Walter Mosley - Futureland - Nine Stories of an Imminent World

He’d already reserved a unit at the Crimson Chalet, a hotel on the beach that from a distance looked exactly like a great red coral reef at low tide. If his neighbors were quiet — not newfound lovers or hop music addicts — he could, he believed, calm down enough to cure his nervous maladies.

But all of that changed with his capricious transfer to GEE-PRO-9. Who knew what awaited him? Fat tablemates, smelly tablemates, or hardworking neighbors — or, worse still, a hardworking unit. What Neil feared most, what most prods feared, was being thrown in among zealot workers. Neil had once seen a vid report that said certain personalities inverted the symptoms of Labor Nervosa and became unstoppable juggernauts of production. “Such workers,” the psychologist surmised, “might ultimately be of greater danger to production than the more common malingerer.”

These words echoed in Neil Hawthorne’s mind as he rode the packed elevator upward. GEE-PRO-9 was on floor 319, one of the highest points on Manhattan Island. The door and walls of GEE-PRO-9 were made of frosted pink glass. Neil stood for a moment at that door wishing he’d never have to enter. He was sweating but his skin felt cold. His hands were shaking and the pink wall began to shimmer and quake.

I’m going to faint, the prod thought.

The next thing he knew Neil was opening his eyes on a breathtaking aerial view. He’d never seen anything like it.

Years before Neil was born, Brandon Brown had come up with the idea of the three-tiered city. At the twentieth floor level the middle avenues and streets were built. At the fortieth floor the upper avenues were constructed. Neil lived on Lower Twenty-ninth Street. The lower level was called Dark Town because no natural light reached there. The middle level was named the Gray Lane because even at high noon natural light was little more than dusk. Everything below the upper level had to be lit by electric light; the middle and lower streets, where motor traffic was still allowed, were always crowded with heavy trucks moving the materials needed to supply the fifty million plus inhabitants of the Twelve Fiefs of New York. On the lower avenues you found warehouses, loading docks, and the apartments of the working poor.

Even on the upper level the sky was mostly hidden by the hundreds of skyscrapers that soared over two hundred fifty floors. Many times Neil had been on the upper floors, but he had never been in a window office before; he had never peeked out and seen the vastness of the sky.

Not only was this office’s wall made completely of glass, but the view was across the East River. On that clear day he could see Brooklyn, Queens, and Long Island — with even a hint of the ocean that lay beyond.

A flock of geese was headed up the river. If they kept to their flight path they’d pass within a hundred yards of Neil’s line of vision.

He was lying on a raised cushion at the far corner of the room. Behind him were the sounds of people working — at the Great Table, he knew. Pretending to be asleep, Neil prayed for a closer look at the long-necked fowl.

The gaggle came closer and closer, until he could see their eyes and the straining of their wings. He even thought he could hear them honking as they passed.

“Pretty great, huh?” a musical voice said at his ear.

Neil jumped, hitting his head on the thick glass.

“Hold up, M,” the voice said. A small hand settled on Neil’s shoulder. “You don’t wanna go unconscious again.”

Neil turned to see a very short, slightly built man he might have mistaken for a boy except for the lines in his face, especially at the corners of his blue eyes.

“They call me Blue Nile,” the man said.

“Neil Hawthorne. Virtual mid-tech chip assembly 446, ID 813–621 q. I’m supposed—”

“... to do what we’re all supposed to be doing, so why don’t you get up and get to work?” the elfin man said with a lilt in his voice.

He pulled Neil by the hand until he was on his feet looking at the Great Table of GEE-PRO-9.

Every chip-prod office was dominated by a GT workstation. Every GT was composed of twenty quarter-circle tables that formed five concentric circles around a center table where two or three unit coordinators worked. These electronic tables were wired to the fully computerized floor. The smaller inner tables were equipped with three clear monitors embedded in the tabletop; the next tier of tables had four monitors each; the number of monitors per table increased until the final tier, with their seven workstations per table.

This collection of tables was the centerpiece of the midtech production line. They fabricated product enhancements assigned to General Specifix by its parent company, Macro-Code. The projects were distributed by the central controllers to one of the sections, and the section chiefs chose a particular GT unit to complete the virtual design. A Unit Controller in turn studied the assignment (i.e., adding a certain kind of grip to a robot doll’s hand or including a specific measuring dial in a medical auto-injector device). They then chose the concatenation of prods to assemble the appropriate chips from the general AI library of MacroCode. The assignment then ran the Spiral, as the chain of production was called, from the inner tables, which did the simplest jobs, to the outer circle. Any number of workers along this path might have chips, or semichips, to install. This whole process was called hacking the prod lane.

At the end, a virtual prototype went through computer-simulated testing and then was sent out to the MacroCode subdivision that had ordered it. From there the plans went to a subcontractor for physical production.

Neil had worked on seven GT prod lanes. They had all been exactly the same, until now. This GT was different. To begin with, no GT unit he’d ever heard of had a window; there was certainly no cushion in the corner that someone could sleep on while the rest of the prods worked. The table itself was regulation but it was sparsely populated. No more than sixty souls were at their stations.

“What is this?” Neil uttered.

“GEE-PRO-9, M,” Blue Nile replied.

The little man, still holding Neil by the hand, led the stunned prod down one of the aisles toward the inner table. There sat two women. These were both of African heritage but they looked quite different from each other. One was smallish and honey-colored. Her hair had what seemed to be natural blond highlights and her eyes were the color of gold. The other woman was larger, though not fat, and very black. Her features were generous and sculpted. Neil doubted if she had even one knot of European DNA in her cells.

The black woman smiled.

“M Hawthorne?”

“Yes, M.”

“Athria,” the woman said. She stood up and extended a hand.

Neil had never shaken hands with a controller before. He rarely shook hands with anyone. He was embarrassed by his perpetually sweaty palms.

“This is Oura,” Athria said, indicating the golden woman.

“Pleased to meet you, Neil,” Oura said with a smile.

“Yeah,” Neil said.

The women and Blue Nile laughed.

“Don’t be nervous, M,” Blue Nile said. “This is GEEPRO-9.”

“I never been anyplace like this,” Neil said.

“We call ourselves the lost lane,” Oura said. “Somewhere along the line we got assigned a special projects title and none of the central controllers question our methods.”

“What methods?”

“Things work a little differently here, Neil,” Athria said. “We don’t go the lane.”

“What?”

“Not too much too fast, Atty,” Oura said to the black woman. “Let’s just let Neil settle in today. Nile?”

“Yes, M?”

“Un says to set Neil up with the Third Eye project. Put him on the upper tier.”