Futureland - Nine Stories of an Imminent World (35 page)

"Here you may roam until there is a body for you to inhabit again," Un Fitt whispered between the thundering waves. "And a world worth living in."

The Nig in Me

1

"You look like shit, Jamey," Harold Bottoms said to his cubicle mate. It was Thirdday.

"I feel bad. Sick. It's that striped flu going around. I got the rash on my chest."

"Dog, why didn't you stay home?"
And keep your germs there,
Harold thought.

"I can't. One more sick day and I go on rotation. You know I can't take another three months underground."

"Whoever thought up'a some shit like that anyway? I only got four points to go my own self."

"If I go off the force one more time Sheila says she'll pull the plug. Three times more and I'm White Noise."

White Noise, Backgrounder, Muzak Jack--words that defined the poor souls who lost their labor rights permanently.

"That's okay, J," Harold told his friend. "Lotsa people got that flu. It don't seem so bad."

"You know anybody black who got it?" Jamey asked.

"Sure. Almost everybody comin' down. They said on the news that everybody and his uncle got the striped flu."

"
You
don't have it."

Nor could Harold think of any of his black friends who did. He'd seen Asians and a few Mexicans, India Indians and lots of white people with the red or brown striations on their upper arms. But he'd never seen any Negro-looking people with them. Neither had he heard any black people with the wheezy cough or complaining about the nagging headache associated with the minor flu. They hadn't said a thing about a racial aspect of the disease on ITV, but that was to be expected. Racial image profiling had been a broadcast offense for more than two decades.

"It's just a little virus, man," Harold said. "Lotsa people got it and lots don't. Wagner down in print don't. Neither Jane Flynn, Nestor whatshisname over in vids, or your bud Fat Phil. They're all white."

"I guess," Jamey said. "I guess you're right."

"Sure I am," Harold said. "Now let's hit the files before M Shirley gets out her marker." __________

"M Halloway, M Bottoms," M Shirley Bride said by way of greeting later that morning.

"Morning, M Bride," Harold said to the boss.

"Morning--" Jamey Halloway got out, and then he coughed.

"You got that flu?" the Unit Controller asked.

"No, M, not me. Went to the tobacco den to meet a friend. We talked too long in the smoke and, well, I kinda lost my voice."

Shirley Bride sniffed the air with her delicate nostrils and frowned.

"You don't smell like smoke." she said.

"Scrubbed off in the tanks last night."

Public bathing in recycled waters was the new rage since the water laws. FastBath of NYC was the largest franchise in North America.

"Oh," she said. "Because if you were sick I could send you home."

"Then you might as well kick me out of my house and annul my marriage license, too."

"That doesn't cut it with a controller," Shirley Bride said. "If I thought the office would be better off I'd have to send you home even if it did put you over seventeen. If I didn't I'd get a permanent mark. You know they're harder on management than they are on cyclers."

Harold and Jamey both hid the derision they felt. Upper management got the Life Plan. They were covered for anything short of a neutron bomb, as the outlawed Wildcat Union claimed on ghostnet.

"But I can send you home without a mark if that's a real cough," Bride continued. "It's an epidemic now, and the uppers have decided that I can give out nonpunitive sick leave." A cough came unbidden to Harold Bottoms's lips.

"Not you, M," Bride said.

It was from that moment Harold could trace the beginning of his suspicions.
2

That night Harold decided to stay in--or out of the viral cluster--and watch the IT curve. The curve was the latest innovation of Internet presentation. A thin sheet of plastic nine feet wide, stretched out to its full length, and four and a half feet high. The screen rolled out on a stand so that it curved around, forming an inner space that was two feet deep at the center and six feet across. Using the chip technology in the stand, the laser optics woven into the plastic could create three-dimensional images.

". . . and hello New York," onetime rapper Chantel was saying. "Well, it's finally happened--Claw-Cybertech Angola has annexed Luxembourg, making that business-state the first Afro-European nation. The Luxembourgers, as you will remember, have been opposing this deal for the past seven years. A general strike led to violence in that tiny nation's capital today, where some three hundred thousand turned out to protest the merger. When CEO Moto of Claw-Cybertech ordered out security forces, the crowd threw flaming balls of waste tar. The protesters made no attempt to hide the racial nature of their political unrest."

An image of thousands of angry protesters appeared in the curve. Many were hurling flaming balls of waste tar, a by-product of modern recycling dumps, at the security forces, which advanced in wheeled plexiplas bubbles, debilitating rioters with dozens of stun whips flailing out from all sides.

"Lars McDermott," Chantel said, reappearing on the screen, "corporate ambassador to the UN, had this to say about today's protest and annexation."

The image of the middle-aged black woman shifted to the full image of a young white man in a rather close-fitting black andro-blouse.

"I applaud the annexation," the man said in an indistinct European accent. "And, no, I do not feel that the Luxembourgers have any reason to fear this move. International Law expressly prohibits migrant labor from overwhelming a new territory beyond prescribed limits within the first twenty-five years."

"But hasn't Claw-Cybertech asked for a relaxation of the migratory clause?" a bodiless, masculine voice asked.

"That is only for them to be able to iron out a few labor problems in their Angolan holdings." Lars McDermott's smile belied his answer.

"Isn't the unemployment cycle in Angola now up to thirty-five percent?" the voice inquired. That smile again, and, "Merely a transitional phase. Claw-C has to retool for a more advanced chip market. That has nothing to do with Europe."

Harold was astonished at how the extra chip he'd bought for the curve cleared up his digital reception. He said, "My fav," and the station changed to a scene where three beautiful black women in military uniform were adjusting weapons holsters on their breasts before jumping out of an aircraft hovering over a moonlit island.

The winking lunar light between the ripples of the sea seemed so real that Harold moved closer to the IT

curve, which took up fully half of his Tribeca loft subdivide. Enchanted by the ocean, he stuck his hand in and it disappeared momentarily under the waves. Chesty Love dived into his palm and swam out through his fingers.

"Hey hey hey." Jamey Halloway's blond head replaced the hovercraft. He had a maniacal look on his face. Harold leaped backward, shocked by the ITV buddy break-in call.

"Hey, man, you scared me," Harold said.

"Turn on the two-way," Jamey commanded.

"Two-way on," Harold intoned.

Immediately the curve became Jamey's room in the Bubble, a condominium that floated off the eastern shore of Staten Island. A small patch in the lower left-hand corner continued the
Devil Girls
show.

"How you feelin'?" Harold asked.

"Flu's gone," Jamey replied. "Just like the med-heads said, three days and it clears up. You wanna go out?"

"Naw, man. I might pick up somethin' out there."

"Aw, com' on, bro. You know the nigs don't get it."

"Hey, man. Why you wanna use that kinda language?"

"Sorry, bro. I didn't know you were sensitive."

"I'm not sensitive," Harold said. "It's just that it's not respectful."

"I said I'm sorry, okay? Can we go out now?"

"I don't know."

"I found Yasmine," Jamey said in a tantalizing tone. "Where?"

"Blanklands."

"No shit?"

"Not even an address. Down in an alley off of Gore near Yclef Terrace. You need a chip to get in and a hundred dollars cover to get out--and that doesn't include Yas."

"I'll meet you there," Harold said. Then he clapped his hands together three times, hard. The screen went blank and the curve rolled itself up into a scroll.

3

Harold rode his adult-size tricycle down Lower Broadway, headed for the Brooklyn Bridge. There had been no motorized traffic allowed on Broadway for over thirty years. A quarter of the streets in Lower and Upper Manhattan were closed to motor-driven vehicles because no cycler could afford the leasing fees and insurance rates on an automobile. Cycler was a term meant for those who rode the unemployment cycles, but it also fit those same individuals' mode of transportation. Harold rode down the crowded avenue looking at the crumbling old brick that showed here and there between holo-ads. Lower Manhattan was falling apart. Every now and then a building was refaced. But the only real improvements came when big business could find a profit niche. Lately that niche had been leased window holo-ads. All you had to do was put a holo-screen across your outside wall space and allow whatever advertiser to display his wares on it. At a dollar per square foot per day--for prime space, at prime time--you could make pocket money for the kids. And now with the new screens you could look out of your windows as if there were nothing there at all.

All down Broadway there were animated signs for leasing IT curves, household utilities, even furniture and some finer clothes. Almost everything by 2055 was leased. That stabilized the profit factor and created a built-in insurance policy. No one owned anything except the manufacturers. Harold knew a lot about leasing because L&L Leasing was the company he worked for. L&L acted as a middleman for various industries. They advertised and brokered the deals while the major manufacturers supplied the goods.

"The people live on the installment plan," XX Y, the revolutionary, said on the poster circulated over ghostnet, "while corpse-barons buy up the sky."

The slogan played its way through Harold's mind while he rolled over the Brooklyn Bridge. He knew that every word of what the militant chromosome of RadCons 6 and 7 said was true. But he also remembered what his professor, Len Gorzki, had said in Political Science 101 at City College.

"Product is everywhere and everything," the slender, AIDS-ridden educator exclaimed. "From the bricks in the wall to the chair under your butts to your butt itself. It's all product, either product or waste." Harold understood the threat posed to him. He believed in XX's ideal but lived according to the cycles. __________

Blanklands was a moveable feast. A bar, restaurant, Eros-Haus, DJ joint hotbed of perversions and alternative lifestyles.

Yasmine Mü--onetime executive secretary for L&L Leasing--was now an Eros-girl working illegally for the drifting Blanklands boutique.

Harold had never met anyone like her. Her Persian family had become fabulously wealthy by developing one of the first labor corps in the Middle East.

A labor corps was a large group of men and women who did a specific kind of labor, usually manual, either at a home base or on location. From apple picking in Vermont to disaster relief in Peru, the labor corps provided sweat and sinew for an annual wage.

Yasmine's parents owned a palace in southern Persia. They also owned two hundred thousand hands. Yasmine was their only child. Everything would one day belong to her. But she left it all for the prod's life in New York City.

"My mum and da," she said in her tutored English accent, "don't see that it's slavery. If you got married you were fired and fined. Salaries are paid in advance and so if you quit you're arrested. Then the government confiscates your labor account and you're forced to work out your term without pay. Everybody says that it's good for the people. Da says that some people are made to work and others are made to rule. So I left and came here to live as a worker."

She confided in Harold, called him a friend. But she never returned his ardent passions. Harold had loved her from the first moment he saw the grim longing in her eyes.

Jamey was waiting in the alley when Harold got there.

"Hey, man," Harold said. "I thought you said the place was here."

"It is."

"Then how come we're the only people here?"

"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.