Walter Mosley - Futureland - Nine Stories of an Imminent World

“Race war? Genes? Man, are you sick?”

“Hardly, Officer Johnson. Hardly.” Kismet’s long face became downcast. “I’m sorry about the girl.”

“Tana?”

“She had to die, you know. By the time I realized that you and she had something the poison was already in her. Her and that adopted stepfather of hers, the one who transmitted the Azuma killing to your eye.”

Folio resisted the urge to dive into the screen.

“You know I can’t let this thing lie, Ivan.”

“I know.”

“You killed that woman. I owed her something. She was a killer but she saved my life. And I’ll have to find these Itsies before they do something crazy.”

“It will be a glorious time, won’t it, old friend?”

“Why did you connect with me, Ivan?” Folio asked.

“It was fate, Folio. Kismet. Your name came up and I realized that this race war will be waged against you, your people. I included you to give you a chance to fight against the Aryan branch of the ISD. I’m giving you a chance to save your people.”

“They’re your people too, man,” Folio sputtered. “Black people are your largest membership on three continents.”

“One day everyone will be my devotee. You, Folio, you are one of my apostles. It is your job to save these people. It is my wish.”

“You’re crazy.”

“Am I?”

Folio put his foot through the screen, then stormed out of the tabernacle and into the night.

Where am I? The words were clear but they had no sound, no voice to communicate timbre or gender. Where are my hands? What is that light? What’s that? Why can’t I look away? Where am I?

The voice had questions mainly. Sometimes, though, memories of strange feelings or half-formed images occurred in his mind. Foods that he never liked suddenly held the most wonderful flavor. He bought a bunch of carrots at a vegetable stand and ate them all in one sitting in the park.

The voice wasn’t always there. There were days at a time when he heard nothing at all. Days where he was almost the man he had been before the Pulse addiction.

Pulse. Wonder drug and death sentence all in one. On the first night he used the drug Leon had lived a whole life span riding at the side of the conqueror Hannibal. He’d ridden fantastic blue elephants across the Alps. After a few years the hyper-real fantasies degraded to washed-out memories with little direction or content. But the addiction was still strong because Pulse was the only thing that kept his brain from collapsing.

“Are you using again?” Dr. Bel-Nan asked at the Neurological Institute of Staten Island.

“No,” said Professor Leon Jones, father of the congress-woman from the Bronx, the onetime UBA heavyweight champion of the world, Fera Jones. “I don’t even want to hear that one voice. You think I want a crowd?”

Bel-Nan, a tall white man in his fifties, smiled. He was missing a lower front tooth. This one detail always disturbed Professor Jones, though there was much that could have disturbed him. Bel-Nan was one of the foremost brain specialists in the world. He was one of the founders of the mysterious Church of Life Everlasting. He had been sentenced to the MacroCode polar prison system for performing illegal brain transplantation operations. He had further developed his techniques in prison.

The operation that Bel-Nan had performed on Leon was a more sophisticated version of the experiments that had put him in prison. Taking living brain tissue from an anonymous donor, the surgeon replaced certain regenerative tissue in Jones’s cortex and frontal lobe. These cells stimulated the atrophied portion of his brain, allowing the onetime history professor to survive without taking Pulse.

“Sometimes there are vestigial memories, pieces of thoughts that the donor once might have had,” Bel-Nan explained as he pushed the long and greasy blond hair away from his eyes.

“But, Doctor,” Jones complained. “It’s not just a word or a patch of color, something like that. There’s questions and sometimes I have yens, desires for things I never wanted before.”

Bel-Nan smiled. His face was long and somehow crooked, as if maybe the man who knocked his tooth out had also broken his jaw. Jones had seen quite a few misshapen faces like that during the years he managed his daughter’s boxing career.

“The brain is a mysterious thing, Professor Jones,” Bel-Nan said. “It is the most volatile and creative material in the world, maybe even the universe. It can evolve without dying. It can conceive of itself. Its concepts are beyond the living cells that comprise it, so that life for us is defined by the faculty of thought rather than the ability to breathe. Breath, as magical as it is, is nothing compared to the reality of personality.”

The ugly scientist smiled, unashamed of the crooked grin and missing tooth.

“What does that have to do with this voice in my head?” Jones asked.

“Your brain has discovered new material,” Bel-Nan explained patiently. “It’s making up this voice to explain it. The shock of the new cells becomes a question in your conscious mind. Where am I? That’s the feeling of the new cells. They are displaced and that feeling of displacement becomes a question. This strangeness of the new cells seeks out a new answer, therefore you try new things. A different taste. A walk in the park. Tell me, do you have headaches before you hear this voice?”

“Yes, I do. I get a headache that lasts for hours, and then, when it subsides, the voice comes out. Not a voice, really, but ideas. Some come across as words, and others, others are images. Why? What does a headache mean?”

“The cells are integrating. As they come together there’s friction and maybe a little heat. That particular phase of the integration is successful, the pain subsides, and a new member is added to the collective of brain cells. There must be something old in those cells and a confusion arises. But all of that will pass. Maybe if you take vitamin E 3or, even better, hedroprofin, the swelling will be contained. But I wouldn’t if I were you.”

“Why not?”

“This is a moment of discovery that very few humans have ever undergone. You are experiencing the reintegration of your mind. You are absorbing the life and the soul of another. Feel it, Professor Jones. Record it. It could be one of the most valuable self-examinations since Freud.”

“You think somebody’d pay for it?”

“I’d read it, Professor. I’ve done a dozen of these operations since they were legalized. But this was the deepest and most extensive transplant of living tissue. I replaced a rather large portion of the cortical stem and interior with various materials from a single donor. We were relying on the similarity of the neuronal material, hoping that the new elements would adapt to the function required of them.”

Leon had been on life support, he was told, for eighteen months after the operation. Machines the size of a brown-stone maintaining basic functions that his brain had to re-learn.

“You are the first to survive this long,” Bel-Nan said.

“Well,” Leon said. “I guess a few echoes aren’t so bad compared to death.”

“Not so bad at all, Professor.”

Professor Jones had spent all of the money he made in boxing on the operation. His daughter had helped only insofar as she used her influence to get him well placed on the waiting list for the highly experimental procedure. But even with her help he was lucky to have been chosen.

It had been three months since his release from the hospital, and so far Leon’s health was fair. He still felt weak after very little exertion, and sometimes when he woke up in the morning he was a little disoriented. He’d look around the room searching for something familiar. Once he thought he saw a small dog sitting patiently in the corner. But one blink and the dog was gone.