Futureland - Nine Stories of an Imminent World (2 page)

The boy turned around and stood on the white satin vanity chair. He was naked and smiling.

"Chilly."

"They wanna take you to get tested an' sen' you to Houston, Po," Chill said. Ptolemy automatically put his hands in the air when the man came near. The child loved the feel of his skin against the muscular man's bare chest.

"No," Popo said. "I don' wanna go."

"I don't want you to go neither. But we got to figger sumpin' out."

"We could run," the boy suggested. "We could go in the swamps like them slave men you said about." Almost every night Chill told Popo stories of runaway slaves on the Underground Railroad. He said that it was because he wanted Popo to know African-American history, "like them white kids know their history. From stories at home." But escape was the real story he wanted to tell. He had been obsessed with escape ever since the day he was convicted of armed robbery. The only way he could fall asleep in his cell at night was by imagining himself a slave who had slipped his chains, pried open the bars, and outrun the dogs. Even after his release Chill needed this fantasy to drop off most nights. For a moment he considered his nephew's innocent suggestion.

The desire for flight burned perpetually in his chest. He owned an illegal ember gun. With that he never needed a reload, one LX battery could last a year.

But then his eyes fell upon his mother, Misty. She only walked for exercise now--fifteen minutes in the morning and five at night. Ptolemy loved his grandmother more than anything.

"No, baby boy," Chill said. "No."

"Then, what?"

"If we had money we could prove to the state that we could afford to get you hooked up to the EEG's Prime Com Link. If they could give you tests and we could get you into that Jesse Jackson Gymnasium that they got for city kids, then maybe you could stay."

"I could get money," Ptolemy said.

"It's gonna take more than your dollar allowance, honey."

"How much, then?"

"Just to pay for the computer link is a hundred fi'ty thousand a year. And then there's forty thousand for the JJ Gym, 'cause you not in the city limits. Three million prob'ly do it with costs goin' up like they do."

"I could get that," Ptolemy said.

"Where at?"

"On the computer."

"Naw, man," Chill said. "Computer's all linked up. They got identity cards along with your PBC on every computer."

"Nuh-uh," Ptolemy said, shaking his head and grinning. "My Personal Bar Code ain't on my computer."

"That thing? That's just a toy. It ain't connected up."

"I can wit' my radios. I can too."

"Show me."

The child jumped around in the chair and started turning dials. The computer's gaseous-looking screen went black. Letters and numbers appeared and reappeared in rapid succession on a line in the center of the screen.

Ptolemy hummed and sang while the computer spoke French and Chinese through the various radio speakers. Chill sat down on his mother's bed and watched.

"Don't let my boy get in trouble, Thill," Misty said.

"He was born in trouble, Mama. Born in trouble."

"But that don't make him no thief."

"If we cain't get in the money then the government gonna take him. I'ma just get 'im to show me, Mama. Ain't nobody gonna steal nuthin', but even if they do it's gonna be me. I'll push the button. But don't worry, I'm just lookin'."

As they spoke, words appeared and remained on the screen:

WORLD BANK INTERNATIONAL

B of A, Citicorp, AMEX, HITO-SAN

welcome to our entry screen

**UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS IS PUNISHABLE**

BY NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL LAW

Below the words were a series of codes and blank lines.

"See," Popo exclaimed. "They gots lotsa money."

"An' they don't know your bar code?" Chill asked.

"They get the bar code from your eyes," Ptolemy said. "When you buy your computer they make you give 'em a eyescan. But they didn't do that way back when they made these laptops. I just borrow somebody else's bar-c from one'a the Jacker DBs and then I put it back when I'm through." While Ptolemy spoke the blanks were being filled in one at a time by an automatic code-breaking program that the boy had adapted from the illegal Jacker Database. After all of the blanks had been filled in, a flurry of screens passed in quick succession, ending finally on a screen whose header read

PROJECT MAINTENANCE FUNDS.

"This ain't nobody's money," the child said. "It's what they got for extra." There were sixteen place numbers on each coded entry of the file.

Chill's upper lip began to sweat.

"Turn it off, Popo."

"But--"

"Turn it off!"

3

"Ow!" Ptolemy Bent yelled.

"You'll need a haircut soon," Kai Lin told him as she dragged the large brush up from the back of the child's neck. "There's more hair than there is little boy."

Misty hissed her paralytic laugh and held a gnarled hand up to shoulder level. She was sitting straight, thanks to her mechanical bed, watching the squat Vietnamese woman torture the poor boy's head.

"He don't wan' it cut," Misty said.

"He'll look like a girl, then," Kai said, giving a hard tug.

"Ow! I don't care," Popo said. "I want my hair like the Jewish man who made relatively. Bushy and big."

"By the time you're his age all we'll be able to see will be your feet." Kai tickled Ptolemy's skinny ribs and the boy doubled over in her lap.

Misty rocked back and forth in sympathy with the boy's glee. Even Kai's impassive face broke into a smile.

Popo grabbed Kai's brush hand, trying to wrest away the implement of torture. But Kai laid him flat on her lap and bent over to blow a loud kiss against his belly.

"I give! I give! You can brush, you can brush." All of the air rushed out of the boy's lungs, making him too weak even to sit up.

"No," Kai said. "All done."

The boy cheered and jumped down, hurrying over to the radio corner, as Misty called it. By then he had deconstructed fifteen old radios, putting their parts together again on every available space. The wires and transistor chips resembled some new form of technologic life growing like fungus down the sides of the vanity onto the floor. There were three old-time laptop computers connected here and there. One of these cast indecipherable images of color and light. The forms sometimes seemed to have an alien sense about them, but mostly they were abstract events appearing for a nanosecond or an hour, changing almost imperceptibly or faster than the eye could follow. Another screen flashed strange characters at various intervals and in differing colors. These characters were being printed horizontally across paper, slowly unfurling from a two-hundred-foot roll on an antique dot matrix printer that Chill had brought home from a yard sale in Jackson, he said.

The final screen was connected to a HondaDrive AE storage system. The three-foot-high canister, encased in crystalline green plastic, was one of the two new pieces of equipment that Popo owned. The HondaDrive was a micro-level storage system that held trillions of bytes of information. It also had an I-crunch that could encode data, making it possible to exponentially expand its capacity. Three years ago a HondaDrive AE would have cost a million dollars. But within the past year, General Electric had stunned the scientific world--and the stock market--with the GE-AI-Drive and its virtually unlimited storage capacity. The GE-AI was big, the size of a refrigerator, but it answered the memory problems of even the most demanding user.

Now a HondaDrive AE cost only ten thousand dollars. No one wanted them, so security had dropped to the point where Chill had been able to steal one from a Radio Shack in Memphis. Along with the drive, Chill stole a LIBCHIP library box, a series of two hundred library chips containing over ten million volumes.

"Let's see you read your way outta that," Chill dared his nephew.

"I will," the boy replied.

The computer connected to the HondaDrive was taking information from the radio receivers, translating it to mathematical codes, and storing the equations. Ptolemy sat naked in lotus position between the screens, watching them and making adjustments to the radio dials now and then. Kai sat behind the boy and pulled him into her lap. He didn't resist. She usually came to the Bent's house last on her rounds as visiting nurse for the state. She told her supervisor that it was because Misty needed to take her walk late in the day, but really it was to be able to spend more time with the child.

"What is all this?"

"Computers," the boy said. "Computers and radios and electricity and, and, that's all."

"But what are they doing?" Kai asked the same question every day. And every day Ptolemy said that it was a secret.

"It's readin' what the radio says and then it's puttin' it into numbers and then it's puttin' the numbers on the HondaDrive."

"But how do you know how to do all that?"

"I don't," Ptolemy said as he leaned over to turn a dial. The clicking from the speakers changed tempo, and the boy nodded his head as if he were listening to a piece of music.

"But how can you do something and not know how to do it?" Kai asked.

"You use words that you don't know what they mean sometimes. You drive a 'lectric car but you cain't make one." Ptolemy was talking but his attention was on the screens. The image screen showed an eerie landscape of pastel greens and metallic blacks interwoven and slipping away into a distant red maw. "I just count the numbers in the radio waves and then use a equation that I got from the math lib'ary on the net. It makes up the numbers and then I look at 'em later."

"What are you looking for?" Kai asked almost timidly.

Ptolemy turned to the visiting nurse. His deep brown eyes were like polished stones.

"It's God, I think," he said. "It's God sangin' through radio waves."

"What do you mean? How could that be? I mean why hasn't anybody else heard it before?" An instant hysteria bloomed in Kai's chest.

"Maybe they did," Ptolemy said in a matter-of-fact tone. He had turned back to his screens. He wasn't really thinking about his nurse. "Maybe they did and then when they talked to him they lefted."

"Left where?"

"To God, I guess. Maybe not, though. Maybe they went to heaben."

"Isn't that where God is?"

"No," Ptolemy said, turning again to the squat, mask-faced woman. "Heaben is somewhere else."

"But, Popo," she said. "Why hasn't anybody else heard these messages?"

" 'Cause they don't play with the radio like I do. They all wanna make things but they don't listen too much, you know?"

"No. I don't know."

"When I listen to the radio waves I can hear little pieces of him talkin'. And then, when I turn the knob I hear a little more. His words comin' through in pieces all over. They think it's static. They made the digit-thingy to block it out. Nobody wanna hear it in they music, so they miss it."

"What does God say?" As Kai heard the words coming from her mouth she realized that she meant them.

"Hi," answered Ptolemy. "How are you and can you hear me."

"Could it be some alien race and not God at all?"

"I guess. But I don't think so."

"We should tell somebody about this," Kai said. Behind her Misty Bent had fallen asleep.

"I did."

"Who? Who did you tell?"

"Chilly."

4

"I have to talk wit' you, Kai," Chill Bent said three weeks after the social worker/nurse was forced to reconsider the existence of God.

It was a cool autumn day. The Tickle River was swollen with waters from recent rains, and fish could be seen darting around in schools numbering in the hundreds.

"Yes, Mr. Bent?"

"I'm gonna have to go away for a few weeks."

"Where?"

"Outta the country."

"Oh." The nurse frowned.

"I gotta get some money or they gonna take Popo away. My cousin Hazel been talkin' to child welfare and the EEG. They wanna take Popo to Houston but I won't let 'em."

"But maybe it would be better," Kai suggested hesitantly.

"M-maybe if he was in Houston you could visit and he'd have all the best guidance and education."

"Boy needs a family and a home," Chill said. "I been in the state institution before. It ain't no good."

"But that was a detention center," the short nurse argued.

"No different. He gonna be detained in the school too. He cain't come home when he want to. You know his grandmama'll die a week after he's gone."

Kai Lin didn't argue that point. She watched the large man's dark face. He had aged in the two years since Kai had met him. Deep furrows had appeared in his cheeks, and something was wrong with his knees. He was still very handsome, though Kai would have never said so out loud.

"Where are you going?" she asked.

"I can't say. But I want you to take care'a Popo. I want you to make sure that Hazel or M Russell don't get him."

"They won't."

"'Cause I know you love that chile," Chill said. "I seen how you are wit 'im. How come you over on your days off. And you know I'm right too. He learnin' all he can right here, right here in this house." Tears sprouted from the ex-con's eyes. They rolled down his face.

"I love that boy more than I love anything," he said. "I will not let them take him. I will not let them white people and them people wanna be white turn him into some cash cow or bomb builder or prison maker. He will find his own way an' make up his own mind, god dammit."

Kai reached out to touch Chill's arm. He pulled her close, holding her forearms in a powerful grip. Kai winced but didn't fight him.

"Maybe that's what they're afraid of," she said. "Maybe they don't want these children to make up their own minds. Maybe if they did that, the world would change."

"I know you know," Chill said. "They afraid Ptolemy would be their king if they didn't brainwash 'im."

"Maybe you're right," Kai said. "Sometimes I'm afraid when he talks. Sometimes I'm afraid of what he can see."

"When I come back you an' me gotta talk," Chill said.