Futureland: Nine Stories of an Imminent World

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 byproduct 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.

The way most cyclers survived an unemployment cycle was by finding illegal labor or a relative or friend who knew the drill. He could become a prettyboy or maybe sell a body part — but, no, it wouldn’t have to come to that. His brother, Rand, in Oklahoma City would take him in. He’d make Harold work in the communal gardens but that was bearable. He wouldn’t have to get involved with the black market, or worse, the weapons market — or worse still, to become a thief. To be caught stealing would mean a thirty-year minimum sentence in one of the corporate prisons. There was no early release, parole, or life after prison. The few ex-cons that Harold had seen were hollow-eyed, slack-jawed men and women. Maybe black people didn’t get the striped flu, but they sure got bit by prison — they sure did.

“Prison sucks the soul out of our men and women through a pinhole in the heart,” XX Y had proclaimed more than fifteen years before. “And we just look the other way...”

Harold’s heart was racing. What was he doing thinking about Common Ground and Angel’s Island prison? He decided to go back, pay the hundred dollars, and leave.

“Here you go,” the nervous doorman said as he opened a door. Jamey pushed Harold through into a room filled with light.

Harold went through the door thinking that he would turn around and go back out again. Yasmine meant a lot to him, but not enough to live in hell.

He looked around to get his bearings. He was standing in a cavernous room full of large raised platforms that held fiberplas beds. There was a ledge around the mattresses and chairs, too. Going by the size of the room Harold figured that it held over forty tablebeds. At a table a few feet away Harold saw something that slowed his exit.

An elderly man, bald and gray, with parchmentlike skin, was sitting on the ledge of a table while a young woman, no more than twenty, stroked his huge penis. The white man had well-defined muscles to complement his twenty-inch boy-hard erection. The slender Asian girl rocked back and forth holding on with both hands. The look of reverence on her face seemed studied but that didn’t detract from Harold’s fascination. He had heard about the sex therapies that the uppers could afford. The process of cell rejuvenation could make parts of the body young again, at least for a while. Drugs could make you virile. An every-other-day visit to sensory-dep tanks could exercise your body until it had what was advertised as peak physique.

This man had it all.

“Yeah, yeah,” the man grunted. Then he looked up at Harold and winked just before he came.

“Yeah, baby,” the Asian prettygirl said.

The man’s emission went on and on. He looked at Harold and Jamey, winking again, as if to say, “Who’s the man?”

“Damn,” Jamey said. “You see that?”

Two tables over a woman who was near the man’s age sat naked at a table. Her face, thighs, and belly were pudgy and somewhat wrinkled, but her breasts put the prettygirl’s to shame. Harold felt nauseated and aroused at the same time. The man was strutting around now with his erection tilting up, still dripping semen.

“Somethin’, huh?” Yasmine Mü said. She was standing next to them. “I know an even older guy who’s got one-half again as long. He has to hold his up when he walks around ’cause it hurts his muscles.

“Hey, Yas,” Jamey said.

He hugged the young brown-skinned woman. She was wearing a clear plastic full-length jacket and a G-string.

Harold had forgotten all about leaving. He was looking at Yasmine, unable to speak.

“Hi, Harold,” the Iranian emigré said.

“Hey.”

“I wondered if you guys’d come,” Yasmine said in her newly acquired American accent.

“We wanted to see you, Yas,” Jamey was saying. His attention was distracted by the older man’s approach to the elderly, young breasted woman.

“See me like that?” she asked.

“Uh,” Harold said. He wanted to say yes before Jamey could, but the word was stuck in his throat.

“As long as you don’t see us like him,” Jamey said.

Yasmine laughed.

“Harold wants you to be his prettygirl,” Jamey said. “He wants to juggle brass pots with you. That’s what he said.”

Harold had said it, three years earlier when he and Jamey first signed on with L&L Leasing. But he didn’t expect Jamey to remember or to speak for him. They had both lusted after Yasmine while she was busy bumping with uppers in storage rooms and doored cubicles. Back then Yas wasn’t interested in cyclers sexually.

But now she smiled and took Harold by the hand. They walked across the mostly empty room of tablebeds toward the far exit. This led to another dank hallway lined with brick and bright light decals. They passed several doors and various men and women along the way. They had to step over three lovers who had fallen to the floor between decals, rutting wild.

Finally they came to a door that sprang open at a word from Yasmine. It was a small room containing only a fiberplas mattress and a hotplate altar with three brass pots on it. Weak candle decals flickered when they entered. There were no decorations on the wall, no carpeting on the floor.

“They move all of this stuff every week?” Harold asked.

“Take off your clothes,” Yasmine answered.

Harold’s andro-alls were off with a quick gesture. He looked down seeing how small his erection was compared to the man in the main room.

“I guess I won’t need the hot pot on you, Harry,” Yasmine said.

She was still the most beautiful woman he had ever seen in person. Tall — his height — and dark-skinned in that Middle Eastern way. She had large eyes that slanted upwards, black as liquid space, and a mouth that was meant to eat only sensuous fruits and honey cakes. Harold had dreamt of Yasmine at least once a week for the past three years.

She moved close to him and took the erection gently in her hand.

“Your card will be decremented by the minute, two dollars a minute. Do you understand?”

“Yuh.”

“I have to say that, Harold. It’s the rules.”

“I know.”

“How long do you want me?”

“As long as I can get.”

“How much money do you have?”

“Three thousand, I think.”

“How much to spend?”

“All of it,” he whispered.

She began stroking his erection in a loose grip. The rest of Harold’s body stiffened.

Yasmine was looking him in the eye.

“Tell me before you come,” she said. She seemed to be studying something that was going on in his head.

He felt his legs buckle. Yasmine supported his buttocks with her free hand.

“Don’t fall. Put all your mind into your cock. Try to come but tell me before you do.”

“I... I... now... now,” Harold rasped.

Yasmine reached down to the altar in a deft motion and brought a brass bowl under his nose. Instantly his diaphragm went into spasm and the feeling of orgasm subsided.

“How’s your heart?” she asked.

“Okay, I think.”

“Because I’m going to do things to you that would kill that old man in the grand hall. Bust his heart open like a rotten peach.”

Harold blinked and almost lost consciousness.

“No sleeping, no sitting,” she said. She held another bowl under his nose and started the gentle stroking again. “I will bring you up to the edge twenty times or more if I want. And every time you have to tell me and every time I’ll pull you back. Okay?”

“What if I said no?”

Yasmine wagged her head slowly from side to side. She smiled and he wondered if his heart was strong enough to last the night.

4

“... three men — captured after apparently trying to contaminate a children’s immunization center in Rockland, Oregon — have all committed suicide while in custody of the Rockland police.” The newsman, Letter Phillips, wore a lavender T-shirt. His hair was brown and thick. He sat forward on his tall stool and spoke seriously, without personal appeal. This switch from his usual wisecracking manner was effected to tell the audience that this was real news. “Our correspondent in Oregon, Couchy Malone, has more.”

A beautiful waif with surgically enhanced eyes appeared in the curve. Her skirt was short and her thin legs seemed unsteady.

“Thank you, New York,” said the freckled child, striped flu marks on her arms. “Police sources have informed this reporter that a map of some sort was found among the possessions of one of the prisoners. This map identifies immunization centers around the Midwest, Oregon, Washington, and Alaska. Each center’s location has been circled in red and some of these had been marked with a black check sign.” Couchy disappeared and a red circle marked with a black check, floating in space, replaced her.

“Was the Rockland site checked, Couchy?” Letter’s voice inquired.

“That’s the problem, New York,” the child said as she reappeared. “It was not checked. The police and the FBI fear that the checked centers may have already been contaminated. These centers work all through the school year. Thousands of children are immunized each day.” The strain of fear, real fear, came into Couchy Malone’s voice.

Harold put down his shrimp and noodle cup to concentrate on the news report.

“This could be the tip of the iceberg, New York,” the young ITL freelancer said. “It could be a very real act of monstrous terrorism.”

“Can you tell us which immunization sites, centers, have been marked with the black check?” Letter asked quickly, as if he were trying to drown out her fears.

“No. No, New York. My sources wouldn’t or couldn’t identify the marked centers.”

“Thank you very much, Couchy,” Letter Phillips said.

Couchy Malone looked as if she wanted to say something else, but her image faded as Letter Phillips returned to the curve. Harold wondered if she wanted to call out some kind of warning to her family or loved ones.

“In another disease-related story, seven cases of Jeffers’s Disease have been reported in and around the Denver area. Named after the doctor who identified it, this new syndrome speeds up the body’s metabolism, depleting certain essential elements for blood and skin maintenance. We have Dr. Jeffers on satellite hookup to talk to us about this new disturbing disease.”

Above the anchorman’s head appeared a patch in which was the head of a man with a thin face and large ears. In childhood he was probably cute.

“Are you with us, Dr. Jeffers?”

“Yes, Letter.”

“Seven cases of this terrible illness,” Letter said. “How many have been fatal?”

“All of them.”

“How long did they suffer?”

“Three days, at least. No one lived out the week.” Dr. Jeffers looked as if he had been frightened and now he was numb.

“What is the cause of this disease, Doctor?”

There was a pause then. Maybe the audio line had gone down and the doctor was simply waiting to hear. But Harold believed that Jeffers was considering his answer. He was wondering what to say.

“We believe that there is an environmental cause to the illness, Letter. As we speak federal agencies are trying to discover some link between the victims — where they worked, what they ate, where they went swimming. It’s something like that.”

“So you don’t believe that this could have anything to do with the potential act of terrorism in the Northwest.”

“I can’t see any connection whatsoever,” Jeffers said. “The immunization centers are for children only, and none of the victims down here have been immunized in over a year.”

“That’s a relief,” Letter said with a big smile.

Jeffers didn’t seem relieved. His image faded.

“On the lighter side...” Phillips began.

“Vid off,” Harold said.

He sat back in his new Propper Chair, a thin sheet of transparent and flexible Synthsteel held aloft by pulsating magnetic waves emanating from a disc anchored to the floor. Like floating on air, the holo-ads claimed. And it was true, but the feeling was only physical. There was nothing light or buoyant about Harold’s life. And this was strange, because he was in love. Yasmine Mü was the center of his life. It was true that he only saw her at the Blanklands Eros-Haus; that he had to pay for her attentions. But she never charged him the full rate and once a week she’d allow him to spend the whole night in her cubicle.

Harold’s heart and body were Yasmine’s to command. But there was a downside to love. The IT curve, the Propper Chair, and all the other little perks of the working life had lost their sheen. He felt small and vulnerable.

Lately Harold had been thinking about his parents, Clarence and Renata Bottoms. By the age of forty they had both faded into White Noise. He hadn’t heard from either one in years. He supposed that they were migrants living in what was known as the undertow, the currents of illegal labor under the cycles of unemployment. These migrants moved from city to city, living in Common Ground.

They were gone.

Harold had been recalling the last conversation he’d had with his father. They’d met at a China Tea stand on One forty-first and Lenox. Harold paid for the drinks.

“Thanks, son,” the elder Bottoms said. He was five eight but seemed shorter because he stooped a little. “Your mama and I had to give up the apartment. I think she goin’ down to Florida. I’ma make it out to St. Louis. Maybe your brother got a hoe in the garden for me.”

He never asked to stay with Harold. There were stiff penalties for stacking up in a rental. Either you made your own rent or you stayed in Common Ground. If you were found sheltering someone unemployed you were evicted, fired, and thrown into a double unemployment cycle.

“I’m gonna miss you, Dad,” Harold remembered saying. Not I love you or Can’t you stay?Just acceptance. And even that weak farewell was a lie. He had never missed his parents.

It wasn’t until he experienced the sweet-faced, rough loving of Yasmine that he began to miss them. He wondered if they still spoke to each other. Everyone had a communication number. This code took the place of the Social Security number after that program went bust in 2012.

Jamey and Harold spent a lot of time together and at the Blanklands. Jamey’s wife had had their marriage license revoked for emotional and material incompatibility. She married the woman she worked for and moved to Seattle to join a state-run pottery studio.

The bachelors frequented the Blanklands, where Harold spent all of his extra money on Yasmine. Yasmine for her part was pleased by the young man’s interest and spent more time with him than he paid for. So it was no surprise that she called him when she found out that she was dying.

“It came on me on Sunday night.” She only transmitted her voice, and so Harold found himself looking upon a speeded-up rendition of the birthing of far-off galaxies in the void of space.

“But that was only three days ago.”

“Meds say it’s some kinda fast-working cancer.”

“But they cured cancer, Yas,” Harold said.

“Not this kind. They said that it works on a chromosomal level. Something like that. I had to quit the road show. Sexno-more.” She giggled to lighten the mood.

“Can I see you?”

“I’m not really pretty anymore,” the disembodied Yas whispered. “And I can’t do anything.”

“I don’t need you to do nuthin’.”

“You don’t?”

“No. Uh-uh. I don’t go there for you to do stuff. I go there to see you. Shit. I’d be happy payin’ for dinner or sumthin’ like that.”

For a long span Yasmine was silent in the depths of unfolding space. Harold forced himself to concentrate on two giant galaxies colliding in the far-off reaches.

“They’re gonna take me home. My parents are gonna come on Friday to take me back to Tehran. You could come tomorrow after work if you wanted.”

“All right. At six?”

“Okay.”

“Just one thing.”

“What?”

“Where do you live?”

”You wanna come wit’ me?” Harold asked Jamey at work the next morning.

“Naw, man. Hey, I don’t wanna remember Yas like that,” Jamey said.

“That’s cold, J.”

The sandy-headed cycler didn’t reply. He was studying ghostnet on his wall monitor, reading an article and looking over his shoulder now and then.

Periodically a member of the Shaker Party embedded a ghostnet chip in the L&L system. Before the chip was destroyed anybody could enter the word ghostnet and get the weekly download, which included a banned issue of the Daily Dump. This chip had been working for over four days.

“They said it’s five marks if they catch you ghostin’, J,” Harold said.

“Shit,” Jamey said, not to his friend.

“What?”

“Somethin’s happenin’ in MacroCode Russia, man.”

“I didn’t see anything on the mornin’ report.”

“Ghost says that they’re killin’ Techs. They destroyed five labs and killed all the scientists. A general has formed an army. Shit. An army. An’ they been killin’ big time.”

“How could that be?” Harold asked. “How could they raise an army and it’s not on the news?”

“They lie on the vid all the time, nig, you know that.”

“But not about somethin’ like that, man,” Harold said, ignoring the lack of respect. “They’re not gonna lie about an army and a revolt against the biggest company in the world.”

“They say at least four hundred and sixty-five thousand people killed. That they dropped clean nukes on Jesus City.”

“That’s crazy,” Harold said.

“Okay, then.” Jamey hit a button and the ghostnet blipped off. Then he said, “M-R-L–L-Tak,” and a blank green screen appeared.

“Moscow’s L&L branch is temporarily off-line,” a friendly voice said. This was Leda, the computer voice that Jamey preferred.

Jamey turned to look at Harold.

“Don’t mean a thing,” Harold protested. “Russia’s off-line more than half the time and you know it.”

“I don’t know a thing, man,” Jamey said flatly. “And neither do you.”

“Fuck you,” Harold said.

Even though Harold knew that Yasmine’s parents were wealthy, he didn’t expect a Park Avenue penthouse high above the streets of Upper Level Manhattan. The elevator opened up inside of her apartment.

“Go down the hall to your left and knock on the last door you get to,” said the black elevator operator in a red uniform.

Yasmine had lost most of her body fat in the four days that she’d been sick. She resembled a humanlike rubber toy that had been deflated.

“It hurts, Harry,” she said. “It hurts all the time. They gave me opium and nerve killers but it still hurts.”

The fading young woman had lesions down her face that looked like the clawing mark of some predatory beast. They were red, almost iridescent.

“It’s okay, honey,” Harold said as he cradled her in his arms.

“Hold me.”

Harold tried not to squeeze the New Age courtesan too hard, fearing that her bones might snap. She clung to him with greater strength than he would have imagined. She smiled.

“Somethin’ funny?” Harold asked.

“I feel safe with you, Harry. You make me feel better. That’s kinda funny, don’t you think?”

“How come funny?”

One of the lesions on Yasmine’s face pulled open and blood trickled down. Harold pressed closer to her so that the pillow covered the bleeding.

“How come funny?” he asked again.

“Because here I am all alone and dyin’ in this big place and my boyfriend is a john.” She stopped talking in order to swallow twice. “It’s really nice.”

Harold held her for a long time after she was dead. He wasn’t ready to go on for over an hour.

“How come they don’t send a nurse up to watch her?” Harold asked the same elevator operator going down.

“Nurses, firemen, security force, everybody in city service been called up.”

“Called up for what?”

“Some kinda big emergency in the outer fiefs where the white people live. Jersey and Long Island. You know white people throw a fit in a minute.”

5

“Wake up, Harold! Wake up!” It was either his brother or his father, but Harold kept his eyes shut because this was a Sunday or it was a summer day. All Harold knew was that it wasn’t time to sign on to school yet. And he was sure that it wasn’t one of the days he was supposed to go in for sports or socialization class.

“Get your ass up outta the bed, nig!”

Harold sat up and said, “I told you that I don’t want you calling me that. Now if you don’t mind, I was about to sign on to class.”

“You awake, Hair?” Jamey was standing in the IT curve’s interior. The plastic screen had unfurled automatically when the call came in.

“No,” Harold said. “But I’m waking up right now and I’ll be with you in a minute.”

“Hurry up, man,” Jamey said. “The world is almost over and we ain’t got time for you to sleep.”

“Huh?”

“That general has dissolved MacroCode Russia and they’re gonna drop on New York.”

The lower half of the screen became an image of carnage in St. Petersburg. Armed soldiers could be seen running down civilians and shooting them with rifles and ember guns.

“This came over the ghostnet. I got the cube from a gypsy hacker in Soho.” The panic in Jamey’s voice brought Harold to full awareness. “The feds gonna shut New York down at six A.M.”

“Who says?”

“Com’on, Harold. We gotta get off the Island tonight.” The scene on the lower half of the curve turned to massacre. People were being cut down while trying to storm a fortress.

A face appeared above the carnage. It was an older man wearing a fancy military hat. He was speaking in Russian but the simultaneous ITV translator muted his voice and spoke over it.

“... the Americans have created this plague. They have killed our people with their bio-warfare...” The massacre transformed into bodies being stacked onto a pyre smoldering slowly into ash.

“... we shall be avenged.”

“Okay,” Harold agreed. “I’ll meet you at the Port Authority. We can take a bus.”

“Why not the mono?”

“Mono stops in Jersey but the bus goes on forever.”

They met at the West Side entrance of the Port Authority Transporation Center at 00:36. Harold had his tricycle, which broke down into a case half the size of one wheel, and a bag that held an extra andro-suit and his Flapjack, the personalized computer-book that had everything a cycler needed.

Jamey jumped out of a yellow cab and needed help pulling a trunk from the back.

“Why you got that big thing, man?” Harold asked.

“This is it, Hair. This is the end. We gotta get gone. This is everything I own.”

The bus station was in tumult. Thousands of people stood in line in front of ticket machines. People were screaming to be heard above the din of panic. Young men and women shepherded crying children. The loudspeaker was droning on and on asking for calm and order.

“Guess we ain’t the only ones been to the gypsy,” Harold yelled into his friend’s ear.

“They’re closing down the Authority at six A.M., that’s why.

“And I bet the magistrates are all already gone.”

“Believe that,” Jamey said. “We better get on line.”

“No, uh-uh,” Harold said, putting out an arresting hand. “I got first-class seats reserved on my chip after you called. We got passage to Burlington, Vermont.”

“First class? How much that cost?”

“Five thousand dollars.”

“Where’d you get that? I thought you spent all your credit on Yas.”

“I took a FedCred card from her wallet before I left her place.”

Jamey looked at Harold in amazement.

“She was dead, man. She didn’t need it and her family’s rich. You know the parmeds woulda taken that shit in a minute.”

Three hastily erected clear plexiplas People Stoppers had been placed along the hall leading to the gates. At each stop Harold and Jamey had to present their ID-chips to get through. At the last stop Harold had to have an eye-scan to check his PBC against the reservation.

They had to wait three hours before boarding the bus.

“They say the plague is a full-blown epidemic in Russia,” a man in an old-fashioned two-piece business suit was saying to a woman in front of him. “It starts out with pains and then it causes those stripes that that flu last fall had. Then bleeding, internal and external, then death. Three or four days and you’re dead.”

“Please stop it!” the woman cried. “Please stop talking to me.”

The man then turned to Harold and hunched his shoulders as if to ask, Is she crazy?

The first-class upper deck of the ElectroHound had been fitted with fourteen extra seats. Jamey’s trunk was taken from him and thrown into the storage hatch on the roof. Below, in the main cabin, passengers were packed in, standing room only. All of the lower seats had been removed.

“World’s comin’ to an end,” Jamey said to his friend. “And ElectroDog wants to get the last dollar.”

Harold would have nodded his agreement but he was too busy taking in his environment to waste even a motion.

The bus lurched its way down the road to the bridge. The traffic of busses and official cars was moving at under ten kays.

“Probably government workers stealing the carpool vehicles,” Jamey said, referring to the inordinate number of city cars on the road.

Harold thought that he was right.

The road carried an exodus but the city was more or less unaware. The DanceDome, an elevated dance field at the Sixtieth Street pier, was in full swing. Ten thousand or more were dancing to the wild music transmitted to tiny ear implants that kept noise pollution down. Big animated signs advertised L&L products, new movies, life-extending operations. In small windows along the highway he saw lighted rooms with people in them. Some were homeworkers and others simply living: watching ITV, listening to their implants, talking on the vid.

“Oh shit!” Jamey spat. He doubled over in the seat next to Harold.

“What’s wrong, Jamey?”

“Pain.”

“Sit up, man. Sit up.” Harold put a hand against his friend’s chest and jerked him up.

“Something wrong up there?” a man from behind asked.

“Just dropped his chip,” Harold said, glancing back. He saw the worried elderly man who sat behind them.

“Is he sick?” the old man asked.

“No. Dropped his chip. We got it. It’s okay.”

The man looked unconvinced but he still leaned back.

“You can’t let ’em know you’re hurting, Jamey. If you do they might kick us off.”

Jamey nodded, gritting his teeth against the pain.

The bus rolled out of the northern borders of New York onto the Canadian Highway. Harold watched closely over his friend, who tried his best to stay still under the waves of deep pain that wracked him at irregular intervals.

“The Russians are right,” someone behind said. “It’s probably one of those bio-tech companies made the plague. Break the corporations and burn the dead. If we want to survive that’s what we have to do too.”

“Yeah,” a woman agreed.

“It’s terrible,” someone else exclaimed.

Outside the window there was nothing but the dark outline of trees and pools of gray grasses under a quarter moon. Harold wondered how much Jamey weighed.

“Oh shit!” Jamey screamed.

He had been able to sleep for a couple of hours while the bus cruised down the unusually crowded highway, but now the pain brought him up to his feet.

“He’s got it!” the elderly man said to the young woman sitting next to him. “I told you, Gina. He’s got it.”

“Oh shit it hurts!” Jamey yelled. “Help me.”

“He ain’t got nuthin’,” Harold hissed at the couple. “He hurt himself in soccer is all. It’s a muscle.”

“You said he dropped his chip before.”

“Mind your own business before you get dropped,” Harold warned.

In his peripheral vision he saw a shadow slip down the stairs.

“Does he?” a woman asked. “Does he have it?”

“Have what? He don’t have nuthin’. There isn’t any plague,” Harold said.

Three men had gotten to their feet.

Harold wished that he had elected judo on Sports-Wednesday at high school instead of volleyball.

“Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck,” Jamey chanted. He fell back down into his seat and then collapsed onto the floor.

“You better get him the fuck off’a this bus, man,” one of the standing men said. His tone was threatening but he didn’t advance.

Harold realized that Jamey had the invisible force field of communicability around him.

Everyone standing had to grab something to stay on their feet because the bus swerved and came to an abrupt halt. Harold stole a glance at Jamey, who was sprawled in the aisle, and then at the stairwell leading down.

The bus driver, a big-boned woman with red hair and deeply tanned skin, ascended to the cabin in three steps.

“What’s goin’ on up here?” she asked.

Harold simply stared.

“That guy has the plague,” someone said.

The bus driver took a step backward.

“He does?” she asked Harold.

“He’s sick,” Harold said. “But there hasn’t been any plague announced by the health board.”

“Half of Russia’s dead and he says there’s no plague,” one of the standing men said.

“They say the niggers don’t get it no way,” another man, of questionable race, said.

“All right, enough of that now,” the driver said. “It’s a punishable offense to slander race.”

“And look at what good it gets us,” the elderly man spat. The driver seemed to consider the senseless sentence. “I’m going to have to put him off the bus.”

“Who?” Harold asked.

“Your friend.”

“What for?”

“I got a hundred and fifty passengers on this bus, son. I’ve never carried even half that. They pulled out the lower seats, they broke the rules by making passengers stand while the bus is in motion. Something’s happening. I don’t know what it is but I can’t jeopardize this whole bus just ’cause the uppers aren’t talking.”

“I need my trunk,” Jamey whined. “I need my trunk.”

Getting off of the bus was fairly easy. The driver made Harold pull the trunk out of the top hatch. She told the passengers she was taking the precaution against further infection.

No one tried to bar the friends’ way. Scared faces of all races witnessed their departure. Harold saw that some of them had scars on their necks and faces, reminders of the striped flu.

“We got to take my trunk, Hair. Everything I got’s in there.”

“We’ll leave it in the trees, J,” Harold promised. “We’ll leave it in the trees and come back when you’re better.”

“Where we gonna go?”

“Looks like everybody from Plintheville’s leavin’. Look at all them cars and busses comin’ on the highway. They’re evacuating. They’re leaving their houses.”

“So?”

“We could hole up in an abandoned house until you get over that cramp.”

The walk through the woods was the hardest work that Harold had ever done. When he didn’t have to drag Jamey he supported his friend’s weight. It took them three hours to make it through the woods and hills to a tiny cul-de-sac of homes in what they assumed was Plintheville.

Harold left Jamey in the woods and watched one home for over an hour. The whole block seemed deserted, but Harold wanted to make sure. If the world wasn’t over he didn’t want to wish that it was from some corporate prison cell.

Just before dawn a bright blast lit up the southern sky. When Harold saw the iridescent mushroom cloud he was no longer worried about jail.

Jamey never moved from the couch in the sunken living room where Harold deposited him. He lay there and wasted away like billions of others were doing all across the globe.

For the first day Harold held his friend’s hand while watching ITV. Newscasters talked openly about the plague that ghostnet had been broadcasting for days. The pain and bloody stripes were associated with the striped flu. Doctors were saying that it was the secondary phase of the virus. They had known that the virus stayed in the nervous system but had no idea that it would return with such ferocity.

The nuclear strikes against New York, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles were minor news topics compared to the plague.

The disease was 100 percent fatal and everybody got it; everybody but people with at least 12.5 percent African Negro DNA.

For thirty-six hours Harold and Jamey watched the reports. Thousands of bodies were being thrown into rivers and the sea. Roving mobs of black and white ruffians were battling in the streets of the major American cities. Astonished Caucasians who survived the plague realized that there was a sizeable portion of Negro blood in their veins.

One newscaster ran a clip from Chicago’s Electro-Exposé which showed the towering figure of Cowled Death rising over a white man only to be stymied when the white man pulled open his shirt to reveal the words THE NIG IN ME: 12.5 %.

After two days all vid communication went blank.

Harold and Jamey spent the empty hours talking about their lives. Jamey told about his delinquent father and his mother’s sister who raised him. Harold thanked Jamey for letting him have Yasmine.

“She woulda gone for you in a minute,” Harold told his pain-wracked friend.

“Anything for a friend’a mine,” Jamey replied.

“Hey, Hair?”

“What?”

“You think it was God mad at the white man for all the shit we done?”

“No, uh-uh. ’Cause why he wanna kill all the Chinese and Aborigines and Indians down in Peru?”

“I guess. What—”

Jamey died just that quickly. In between spasms, in the middle of a thought. Harold sat there next to his friend trying to figure out how he got there.

Harold covered Jamey with a blanket and left him on the couch. He knew he’d have to bury his friend after a while but he didn’t want to lose him yet. He wandered around the sprawling suburban home hoping that it was a clean bomb that the Russians dropped on New York.

The family had been a mother and a father with two sets of twins, boys and girls, and an older sister, all of them blond and fair.

On the second day after Jamey died the wall vid came to life.

“All hail the great XX Y,” a voice said, and then the sky-blues artist Silver Rap and his girl partner Cellophane Dream came into view. Silver was wrapped in tight-fitting shiny cloth that resembled old-time aluminum wrap. Cellophane Dream wore a clear material like Yasmine had worn at the Blank-lands. Dream had bigger curves than Yas, however. She was a hefty woman with strong bodily features. It was she who addressed the vid.

“The day has come and the day has gone,” she intoned. “Good-bye white brothers and hello to our African home.”

The camera switched focus and XX Y stood on a column that was at least ten feet high. He was a dark-skinned black man with blue-gray hair combed straight back. His features were broad and heavy. His eyes were bright and a little insane.

“The day of the white man is over. By his own hand he created a doomsday device designed to kill you and me. I say you and me because that’s all that’s left, you and me and the few who received the antidote. We have recovered the files of the so-called National Security Department and have learned that the International Socialist Party, that foul and racist crew, had paid geneticists in MacroCode Russia to develop a gene virus that would target the black race. But the mighty gene fooled ’em.” XX grinned with a perfect set of white teeth. “Yes, she fooled ’em. She said, ‘I will not prey upon myself. I will not obey your insane plan.’

“They broke into immunization centers around the world when they realized that the striped virus was infecting their own. Some white children will survive because of this. Other so-called whites bear the sign saying THE NIG IN ME.

“Some of you say we should finish the job that they started. That we should kill every last blue-eyed devil. But I am not so inclined. I am not the evil slayer. I do not set myself up as God. Most of the world needs burying. And some running dogs need to pay for their crimes.”

The speech went on for hours. Harold sat with the stink of his friend’s rotting corpse, not because he was enthralled, but because he was lonely. Lonely for lost Jamey and Yasmine. Lonely for the world that he moved in. He wondered if those dancers on the Sixtieth Street pier saw the flash of the bomb for an instant before they died.

6

Harold spent days in the abandoned house at the end of the cul-de-sac. There were lights and power because that neighborhood ran off an array of solar panels placed upon a nearby hill.

XX Y was the only show in the world. He ranted as much as six hours a day. He entered into long harangues against the old society. He pleaded to the so-called whites who had survived because of the quantity of African blood in their veins.

“Accept your blood, brothers,” he crooned. “Blood brothers, that’s us...”

Bleep, bleep.

“... soon the arks of Africa will arrive on our shores. The colonized and enslaved motherland will come to reclaim us. Do not fight them. Do not deny your heritage. Embrace the new world order.”

Bleep, bleep.

Harold became aware of the tiny electronic alarm. It had been sounding for hours. It was his ID-chip. The small display on the chip was mostly garbage. The date was a line of happy faces. The time was a row of eights. But there was a valid return number, eighteen digits long.

Harold at first thought that it might be a trick of XX Y to find and draft all living black people into his World Africa Army. But when he decided to take a car and see the world for himself, Harold entered the number into the Gales’ kitchen vid. When he was greeted by the aged image of his father he was stunned and saddened.

“Pop,” he whispered.

“Hey, baby boy.” It was his nickname before his ninth birthday. “I thought you got it in New York,” Clarence Bottoms said. “I been pagin’ you for a week.”

Harold had nothing to add. He hadn’t even thought of calling his father.

“How is it up there where you are, son?”

“It’s only me around here.”

“That’s good. We been fightin’ a war down here.”

“Where are you?”

“Florida. They got four groups down here. Two Spanish-black armies, a white — or so-called — group, and then there’s the American blacks. Fightin’ over groceries, guns, and women. Fightin’ over control of the utilities and right-of-way in the streets.”

“Fighting?” Harold said. “Blacks fighting each other?”

“Not everybody’s fightin’. Not even most of us. But it only takes a few fools with guns to mess it up for everybody.

“I found your mother. I came down here lookin’ for her and damn if I didn’t find her. We gonna sneak outta Dade County in a few days and make it up to St. Louis.”

Harold was still wondering why he hadn’t called anyone.

“My friends all died, Pop,” Harold said. “Yasmine and Jamey.”

“White kids?”

“I guess.”

“Don’t worry, Harold. Come meet us at Rand’s farm in St. Louis. We can start over.”

Harold found the keys to the Solaro in the Gales’ garage. He filled five bags with canned and freeze-dried food. He had twelve five-gallon containers of water. He carried it all out to the car and loaded up. Then he sat behind the wheel in the cool darkness of the garage, looking at a wall covered with hanging hand tools.

He turned the key and grabbed the steering wheel, but had no idea of how to drive the car. He cried hysterically for six or seven seconds and then stopped. Climbing out of the car he walked out of the garage and headed for the Gales’ front door.

“Hey, nig!” a man’s voice shouted.

Harold turned to see three swarthy-looking white men. They were dressed in fancy suits decorated at the knees and elbows with brightly colored scarves.

One man raised a pistol.

Harold ducked and ran. All around him branches, windows, and even the walls of the Gales’ home exploded from the charged shells that the so-called white men loosed.

Harold went through the house and out the back window, into the woods and was gone. There was a rhythm to his footfalls and his body through the trees. When Harold realized that he had escaped death, he began to laugh.

The world had started over.