Futureland - Nine Stories of an Imminent World (22 page)

"Hi, mister," she said.

"Hello, Tracie. How are you today?"

"You were sleepin'," she said mischievously. "I thought you were gonna fall down, but every time you almost did you sat up just in time."

"I did?"

"An' you were talkin' in your sleep, too," Tracie said while nodding her head.

"And what did I say?"

"Harmonica's cryin'." Tracie labored over the correct pronunciation.

"Harmoni . . ." Leon said, and then he realized what the child had heard. "Harmonic cryonics?"

"That's it," Tracie agreed. "What does that mean?"

"It's a way to keep living cells in their original condition by duplicating and isolating the material vibrations of their internal environments."

"Huh?"

"To keep someone alive forever in sleep without freezing them."

"Like Sleeping Beauty?"

"Just like her."

"But why would somebody wanna do that?"

Leon looked closely at the girl. She wore the cranberry dress and there was a blue elastic holding her hair up on her head.

"Do you know where I was just now?"

Tracie shook her head slowly, keeping her eyes on the professor's face.

"What do you want me to do?" he asked.

"Take me swimmin'?"

"Okay," he said. "You lead the way."

Up the path they went, smallish black man and smaller still girl.
The world,
a New Age monk once told Leon,
is a pious man dreaming of God. In the dream he sees God dreaming of him and in that
dream the man dreams of God.

Smallish black man and blond child hand in hand ascended the long upward path. The park's forest deepened as they went. The sun became brighter and Leon Jones wondered if he had died recently, if his brain were going through a final Pulsedream.

Maybe it's just a last spasm,
he thought.

But the smell of pine and the glare of the sun, the feeling of wind in the cuff of his jacket--they were all too pedestrian for Pulse. And it was warm. Leon had to take off his coat. His left knee ached as it always did when he attempted a steep climb.

Everything was real. More real even than the Pulse had been. More real than life itself had been, at least more real than he had felt for a very long time.

"It's right up there," Tracie shouted happily. She had thrown off the dress and ran in blue underpants up to the summit.

"Wait up," Leon cried, but Tracie couldn't hear him or couldn't stop. At the top of the path there was a fallen-down wooden gate that led into a broad lawn bordering upon a lake. There were dozens of picnickers playing and eating and swimming in the lake.

"Hi, Mom," Tracie shouted.

Leon saw a woman turn and wave. It was a tall woman in a blue T-shirt and blue jeans. She was talking to a man but he was on the other side of her and obscured from Leon's view. The woman moved as if she were going down to the lake but the man put a hand on her shoulder and they continued their talk. Leon was terrified but he didn't know why. He hurried toward the water. But before he got there Tracie's mother screamed exactly as she had done at the park days before. Leon knew this was a dream but at the same time it was also life and death. He hobbled down to the shore, where Tracie's body had just been dragged out of the water. People stood around her but no one was doing anything. Leon threw the child over his knee and pressed against her back.

Her mother was there and the man named Bill. Maybe William was Dr. Bel-Nan's original middle name. Tracie's mother was shouting, "She's dead! She's dead!" and trying to pull the child from Leon's knee. But he resisted her and kept going through the press-and-release exercise until the mother receded and the park faded. Tracie coughed and fell to the ground.

"Thanks," she said. "I knew you would save me."

"But why did I have to?"

"Because you had to," she said. "You had to come up here so you could see my world and save me. And now I can see your world and then . . ."

At that moment Leon felt his heart catch and he knew the patchwork memories of Tracie Rogers, daughter of Bill and Mom, from somewhere in California, at last count five years old--these memories were his own. She kept his heart beating and his lungs breathing; she watched for old dangers like a lion's roar. Her memories laced themselves around his deeper brain functions. She had become him and he had become her.

8

He was still on the floor near the coffin but no longer crying. The woman with yellow eyes, Bill, and a few others were checking the machinery that kept the harmonics on key.

"So you're awake, Leon," Bel-Nan said.

"Sure am, Bill. More awake than I ever been."

"I take it that you and my daughter have met?"

"What the fuck am I doin' here, man?"

Bel-Nan offered his hand. Leon took it and got to his feet. Again he felt strong and vital.

"Life everlasting," Bel-Nan answered. "From manhood to godhood."

"You sure it isn't just guilt that you let your daughter die?"

"She was the love of my life."

"Then why didn't you splice her into your head instead'a mine?"

"I'm the only one who could do the operation. And what if I died?"

"Sounds good to me," Leon said. "So what now?"

"I would expect you to know, Professor."

"Let's see," Leon mused. "You got a clone of the child somewhere. Maybe nine months or so. You take her personality from outta me and put it into the clone."

"The clone is twelve months, has the name of Tracie, and knows me as her father. Later on we will test the process on younger subjects."

"Man, you got a little girl. Why don't you just love her?"

"Tracie, or any living, sentient being, is unique. Her mother broke down after the accident. The only way to rouse her, to remake our family, is this operation."

"Why did you need me at all?" Leon asked. "Why not just go right from the original to the clone?"

"Money, Professor. The equipment I needed to follow up the examination was too great. And also I needed to replicate the cortical functions of the brain so that I wouldn't need to have her under treatment for so long restructuring lower brain functions."

"And what happens to me, Dr. Bel-Nan? What happens when you rip out the center of my brain?" The yellow-eyed woman looked down when she heard this question.

"You were dead when they brought you to me," Bel-Nan said. "Confined to a gravity chair, having to undergo shock treatments eighteen hours a day. Hardly able to speak more than a sentence before you went into spasm. There was no cure. There was no hope but me. I gave you life. And now I'm asking for repayment. Your few months of grace for the life of my daughter."

"What if I don't want to give up my life just yet?"

"We cannot wait. As time passes, Tracie's personality will become a part of you. We must move her while she is still distinct. And anyway, you want her to survive. You love her as much as I do." Leon thought about these last words. He did love the girl. He wanted her to be alive and happy. He wondered if there was a compromise that could be reached.

But while he thought a hand grabbed his shoulder. He felt a familiar tingling at his elbow and fell again. __________

"Wake up, Leon," a girl's voice said.

It was Tracie. But she had aged at least six months, taller now and wearing the same blue jeans that her mother had worn. Her face was just that much longer, and the happiness in her eyes was leavened with the awareness of Leon's fear.

"Where am I?" he asked.

"I don't know," she said. "I can't see what you see right away."

"Are they operating?"

"No."

"How can you be sure?"

"I heard something," she said. "They arrested my daddy for taking you away."

"When?"

"I don't know. I don't hear things right away, either. And you've been sleeping so it takes even longer."

"Daddy?"

Leon opened his eyes to see Fera standing above his bed. He was in a hospital. The ocean roared outside the window.

"Honey?"

"Yes, Daddy," the congresswoman from the Bronx replied. "How are you?"

"What happened?"

"Pell got your letter and he got the international corporate corps to free you."

"But how did you find me?"

"We put a tracer on you, Daddy. Don't get mad. It's just that when you first got out of the hospital you were so foggy. I worried that you might forget to carry your chip, so Pell had your dentist do it at your last checkup. And it's lucky he did."

"I'm not mad. Nothing belongs to me anyway."

"What do you mean?"

"Not my body or my mind, not my history or even what I know. But it ain't bad. Naw. It ain't bad at all.

'Cause I'm still feelin' and thinkin' somethin'."

"They want you to go to a government laboratory for some tests, Daddy," Fera said. "It's in a nice place."

"What happened to Bel-Nan?"

"He was sent back to the polar prison. MacroCode paid off on his policy. They took the whole installation back for study and critique."

"Are they going to start with transplantations?"

"I don't know, Daddy. I don't know."

__________

That night Leon went outside to walk on the beach. He didn't know what ocean it was or what sky. But the air was warm and the waves crashed. He walked down the shore with a small child at his side. They talked and laughed, but only he left footprints in the sand.

Little Brother

1

Frendon Blythe was escorted into courtroom Prime Nine by two guards, one made of flesh and the other of metal, plastic, four leather straps, and about a gram of cellular gray matter. The human guard was five feet three inches tall, wearing light blue trousers with dark blue stripes down the outer seam of each pant leg. He wore a blue jacket, the same color as the stripes, and a black cap with a golden disk above the brim. Thick curly hair twisted out from the sides of the cap and a dark gray shadow covered his chin and upper lip. Other than this threat of facial hair, Otis Brill, as his name tag plainly read, had skin as pale as a blind newt's eye.

Otis had been his only human contact for the six days that Frendon had been the prisoner of Sacramento's newly instituted, and almost fully automated, Sac'm Justice System. Otis Brill was the only full-time personnel at Sac'm. And he was there only as a pair of eyes to see firsthand that the system was working properly.

The other guard, an automated wetware chair called Restraint Mobile Device 27, used straps to hold Frendon's ankles and wrists fast to the legs and arms. RMD 27 floated silently down the wide hall of justice on a thousand tiny jets of air. The only sound was the squeaking of Otis Brill's rubber shoes on the shiny Glassone floor.

The gray metal doors to courtroom Prime Nine slid open and the trio entered. Lights from the high ceiling winked on. Frendon looked around quickly but there was only one object in the music-hall-size room: a dark gray console maybe five meters high and two wide. In the center of the console was a light gray screen a meter square.

RMD 27 positioned itself before the screen and uttered something in the high frequency language of machines. The screen lit up and a cowled image appeared. The image was photo-animae and therefore seemed real. Frendon could not make out the face under the shadows of the dark cowl. He knew that the image was manufactured, that there was no face, but still he found himself craning his neck forward to glimpse the nose or eye of his judge, jury, and executioner.

"Frendon Blythe?" a musical tenor voice asked.

There was a flutter at the corner of the high ceiling and Frendon looked up to see a pigeon swoop down from a line of small windows thirty feet above.

"Goddamn birds," Otis cursed. "They get in here and then stay up at the windahs until they kick. Stupid birds don't know the stupid windahs don't open."

"Frendon Blythe?" the voice repeated. In the tone there was the slightest hint of command.

"What?" Frendon replied.

"Are you Frendon Ibrahim Blythe, U-CA-M-329-776-ab-4422?"

Frendon rubbed his fingers together.

"Answer," Otis Brill said.

"It is required that you answer as to your identity," the cowled console image said.

"What if I lied?" Frendon asked.

"We would know."

"What if I thought I was somebody but really I wasn't?"

"You have been physiologically examined by RMD 27. There is no evidence of brain trauma or aberrant neuronal connection that would imply amnesia, senility, or concussion."

"Why am I strapped to this chair here?"

"Are you Frendon Ibrahim Blythe?" the cowled figure asked again.

"Will you answer my questions if I answer yours?"

After a second and a half delay the machine said, "Within reason."

"Okay, then, yeah, I'm Frendon Blythe."

"Do you know why you're here?"

"Why you got me strapped to this chair?"

"You are considered dangerous. The restraint is to protect the property of the state and to guard the physical well-being of Officer Brill."

"Don't you got a neural-cam attached to my brain?"

"Yes."

"Then the chair here could stop me before I did anything violent or illegal." After a three-second delay there came a high-pitched burst. The straps eased their grips and were retracted into the plastic arms and legs of the wetware device.

Frendon stood up for the first time in hours. In the past six days he had only been released long enough to use the toilet. He was still connected to the chair by a long plastic tube that was attached at the base of his skull.

He was a tall man, and slender. His skin was the red-brown color of a rotting strawberry. His eyes were murky instead of brown and his wiry hair contained every hue from black to almost-orange.

"That's more like it," Frendon said with a sigh.

"Do you know why you're here?"

"Because you won and I lost," Frendon replied, quoting an old history lesson he learned while hiding from the police in an Infochurch pew.

"You have been charged with the killing of Officer Terrance Bernard and the first-degree assault of his partner, Omar LaTey."