Futureland - Nine Stories of an Imminent World (27 page)

Neil wondered what he should do at this point in the test. This was obviously a severe breach in international labor regulations.

"I won't work from home," he said.

"You don't have to. You could just work extra hours and cut the week short that way."

"Extra what?"

"GEE-PROD-9 prods have special access cards," Nina said. "We can come and go whenever we want--day or night."

"You ride the escalators?"

"Unh-uh. We got express elevator passes."

"What's an express elevator?"

Nina smiled at Neil. She moved up next to him in the window case.

"It's gonna be okay, Neil," she said, in a much deeper voice than she had used up until then. Neil felt the vibrations of her voice on his neck even though she was at least a foot away from him.
3

Neil left GP-9 at seventeen fifteen, his appointed hour. He rode the elevator down, packed into the 275-max-cap car. He walked to the public stairwell and descended to Dark Town and Lower Twenty-ninth Street.

Neil's apartment had once been the entrance hall to a moderate three-bedroom unit on the fourth floor. He had looked up the floor plan on the free-web before it was discontinued for pornography abuses. His mattress was leased from Forever Fibers. His chair and desk were let from Work Zone 2100. Everything else--the shelves, the rugs, his two pots, three plates, two cups, and one shatterproof glass--were the property of the landlord, Charlie Mumps Inc. The ultraviolet cooking unit, the refrigerator, and the wall-vid were all built-ins and covered under Neil's apartment dweller insurance. It wasn't much, even by current New York standards, but it was better than a sleep tube two thousand feet under the ground. Neil knew that if he lost his job he would have to go under unless he was willing to use six years' savings to pay his rent for three months. The rent would go up if he was unemployed because he would have to pay the Unemployed Tax if he wanted to stay aboveground without a job. The vid shows seemed stupid. Neil couldn't concentrate on their inane plots, but neither could he sleep. As the evening wore on he became more and more restless. For some reason the thought of drinking synth disgusted him. He couldn't understand what was happening at work. Why had they transferred him? Why didn't they take him to a med-head when they found him unconscious at the door? He was pretty sure that he wasn't in a psych-eval unit, because they were all in the subbasement. Maybe it was a whole unit that had inverted
Labor Nervosa
. Maybe they had pirated the protocols and become some kind of renegade production unit. That was crazy, Neil knew. There were so many checks and spies in every major corporation that no one could so much as download a manual for unauthorized personal use without getting caught.

As the night wore on Neil became even more agitated. He called his mother, Mary-Elaine, a nighttime ID-chip check girl at a legal Eros-Haus, but she was at work. He called an old friend named Arnold Roth, but he was told by the ID-messaging system that M Roth was in Common Ground and his calls could not be forwarded or retained.

At one in the morning Neil began reciting on his wrist-writer, the only piece of property, besides his clothing, that he owned.

If only they'd let me be I'd be okay. I mean, why they have to, why they want to make me give it
all to them anyway? Why can't I just do my job? That's all I want. That's all I want. That's all I
want. If they just let me, just let me, just let me. I don't know. Maybe it is a test. Maybe. Maybe
I'm supposed to go to the Monitor Center and tell them that there's something funny in
GEE-PRO-9. No uh, sit wherever you want, eat whenever you want, work as long as you want.
Maybe it's a test. They're testing me to see if I'll turn them in. But why would they go through all
that just to check on my loyalty? Why not just recycle me?

Maybe I should do the megadose of Pulse now. Maybe I should. Maybe I should.

Neil closed the cover on the armband where he kept his favorite recitations. The threat and promise of Pulse released enough tension that Neil was almost sleepy. He made a cup of Numb Tea on the UV

stove. He was just sitting down to drink it when a loud electric buzzing went off. At first Neil didn't know what it was, but then he remembered that it was the buzzer for someone wanting to be let in. It was two twenty-three in the morning.

"Hello?"

"Neilio?"

"Who is it?"

"Blue Nile, my boy."

"Who?"

"Come on, Neilio. Let me in. Oura and Athria sent me for you."

Every prod was on call twenty-four hours a day. They could refuse to go in, but without a verifiable excuse, unemployment was a certainty.

__________

The small man was wearing dark blue dress overalls with no shirt underneath. His eyes were twinkling as he made himself comfortable in Neil's only chair.

"What are you doing here?" Neil asked his late-night visitor.

"What's this?" Blue Nile said. He picked up Neil's cup of tea from the desk and jumped to his feet.

"Numb Tea. I was trying to get to sleep."

"Uch!" Blue Nile took the tea to the cooking nook and poured it down the drain. "This stuff is bad for ya. Who needs to shut off their mind anyway? If you're awake you should be alive, you should go outside and smell the asphalt." With that the little man laughed.

"What are you doing here at this time of night?"

"They sent me for you but they said only if you were awake. So I looked and saw your light."

"I don't have a window."

"Oura and Athria wanted me to bring you this." Blue Nile produced a prod card with Neil's picture on it. It was a thick card, obviously hard coded with special protocols.

"I already got a card."

"Not like this one."

"What's so different about this one?"

"Throw on some duds," Blue Nile replied, "and I'll show you." __________

The Verticular was just as crowded at three in the morning as it was at seven. But Neil didn't feel the deep panic of claustrophobia because Blue Nile kept talking, saying things that distracted him.

"I know you think that you can't make the grade on this new Eye thing," Blue Nile said. "But you underestimate your abilities."

"How would you know that?"

"We all misjudge ourselves. We have to. Our minds are like the computers we use to play simple games. Those same computers have the resources to run one of our robotic mining operations on the moon or Mars. Our minds are the product of two billion years of evolution, at least. Do you think it's the limit of your ability to make internal undulations on masturbation machines?" Neil was taken by the thought. He wondered if there was some greater ability he had.

"You're wrong," he said, as they were walking down Middle First Avenue toward the General Specifix Gray Lanes entrance. "The corporations and unions give us all the testing we can take to make sure that we are at optimum productivity."

"Looking up a quad chip and putting it into a quad slot, so that a synthskin surface will give two to seven pounds pressure per quarter-inch wave every point two to one point one seconds--that's your optimum ability?"

Neil wondered how the little man knew what his last assignment in LAVE-AITCH-27 was, but he decided not to ask.

"Have you been at GEE-PRO-9 long?"

"Oh, yeah," the late-night intruder said. "I been workin' for them a long time now. Long time. And the longer I work there the better I feel."

"But it's so weird."

They entered the darkened front doors of General Specifix and approached the assignment kiosk. There was a man in this time, also with a blunt face. Neil wondered if maybe the glass warped all the attendants'

features.

"Yes?" the man asked, obviously suspicious of the off-hour approach. Blue Nile handed his card through the slot provided. The man, who was young and bald, read something on his screen and said, "GEE-PRO-9, M."

Blue Nile gestured for Neil to proffer his new card. Neil hesitated. He knew that if rejected by the system he could be arrested for attempted illegal entry.

"Come on, Neil," Blue Nile said. "It took my card." With trembling fingers Neil slipped the card into the slot.

"GEE-PRO-9, M," the bald man said immediately.

__________

Neil headed for the 275-max-cap elevators but Blue Nile took him by the arm and led him toward another hallway that curved around the back of the building. There they came to a door with a card-lock pad next to it. Blue Nile held his identity card against the lock pad and the door slid open revealing a small elevator car.

"Floor three one nine," Blue Nile said, and the door closed.

As the car rose the outer wall proved to be transparent, and above the fortieth floor the city came into view. Hundreds of thousands of lights down Upper First became visible. It was, Neil thought, like seeing a slender corridor of a galaxy. As they ascended he could see more and more of the city. The lights melded with the stars in the night sky. Neil began to tremble.

"It's a two-way glass," Blue Nile said.

"What?"

"It's a two-way glass. From the outside this elevator shaft looks like a wall, but from inside you can see everything."

"I never knew that something like this existed. I never knew."

"Of course you didn't. Most central controllers don't know about it. The rich and powerful live in a world that most of the rest of us don't even suspect."

"But how do you know about it, then? How do I rate a pass to ride it?"

"GEE-PRO-9," Blue Nile said, his blue eyes twinkling, city lights shimmering all around his head. __________

GEE-PRO-9 was not empty. Four prods sat at their desks poring over multiple screens. One woman on the upper tier was smoking a cigarette. She looked down from her perch and waved at Blue Nile. He smiled in return.

"Is that tobacco?" Neil asked, sniffing the air.

"Yeah. Marva knows that it's bad for her, but ever since she started smoking she's been happier. Oura says that it's because she needs to rebel, to do something wrong. But she doesn't want to hurt anybody or steal. So she smokes."

"Isn't she hurting those people around her?"

"There's a big fan up over that table. It sucks up almost all the secondhand shit." The sun wasn't up yet. The lights that trailed across Brooklyn and Queens and on to Long Island were all that Neil wanted to see. He knew that any minute he'd be arrested for illegal access, for using an unauthorized identity card, for being in the presence of tobacco use, for failing to report his own
Labor
Nervosa
. But he couldn't think about that with the world spread out before him.

"Why did you bring me here?" Neil asked Blue Nile.

"To show you the power you have. To amaze you and make you laugh . . . To save you from taking that megadose and to keep you from reporting us to the monitor staff."

Even these words could not make Neil turn away from the night sky.

"How did you know about that?" he asked.

"We been monitoring your wrist-writer for three months, son."

Now Neil did turn to Blue Nile. "What? How? What for?"

"How many people do you think work in GEE-PRO-9?" the small man asked.

"One hundred and three."

"No. We have six hundred forty-two members in our cell."

"That's impossible. It's policy to have one hundred and three prods in each GT. That's all. Never more, and only less if someone is sick or dies or gets fast-fired. I worked in a GT where the assignment desk sent an extra prod once. They laid me off for a day because of it. It was the only day off I've ever had except if I was sick."

Blue Nile shook his head and smiled.

"Six hundred forty-two," he said. "All of them like you and me."

"What does that mean? I'm not like you or anybody else here."

"We look for the prods on the margin, prods like you and me."

"What's that? The margin?"

"Excuse me," Blue Nile said. "I keep forgetting that you don't know. Come on, let's go sit on the cushion and watch the sky."

It was an offer that Neil could not resist. He went to the first place he'd known in the crazy GT and sat so that he could see the night and Blue Nile smiling.

"We look for the creative mind," the small man said. "We monitor all bands, even the incidental ones, like the weak emissions from your wrist-writer."

"How would you know to read my journal? I mean, there must be thirty million electronic journals in Greater New York."

"The UC, Un Fitt, wrote up a program that looks for certain criteria from the various human-generated emissions."

"What kinda criteria?"

"Suffering," Blue Nile said, holding up one finger, "intelligence, creativity, discipline, courage . . ." For each subject he put up another finger. He had, Neil noticed, powerful hands.

"How could you tell that from my journal?"

"Your method of suicide is both creative and brave, my boy. The fact that you've struggled with and mostly overcome
Labor Nervosa
on your own tells of discipline. The intelligence-testing driver that Un Fitt built is still opaque to me, but I can tell by talking to you that you're bright."

"Why me?"

"Why not? We have a list of thousands of potential GEE-PRO-9 mems, but we can only accept a few. We need prods who won't be disruptive and who will be able to work on their own. We wanted you because you fit all the categories, you already worked in the building, and because you needed us."

"What's that supposed to mean? I need you? I'm doing just fine with nobody's help. I got money in the bank, a vacation already reserved, only three D-marks in two years. I've only had one unemployment cycle and I'm twenty-two with six years' service."

"Don't forget the four Pulse capsules you have in your ID case," Blue Nile said. "Or the fainting spells you've experienced. And then there's how much you sweat and fret at work every day."

"Everybody has problems like that," Neil said.

"I don't."

"But you ride secret elevators and take breaks and turn your seat around to look out the window. Those infractions alone could throw you on an unemployment cycle. And using company devices to listen in on people to recruit them secretly--that's enough to put you in corporate prison. You'll be living in the dark taking drugs that'll keep you docile for twenty years. By the time you wake up, half of your brain will be sponge."