Walter Mosley - Futureland - Nine Stories of an Imminent World

“Show me.”

The child jumped around in the chair and started turning dials. The computer’s gaseous-looking screen went black. Letters and numbers appeared and reappeared in rapid succession on a line in the center of the screen.

Ptolemy hummed and sang while the computer spoke French and Chinese through the various radio speakers. Chill sat down on his mother’s bed and watched.

“Don’t let my boy get in trouble, Thill,” Misty said.

“He was born in trouble, Mama. Born in trouble.”

“But that don’t make him no thief.”

“If we cain’t get in the money then the government gonna take him. I’ma just get ’im to show me, Mama. Ain’t nobody gonna steal nuthin’, but even if they do it’s gonna be me. I’ll push the button. But don’t worry, I’m just lookin’.”

As they spoke, words appeared and remained on the screen:

Below the words were a series of codes and blank lines.

“See,” Popo exclaimed. “They gots lotsa money.”

“An’ they don’t know your bar code?” Chill asked.

“They get the bar code from your eyes,” Ptolemy said. “When you buy your computer they make you give ’em a eyescan. But they didn’t do that way back when they made these laptops. I just borrow somebody else’s bar-c from one’a the Jacker DBs and then I put it back when I’m through.”

While Ptolemy spoke the blanks were being filled in one at a time by an automatic code-breaking program that the boy had adapted from the illegal Jacker Database. After all of the blanks had been filled in, a flurry of screens passed in quick succession, ending finally on a screen whose header read

“This ain’t nobody’s money,” the child said. “It’s what they got for extra.”

There were sixteen place numbers on each coded entry of the file.

Chill’s upper lip began to sweat. “Turn it off, Popo.”

“But—”

“Turn it off!”

“Ow!” Ptolemy Bent yelled.

“You’ll need a haircut soon,” Kai Lin told him as she dragged the large brush up from the back of the child’s neck. “There’s more hair than there is little boy.”

Misty hissed her paralytic laugh and held a gnarled hand up to shoulder level. She was sitting straight, thanks to her mechanical bed, watching the squat Vietnamese woman torture the poor boy’s head.

“He don’t wan’ it cut,” Misty said.

“He’ll look like a girl, then,” Kai said, giving a hard tug.

“Ow! I don’t care,” Popo said. “I want my hair like the Jewish man who made relatively. Bushy and big.”

“By the time you’re his age all we’ll be able to see will be your feet.” Kai tickled Ptolemy’s skinny ribs and the boy doubled over in her lap.

Misty rocked back and forth in sympathy with the boy’s glee. Even Kai’s impassive face broke into a smile.

Popo grabbed Kai’s brush hand, trying to wrest away the implement of torture. But Kai laid him flat on her lap and bent over to blow a loud kiss against his belly.

“I give! I give! You can brush, you can brush.” All of the air rushed out of the boy’s lungs, making him too weak even to sit up.

“No,” Kai said. “All done.”

The boy cheered and jumped down, hurrying over to the radio corner, as Misty called it. By then he had deconstructed fifteen old radios, putting their parts together again on every available space. The wires and transistor chips resembled some new form of technologic life growing like fungus down the sides of the vanity onto the floor. There were three old-time laptop computers connected here and there. One of these cast indecipherable images of color and light. The forms sometimes seemed to have an alien sense about them, but mostly they were abstract events appearing for a nanosecond or an hour, changing almost imperceptibly or faster than the eye could follow. Another screen flashed strange characters at various intervals and in differing colors. These characters were being printed horizontally across paper, slowly unfurling from a two-hundred-foot roll on an antique dot matrix printer that Chill had brought home from a yard sale in Jackson, he said.

The final screen was connected to a HondaDrive AE storage system. The three-foot-high canister, encased in crystalline green plastic, was one of the two new pieces of equipment that Popo owned. The HondaDrive was a micro-level storage system that held trillions of bytes of information. It also had an I-crunch that could encode data, making it possible to exponentially expand its capacity. Three years ago a HondaDrive AE would have cost a million dollars. But within the past year, General Electric had stunned the scientific world — and the stock market — with the GE-AI-Drive and its virtually unlimited storage capacity. The GE-AI was big, the size of a refrigerator, but it answered the memory problems of even the most demanding user.

Now a HondaDrive AE cost only ten thousand dollars. No one wanted them, so security had dropped to the point where Chill had been able to steal one from a Radio Shack in Memphis. Along with the drive, Chill stole a LIBCHIP library box, a series of two hundred library chips containing over ten million volumes.

“Let’s see you read your way outta that,” Chill dared his nephew.

“I will,” the boy replied.

The computer connected to the HondaDrive was taking information from the radio receivers, translating it to mathematical codes, and storing the equations. Ptolemy sat naked in lotus position between the screens, watching them and making adjustments to the radio dials now and then.

Kai sat behind the boy and pulled him into her lap. He didn’t resist. She usually came to the Bent’s house last on her rounds as visiting nurse for the state. She told her supervisor that it was because Misty needed to take her walk late in the day, but really it was to be able to spend more time with the child.

“What is all this?”

“Computers,” the boy said. “Computers and radios and electricity and, and, that’s all.”

“But what are they doing?” Kai asked the same question every day. And every day Ptolemy said that it was a secret.

“It’s readin’ what the radio says and then it’s puttin’ it into numbers and then it’s puttin’ the numbers on the HondaDrive.”

“But how do you know how to do all that?”

“I don’t,” Ptolemy said as he leaned over to turn a dial. The clicking from the speakers changed tempo, and the boy nodded his head as if he were listening to a piece of music.

“But how can you do something and not know how to do it?” Kai asked.

“You use words that you don’t know what they mean sometimes. You drive a ’lectric car but you cain’t make one.” Ptolemy was talking but his attention was on the screens. The image screen showed an eerie landscape of pastel greens and metallic blacks interwoven and slipping away into a distant red maw. “I just count the numbers in the radio waves and then use a equation that I got from the math lib’ary on the net. It makes up the numbers and then I look at ’em later.”

“What are you looking for?” Kai asked almost timidly.

Ptolemy turned to the visiting nurse. His deep brown eyes were like polished stones.

“It’s God, I think,” he said. “It’s God sangin’ through radio waves.”

“What do you mean? How could that be? I mean why hasn’t anybody else heard it before?” An instant hysteria bloomed in Kai’s chest.