Walter Mosley - Futureland - Nine Stories of an Imminent World

But try as he might some infraction always brought him down. Crossing a perimeter, breaking for too long at work. Once he veered too close to a guard and received a shock and a nova demerit which meant he wasn’t allowed to accrue markless days for eighteen months.

After all that time Bits realized that he would never earn his freedom, that he was nothing and no one forevermore. His crime had been too successful, his threat ended his existence in the world.

“Cancer of the lung and colon,” Sella said as Bits lay under bright yellow light on the silvery operating table. “The snake identified it a month before it would have been irreversible.”

There was the sound of success in her voice. Bits wondered, not for the first time, if carcinogens were entered into the prison food and air, if the study of the snake packs was the first step in a much larger plan.

“He’ll need three weeks in solitary for the treatments to work.”

“I thought the magic bullet took only two days?” Bits asked.

Neither of the meds answered his question.

He was treated in a big white room that seemed to go on forever like Roger’s. There was a bed in the room and a console computer in a transparent plasteel casing. Bits received an aerosol treatment from gasses released out of four canisters controlled by the computer system.

When he was attended by guards or the meds, they appeared from thirty feet or more away, approaching like nomadic angels wandering a forever white sky.

Now and again Bits glanced at the computer, never for too long and not at regular intervals either. The vids might be set to watch for his interest in the computer system.

After three weeks of daily treatments he was taken to the infirmary.

“Colon is fit,” M Lamont said. “But the lungs have not progressed far enough. Looks like a subbac cancer. A new regimen is indicated.”

Sella nodded.

“Can I go back to my cell?” Bits asked.

“Yes,” Sella said without looking at him. “You can even work. We will allow the cancer to grow again, so that we can tell exactly what it is. If it’s subbac it won’t take long. The snake will tell us when you are optimum for the next procedure.”

“Another three weeks breathing gas?” Bits complained.

Sella smiled. “No. The next treatment is one shot and then three hours of observation. You may return to your cell now, convict.”

“Catch a what?”

“You heard me,” Bits said as he helped Stiles retrieve a fallen bundle of choke.

“What for?”

“With it I can break a hole in the monitoring system.”

“How?”

“That’s my worry, white boy. All you need to do is do it. But remember, nuthin’ over three inches long. And you got to get me a fresh one every other day.”

They were on the hillside and the day was beautiful. Bits had trouble walking because of a pain in his pelvic area. He hadn’t been able to jog since being released from the infirmary.

He’d found a scrap of wrapping plastic from some guard’s lunch on the truck four weeks earlier. He risked another eighteen markless months hiding the plastic under his tongue. He didn’t care if they caught him though. He had never met a prisoner who knew of anyone being released. Some had been transferred to other levels, some had died, many disappeared in the middle of the sleep cycle and never returned. But no one was freed from Angel’s Island because there were no real people there. Without nationality they had nowhere to go.

Three days after his talk with Stiles, Bits was ordered to report to the infirmary. He was so weak however that M Lamont was dispatched to meet him with a PAPPSI chair.

“You shouldn’t be this weak, convict,” Lamont said. “You’re just being a hypochondriac.”

Bits lolled backward and leaned over, hiding his left hand. He was happy to see his old white room, the trim little bed and the console computer, an XL-2500 Decadon.

“Get up and get in that bed on your own, convict,” M Lamont ordered.

Bits did as he was told as best as he could manage. It took him a moment to build up the strength to stand, turn, and fall onto the bed.

“This won’t hurt, convict,” Sella said as she used a laser injector the size of a rifle to deliver the serum to his veins. “But I must tell you, the snake pack has diagnosed you with a strain of subbac cancer.”

“What’s that mean?”

“There’s no bullet for subbacs. They’re a new form of infection. All we can do now is try whatever experimental drug the IDA has approved for testing on prisoners.”

“How do you get this subbuk?” Bits asked, but his mind was elsewhere.

“Lots of soldiers from the Mideast Conflagration of ’25 got it,” Sella said. “It’s made the rounds of permanent residents of Common Ground.”

“How did I get it?”

Sella looked away and said, “How would I know?”

Ninety seconds, Bits thought. When the time comes that’s all I got.

For the next hour M Lamont and Sella read the data transferred to the computer system from Bits’s snake. The triple-chinned shapeless Lamont grunted now and then. Finally the grotesque med got bored, walked away into the distance, and disappeared.

Bits waited for what felt like an hour more before injecting the stinger sack into his left buttock. The pain was exquisite and instantaneous.

“Doctor,” Bits said through gritted teeth. “I seem to be developing a hard lump on my left buttock.”

“What?” Immediately she turned to the screen.

“Please look at it, Doctor,” Bits said with the urgency of pain in his voice.

When she turned to look from the prescribed eighteen-inch distance Bits lunged and grabbed Sella’s hand, squeezing so hard that he could feel bones snapping.

Before she had time to yell he said, “Tell me your access code. You have twelve seconds or I kill you.”

“Sella-118,” the woman gasped.

The count going off in the back of his mind had reached twenty-seven.

A red strobe flashed.

“WARNING IN OP-ROOM,” boomed a mechanical voice.

Bits dragged Sella to the console and saw that she was already signed on.

“Tell it manual,” he threatened.

“Manual,” the woman whimpered, and a typing console with an audiophone unit appeared from the bowels of the machine.

Bits socked Sella in the jaw and began punching numbers furiously. The fire in his buttock was almost unbearable. Words began to appear on the screen: Vid access, Sydney, electronic transfer line...

“WARNING IN OP-ROOM.”

The red light flashed faster.

Bits punched in 14-76T-1187-222.

An image of a green circle appeared on the screen. It broke into eleven equal sections. Twenty seconds went by, thirty.

“Bits displacement system active,” a feminine computer voice announced. “Voice pattern Vortex invoked.”

“End alert status of current system,” Bits said.

The flashing light stopped.

Bits tore off sheets and bound Med Sella to the bed. Then he collapsed on top of her and breathed slowly while the automatic medicine from the snake pack worked to stem the pain and damage from the baby tiger scorpion’s sting.

Later Bits located a tranquilizer pistol in Sella’s bag. He made sure the gun was loaded and then ordered his virus program to summon M Lamont.

Stiles’s eyes lit with amazement when he found that the orange and brown line he’d been ordered to follow brought him to a vast white room where Meds Sella and Lamont were seemingly unconscious and tied to the foot of a bed while Bits sat above them ordering images on a computer like he was a king.

“What the f?” Stiles said.

“We did it, white boy,” Bits said.