Walter Mosley - Futureland - Nine Stories of an Imminent World

There were too many circuits involved to put them on someone’s head, and no one wore hats in the year 2055. For a while he considered putting the control circuits and mem-boards in the user’s shoes, with ultrasound transmitting devices, but then he wondered what would happen if the user got separated from his shoes or if it was a lady user with skimpy heels.

The sky cleared and Neil spent over forty minutes looking out at the distance. His breathing was deep and satisfying. He could hear gusts of wind now and then.

The shoe question wasn’t important anyway. Neil knew of no device that could record and transmit the range of data that Blue Nile’s file described. Parts of some circuit boards performed some of the functions, but they would have to be dismantled and restructured to specialize. Neil had no idea of how to use streamliner chip protocols.

A peregrine hawk landed on the ledge outside the window. It perched there looking down for a meal. Neil stopped breathing and held his hands together as if he were going to pray.

“You ready for lunch yet, Neil?” Nina asked.

The hawk dropped from the ledge. Neil didn’t know if it was diving after a pigeon or scared off by Nina’s approach.

“What time is it?” he asked.

“Fifteen thirty-seven.”

“What?”

“You been workin’ hard up here.”

“Lunch is over, then.”

“Naw,” Nina said. “Lunch up in here is whenever you want it.”

“What’s the hot box in the vendor machine today?”

“We ain’t got one’a them.”

“Then how do you get lunch?”

“They get it sent up, from the cafeteria.”

This convinced Neil that he was undergoing some kind of psychological test. The cafeteria food was only for the highest-level workers. He decided to ride it out, to prove to the psych-controllers that he was able to function.

“Then I must have missed it,” Neil replied, resigning himself to hunger.

“Naw, honey,” the strange prod said. “They get it delivered to the Unit Controller’s office.”

“The UC’s office. We can’t go in there.”

Nina smiled and grabbed Neil by the arm.

“Com’on,” she said.

The young woman pulled and Neil followed. He didn’t want to go but he wasn’t worried about getting in trouble. He was clearly the victim of on-the-job sexual harassment. The International Union of Production Workers’ rule book clearly stated that physical contact beyond accepted consensual greeting was forbidden in any workspace. This meant that even a husband and wife exchanging a hug on work time were liable to get three D-marks each for sexual harassment.

Nina dragged Neil down one of the aisles between the concentric tables to Athria and Oura’s desk.

“Neil don’t think he could have lunch in the UC’s office,” she blurted out.

Oura looked up, while her partner kept her gaze concentrated on her table screen.

“Of course you can,” the golden-skinned, golden-eyed, golden-haired woman said. “We all do.”

“But it’s against the rules.” Neil postured for the cameras that he knew had to be recording the scene.

“Not any rules here,” Athria said without looking up.

Neil glanced down at the dark woman’s screen and saw that she was watching Ito Iko, the world-famous Japanese soap opera about an ancient Chinese royal family in the ninth century.

“That’s right,” Oura said.

“But don’t you two use the office?” Neil asked.

“No more than anybody else.”

“But you’re the UCs,” he insisted.

“No,” Athria said, peering up over her glasses. “We’re just prods. We sit here because we’re good at labor distribution, but we’re not the bosses.”

“Come on,” Nina said, again pulling Neil by the arm.

“It’s different here,” the Mississippian was saying as she led Neil into the UC’s office.

This smaller room had an enclosed landing that jutted out from the building. Neil headed straight for the glass-walled outcropping, clenching his fists and breathing deeply.

“The UCs never come in,” Nina continued.

“What do you mean they never come in?”

“They just send instructions over the net and we follow them. A lotta the prods don’t come in every day.”

“What do you mean? Everybody is on a four-day week, everybody in the twelve fiefs.”

“Well, yeah.” Nina hesitated for the first time. “We all report four, and we all do the optional two, but a lotta times we work from home.”

Almost every prod in New York worked on-site four days a week. Over 90 percent of them worked an extra two days to make ends meet. In spite of the great promise of work-at-home that the Internet offered at the beginning of the century, the great corporations decided with organized labor that an on-site, controlled labor force was more desirable.

Neil wondered what he should do at this point in the test.

This was obviously a severe breach in international labor regulations.

“I won’t work from home,” he said.

“You don’t have to. You could just work extra hours and cut the week short that way.”

“Extra what?”

“GEE-PROD-9 prods have special access cards,” Nina said. “We can come and go whenever we want — day or night.”

“You ride the escalators?”

“Unh-uh. We got express elevator passes.”

“What’s an express elevator?”

Nina smiled at Neil. She moved up next to him in the window case.

“It’s gonna be okay, Neil,” she said, in a much deeper voice than she had used up until then. Neil felt the vibrations of her voice on his neck even though she was at least a foot away from him.

Neil left GP-9 at seventeen fifteen, his appointed hour. He rode the elevator down, packed into the 275-maxcap car. He walked to the public stairwell and descended to Dark Town and Lower Twenty-ninth Street.

Neil’s apartment had once been the entrance hall to a moderate three-bedroom unit on the fourth floor. He had looked up the floor plan on the free-web before it was discontinued for pornography abuses.

His mattress was leased from Forever Fibers. His chair and desk were let from Work Zone 2100. Everything else — the shelves, the rugs, his two pots, three plates, two cups, and one shatterproof glass — were the property of the landlord, Charlie Mumps Inc. The ultraviolet cooking unit, the refrigerator, and the wall-vid were all built-ins and covered under Neil’s apartment dweller insurance.

It wasn’t much, even by current New York standards, but it was better than a sleep tube two thousand feet under the ground. Neil knew that if he lost his job he would have to go under unless he was willing to use six years’ savings to pay his rent for three months. The rent would go up if he was unemployed because he would have to pay the Unemployed Tax if he wanted to stay aboveground without a job.

The vid shows seemed stupid. Neil couldn’t concentrate on their inane plots, but neither could he sleep. As the evening wore on he became more and more restless. For some reason the thought of drinking synth disgusted him. He couldn’t understand what was happening at work. Why had they transferred him? Why didn’t they take him to a med-head when they found him unconscious at the door? He was pretty sure that he wasn’t in a psych-eval unit, because they were all in the subbasement. Maybe it was a whole unit that had inverted Labor Nervosa . Maybe they had pirated the protocols and become some kind of renegade production unit. That was crazy, Neil knew. There were so many checks and spies in every major corporation that no one could so much as download a manual for unauthorized personal use without getting caught.

As the night wore on Neil became even more agitated. He called his mother, Mary-Elaine, a nighttime ID-chip check girl at a legal Eros-Haus, but she was at work. He called an old friend named Arnold Roth, but he was told by the ID-messaging system that M Roth was in Common Ground and his calls could not be forwarded or retained.