Futureland - Nine Stories of an Imminent World (29 page)

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."
5

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. The hazards were many, but one was worse than all the others. He could see that maybe he would never get caught, or that he would only get caught after some years of working with Oura, Athria, and Blue Nile--but unprotected sex with a woman who was obviously well versed in intercourse of all kinds was like playing Russian roulette with five loaded chambers in the gun.

Still Neil could not deny Nina. He wasn't attracted to her but he was lost in the face of her sexual hunger. Her passion for his body and hers made him submissive to the point that he would allow her to hurt him rather than pull away. Her orgasms and lewd suggestions stayed in his mind all the time. He dreamed about her and found himself waiting for her to arrive every night.

One night she didn't come and he didn't sleep at all. The next day he shunned her when she came to talk to him; he walked away from her when she tried to join him for lunch. That night she rang his buzzer and he didn't answer for five minutes.

"Why you actin' like that?" she asked when he finally let her in.

"I thought you were through with me," he said.

"Just 'cause I didn't come one night? What did you think I was doin'?"

"I don't know."

"Yeah you do. You know what you think."

"I thought you were with another guy."

"I wasn't," she said. "I was with two men . . ."

Neil fell back a step when she said this. His right eyelid began twitching.

". . . they was at the Conga Club. Two friends in town on business. They came up to me while I was havin' a drink and said if I wanted to go to their room. Said they was from Florida City, that they wanted to do one girl. It's okay, though, I made 'em wear rubbers, double rubbers."

"Why don't you let . . . have me wear a rubber?"

" 'Cause I know you're safe, baby. I read your meds 'fore I took you to bed."

"What about me? I haven't read your records."

Nina cupped Neil's face between her hands. She leaned in close and kissed him lightly on the lips. "I wouldn't put you in danger, honey. I wouldn't hurt you at all. An' them two men didn't mean nuthin' to me. They back down south now, braggin' about what's yours."

Neil sat down on the bed and pressed his palms against his eyes. The darkness was laced with red veins.

"You sick, honey?" Nina asked.

"No."

"What's wrong, then?"

Neil felt her hands on his shoulders, her weight leaning against his back.

"Talk to me, Neil."

He tried to answer but he couldn't. Nina began to rock him gently forward and back. Her fingers massaged his scalp.

"You got curly hairs," Nina said. "Somebody in your family Irish or Greek?"

"I used to get in trouble," Neil said. "In school."

"What kinda trouble?"

"I wouldn't do anything. I wouldn't listen or answer questions or do homework."

"How come you didn't?"

"I don't know. One of my teachers, Miss . . . I mean M Lassiter, said to my mother that she thought I had ideas of my own. She wanted me to go to the Ben Franklin Academy. But that cost too much and Mom was mad, so she put me in prod-ed 'cause I didn't obey."

"Your mother did that?"

"Yeah."

"Is that why you sad?"

"I'm not sad, I'm just quiet," he said. And then, "You wouldn't hurt me, would you, Nina?"

"No. I said I wouldn't."

"And I believe you."

"So? What's wrong with that?"

"I never believed anybody before. Nobody. Not my mother, not my friends." Nina hugged Neil and pressed her head against the back of his neck.

"That's good, isn't it?"

"In my head it is," Neil whispered. "But in my heart I'm more scared than if you buried me alive."
6

At six that same morning Neil approached the Middle First Avenue entrance of General Specifix. He rode the glass elevator, using his thick identity card on the GEE-PRO-9 door.

"Hi, Neil," Marva called from the upper tier. She was the only one there, smoking her illegal tobacco and coughing.

Neil caught a whiff of the smoke in the air but he didn't care. He went directly to the UC room and logged onto the red controller screen. He entered his name and the forty-seven-digit number Blue Nile had given him, offered up his handprint, and initiated the search. Only when the record appeared before him did he stall. He didn't know if there was some kind of special code that one might need to alter the EPR, employee permanent record. He worried armed security guards would come out from some secret doorway and drag him away to a private prison without even a trial.

"M Hawthorne," he imagined some corporate official saying to his mother. "Your son contracted the new strain of
Ebola C
virus. In accordance with the emergency laws enacted by the mayor we had no choice but to immediately cremate his remains." He would hand Neil's mother an urn with ashes gathered from a Midwestern dog pound and she would cry and ask who was the beneficiary of his insurance policy. Then the red sun began to emerge from the Brooklyn skyline.

With light came the feeling of space. Neil looked out over the city and then erased the D-marks for fainting and lack of concentration. Nothing happened. When he deleted the contents of the diagnosis box the recommended dismissal automatically disappeared and the Penalty Screen was replaced by an aqua Merit Screen. Here Neil wrote that he had shown great skill and had been promoted to the seventh tier. He worked well with his chain mates, he took initiative in his tasks without causing trouble on the line. This automatically evoked recommendations for a raise and promotion. Then he switched over to the Policy Screens and changed the beneficiary from his mother to Nina Bossett.

"M Hawthorne," a voice said from the doorway behind him.

The young prod leapt to his feet and spun around. He decided to fight the security guards, to die rather than go to prison.

"What's wrong, Neil?" Marva Monel asked. "I just wanted to know if you were ordering lunch."

"No," Neil said, trying to unclench his fists. "I'm just working in here."

"Did my smoke bother you?"

"No. No. I guess I just like being alone awhile in the morning." The older woman smiled. "Me too. That's why I come in here so early. I love looking down on the big table while I'm entering protocols. It makes the work seem better somehow."

"Yeah," Neil said. "Yeah, exactly."

After Marva left Neil entered his updated EPR into the General Specifix permanent database. A feeling of great calm came over him. He celebrated by opening a blank chip template. He had decided that he would create a new chip for the transmission and reception of data between an as yet nonexistent device and the brain. He had never created a processing chip before. He was taught in prod-ed that only a prod with five years of post-prod-ed had the ability to encode the millions, sometimes billions, of binary instructions necessary to achieve an independent function.

But Neil had learned from Un Fitt that the major logic designers had developed a giant subroutine database that had hundreds of millions of entries categorized by function, size, speed, and compatibility with other subroutines. All Neil had to do was to think of a function and then ask the system to search according to his parameters.

This system, Un Fitt had said in an early communication, was originally developed for general use by HI, Hackers International, but had been co-opted by MacroCode Corporation in a hostile event toward the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century. This database, a closely guarded secret, was updated hourly with logics created in-house, bought from external sources, or stolen. 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 unduprotocols 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."