Walter Mosley - Futureland - Nine Stories of an Imminent World

“I’m sixty-two, Doc. I think’a my own daughter as a baby.”

Bel-Nan was rubbing the tips of his fingers together under the desk.

“Why would you think I dreamed about a girl and then I met her?” Leon asked.

The two seconds of blank expression on Bel-Nan’s repulsive face convinced Jones that he was about to hear a lie.

“The recording process in the microcircuitry,” the doctor said, “sometimes switches events. The system of recording is linear instead of the random-emphasis method of biological memory. Sometimes an event might be misrecorded when the sheath starts breaking down. You know, memories in two places.”

“I got to go, Doctor.”

“I don’t think that’s advisable,” Bel-Nan said.

“Why not?”

“I’d like to keep you under observation for a night or two.”

“I’ll be happy to, Doc,” Leon said. “But not tonight. Tonight I’m meetin’ a friend to play a game of chess.”

The ugly smile returned, tinged with bad intentions.

“What’s this friend’s name?”

Leon stood up. “What’s your real name, Doctor?”

The smile vanished.

Leon turned away and walked out the door.

“Come back, Professor,” Bel-Nan called. “I’m afraid that I can’t let you leave.”

Bel-Nan’s office was on the eighteenth floor of a forty-floor building. There was an express elevator which stopped only at floors 1, 18, and 35; this to speed up traffic for those who didn’t mind walking a few floors up or down.

An elevator car was waiting.

The ground floor was a vast chamber of Synthsteel and glass. There were two hundred feet for Leon to walk to the entrance. He moved quickly through the sparsely populated room. A line of four people waited to walk through the Data Detectors — the system that checked IDs against the possession of unlicensed property, and also for weapons, warrants, and labor truantism.

Each person passed between the slender copper-studded glass poles without incident. But when Leon passed through an alarm was set off. Two large guards emerged from a kiosk in the plaza and approached him.

“Excuse me, M,” a brawny, redheaded white man said. He was followed by a lanky young man who was white-haired.

“What’s the problem, M?” Leon said without a stutter.

“Seems like somebody put a hold on your ID,” the large redhead said in a friendly manner. “Maybe you left your briefcase or something like that.”

“I didn’t have anything,” Leon said. “It must be a mistake.”

“It’ll just take two minutes,” the guard assured.

Both men wore the bright red T-shirts that meant private law enforcement. The lanky man had yellow trousers and the redhead wore black. These colors meant that the larger man was the superior officer.

“I can’t wait,” Leon said, veering around the first guard.

“Hold it right there,” the other guard said, putting up both hands.

Leon turned to the friendly guard but all he got was an I’m-so-sorry smile.

Bel-Nan appeared a few minutes later.

“Bring him back upstairs,” he said.

“Okay. Let’s go,” the lanky guard said, laying a hand on Leon’s shoulder.

“Hold up, Lin.” The larger guard held up one finger.

“What do you mean?” Bel-Nan said. “This man has to be hospitalized immediately.”

“For what?”

“Are you a doctor?” Bel-Nan sneered.

“Moses Fine,” the brawny guard said, introducing himself. He looked down at his handheld com-screen. “This request didn’t give your name.”

“Bel-Nan. Dr. Bel-Nan.” The rage in the blond-haired surgeon made the curve in his face seem even more pronounced.

Security Officer Fine tapped the screen with his finger a few times and read. Then he said, “Okay. What’s the problem?”

“You are the problem,” Bel-Nan said. “Now bring this man to the thirty-third floor.”

“That’s the security floor, Doctor.”

“Am I the idiot here or are you?”

Moses Fine smiled.

The officer named Lin removed his hand from Leon’s shoulder.

“Tell me the nature of the condition that makes it necessary to incarcerate the patient.” Fine was quoting some ordinance, Leon was sure.

“He’s psychotic,” Bel-Nan hissed.

“He seems okay to me.”

“Are you a psychiatrist?”

“I’m not an idiot or a psychiatrist, Doctor.”

“Then do as I tell you.”

“I’m not a psychiatrist. But then again, neither are you,” Moses said. “This man is not in possession of stolen property, he doesn’t work here, there are no warrants out on him or liens against his property. If he is psychotic it’s not for you or me to say.”

Bel-Nan seemed to be considering an attack on Moses Fine. But he decided against it.

“Hold him until I return with someone with the proper credentials,” the brain specialist said. He turned back toward the bank of elevators on the other side of the room.

“Wanna take him to the blue room?” Lin asked.

“You’re Leon Jones, Fera Jones’s father, aren’t you?” Moses asked.

“Yes, I am.”

“She broke my heart the night she broke Zeletski’s jaw. She’s the best that ever was.” Security Officer Fine chewed on his lip for a moment and then said, “Go on. Get outta here.”

On the subway ride back to Manhattan Leon was lost. He couldn’t go home because Bel-Nan probably could find a psychiatrist who would agree to institutionalize him. Even on the street he was in danger because his ID-chip had a tracer function in it. Any citizen could be found at any time by their ID-chip. Law enforcement argued that it was to protect the innocent. The ACLU said that it was an infringement on Americans’ constitutional rights. But after consideration by a Supreme Court that had become steadily more conservative for decades it was decided that tracking chips was not an infringement on privacy after all.

Leon got out at the Wall Street stop of the local number 12 subway and went to the Interplanetary Trade Center. There he found a post office and addressed an envelope to Pell Lightner. He included a microrecording which he made in a recording booth available to all postal customers.

“I hope I impressed you that I’m not crazy the other night, Pell,” Leon’s message went. “Because Bel-Nan thinks that I am. He wanted to hospitalize me but I demurred. Here’s my chip. I’ll be down to D.C. by the time you get the post. Try and set it up to get a second opinion before the doctor can put me in SINI.”

Leon sent the envelope next day mail and then returned on the subway to the Lower Forty-second Street main branch of the library.

There was no written material on record for Axel Bel-Nan, professor of neurological sciences at the University of Staten Island. The Stylus Machine, which was used to print out voice-recorded data upon recyclable plastic paper, was out of paper, and the librarian on subfloor eight was not sure when the trays would be refilled.

“We don’t really get much call for printing nowadays,” the young Nigerian said. “The new neural phono links do everything you could ever want right in your head.”

“Except think,” Leon said. But the young woman had already moved away.

Professor Jones’s only choice was to listen to the computer’s rendition through earphones.

“Dr. Axel Bel-Nan,” proclaimed a baritone actor from the previous century. The great Shakespearian had sold the rights of his voice pattern to the NYPL. “Born Lemuel Rogers... educated at the University of Las Vegas in the neurological sciences... alleged secretary of the illegal organization the Church of Life Everlasting (CLE)... [ subsearch-1: Church of Life Everlasting (CLE); seeking to clone bodies and reintegrate the cells of deceased members into brain cavity of new life... process declared illegal by congressional proclamation in 2019 ]... broke with the central committee of the CLE in 2031 over moral questions... convicted in 2032 of illegal acquisition of brain materials from the Ugandan Labor Corps... served a seven-year sentence in MacroCode polar prison system... rehabilitated... released... reintegrated into the scientific community... rehabilitation insured by MacroCode penitentiary division, 2039.”