Walter Mosley - Futureland - Nine Stories of an Imminent World

At one in the morning Neil began reciting on his wrist-writer, the only piece of property, besides his clothing, that he owned.

If only they’d let me be I’d be okay. I mean, why they have to, why they want to make me give it all to them anyway? Why can’t I just do my job? That’s all I want. That’s all I want. That’s all I want. If they just let me, just let me, just let me. I don’t know. Maybe it is a test. Maybe. Maybe I’m supposed to go to the Monitor Center and tell them that there’s something funny in GEE-PRO- 9 . No uh, sit wherever you want, eat whenever you want, work as long as you want. Maybe it’s a test. They’re testing me to see if I’ll turn them in. But why would they go through all that just to check on my loyalty? Why not just recycle me?

Maybe I should do the megadose of Pulse now. Maybe I should. Maybe I should.

Neil closed the cover on the armband where he kept his favorite recitations. The threat and promise of Pulse released enough tension that Neil was almost sleepy. He made a cup of Numb Tea on the UV stove. He was just sitting down to drink it when a loud electric buzzing went off. At first Neil didn’t know what it was, but then he remembered that it was the buzzer for someone wanting to be let in.

It was two twenty-three in the morning.

“Hello?”

“Neilio?”

“Who is it?”

“Blue Nile, my boy.”

“Who?”

“Come on, Neilio. Let me in. Oura and Athria sent me for you.”

Every prod was on call twenty-four hours a day. They could refuse to go in, but without a verifiable excuse, unemployment was a certainty.

The small man was wearing dark blue dress overalls with no shirt underneath. His eyes were twinkling as he made himself comfortable in Neil’s only chair.

“What are you doing here?” Neil asked his late-night visitor.

“What’s this?” Blue Nile said. He picked up Neil’s cup of tea from the desk and jumped to his feet.

“Numb Tea. I was trying to get to sleep.”

“Uch!” Blue Nile took the tea to the cooking nook and poured it down the drain. “This stuff is bad for ya. Who needs to shut off their mind anyway? If you’re awake you should be alive, you should go outside and smell the asphalt.” With that the little man laughed.

“What are you doing here at this time of night?”

“They sent me for you but they said only if you were awake. So I looked and saw your light.”

“I don’t have a window.”

“Oura and Athria wanted me to bring you this.” Blue Nile produced a prod card with Neil’s picture on it. It was a thick card, obviously hard coded with special protocols.

“I already got a card.”

“Not like this one.”

“What’s so different about this one?”

“Throw on some duds,” Blue Nile replied, “and I’ll show you.”

The Verticular was just as crowded at three in the morning as it was at seven. But Neil didn’t feel the deep panic of claustrophobia because Blue Nile kept talking, saying things that distracted him.

“I know you think that you can’t make the grade on this new Eye thing,” Blue Nile said. “But you underestimate your abilities.”

“How would you know that?”

“We all misjudge ourselves. We have to. Our minds are like the computers we use to play simple games. Those same computers have the resources to run one of our robotic mining operations on the moon or Mars. Our minds are the product of two billion years of evolution, at least. Do you think it’s the limit of your ability to make internal undulations on masturbation machines?”

Neil was taken by the thought. He wondered if there was some greater ability he had.

“You’re wrong,” he said, as they were walking down Middle First Avenue toward the General Specifix Gray Lanes entrance. “The corporations and unions give us all the testing we can take to make sure that we are at optimum productivity.”

“Looking up a quad chip and putting it into a quad slot, so that a synthskin surface will give two to seven pounds pressure per quarter-inch wave every point two to one point one seconds — that’s your optimum ability?”

Neil wondered how the little man knew what his last assignment in LAVE-AITCH-27 was, but he decided not to ask.

“Have you been at GEE-PRO-9 long?”

“Oh, yeah,” the late-night intruder said. “I been workin’ for them a long time now. Long time. And the longer I work there the better I feel.”

“But it’s so weird.”

They entered the darkened front doors of General Specifix and approached the assignment kiosk. There was a man in this time, also with a blunt face. Neil wondered if maybe the glass warped all the attendants’ features.

“Yes?” the man asked, obviously suspicious of the off-hour approach.

Blue Nile handed his card through the slot provided. The man, who was young and bald, read something on his screen and said, “GEE-PRO-9, M.”

Blue Nile gestured for Neil to proffer his new card. Neil hesitated. He knew that if rejected by the system he could be arrested for attempted illegal entry.

“Come on, Neil,” Blue Nile said. “It took my card.”

With trembling fingers Neil slipped the card into the slot.

“GEE-PRO-9, M,” the bald man said immediately.

Neil headed for the 275-max-cap elevators but Blue Nile took him by the arm and led him toward another hallway that curved around the back of the building. There they came to a door with a card-lock pad next to it. Blue Nile held his identity card against the lock pad and the door slid open revealing a small elevator car.

“Floor three one nine,” Blue Nile said, and the door closed.

As the car rose the outer wall proved to be transparent, and above the fortieth floor the city came into view. Hundreds of thousands of lights down Upper First became visible. It was, Neil thought, like seeing a slender corridor of a galaxy. As they ascended he could see more and more of the city. The lights melded with the stars in the night sky. Neil began to tremble.

“It’s a two-way glass,” Blue Nile said.

“What?”

“It’s a two-way glass. From the outside this elevator shaft looks like a wall, but from inside you can see everything.”

“I never knew that something like this existed. I never knew.”

“Of course you didn’t. Most central controllers don’t know about it. The rich and powerful live in a world that most of the rest of us don’t even suspect.”

“But how do you know about it, then? How do I rate a pass to ride it?”

“GEE-PRO-9,” Blue Nile said, his blue eyes twinkling, city lights shimmering all around his head.

GEE-PRO-9 was not empty. Four prods sat at their desks poring over multiple screens. One woman on the upper tier was smoking a cigarette. She looked down from her perch and waved at Blue Nile. He smiled in return.

“Is that tobacco?” Neil asked, sniffing the air.

“Yeah. Marva knows that it’s bad for her, but ever since she started smoking she’s been happier. Oura says that it’s because she needs to rebel, to do something wrong. But she doesn’t want to hurt anybody or steal. So she smokes.”

“Isn’t she hurting those people around her?”

“There’s a big fan up over that table. It sucks up almost all the secondhand shit.”

The sun wasn’t up yet. The lights that trailed across Brooklyn and Queens and on to Long Island were all that Neil wanted to see. He knew that any minute he’d be arrested for illegal access, for using an unauthorized identity card, for being in the presence of tobacco use, for failing to report his own Labor Nervosa . But he couldn’t think about that with the world spread out before him.

“Why did you bring me here?” Neil asked Blue Nile.