Walter Mosley - Futureland - Nine Stories of an Imminent World

“And I don’t believe that he’s getting up,” Billy added. “No. Luke is waving Fera away. He’s calling the fight over. The parmeds are jumping into the ring. Six of them.”

“They’ll need that many if they have to carry him out of here.”

“Look, Chet. The women are tearing up the stands! They’re throwing the chairs into a group of taunting men. Fights are breaking out everywhere.”

“You better get in there and talk to the winner, Champ. Before they tear the house down.”

“So, M Jones,” the Eclipse asked amid the hubbub of the crowded ring, “how did it feel in there against a man?”

“I’ve had harder fights, Billy,” Fera said. “But first I want to give thanks to the goddess Diana, and I want to thank my daddy for making me the greatest fighter in the world.”

“He hit you pretty hard a couple of times. We thought you were going down once.”

“He never hurt me. The first time he hit me I moved back in case he was throwing a combination, but I stumbled and fell into the ropes. He never hurt me.”

“Well, you sure hurt him.”

“Bring on Zeletski,” Fera said. “Bring on your champion.”

“What do you think, Professor Jones?” Bonner asked Fera’s father/trainer/manager. “Do you want to see her jump up in competition to Zeletski’s level this quickly?”

“Fera could beat Zeletski any day. She has the power and she knows how to get it to him. You saw how Jellyroll hit her. I tell you Fera would make Sonny Liston quiver in his boots.”

“Thank you, Professor, Fera...” An uproar rose. “Someone has just thrown a chair into the ring. There are fights breaking out everywhere. The police are trying to restore order, but I don’t even know if the main event will go on. Back to you, Chet.”

“There you have it. Fera Jones has an impressive win tonight and her trainer says that she’s ready for a championship shot. There would be a lot of money in that fight. But not if a brawl breaks out like this one. I’m being told that we will go off the air while the police regain some semblance of order. This is Chet Atkinson, with the Champ, Billy ‘the Eclipse’ Bonner, saying—”

“But, Daddy, I am ready. I can take him. I can. You said so yourself after the fight with Jelly Belly.”

“You got the power, Fifi. You got the heart. But you need more experience.”

“Nobody’s ever beat me, Daddy.”

“What about the last fight you had, with Bobo Black?”

“I told you. I was off. I had trouble getting it to him.”

“You had trouble because you couldn’t get to him, and you couldn’t get to him because he was outthinking you in there. If he hadn’t’a got tired you would have had your first UBA loss.”

They were in Fera’s permanent suite on the three hundredth floor of the Fifth Business, the Broadway hotel. Fera had had eight UBA fights by then. All with men. All ending by KO.

“Zeletski can box better than Black, and he doesn’t get tired. He hits hard enough to put you down. We need a little more time. You need a better class of fight. Like this Black. You have to go through a couple of wars. And there’s something else.”

“What, Daddy?”

“Money, baby. Lotsa money. It’s been chump change up till now. We got this suite, but that’s just ’cause this hotel wants to brag on you. You lose one fight and we’re outta here.”

“We’ve been broke before.”

“Yeah, but,” he hesitated. “You know with the Pulse I can’t take chances. Ever since Congress legalized Pulse you got to have money. You got to have money or you’re dead.”

The Pulse was a drug dealer’s dream. Cooked up at Cal-Tech in the late hours when the professors were in bed. The gene drug altered the structure of the pleasure centers of the brain, temporarily allowing consciousness some measure of control over dreams. With just the right amount, a pulsar, as the users called themselves, could create a complex fantasy, build a whole world and live in it for what seemed like days, weeks. The original intention of the students was to create a time warp in the brain where they could do months of complex research in an evening.

“But the drug gave entrée to the id,” Dr. Samboka of NYU explained in the EastCoast DataTimes after it was far too late. “And the id has a powerful inclination for sensuality and instinct.”

Pulsars’ minds drifted into passionate love affairs and musical performances that lasted for days. Many lost interest in the world around them, making better worlds in their unconscious minds. And to make matters worse, or better from a profit point of view, it turned out that after four or five uses, the brain collapsed in on itself without regular ingestion of the drug. It was an addiction from which death was the only withdrawal.

The Pulse, named after the heartbeat many addicts reported hearing before slipping into fantasy, was legalized in 2031. Pulse party parlors appeared everywhere. The cost was fixed by the government, but there was no coverage on state medical insurance and no emergency fund for the poor pulsar who went broke. And because the user had to have the drug every three days, there were few job cycles that a pulsar could hold.

Pulsedeath was an everyday event. Almost every user died horribly from a collapsed brain. Only the rich could be sure of long-term supply. And even they died ultimately, their brains like overstretched rubber bands snapping finally from overwork.

“I know it’s going to kill me,” Rickert Londonne, Pulse proponent and user, proclaimed on prime vid. “But last night I was the emperor Hadrian. I controlled the Roman empire. I strode the city streets and lived among the people, common and extraordinary. I battled the Vandals, the Goths, and the Persians. I built a world. What did you do last night?”

Pulse had another unexpected impact on the economy. In the days between use, Pulsars read many books of fiction and history to seed their minds with the possibility of dreams. Electronic publishing industry stocks soared.

“We could make a billion-dollar fight if you get the women of the world on your side, Fifi. Get that and I can live a few more years.”

“I will, Daddy. And I’ll pay to have the MacroCode Gen-Team find you a cure.”

“I know you will, baby. I know you will.”

The night before the Mathias Konkon fight, Pell Lightner came up to the three hundredth floor of the Fifth Business. He whispered his name into the key-mike and the door slid open. He hesitated a moment before entering, took a deep breath, and then walked in confidently, standing to his full five foot nine and a half inches.

“Fifi?”

There was no answer. He went through the entrance area into the living room.

The sight of Leon Jones sitting on the long, overstuffed sofa gave Pell a scare, but then he realized that his girlfriend’s father was far beyond worrying about him. The elder Jones’s eyes were open, and he seemed to be looking right at Pell, but really he was gazing far away into faded Pulsedreams. After years of use the dreams had dwindled into a kind of bleached-out euphoria. The loss of specific dream content was the first sign that a user’s brain was near final collapse.

“Hey, baby.” Fera was standing at the door to her bedroom, naked.

Pell liked it that the musculature of Fera’s chest hadn’t erased her womanly figure. Her breasts were real breasts, and except for that one evening on the Sammy Rosen show, Pell was the only man to see under her dress nowadays.

All of his young life, Pell had lived in Common Ground, the place for all unemployed citizens. He had learned to appreciate a good thing. He was only nineteen, permanently unemployed and without benefits except for an octangular sleep tube underground and regular rations of rice and beans.