Walter Mosley - Futureland - Nine Stories of an Imminent World

“What is it you want from me, Neil?”

“I want you to do for me what they make everybody else here do for themselves.”

“Your assignment?” she asked. Her hand began sliding up his leg.

“No.”

“Then, what?” Her hand moved further.

Neil squirmed.

“Don’t move away,” she whispered.

He stopped and her fingers reached the tip of his penis through the thin material of his tan andro-suit. He became instantly erect. Nina smiled and breathed into Neil’s face. Her breath was strong but not bad, sweet. Neil wanted to scream.

“What do you call this?” she asked.

“My, my penis.” As he said the word her hand slid over the erection and squeezed it slightly.

“Is that what you call it? Really?”

“Dick, cock. My hard cock.”

“Say it.”

“What?”

“Say it.”

“That’s my hard cock. Hard cock.”

“That’s right. You see? You know how to talk. You know how to say it.”

“Please,” Neil said.

Still holding on to Neil’s erection, Nina got up on her knees in the window space. She flipped her dress up, showing that she wore nothing underneath.

“Do me, baby,” she said.

“Somebody might come.”

“I put a sign on the door.”

“What kinda sign?”

“Just to say not to bother us. Do me now, baby. Come on.”

“I don’t have a condom.”

“You don’t need it.”

“You don’t know that.”

“If you want me to help you, you have to do me.” Saying this she let him go and raised her posterior into the air, spreading her legs so that the sun shone through, illuminating her wild and errant hairs.

Neil had never even dreamed of something like this. The bold blue sky and the bolder still woman who excited him so much that he felt sick down in his core.

He pulled down his pants and fumbled around until he pushed inside her. She moaned and called out a name that was not quite Neil. He looked down at her butt thrusting against him and then up at the sky. They bucked hard against each other and for the first time Neil thought about dying without fear or trepidation. When he came he saw his own reflection grinning in an infinite blue sky. A muscle tore in his groin but he didn’t care. He tried to pull away but Nina reached her hand around his backside and held him.

“Don’t, baby. Don’t take him out yet.”

“Somebody might come.”

“That’s me, hon,” she moaned. “That’s me comin’.”

Later, when Nina’s spasms stopped, they lay curled against each other in the window.

“Will you do it for me now?” Neil whispered nervously. He was still afraid that someone would walk in on them.

“Do what?”

“Alter my records.”

“You have to do that yourself, hon. That’s the rules.”

“But I thought you said that if I had sex with you that you’d help me.”

“I did help you. You needed a good fuck, Neil. You needed it bad.”

That night he was wide awake in his apartment thinking about prison, sex, and the sky. These thoughts brought on bouts of dizziness and confusion. He was afraid and aroused, feeling awe and panic. He considered running but there was no way out of New York. Anyone could leave the city, but in order to live outside your work perimeter you would have to pay a high tax or take up residence in Common Ground.

Neil thought about GEE-PRO-9’s window on the sky, about the silicon protocols used to read the electrical pulses generated by nerve cells. He wondered who wanted the Third Eye. Maybe it wasn’t even a MacroCode division that ordered the device. Almost certainly it was not, because that kind of research had been outlawed. It occurred to him that no client would order brain-altering technology except a foreign power. That would make Neil’s project espionage, and espionage was punishable by death.

Neil thought about calling his mother but he knew that she couldn’t help. And even if she could, all of his electronic communications were being monitored by Blue Nile and others.

“I don’t want to die,” Neil said aloud.

He thought about going to the newly instituted CBI. It was a branch of the federal government that investigated corporate fraud and crimes against the state. They had the power to save him if he became a witness. They had the power to save him but they could crush him too.

In prod-ed they taught the future data manipulators of the workplace to avoid reporting infractions.

“It’s someone else’s job to prove, penalize, and punish — not yours,” M Butterman would say whenever asked about legal aspects of production. “Everything you do at work is either your job or wasting corporate time. Wasting time is wasting money and wasting money is worse than anything else.”

Neil was wondering where the main office of the CBI was when the buzzer to his door sounded.

“Yes,” he asked, fearing the Bureau had found him first.

“It’s Nina,” she said over the speaker. “Let me up.”

She wore an ankle-length, emerald green, fake leather coat tied with a red sash at the waist. Her hair was combed straight back. Her thick eyebrows had been plucked down to slender lines.

“They want me down at work?” he asked her at the door. Nina pushed her way in, closing the door behind her. Her eyes seemed to say, There’s no escape.

“What?” Neil asked.

Nina removed her coat. She was naked underneath. Her breasts were small and sagging a bit. Neil had never seen breasts like hers. Eros-Haus girls all had surgically altered breasts. Perfect. Their pubic hair was either completely shaved or mostly so, leaving just a wisp of hair that the girls called their little goatee. Nina’s pubic hair was deep and thick, covering a wide swath under her belly. Again Neil was repelled by her. But at the same time he couldn’t look away.

“I was thinkin’ about you,” Nina said. There was a swagger in her voice.

“Thinking what?”

“You only been to Eros girls before today, huh?” She moved close to him. He thought about moving away but did not.

“No.”

“That’s what your wrist-writer says.”

“That’s private.”

“I was thinking,” Nina said again. She wrapped her arms around his neck and thrust her pelvis against him. “... that Eros girls never teach men how to eat pussy.” She said the last two words in his ear.

Neil moaned and was suddenly dizzy. He didn’t know if Nina pushed him down or if he fell.

“Up on your knees, M,” she said. “You’re gonna wag that tongue till he bleed.”

The next two weeks were a balance of work, sex, and fear for Neil. Every day he delved deeper into the thousands of pages provided by Un Fitt. Every evening he fretted over the possible ramifications of his work. After midnight Nina would come over and teach him another lesson in the lexicon of sex.

Only in the early-morning hours did Neil have a few moments of peace. At five Nina usually went home to change. Neil would get up and try to think of a way out. But he could see no way. General Specifix was going to fire him if he didn’t break the law by altering his records. If he was fired for having Labor Nervosa no other corporation would hire him. He might find work at a fast food restaurant or at some fuel stop, but that wasn’t enough money for topside living; those kinds of jobs were done by transient Common Grounders for choke cigarette money or to earn a pass to get out for a day or two on the upper tier.

Even if he did alter the records, and even if he wasn’t caught, there was still the problem of being associated with the rogue GT unit. If, by some fluke, there was a valid purpose for the existence of GEE-PRO-9, the Third Eye project was still illegal. And Neil couldn’t deny knowledge of the law because the introduction of his research files contained a detailed analysis of the laws he was breaking.