Walter Mosley - Futureland - Nine Stories of an Imminent World

Each entry in this system had a list of possible hardware devices attached to it. Through this list Neil felt sure that he could find the most efficient devices for the Third Eye project.

He worked all day and late into the evening. At nine he moved to the high table in the GT room. There he worked hard, laughing out loud to himself sometimes and grimacing at others. At various odd moments he would get up and walk around visiting his fellow workers. Oura was especially happy for his visits and told him so.

“Hi, baby,” Nina said, in a late afternoon visit to his workstation. “How’s it goin’?”

“Great. Couldn’t be better.”

“You workin’ good?”

“I finally realized, Nina.”

“What?”

“This is all I have. I couldn’t go back to LAVE-AITCH even if they’d let me. I couldn’t sit there and call up undu-protocols or timekeeper registers. I couldn’t wake up at seven and go to bed at ten. I couldn’t live without you.”

He said this all in a rush with no particular emphasis on any word or idea. It was just information flowing out of him. Nina put her hand up over her mouth and frowned.

“I know I’m not pretty,” she said.

“Don’t say it,” he said. “Don’t say anything but that you still want to see me even though I’m an idiot, a deffy-boy on the lower streets.”

Nina kissed him on the lips, a fast-fireable infraction, and turned away quickly, returning to her station.

Neil threw himself fully into the Third Eye project after that. For the next year he worked twelve hours almost every day. He spent his leisure time with fellow workers and most of his nights with Nina. There were evenings that she would disappear with her hefty-men; on those evenings Neil would swear to himself that he would never see her again. But a day or two later they were back together.

One night while Nina was out scrambling around, as she would say, Neil called Blue Nile and asked him if he would like to get together for a late dinner in Dark Town.

“That’d be great, Neilio,” the little man said. He did a jig in the 3D vid arch. “Where to?”

“A place I go to sometimes,” Neil said. “Hallwell’s China Diner on Lower Thirty-third and Park.”

“Hey, hey,” Blue Nile said. “Sounds like an underground poet named her. And if that poet’s also a cook... Well, you know, poetry’s the only real soul food.”

They met at the front door of the hole-in-the-wall at just past twenty hours. The only other people there were a short woman dressed in a black T-shirt and a long brown skirt and a black man with a synthetic blue eye who sat in a corner considering the wall.

“Teriyaki frogs’ legs over hominy with onion and chard,” D’or Hallwell — proprietor, waitress, cook, and janitor of the China Diner — said. “Or grubsteak fresh from the rain forest of Brazil.”

“I don’t know,” Blue Nile said. “I never ate a worm before.”

D’or walked up to the table and put a meaty fist on her hip. She had wiry gray-blond hair that stuck almost straight out from her head. “If you ever ate a prepared meal out of a plastic can chances are ten to one you ate a worm. And not no farm-certified worm like my grubsteak, neither. No sir. Canned worms are wild things. Maggots and larvae and carnivorous caterpillars.”

“Oh,” Blue Nile said. It was the first time Neil had ever seen his friend look somebody in the eye without smiling.

“Let him alone, D’or,” the black man sitting in the corner said. “He just wants a meal, not the IDA report on canned foods.”

“Hello, M Johnson,” Neil said to the man.

“M Hawthorne,” the Electric Eye replied.

“Well?” D’or asked Blue Nile. “What’ll it be?”

“What about you, Neil?”

“He’s a commie kid,” D’or said. “The cheapest plate is always his favorite dish.”

“Then grubsteak, please, ma’am,” Blue Nile said.

D’or smiled and went away to get their meals.

“Nice place,” Blue Nile said. “How long you been comin’ here?”

“I always knew about it,” Neil said. “For the first five years I came about once every year or so, to treat myself. I was saving up for my vacation so I didn’t want to waste money on restaurant food. But after I started GP-9 I been comin’ once or twice a week.”

“Whatever happened to that vacation of yours?”

“I don’t know. It didn’t seem important anymore, I guess. I mean, a seventh-class room in a hotel that has ten thousand rooms sounded like work to me.”

Blue Nile laughed and rocked in his rickety chair. “You like the food here?” he asked.

“I like the place. It’s privately owned you know.”

“No.”

“Yeah. M Hallwell’s mother owned it and never had to turn it over during the corporate takeover days because the rest of the block was city owned back then. By the time the city sold out the laws had changed and D’or didn’t have to sell it.”

“A private business,” Blue Nile said. “In New York. Wow.” D’or returned with their dinners. Neil had frogs’ legs over hominy and Blue Nile had a big grubsteak smothered in fried mushrooms, onions, and peas.

“I never seen you before, have I?” D’or asked Blue Nile.

“This is my first time in your fine establishment,” Blue Nile said. “But you can be sure that it’s not my last.”

The restaurant owner pulled a chair from a vacant table and sat down. Neil wasn’t happy about this. He liked D’or but he wanted to talk to his friend about Nina. He wanted to ask about her history and family. Blue Nile had the file protocols to look up prod records. Neil could have requested access but he worried that Nina would get angry if she thought he was checking her background.

“You’re cute,” D’or was saying to Blue Nile.

“Thank you. You’re a lovely woman.”

“Neil,” D’or said, “you should bring your friend around more often.”

“I don’t think he’ll need me to bring him after he’s tasted your grubsteak.”

“The boy’s right, there,” Nile agreed.

“What’s your name?” D’or asked.

“Blue Nile.”

“No shit?”

“Straight as the hole down to Common Ground.”

“Where you from, Blue Nile?”

“Vermont. Montpelier.”

“Mm! That’s some cold country up there.”

“Not if you dig a hole and stay down in it for six months.”

“What brought you down here?”

“My mother. She slipped into Simpson’s Coma Disorder. I wanted to help her, but you know a country boy can’t make a dime. She needed three kinds of drugs, so I sold my labor contract to MacCo. They bought forty years of my labor for her drugs and room and board for me.”

“You sold your entire work life to MacroCode?” Neil was shocked.

“Lotsa people do it, kid,” Blue Nile said. “How else can a prod afford to take care of his loved ones? There’s no more private property, hardly. All a prod’s got is his labor.”

“How long ago was that?” D’or asked.

“Let’s see,” Blue Nile said. “I’m fifty-five now, so it must be twenty-two years.”

“Is your mother still alive?”

“No. She died three years after I came to MacCo.”

“You poor thing,” D’or Hallwell said.

“That’s what they do to you,” a man’s voice said.

Neil and Blue Nile looked up at the towering figure of the black man with the artificial blue eye.

“Do you mind if I join you, M Hawthorne?” Folio Johnson asked.

“No, M Johnson. Of course not. This is my friend — M Blue Nile.”

“Call me Blue,” Nile said. He stood up and extended a hand to Folio.

“Can you beat that shit?” D’or asked the electric detective as he pulled up a chair. “Bought his whole life, just like he was an old-time slave.”