Futureland - Nine Stories of an Imminent World (26 page)

"What is this?" Neil uttered.

"GEE-PRO-9, M," Blue Nile replied.

The little man, still holding Neil by the hand, led the stunned prod down one of the aisles toward the inner table. There sat two women. These were both of African heritage but they looked quite different from each other. One was smallish and honey-colored. Her hair had what seemed to be natural blond highlights and her eyes were the color of gold. The other woman was larger, though not fat, and very black. Her features were generous and sculpted. Neil doubted if she had even one knot of European DNA in her cells.

The black woman smiled.

"M Hawthorne?"

"Yes, M."

"Athria," the woman said. She stood up and extended a hand.

Neil had never shaken hands with a controller before. He rarely shook hands with anyone. He was embarrassed by his perpetually sweaty palms.

"This is Oura," Athria said, indicating the golden woman.

"Pleased to meet you, Neil," Oura said with a smile.

"Yeah," Neil said.

The women and Blue Nile laughed.

"Don't be nervous, M," Blue Nile said. "This is GEE-PRO-9."

"I never been anyplace like this," Neil said.

"We call ourselves the lost lane," Oura said. "Somewhere along the line we got assigned a special projects title and none of the central controllers question our methods."

"What methods?"

"Things work a little differently here, Neil," Athria said. "We don't go the lane."

"What?"

"Not too much too fast, Atty," Oura said to the black woman. "Let's just let Neil settle in today. Nile?"

"Yes, M?"

"Un says to set Neil up with the Third Eye project. Put him on the upper tier."

"I'm a midleveler, M," Neil said then. "I don't have the creds for outer-circle work."

"Don't worry," the golden woman replied. "You'll be fine." Blue Nile led the confused prod toward the outer circle, to a table that had no other workers.

"You can sit backward you know," the little man told Neil.

"What?"

"Control double-space switches the screen. We read your med-docs. They diagnosed claustrophobia. Open sky's the best cure for that."

"They won't mind?"

"Who?"

"The controllers."

"You mean Atty and Or? No. They don't care as long as the job gets done."

"But . . ." Neil stopped talking because he felt light-headed again. Blue Nile dragged the clear plastic chair under the table, set it upright to face the window, and slapped the slender backrest, to indicate that Neil should take a seat. Then he hit a few keys and the virtual monitor appeared backward, just as the little man had said it would. The nervous young prod sat and looked down on the semiopaque images that appeared inside the clear plastic of the table before him.

"This is an important project, Neilio," Blue Nile said. "It's called the Third Eye. It's a device that will record and enhance all sensory data that the wearer experiences: sight, sound, temperature, even atmosphere content and ultraviolets and sounds beyond human range. It's a perfect passive device for police evidence or espionage and a good active device for soldiers in the field." On the screen was a simple line figure of a man with a huge eye embedded in his forehead.

"I can't do this level. I mean, I do robotic fingers and surface undulations. This work is beyond anything I was ever taught. I've never even heard of ultraviolet preceptor chips."

"That's because none exist."

"Then how do you expect me to--"

"Dr. Kismet said in his intro to
The Digital Production Line
that micro-logic design can address any mechanical question a human being can ask."

"But you have to know how to use it."

"There's seven workstations at this table--all for you."

"How long do I have to finish?"

"Work at it for a few weeks and then report to Oura on how you're coming."

"A few weeks? What about the M after me?"

"There is no one after you. The Third Eye will be your design." Blue Nile left Neil at his workstation considering the sky. The only clouds he had ever seen before had been cut off by buildings at the end of the long blocks of Upper Manhattan. Even at the East River the skyline of Brooklyn blocked the light from street level. On the other side of Old Manhattan the Hudson River had long ago been built over to allow New York to obtain seven of its twelve fiefs from New Jersey.

Neil had never seen clouds like these, larger than any building, larger than Old Manhattan itself. He tried to work but he was distracted. He'd never been in an office like this one. Maybe it was a test, a test they gave after a prod was found unconscious in the hall in front of his new assignment. He might not even be in office GEE-PRO-9. He could be in the subbasement psychological evaluation area. This window could be a screen pretending to be the sky outside.

I wonder if it's real, though,
Neil thought.
If it's film and not computer-generated.
He couldn't leave the office to check where they were, that was New York law. Prod rooms were designed with portable toilets against the wall and food machines near the door. Lunch breaks were to be taken at your workstation, this was so for all buildings of over one hundred eighty floors.
Due to the high density of population, hall traffic must be controlled in case of emergency
evacuation,
the ordinance read. The only way to leave the building, outside of the prod's prescribed exit time, was by obtaining an escalator pass. But past the fiftieth floor the escalators took too long: by the time you got halfway to the street it would be time to return to your station. So Neil had to pretend that this impossible work situation was real. He applied himself to the project he'd been given, trying to remember all the look-up protocols they'd taught him in high school, but his eyes kept raising from the table to look out on the sky. There was a strange yellowish gray mist on the horizon underneath an extremely dark cloud.

"That's a rain cloud," a feminine voice said.

She was a dark-colored young woman with features so strong and set that her face seemed almost artificial.

"What?" Neil asked nervously.

"That mist." She had a southern accent. "It's rain. Pretty soon it's gonna hit the windah."

"We can't talk."

"Uh-huh, we can. They let us take breaks whenever we need to."

"Breaks? Whenever you want?"

"Whenever you need 'em," the girl said.

Neil thought her face was ugly, but there was something very sensual about the way her mouth made words.

"That's crazy."

"Why?"

"Because . . . because nobody would ever work if they could just stop whenever they wanted."

"Not when you
want
it," she said, "when you
need
it."

"What's the difference?" Neil asked.

"Don't you ever get tired sometimes when you workin'?" The woman sat on top of the workstation next to Neil's. He looked around to see how Athria or Oura would react, but they didn't seem to notice where their prods were or what they were doing.

"Don't you?" she asked again.

"Um, well, sometimes."

"Like you lookin' at the screen and it seem like it don't make no sense whatever."

"Yeah," Neil said, giving in to the conversation. "Most of the time."

"It wouldn't be so bad if you could get up and stretch your legs. It wouldn't be too much if you could go talk for a few minutes."

"But that's a D-mark," Neil said. "Seventeen'a them and you're in Common Ground."

"But they don't give no D-marks here," she said. "They just say get back to work, but in a nice way."

"What's your name?"

"Nina."

"Nina what?"

"Bossett. I'm from down Mississippi."

"I'm Neil Hawthorne. I was born here in Manhattan."

"Look," Nina said, pointing at the window. "Here it comes." Neil turned and was greeted by heavy sheets of rain. A bright branch of lightning flashed over Brooklyn and a distant rumble of thunder boomed in through the glass.

"It's beautiful," Nina said, touching the big knuckle of Neil's right hand. For his part Neil was fighting dizziness again. He'd never seen rain from a high window, nor had he been touched by a woman with real passion in her voice. He'd visited the Eros-Haus almost every month to be with the impatient sex-worker girls, he'd seen meteorological reports depicting rainstorms on the 3D vid, but he'd never looked out on the world from such a vantage point, he'd never had a woman touch him in a gesture of friendship.

"I gotta get back to work," Neil said, worrying that the ugly girl with the sensuous mouth would look through the clear tabletop and see the erection pushing its way down his thigh.

"Okay," Nina said. She hopped off the desk. "But could we eat lunch together later?" Neil didn't want to have anything to do with her. "Okay," he said in spite of his thoughts. __________

For the next few hours Neil Hawthorne tried to come up with a plan to create the Third Eye sensory recording device. He had never designed a product before. No GT office he'd ever worked in actually designed a device. All they did was apply circuits to systems that needed them added in the most economical and functional ways. Inserting a timepiece in a suitcase handle or embedding a vid-sys in a bathroom tile--that was the kind of work mid-techs did. All of the technology already existed, had been used and proven, but the Third Eye was new ground. It wasn't an insertion but an original design. There were too many circuits involved to put them on someone's head, and no one wore hats in the year 2055. For a while he considered putting the control circuits and mem-boards in the user's shoes, with ultrasound transmitting devices, but then he wondered what would happen if the user got separated from his shoes or if it was a lady user with skimpy heels.

The sky cleared and Neil spent over forty minutes looking out at the distance. His breathing was deep and satisfying. He could hear gusts of wind now and then.

The shoe question wasn't important anyway. Neil knew of no device that could record and transmit the range of data that Blue Nile's file described. Parts of some circuit boards performed some of the functions, but they would have to be dismantled and restructured to specialize. Neil had no idea of how to use streamliner chip protocols.

A peregrine hawk landed on the ledge outside the window. It perched there looking down for a meal. Neil stopped breathing and held his hands together as if he were going to pray.

"You ready for lunch yet, Neil?" Nina asked.

The hawk dropped from the ledge. Neil didn't know if it was diving after a pigeon or scared off by Nina's approach.

"What time is it?" he asked.

"Fifteen thirty-seven."

"What?"

"You been workin' hard up here."

"Lunch is over, then."

"Naw," Nina said. "Lunch up in here is whenever you want it."

"What's the hot box in the vendor machine today?"

"We ain't got one'a them."

"Then how do you get lunch?"

"They get it sent up, from the cafeteria."

This convinced Neil that he was undergoing some kind of psychological test. The cafeteria food was only for the highest-level workers. He decided to ride it out, to prove to the psych-controllers that he was able to function.

"Then I must have missed it," Neil replied, resigning himself to hunger.

"Naw, honey," the strange prod said. "They get it delivered to the Unit Controller's office."

"The UC's office. We can't go in there."

Nina smiled and grabbed Neil by the arm.

"Com'on," she said.

The young woman pulled and Neil followed. He didn't want to go but he wasn't worried about getting in trouble. He was clearly the victim of on-the-job sexual harassment. The International Union of Production Workers' rule book clearly stated that
physical contact beyond accepted consensual
greeting was forbidden in any workspace.
This meant that even a husband and wife exchanging a hug on work time were liable to get three D-marks each for sexual harassment. Nina dragged Neil down one of the aisles between the concentric tables to Athria and Oura's desk.

"Neil don't think he could have lunch in the UC's office," she blurted out. Oura looked up, while her partner kept her gaze concentrated on her table screen.

"Of course you can," the golden-skinned, golden-eyed, golden-haired woman said. "We all do."

"But it's against the rules." Neil postured for the cameras that he knew had to be recording the scene.

"Not any rules here," Athria said without looking up.

Neil glanced down at the dark woman's screen and saw that she was watching
Ito Iko,
the world-famous Japanese soap opera about an ancient Chinese royal family in the ninth century.

"That's right," Oura said.

"But don't you two use the office?" Neil asked.

"No more than anybody else."

"But you're the UCs," he insisted.

"No," Athria said, peering up over her glasses. "We're just prods. We sit here because we're good at labor distribution, but we're not the bosses."

"Come on," Nina said, again pulling Neil by the arm.

__________

"It's different here," the Mississippian was saying as she led Neil into the UC's office. This smaller room had an enclosed landing that jutted out from the building. Neil headed straight for the glass-walled outcropping, clenching his fists and breathing deeply.

"The UCs never come in," Nina continued.

"What do you mean they never come in?"

"They just send instructions over the net and we follow them. A lotta the prods don't come in every day."

"What do you mean? Everybody is on a four-day week, everybody in the twelve fiefs."

"Well, yeah." Nina hesitated for the first time. "We all report four, and we all do the optional two, but a lotta times we work from home."

Almost every prod in New York worked on-site four days a week. Over 90 percent of them worked an extra two days to make ends meet. In spite of the great promise of work-at-home that the Internet offered at the beginning of the century, the great corporations decided with organized labor that an on-site, controlled labor force was more desirable.