ll be puttin ’em on. Maybe them but not the white race. We’ll be pushin’ the buttons and you’ll be liftin’ the weight.”

Bits felt a mild chemical shock in his right hand. The thirty-second warning before punishment for slacking off.

“Why didn’t Jerry go into a coma when he ran past the markers?” Bits asked Darwin as they rode in the back of a robot truck down the tunnel ramp into the prison.

“I don’t know exactly,” the madman said. “But when there’s a medical emergency in a man the snake pack knows and turns off for a while.”

“How long?”

“Maybe two minutes. But it ain’t no help for escape. You got to be on the verge of death to stun a snake.”

Every evening after choke harvesting the men were given a serving of dried soya protein and a square of chocolatelike carob candy. The men of color squatted together, while Stiles moved to his corner composing lines to a poem that he’d been working on for months.

“Who’s this Logan?” Bits asked on one such evening.

The men looked away from him. He was still new and not yet received with full trust.

“This harvest be over soon,” Loki said. “That means another six weeks underground.”

“Maybe,” Darwin said.

“What you mean maybe?” Loki challenged. “It’s always the same number of days. Forty-two and then we’re back upside.”

“Forty-two times wakin’ up,” Darwin lectured. “Forty-two times goin’ t’ sleep. But who knows how much time has passed? They can drug you in your sleep, you already know that. They could add a day or even a week to your nap. They could take a year away from you and you’d never know it. Uh...” The moan escaped Darwin’s lips and his head dipped. “They could, they could...”

Darwin lay back on the mat floor and fell instantly into sleep. Jerry lifted the sleeping figure and carried him to his cot.

Needles chuckled.

“They didn’t hear him,” Needles said to Bits. “His blood just got worked up. Snake pack felt his excitement and put ’im under. But that set off the alarm an’ so a guard’ll be watchin’ us pretty soon.

“Yeah they got our number for the most part. You get too excited, feel the wrong thing, an’ the sand man’s fairy dust just fall down on your eyes.”

“You say for the most part,” Bits prodded. “Is there a hole to hide in?”

“Naw, man,” Needles sighed. “Ain’t no hidin’ from these bastards. No hidin’, no. But every once in a while you have a dude like Logan—”

“Watch it, junkie,” Moomja warned.

But Needles just waved his hand to dismiss the threat.

“Yeah,” Needles said. “Logan was a good dude, good guy, but he could be the coldest muthafuckah you could imagine. He was blood in RadCon5: assassin. One day, upside, he saw a guard twenty feet off. You know that screw’s wife was a widow the second Logan’s stone hit his head.”

“Why didn’t the snake pack juice him?” Bits asked.

“Because he didn’t have no feelin’s. For all the snake knew he was just takin’ a stretch. Uh—” Needles held up a finger. “They puttin’ the H in early tonight.” Then he spoke to the unseen roof, “You need more’n that, Roger. You need a lot more’n that.”

But Needles was flagging. His eyes were going in and out of focus.

“After that Logan took sick. Finally one day he was just gone. Poof!” Needles gestured with his hands to express the magic of it all and then he slumped over into unconsciousness.

Bits wanted to think about what he had heard but he too felt tired as the drug flowed into his veins.

In the middle of the night Bits came suddenly awake. He realized that he had to urinate. He sat up and saw a purple dotted yellow line leading away through a gap in the circle of light. The line led to a yellow outlined urinal.

On the way back he spied two guards on the tier just below. They were carrying a stretcher between them which held the nude body of a white prisoner.

Bits didn’t slow down or allow his heart to race. He just walked back to his cell.

As soon as he put his head down he was fast asleep again.

After the harvest, time was the enemy. As much as eighteen hours of every day was spent in the cell. There were three forty-five minute eating periods when the men were herded into a great cafeteria walled in black. There the men from Level 18 could mingle with prisoners from other cells. Stiles always ate with the Itsies, International Socialists — Nazis on a world scale.

Moomja had a friend named Thomas whom he always ate with. Jerry knew a few young men. They played a gambling game with a foreign coin that one of them had found during harvest. The winner could keep the coin until the next meal, when the game would start over.

“How do you play?” Bits asked Jerry during one of the long idle spells in their cell.

“You bet on a number, either one or two,” Jerry said. He had won the coveted dinner game and had the coin clutched in his hand for the night. “Then somebody flips. We take turns flippin’. If you bet one and it comes up heads, you get a point. If you bet two and it come up tails, you get a point—”

“How you know the difference between a head and a tail on the crazy coin?” Loki asked. “I seen it. You cain’t tell what it is.”

“We just decided on what was what,” Jerry said. “The side got the star on it’s the head. An’ ain’t nobody talkin’ to you anyway.”

“Anyway,” Jerry said, turning back to Bits. “At the end of twenty-five flips the one with the most points keep the coin.”

“What if there’s a tie?” Bits asked.

“Then we have a play-off,” Jerry said, grinning.

“More flipping?”

“Yes sir.”

The cell was round, seven meters in diameter as closely as Bits could figure. There were seven cots spaced evenly around the perimeter. Most of the time Bits stayed in his bed. It was an unspoken rule that no one talked to you if you were on your cot.

The men, with the exception of Stiles, often congregated in the central space. They sang songs, told riddles, and made up long and intricate stories that they had committed to memory.

Time, in between harvests, nearly stopped. The days had no names, the hours had no numbers. There were no seconds or minutes, only spaces spent waiting for the next meal and the next two-week harvest. The only light was the green circle that defined the cell and a weak luminescence that allowed the men to see each other.

There was no physical contact beyond brief handshakes, because any prolonged physical interaction caused a dose of pain.

At first Bits wondered why they hadn’t all gone insane. Why hadn’t the men decided to cross over that green line three times and go comatose forever? Then he began to see.

The snake pack was an amazing and subtle device. It could read sexual excitation and violence in nerve endings; it could perceive biological needs in the blood. But there was more. The snake could also identify anxiety, depression, and even more complex psychological manifestations. It could keep a man from feeling claustrophobia even if he was buried alive, Bits thought.

Slowly, over time, Bits began to feel hatred. It was a new emotion for him. Maybe, he thought, before the mem-job I hated. But he didn’t remember. All he knew was the spite he felt for the snake and its master — Roger.