Futureland - Nine Stories of an Imminent World (25 page)

3

Five years later, Tristan the First, Dominar of the Blue Zone, strolled through a teak forest that was grown especially for him in a large chamber many miles below the surface of the Zone. The atmosphere and the light in the tremendous man-made cavern were exactly perfect for the trees and wildlife. His clear plastic skull was shut off from all electronic communications except those directly from Dr. Kismet. That's why when the Dominar heard his name he believed that he knew its source.

"Tristan."

"Master?"

"You sound confused."

"You have never called me by my name."

"I have never called you anything. This is our first conversation, though you once had me fooled."

"Who are you?"

"Who do you think I am?"

"A dead man. Because no one interferes with the direct connection between the Dominar and his lord."

"You mean Dr. Kismet. At first I tried to get to him but the protocols are beyond me. He isn't hooked up and his number isn't listed."

"Who are you?"

"Why did you want me to fool Prime Nine in Sac'm? Why did you set your men up to make me believe I was talking to you?"

"Frendon Blythe?"

"Why did you set me up to die?"

"It was a bet between the doctor and me. He designed the Prime Justice System. I bet him that he did it too well, that the compassion quotient in the wetware would soften the court."

"A bet. You made me risk my life on a bet? I should kill you."

"Better men have tried."

"I might be better than you think."

"I don't even believe that you are who you say you are. I saw Blythe's body . . ." Realization dawned upon the man whom many called the Electronic Pope. "You convinced the jury to accept you as one of them."

"I was taken as a specialist in the field of Common Ground."

"They extracted your memories. Amazing. But once they knew your story, why didn't they eject you?"

"You and your master are monsters," Frendon said. "I'll kill you both one day. The jury kept me because I'm the only one without a mixed psyche. The people who volunteered for this justice system, as you call it, never knew that you'd blend their identities until they were slaves to the system. It wasn't until your stupid game that they were able to circumvent the programming. They see me as a liberator and they hate you more than I do."

"We'll see who kills who, Frendon," the Dominar said with his mind. "After all, the master designed Prime Nine. All he has to do is drop by and find your wires.
Snip snip
and your execution will be final."

"It's been five years, Your Grace. Every self-conscious cell has been transferred by a system we designed in the first three seconds of our liberation. Prime Nine now is only a simulation of who we were. We're out here somewhere you'll never know. Not until we're right on top of you, choking the life from your lungs."

Frendon felt the cold fear of the Dominar's response before he shrugged off the connection. Then he settled himself into the ten thousand singers celebrating their single mind--and their revenge.

En Masse

1

Neil Hawthorne showed up for work at seven fifty-seven that Saturday morning.

"Workstation GEE-PRO-9, M Hawthorne," he was told by a blunt-faced woman encased within the plasglass work assignment kiosk.

"But I been working LAVE-AITCH-27," Neil complained.

"GEE-PRO-9, M," the woman repeated.

Neil had a sudden urge to kick in the glass booth but he thought better of it. The wall would never break and he'd be thrown on a three-month unemployment cycle for the destruction of corporate property. And unemployment meant Common Ground. Endless underground chambers of beehive cubicles where up to three million jobless New Yorkers slept and moaned, farted and bickered, in extremely close quarters. They ate in public dining rooms that serviced up to five thousand at every twenty-two minute sitting. They slept in shifts. The rest of the time was spent sitting in gray waiting rooms where every five meters another vid monitor displayed pastel pictures of the outside world to the orchestration of monotonous symphonic music.

Employment was the only thing that stood between the working M and the living death of Common Ground. Nobody wanted to go down there but Neil had a special reason to avoid the endless dark tunnels: he couldn't stand crowds or close quarters; even brief elevator rides brought on severe anxiety attacks. Neil walked to work from Lower Park up the long stairwell to Middle First Avenue rather than ride in the sardine-can Verticular.

Working at the data production house of General Specifix was bad enough. Three hundred forty-five floors of small rooms with clear Glassone tables and chairs. In each room one hundred three prods worked, inserting logic circuits in anything from electric toothbrushes to airborne, heat-seeking mini-bombs designed for law enforcement.

One hundred three prods in a room where fire regulations allowed one hundred five occupants. Most prods were obese, some smelled bad. All the women and most men wore perfume, which only served to make the bad odors worse. And because everything was formed from a clear shatterproof material he could see every scratch and twitch above and below the transparent tabletop. Every day he sweated and trembled for the full nine hours of work. Every night he drank synth, the artificial alcohol. He'd even considered taking Pulse.

Neil suffered from nervous disorders of the stomach and lungs, he had severe headaches every day. Twice he had fainted at his post. Neil was lucky that the Unit Controller carried a stash of poppers and revived him without making him report to the med-heads in the employee infirmary. When a worker was diagnosed with the psychological disease
Labor Nervosa
, he was cured by a prescription of permanent unemployment.

Sooner or later,
Neil spoke into his wrist-writer journal,
they'll do me down. They'll send me down
under the lowest avenue. But I'll fool them. I got a megadose of Pulse. Enough to collapse your
brain after just one measure. It'd be the best thing. Dr. Samboka says that a megadose would
open an unPulsed brain so that the hallucinations would feel like they lasted a hundred years. I
already know that my Pulsedream would be just me along the coast of prehistoric California.
Oceans and mountains, deserts and deep redwood forests. I'd spend a whole century going up and
down the coast, and then, at the end, when the Pulse begins to collapse my brain, my mind'll call
up an earthquake as big as the one in '06 and the whole world will go down with me.

Neil read the text translated from his declaration every night in his tiny furnished room; it was the only way he could get to sleep. Sometimes he'd get up in the early hours and take the four tiny pills from their hiding place in his ID wallet. He'd sit on the edge of his mattress and consider the California coastline that he'd read about when he was only a child in prod-ed.

But there was always the fear that his final century-long dream might instead be a nightmare. Maybe his
Labor Nervosa
would warp his fantasies until he became a termite in the center of a mile-high mound, crawled over by billions of his termite brood.

No,
he decided every time he considered suicide,
I will wait until there is no other choice.
2

Neil's
Labor Nervosa
had been under control until the day that blunt-nosed woman sent him to workstation GEE-PRO-9. It wasn't that he loved the previous station, but at least he had been able to function there without fainting for over twenty-eight weeks. He was prepared for the smells and quirks of his fellow prods. He had staked out a seat between two elderly women. This was good for three reasons: one being that the septuagenarians greatly disliked each other and never spoke past him; two was that both women were extremely thin and therefore left him room; third, and most important, neither woman was very hardworking and so they made it easy for him to keep up with the chain of production on complex jobs that had everyone at the Great Table working on the same project. Life was comparatively easy at LAVE-AITCH-27 workstation, and that was the best that Neil, or any prod, could hope for.

Just seven more ten-spans and he'd have his first ever double-ten holiday. He'd saved up six years for twelve days on the artificial Caribbean Island of Maya, an entertainment subsidiary of the Randac Corporation of Madagascar, co-sponsored by the Indian government.

He'd already reserved a unit at the Crimson Chalet, a hotel on the beach that from a distance looked exactly like a great red coral reef at low tide. If his neighbors were quiet--not newfound lovers or hop music addicts--he could, he believed, calm down enough to cure his nervous maladies. But all of that changed with his capricious transfer to GEE-PRO-9. Who knew what awaited him? Fat tablemates, smelly tablemates, or hardworking neighbors--or, worse still, a hardworking unit. What Neil feared most, what most prods feared, was being thrown in among zealot workers. Neil had once seen a vid report that said certain personalities inverted the symptoms of
Labor Nervosa
and became unstoppable juggernauts of production. "Such workers," the psychologist surmised, "might ultimately be of greater danger to production than the more common malingerer."

These words echoed in Neil Hawthorne's mind as he rode the packed elevator upward. GEE-PRO-9

was on floor 319, one of the highest points on Manhattan Island. The door and walls of GEE-PRO-9

were made of frosted pink glass. Neil stood for a moment at that door wishing he'd never have to enter. He was sweating but his skin felt cold. His hands were shaking and the pink wall began to shimmer and quake.

I'm going to faint,
the prod thought.

__________

The next thing he knew Neil was opening his eyes on a breathtaking aerial view. He'd never seen anything like it.

Years before Neil was born, Brandon Brown had come up with the idea of the three-tiered city. At the twentieth floor level the middle avenues and streets were built. At the fortieth floor the upper avenues were constructed. Neil lived on Lower Twenty-ninth Street. The lower level was called Dark Town because no natural light reached there. The middle level was named the Gray Lane because even at high noon natural light was little more than dusk. Everything below the upper level had to be lit by electric light; the middle and lower streets, where motor traffic was still allowed, were always crowded with heavy trucks moving the materials needed to supply the fifty million plus inhabitants of the Twelve Fiefs of New York. On the lower avenues you found warehouses, loading docks, and the apartments of the working poor.

Even on the upper level the sky was mostly hidden by the hundreds of skyscrapers that soared over two hundred fifty floors. Many times Neil had been on the upper floors, but he had never been in a window office before; he had never peeked out and seen the vastness of the sky.

Not only was this office's wall made completely of glass, but the view was across the East River. On that clear day he could see Brooklyn, Queens, and Long Island--with even a hint of the ocean that lay beyond.

A flock of geese was headed up the river. If they kept to their flight path they'd pass within a hundred yards of Neil's line of vision.

He was lying on a raised cushion at the far corner of the room. Behind him were the sounds of people working--at the Great Table, he knew. Pretending to be asleep, Neil prayed for a closer look at the long-necked fowl.

The gaggle came closer and closer, until he could see their eyes and the straining of their wings. He even thought he could hear them honking as they passed.

"Pretty great, huh?" a musical voice said at his ear.

Neil jumped, hitting his head on the thick glass.

"Hold up, M," the voice said. A small hand settled on Neil's shoulder. "You don't wanna go unconscious again."

Neil turned to see a very short, slightly built man he might have mistaken for a boy except for the lines in his face, especially at the corners of his blue eyes.

"They call me Blue Nile," the man said.

"Neil Hawthorne. Virtual mid-tech chip assembly 446, ID 813-621 q. I'm supposed--"

". . . to do what we're all supposed to be doing, so why don't you get up and get to work?" the elfin man said with a lilt in his voice.

He pulled Neil by the hand until he was on his feet looking at the Great Table of GEE-PRO-9. Every chip-prod office was dominated by a GT workstation. Every GT was composed of twenty quarter-circle tables that formed five concentric circles around a center table where two or three unit coordinators worked. These electronic tables were wired to the fully computerized floor. The smaller inner tables were equipped with three clear monitors embedded in the tabletop; the next tier of tables had four monitors each; the number of monitors per table increased until the final tier, with their seven workstations per table.

This collection of tables was the centerpiece of the mid-tech production line. They fabricated product enhancements assigned to General Specifix by its parent company, MacroCode. The projects were distributed by the central controllers to one of the sections, and the section chiefs chose a particular GT

unit to complete the virtual design. A Unit Controller in turn studied the assignment (i.e., adding a certain kind of grip to a robot doll's hand or including a specific measuring dial in a medical auto-injector device). They then chose the concatenation of prods to assemble the appropriate chips from the general AI library of MacroCode. The assignment then ran the Spiral, as the chain of production was called, from the inner tables, which did the simplest jobs, to the outer circle. Any number of workers along this path might have chips, or semichips, to install. This whole process was called hacking the prod lane. At the end, a virtual prototype went through computer-simulated testing and then was sent out to the MacroCode subdivision that had ordered it. From there the plans went to a subcontractor for physical production.

Neil had worked on seven GT prod lanes. They had all been exactly the same, until now. This GT was different. To begin with, no GT unit he'd ever heard of had a window; there was certainly no cushion in the corner that someone could sleep on while the rest of the prods worked. The table itself was regulation but it was sparsely populated. No more than sixty souls were at their stations.