Walter Mosley - Futureland - Nine Stories of an Imminent World

United Nations forces entered Angel’s Island on the third day after the escape. They found three hundred seventy-five guards and staff unconscious and unwakeable — victims of the ChemSys snake pack.

Everyone had fallen while going about their duties. The warden was unconscious next to his desk, men slept on toilets or in the long gloomy halls. Two men on guard duty had died from exposure up on the choke plantation.

Everyone else was asleep, except for Sella Lans and Vortex “Bits” Arnold, who were also dead, and Med M Packard Lamont, who was dying in the infirmary.

“What is it?” the doctor who ministered to Lamont asked.

“Subbac cancer,” Lamont moaned. “We were studying it. The convict Bits infected us with it.”

“Subbac... But that’s incurable. Who infected him?” asked the doctor, an elderly Swede.

Lamont did not answer the question. Instead he said, “Bits said that he put a timer on the system. His virus will wake the staff and then erase itself. He said that by then I should be dead.”

The fat under the big man’s skin had dissipated. He was slowly being eaten away by the fast-acting incurable disease.

“He said to tell you that he had the system monitor our deaths because that’s what we liked to do.” And then Lamont himself was dead.

Three years later Fidor Esterman and Meena Tokit, employees for the Manatee Tobacco company, were sifting through the Angel’s Island computer records. After an international outcry about the medical practices on Angel’s Island, the Manatee corporation had closed the prison and re-made the facility into a robot plantation. Fidor and Meena, both computer programmers, were two of fifteen people responsible for the plantation operating system, which included four state-of-the-art GE-AI computer systems, sowing, harvesting, and bundling machines, and various robot vehicles.

“Look at this, Meena,” Fidor said. He was seated at the main screen of the central computing system.

On the screen a green circle appeared. It broke into eleven equal sections.

“What’s that?” Meena asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Bits displacement system active,” a robotic female voice announced.

“Oh shit,” Fidor said. “That’s the Bits virus, isn’t it?”

“Downloading document Last File,” the lady robot declared. “Download complete.”

The green segments began sparkling and changing colors. The segments of the green pie swirled together, adding colors and definitions, until they formed the face of a young black man, made old by the ravages of disease.

“Hey,” the man said. “I am very close to death and so I hope you will excuse me if I get right into what I have to say. I don’t know who you are and you might not know me so I’ll start from the beginning. My name is Vortex Arnold. I have no other designation because the United States government has nullified my citizenship and sentenced me here, to the Angel’s Island private prison authority. You may already know all of this. I was able to send out a hundred and fourteen thousand C-mails detailing the practices here and the particulars of our escape.” Bits stopped a moment to rub his left eye. A large, yellowish tear pressed out of his sagging lid. Bits took a deep breath and then another before attempting to speak again. “I think it was probably the largest prison break in the history of the world. Maybe... As I said, I sent out thousands of detailed explanations of this prison and its inhuman practices, with special emphasis on the snake packs that they used on prisoners and guards alike. If this is many years later, which I doubt, and you haven’t seen my report, which is more likely, then there will be a copy available to you at the end of this transmission.

“I tried to send out a C-transmission a few moments ago but I suppose the authorities have received my earlier communication by now and have isolated my signals...”

“Should we be listening to this?” Fidor asked Meena.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I guess we’d better. If anyone is monitoring our system they will believe that we’ve heard the whole thing anyway. If they ask us what it said we should probably be able to answer.”

Fidor touched his large nose and nodded uncomfortably.

“... my earlier messages had information that wouldn’t have been surprising for most people. Maybe many of them would agree with the practices here. After all, there are no beatings, rapes, or dangers to the guards or the guarded. If you follow the rules then you are treated well, well enough for a social deviant. Even if we are political prisoners, what of it? The ruling system, one might say, has the right to protect its constituents.” Bits allowed his eyes to close. He nodded, leaned forward, almost fell from his chair. But then he righted himself. “Protect... But I have done further study. The ChemSys Corporation has signed contracts with the federal government to supply over three million snake packs to the military and mental services by the year 2053. Snake packs used to make soldiers into drones, our mental divergents into brainwashed zombies. Read these reports and ask yourselves how long will it be before schoolchildren will be snaked. The reports are all here, at the end of this file. All here...”

Bits began to fall forward and the screen went to blank green. After a moment two gray option lines appeared. The first was called THE ORIGINAL REPORT ON THE PRACTICES OF ANGEL’S ISLAND. The second option was THE CHEMSYS PROJECTED GROWTH IN THE BEHAVIOR MOD SECTION REPORTS.

Meena and Fidor sat motionless and quiet before the bright green screen.

“Can we delete it?” Fidor asked after a while.

“I don’t know. The controls are frozen.”

“How about severing the power?”

“The emergency systems will override,” the chubby, brown-skinned young woman replied.

“What can we do?” the young man asked.

“Did you excite the virus with an entry?”

“No. I wasn’t doing anything.”

“Neither did I. It must have been the interaction of programs in the system, or maybe a timer that caused this action.”

“So?”

“So no one knows that we were here. We could just leave. Come back later and report a systems glitch. Maybe even somebody else will find it in the meantime.”

They stood together and backed away from the console. They turned as one and walked from the room.

Folio Johnson was sitting at his usual table at Hallwell’s China Diner on Lower Thirty-third Street reading the Daily Dump on a tiny pocket screen. The high-res zircon imager was eight centimeters square and could display a maximum of five hundred lines of data at one time. Where most people decreased the display mode to eight or twelve lines per screen, Folio, with the help of his blue synthetic eye, read at maximum density. First he read the general International News Agency (INA) stories that the Dump supplied. There had been a 14 percent decrease in murders topside — above Common Ground — in the past ten-day span. The Mars colonization program was continuing even though the voters had made it clear in the monthly Internet poll that they did not want their tax money used in that way.

The Dump was an unauthorized news agency run by Pacific Rim anarchists and so a back story was supplied for each INA release. The murder rate in Common Ground had increased over 97 percent in the last three spans due to political unrest. This unrest had been caused, the anarchists claimed, by outside agitators paid by MacroCode America. The increase in crime was used to convince the White House that an interplanetary colonization plan would ease the burden on the labor cycles and reduce the cost of policing.