Walter Mosley - Futureland - Nine Stories of an Imminent World

“It’s early. When I saw Yas she said she could get us in if we came early. You got your chip?”

Harold pulled out a clear plastic card in which his identity chip was embedded. The ID-chip was a cycler’s most important piece of property. It was everything. His PBC (personal bar code), his work history, his current résumé, and his DNA voter’s registration data. The loss of an ID-chip was an immediate fifty-one points against your labor record — a consecutive nine months of unemployment cycles, almost a year of beans and rice, living in an octangular hive cubicle; three of the eight steps before becoming a Muzak Jack.

The ID-chip meant everything, and so when they demanded to hold Harold’s before he could go into Blanklands he balked.

“Com’on, man,” the nervous white doorman said. He had brown scars on his throat and arms from a recent bout with the striped flu. “I ain’t got time.”

“Just let it go,” Jamey said from behind. He put his hand on Harold’s shoulder, and Harold released his grip on the card.

While walking down the long, brick-lined corridor Harold felt panic in his chest and across his brow. He hadn’t let go of his ID-chip in twelve years, since the day of his labor adulthood at fifteen. The eerie glow from the light decals slapped on the wall at irregular intervals only served to make him more apprehensive. He had never spent a day in Common Ground, the underground public homestead that provided compartments barely large enough to hold a fiberplas mattress. But Harold knew from his uncle that it was no free ride like the holo-ads claimed. It was dangerous and it smelled. You couldn’t lock your space and you couldn’t own anything. The place was full of gangs of Backgrounders who raped and robbed men and women alike.

The way most cyclers survived an unemployment cycle was by finding illegal labor or a relative or friend who knew the drill. He could become a prettyboy or maybe sell a body part — but, no, it wouldn’t have to come to that. His brother, Rand, in Oklahoma City would take him in. He’d make Harold work in the communal gardens but that was bearable. He wouldn’t have to get involved with the black market, or worse, the weapons market — or worse still, to become a thief. To be caught stealing would mean a thirty-year minimum sentence in one of the corporate prisons. There was no early release, parole, or life after prison. The few ex-cons that Harold had seen were hollow-eyed, slack-jawed men and women. Maybe black people didn’t get the striped flu, but they sure got bit by prison — they sure did.

“Prison sucks the soul out of our men and women through a pinhole in the heart,” XX Y had proclaimed more than fifteen years before. “And we just look the other way...”

Harold’s heart was racing. What was he doing thinking about Common Ground and Angel’s Island prison? He decided to go back, pay the hundred dollars, and leave.

“Here you go,” the nervous doorman said as he opened a door. Jamey pushed Harold through into a room filled with light.

Harold went through the door thinking that he would turn around and go back out again. Yasmine meant a lot to him, but not enough to live in hell.

He looked around to get his bearings. He was standing in a cavernous room full of large raised platforms that held fiberplas beds. There was a ledge around the mattresses and chairs, too. Going by the size of the room Harold figured that it held over forty tablebeds. At a table a few feet away Harold saw something that slowed his exit.

An elderly man, bald and gray, with parchmentlike skin, was sitting on the ledge of a table while a young woman, no more than twenty, stroked his huge penis. The white man had well-defined muscles to complement his twenty-inch boy-hard erection. The slender Asian girl rocked back and forth holding on with both hands. The look of reverence on her face seemed studied but that didn’t detract from Harold’s fascination. He had heard about the sex therapies that the uppers could afford. The process of cell rejuvenation could make parts of the body young again, at least for a while. Drugs could make you virile. An every-other-day visit to sensory-dep tanks could exercise your body until it had what was advertised as peak physique.

This man had it all.

“Yeah, yeah,” the man grunted. Then he looked up at Harold and winked just before he came.

“Yeah, baby,” the Asian prettygirl said.

The man’s emission went on and on. He looked at Harold and Jamey, winking again, as if to say, “Who’s the man?”

“Damn,” Jamey said. “You see that?”

Two tables over a woman who was near the man’s age sat naked at a table. Her face, thighs, and belly were pudgy and somewhat wrinkled, but her breasts put the prettygirl’s to shame. Harold felt nauseated and aroused at the same time. The man was strutting around now with his erection tilting up, still dripping semen.

“Somethin’, huh?” Yasmine Mü said. She was standing next to them. “I know an even older guy who’s got one-half again as long. He has to hold his up when he walks around ’cause it hurts his muscles.

“Hey, Yas,” Jamey said.

He hugged the young brown-skinned woman. She was wearing a clear plastic full-length jacket and a G-string.

Harold had forgotten all about leaving. He was looking at Yasmine, unable to speak.

“Hi, Harold,” the Iranian emigré said.

“Hey.”

“I wondered if you guys’d come,” Yasmine said in her newly acquired American accent.

“We wanted to see you, Yas,” Jamey was saying. His attention was distracted by the older man’s approach to the elderly, young breasted woman.

“See me like that?” she asked.

“Uh,” Harold said. He wanted to say yes before Jamey could, but the word was stuck in his throat.

“As long as you don’t see us like him,” Jamey said.

Yasmine laughed.

“Harold wants you to be his prettygirl,” Jamey said. “He wants to juggle brass pots with you. That’s what he said.”

Harold had said it, three years earlier when he and Jamey first signed on with L&L Leasing. But he didn’t expect Jamey to remember or to speak for him. They had both lusted after Yasmine while she was busy bumping with uppers in storage rooms and doored cubicles. Back then Yas wasn’t interested in cyclers sexually.

But now she smiled and took Harold by the hand. They walked across the mostly empty room of tablebeds toward the far exit. This led to another dank hallway lined with brick and bright light decals. They passed several doors and various men and women along the way. They had to step over three lovers who had fallen to the floor between decals, rutting wild.

Finally they came to a door that sprang open at a word from Yasmine. It was a small room containing only a fiberplas mattress and a hotplate altar with three brass pots on it. Weak candle decals flickered when they entered. There were no decorations on the wall, no carpeting on the floor.

“They move all of this stuff every week?” Harold asked.

“Take off your clothes,” Yasmine answered.

Harold’s andro-alls were off with a quick gesture. He looked down seeing how small his erection was compared to the man in the main room.

“I guess I won’t need the hot pot on you, Harry,” Yasmine said.

She was still the most beautiful woman he had ever seen in person. Tall — his height — and dark-skinned in that Middle Eastern way. She had large eyes that slanted upwards, black as liquid space, and a mouth that was meant to eat only sensuous fruits and honey cakes. Harold had dreamt of Yasmine at least once a week for the past three years.

She moved close to him and took the erection gently in her hand.

“Your card will be decremented by the minute, two dollars a minute. Do you understand?”