Futureland: Nine Stories of an Imminent World

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 midtech production line. They fabricated product enhancements assigned to General Specifix by its parent company, Macro-Code. 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.

“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 GEEPRO-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.

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-maxcap 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 GEEPRO-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.”

“Is that worse than Common Ground?” Blue Nile asked with a sly smile.

Neil didn’t answer the question. The comparison seemed impossible to comprehend. Nothing seemed possible except his job, his apartment, and the daily fact of his survival.

“Come here, Neil,” Blue Nile said. He stood up and went over to the nearest GT table. Neil went along.

The little man was proficient at table use. He hit a couple of virtual keys and joined two screens into one large monitor. He then entered the Unit Controller screen.

“What are you doing?” Neil asked.

“Showing you something.”

“But that’s the UC page. It’s permanent unemployment over that — even just to look at a UC’s screen.”

“I have the protocols.”

“Are you the UC?”

“None of us are. But we have all been given the protocols and clearance to use our UC’s codes.” With that Blue Nile entered a forty-seven-digit code number. The central computer paused for a moment and then presented the image of a handprint. Blue Nile placed his hand inside the print. The computer paused three seconds. Neil felt his heart thrumming.

A red entry screen appeared. Neil had only once seen a red screen. That was when he first worked for Specifix, almost six years earlier. He had somehow frozen the whole GT system; no one at the table could log on. The UC, an unclean man named Nordeen, had entered his codes to fix the problem. He had used a red screen with yellow and orange letters just like the one Blue Nile had raised.

On the search line he entered Neil’s name and his last GT, LAVE-AITCH-27. A file appeared that had Neil’s ranking and picture at the top.

“You see that blue dot?” Blue Nile asked.

Neil saw the large blue spot pulsing at the right side of his photograph. He also noticed that the picture was not the one he had taken when he came to work; it was a recent shot of him leaning over the camera’s lens. He realized that his monitor must have an internal camera so that he could be watched continually.

“What does it mean?” Neil asked.

Blue Nile placed his finger over the dot and tapped the virtual clicker. Immediately a green screen, also with yellow letters, appeared. The words PENALTY SCREEN were at the top of the form. Neil read through the document. Every time he had fainted had been logged, the number of times he had drifted while he was supposed to be working had been recorded and graphed. His verbal complaints, even those he made only to himself, had been recorded. Toward the end of the form there was a diagnosis box that read Labor Nervosa; Acute. The suggested treatment was permanent unemployment at the end of the current work semester.

The date of his discharge was three days before he was to have his first vacation.

Neil’s stomach began to roil. He heard a sound that he thought was coming from the table but then he realized that it was a low moan from his own chest. He thought about sitting down but he was frozen over the screen.

His teeth began to chatter.

Suddenly there was a sharp pain at the side of his head. He fell to the floor. He looked up and realized that Blue Nile had hit him.

“Why?” Neil asked.

“ ’Cause you were losin’ it. A shock sometimes breaks you out of it.”

“No, not that. Why are they firing me? What did I do?”

“You’re just part of the margin, kid,” Blue Nile said. “Workin’ for the corporation is just like goin’ to school, and in this classroom they grade on a curve.”

4

“It’s simple, Neil,” Oura Olea said in the UC’s office. “You either erase the data from your record or you’re thrown into permanent unemployment.”

“There has to be another way,” Neil whined. “I mean, tampering with work records is a crime.”

“And living in Common Ground is a prison sentence,” Oura said. “Obey the law and you spend the rest of your life in jail.”

“It can’t be. It can’t be,” Neil said. “Will you do it for me?”

“No.”

“Why not? You understand these things better than I do. You sit in the inner circle.”

“You could sit there if you wanted. Athria and I are prods like everyone else here.”

“But I could get sent to jail.”

“We’ve covered this ground before, Neil,” the golden woman said. “It’s one of our only rules. If you want to work with us you have to clean up your own file.”

“But if I get thrown out they might find out about you,” Neil said softly.

“How?”

“I don’t know. They’ll check my records. They’ll, they’ll come here to ask questions.”

“Only if you send them, Neil.” Oura’s face was impassive. Neil missed her maternal smile.

“I don’t mean that—”

“You wrote in your journal that you thought you were being tested, that maybe they expected you to turn our GT in.”

“M Olea,” Neil said. “I’m scared. Really scared. I’ve never been anything but a prod. When I was ten my mother sent me to prod-ed and that’s all I’ve ever been. I don’t know about forging records and using a UC’s codes. I never knew about glass elevators and windows that look out on the sky or sitting backwards or letting people smoke cigarettes. All I want is to go back to being normal, back to LAVE-AITCH-27 between Hermianie and Juliet.”

“That’s all gone, Neil. The doors are closed, your seat is taken, and if you don’t change the files you will be underground for the rest of your life.”

“I can’t.”

Oura smiled again. It was a sad smile. She touched Neil’s hand and said, “It’s a lot to take in all at once. You have six weeks before the judgment will be executed. Think about it.”

At his station on the upper tier Neil was lost. He looked out at the open sky filled with clouds. He tried to imagine some way to get out from under the weight of his fate. He knew now that GEE-PRO-9 wasn’t some kind of test, at least not a test produced by his employers. He’d fallen into a renegade group that had subverted the company’s structure. But all Neil wanted was to go back to his previous life. He spent the late morning trying to figure out how he could succeed at staving off permanent unemployment.

Close to noon a red light appeared on the table before him. It was an interoffice e-mail. He touched the light and his table monitor came to life.

By the time he reached the end of the document Neil had completely forgotten about his impending doom. He was amazed by the candid, conversational transmission of the UC. He was also deeply interested in the content of the attached documents. He downloaded fourteen segments, each of which contained in excess of a hundred thousand words. On top of these text documents he received over fifteen hundred graphs and illustrations, and seventeen video presentations. Neil read through the rest of the day and way into the evening. He was so enthralled by what he read that he would forget to look out at the sky for over an hour at a time.

The introductory document Neil thought must have been written by Un Fitt himself (if indeed the UC was a male). This long rambling essay explained how Congress passed legislation that allowed neuronal research for use in computer technology but at the same time outlawed any brain implants, neuronal connectors, or mind-altering experiments. This latter prohibition was supposedly based on the possible infringement of individual rights.

From there was a long essay called “The Road to the Mind,” which postulated that any working neuronal pathway could extend brain functions using certain octal protocols. This pathway could utilize the brain’s instinctual functions to manipulate data calculations. Ultimately, the essay postulated, the only computer a human would need would be an octal interface and the use of his own brain. A footnote from this essay said:

But, Neil thought, a device that small could never store the amount of information necessary to make the Eye useful.

He read on through the night. The types of circuits necessary to run the device suggested had not as yet been developed, or, if they had, the corporations using them had not shared or released the technology.

Neil returned home twenty-four hours after he had been taken away by Blue Nile. He fell onto his mattress, slept for five hours, and then awoke in a sudden panic. Everything came back to him. The diagnosis of Labor Nervosa, the promise of forever unemployment, of fifty years underground in the honeycombs of Common Ground. His only other choice, the erasure of his record, was a felony. He began to tremble and sweat. He threw up in his small toilet and collapsed on the floor.

“Can I talk to you, Nina?” he said to the dark young prod.

“Sure, Neil,” she said.

Neil was confused by her friendliness and obvious flirtation; by her apparent ugliness and the deep sexual attraction she held for him.

“Could we go in the UC’s room.”

“Yeah,” she said.

She had been sitting next to a male prod, an Asian man.

“Excuse me, Nin,” she said to him.

The man nodded and smiled at Neil.

“What do you want, Neil?” Nina asked when they were in the back room.

“I want...” he said.

“Yeah?”

“I want you to do something for me.”

“What?”

“The thing, the thing with the records.”

“What thing, Neil?”

“You know what I mean.”

“No I don’t. Not unless you tell me what it is.”

“I don’t want to say it in here.”

“There’s no monitor cameras or listening devices here, hon. We had them removed.”

“I still don’t want to say it.”

Nina gave him a broad smile. Her skin was almost black, but not quite. Her smile was happy; red gums and spaces between all of her small teeth. Her eyes were deep holes, dull but not lifeless or unintelligent. They were too deep for Neil to fathom. Her hair was thick, braided into a dozen short ponytails.

Neil felt his stomach rumble when he looked at her. “Come sit with me in the window,” she said.

He obeyed and she sat close to him, putting her right hand on his thigh.

“What is it you want from me, Neil?”

“I want you to do for me what they make everybody else here do for themselves.”

“Your assignment?” she asked. Her hand began sliding up his leg.

“No.”

“Then, what?” Her hand moved further.

Neil squirmed.

“Don’t move away,” she whispered.

He stopped and her fingers reached the tip of his penis through the thin material of his tan andro-suit. He became instantly erect. Nina smiled and breathed into Neil’s face. Her breath was strong but not bad, sweet. Neil wanted to scream.

“What do you call this?” she asked.

“My, my penis.” As he said the word her hand slid over the erection and squeezed it slightly.

“Is that what you call it? Really?”

“Dick, cock. My hard cock.”

“Say it.”

“What?”

“Say it.”

“That’s my hard cock. Hard cock.”

“That’s right. You see? You know how to talk. You know how to say it.”

“Please,” Neil said.

Still holding on to Neil’s erection, Nina got up on her knees in the window space. She flipped her dress up, showing that she wore nothing underneath.

“Do me, baby,” she said.

“Somebody might come.”

“I put a sign on the door.”

“What kinda sign?”

“Just to say not to bother us. Do me now, baby. Come on.”

“I don’t have a condom.”

“You don’t need it.”

“You don’t know that.”

“If you want me to help you, you have to do me.” Saying this she let him go and raised her posterior into the air, spreading her legs so that the sun shone through, illuminating her wild and errant hairs.

Neil had never even dreamed of something like this. The bold blue sky and the bolder still woman who excited him so much that he felt sick down in his core.

He pulled down his pants and fumbled around until he pushed inside her. She moaned and called out a name that was not quite Neil. He looked down at her butt thrusting against him and then up at the sky. They bucked hard against each other and for the first time Neil thought about dying without fear or trepidation. When he came he saw his own reflection grinning in an infinite blue sky. A muscle tore in his groin but he didn’t care. He tried to pull away but Nina reached her hand around his backside and held him.

“Don’t, baby. Don’t take him out yet.”

“Somebody might come.”

“That’s me, hon,” she moaned. “That’s me comin’.”

Later, when Nina’s spasms stopped, they lay curled against each other in the window.

“Will you do it for me now?” Neil whispered nervously. He was still afraid that someone would walk in on them.

“Do what?”

“Alter my records.”

“You have to do that yourself, hon. That’s the rules.”

“But I thought you said that if I had sex with you that you’d help me.”

“I did help you. You needed a good fuck, Neil. You needed it bad.”

5

That night he was wide awake in his apartment thinking about prison, sex, and the sky. These thoughts brought on bouts of dizziness and confusion. He was afraid and aroused, feeling awe and panic. He considered running but there was no way out of New York. Anyone could leave the city, but in order to live outside your work perimeter you would have to pay a high tax or take up residence in Common Ground.

Neil thought about GEE-PRO-9’s window on the sky, about the silicon protocols used to read the electrical pulses generated by nerve cells. He wondered who wanted the Third Eye. Maybe it wasn’t even a MacroCode division that ordered the device. Almost certainly it was not, because that kind of research had been outlawed. It occurred to him that no client would order brain-altering technology except a foreign power. That would make Neil’s project espionage, and espionage was punishable by death.

Neil thought about calling his mother but he knew that she couldn’t help. And even if she could, all of his electronic communications were being monitored by Blue Nile and others.

“I don’t want to die,” Neil said aloud.

He thought about going to the newly instituted CBI. It was a branch of the federal government that investigated corporate fraud and crimes against the state. They had the power to save him if he became a witness. They had the power to save him but they could crush him too.

In prod-ed they taught the future data manipulators of the workplace to avoid reporting infractions.

“It’s someone else’s job to prove, penalize, and punish — not yours,” M Butterman would say whenever asked about legal aspects of production. “Everything you do at work is either your job or wasting corporate time. Wasting time is wasting money and wasting money is worse than anything else.”

Neil was wondering where the main office of the CBI was when the buzzer to his door sounded.

“Yes,” he asked, fearing the Bureau had found him first.

“It’s Nina,” she said over the speaker. “Let me up.”

She wore an ankle-length, emerald green, fake leather coat tied with a red sash at the waist. Her hair was combed straight back. Her thick eyebrows had been plucked down to slender lines.

“They want me down at work?” he asked her at the door. Nina pushed her way in, closing the door behind her. Her eyes seemed to say, There’s no escape.

“What?” Neil asked.

Nina removed her coat. She was naked underneath. Her breasts were small and sagging a bit. Neil had never seen breasts like hers. Eros-Haus girls all had surgically altered breasts. Perfect. Their pubic hair was either completely shaved or mostly so, leaving just a wisp of hair that the girls called their little goatee. Nina’s pubic hair was deep and thick, covering a wide swath under her belly. Again Neil was repelled by her. But at the same time he couldn’t look away.

“I was thinkin’ about you,” Nina said. There was a swagger in her voice.

“Thinking what?”

“You only been to Eros girls before today, huh?” She moved close to him. He thought about moving away but did not.

“No.”

“That’s what your wrist-writer says.”

“That’s private.”

“I was thinking,” Nina said again. She wrapped her arms around his neck and thrust her pelvis against him. “... that Eros girls never teach men how to eat pussy.” She said the last two words in his ear.

Neil moaned and was suddenly dizzy. He didn’t know if Nina pushed him down or if he fell.

“Up on your knees, M,” she said. “You’re gonna wag that tongue till he bleed.”

The next two weeks were a balance of work, sex, and fear for Neil. Every day he delved deeper into the thousands of pages provided by Un Fitt. Every evening he fretted over the possible ramifications of his work. After midnight Nina would come over and teach him another lesson in the lexicon of sex.

Only in the early-morning hours did Neil have a few moments of peace. At five Nina usually went home to change. Neil would get up and try to think of a way out. But he could see no way. General Specifix was going to fire him if he didn’t break the law by altering his records. If he was fired for having Labor Nervosa no other corporation would hire him. He might find work at a fast food restaurant or at some fuel stop, but that wasn’t enough money for topside living; those kinds of jobs were done by transient Common Grounders for choke cigarette money or to earn a pass to get out for a day or two on the upper tier.

Even if he did alter the records, and even if he wasn’t caught, there was still the problem of being associated with the rogue GT unit. If, by some fluke, there was a valid purpose for the existence of GEE-PRO-9, the Third Eye project was still illegal. And Neil couldn’t deny knowledge of the law because the introduction of his research files contained a detailed analysis of the laws he was breaking.

The hazards were many, but one was worse than all the others. He could see that maybe he would never get caught, or that he would only get caught after some years of working with Oura, Athria, and Blue Nile — but unprotected sex with a woman who was obviously well versed in intercourse of all kinds was like playing Russian roulette with five loaded chambers in the gun.

Still Neil could not deny Nina. He wasn’t attracted to her but he was lost in the face of her sexual hunger. Her passion for his body and hers made him submissive to the point that he would allow her to hurt him rather than pull away. Her orgasms and lewd suggestions stayed in his mind all the time. He dreamed about her and found himself waiting for her to arrive every night.

One night she didn’t come and he didn’t sleep at all. The next day he shunned her when she came to talk to him; he walked away from her when she tried to join him for lunch. That night she rang his buzzer and he didn’t answer for five minutes.

“Why you actin’ like that?” she asked when he finally let her in.

“I thought you were through with me,” he said.

“Just ’cause I didn’t come one night? What did you think I was doin’?”

“I don’t know.”

“Yeah you do. You know what you think.”

“I thought you were with another guy.”

“I wasn’t,” she said. “I was with two men...”

Neil fell back a step when she said this. His right eyelid began twitching.

“... they was at the Conga Club. Two friends in town on business. They came up to me while I was havin’ a drink and said if I wanted to go to their room. Said they was from Florida City, that they wanted to do one girl. It’s okay, though, I made ’em wear rubbers, double rubbers.”

“Why don’t you let... have me wear a rubber?”

“ ’Cause I know you’re safe, baby. I read your meds ’fore I took you to bed.”

“What about me? I haven’t read your records.”

Nina cupped Neil’s face between her hands. She leaned in close and kissed him lightly on the lips. “I wouldn’t put you in danger, honey. I wouldn’t hurt you at all. An’ them two men didn’t mean nuthin’ to me. They back down south now, braggin’ about what’s yours.”

Neil sat down on the bed and pressed his palms against his eyes. The darkness was laced with red veins.

“You sick, honey?” Nina asked.

“No.”

“What’s wrong, then?”

Neil felt her hands on his shoulders, her weight leaning against his back.

“Talk to me, Neil.”

He tried to answer but he couldn’t. Nina began to rock him gently forward and back. Her fingers massaged his scalp.

“You got curly hairs,” Nina said. “Somebody in your family Irish or Greek?”

“I used to get in trouble,” Neil said. “In school.”

“What kinda trouble?”

“I wouldn’t do anything. I wouldn’t listen or answer questions or do homework.”

“How come you didn’t?”

“I don’t know. One of my teachers, Miss... I mean M Lassiter, said to my mother that she thought I had ideas of my own. She wanted me to go to the Ben Franklin Academy. But that cost too much and Mom was mad, so she put me in proded ’cause I didn’t obey.”

“Your mother did that?”

“Yeah.”

“Is that why you sad?”

“I’m not sad, I’m just quiet,” he said. And then, “You wouldn’t hurt me, would you, Nina?”

“No. I said I wouldn’t.”

“And I believe you.”

“So? What’s wrong with that?”

“I never believed anybody before. Nobody. Not my mother, not my friends.”

Nina hugged Neil and pressed her head against the back of his neck.

“That’s good, isn’t it?”

“In my head it is,” Neil whispered. “But in my heart I’m more scared than if you buried me alive.”

6

At six that same morning Neil approached the Middle First Avenue entrance of General Specifix. He rode the glass elevator, using his thick identity card on the GEE-PRO-9 door.

“Hi, Neil,” Marva called from the upper tier. She was the only one there, smoking her illegal tobacco and coughing.

Neil caught a whiff of the smoke in the air but he didn’t care. He went directly to the UC room and logged onto the red controller screen. He entered his name and the forty-seven-digit number Blue Nile had given him, offered up his handprint, and initiated the search. Only when the record appeared before him did he stall. He didn’t know if there was some kind of special code that one might need to alter the EPR, employee permanent record. He worried armed security guards would come out from some secret doorway and drag him away to a private prison without even a trial.

“M Hawthorne,” he imagined some corporate official saying to his mother. “Your son contracted the new strain of Ebola C virus. In accordance with the emergency laws enacted by the mayor we had no choice but to immediately cremate his remains.” He would hand Neil’s mother an urn with ashes gathered from a Midwestern dog pound and she would cry and ask who was the beneficiary of his insurance policy.

Then the red sun began to emerge from the Brooklyn skyline.

With light came the feeling of space. Neil looked out over the city and then erased the D-marks for fainting and lack of concentration. Nothing happened. When he deleted the contents of the diagnosis box the recommended dismissal automatically disappeared and the Penalty Screen was replaced by an aqua Merit Screen. Here Neil wrote that he had shown great skill and had been promoted to the seventh tier. He worked well with his chain mates, he took initiative in his tasks without causing trouble on the line. This automatically evoked recommendations for a raise and promotion. Then he switched over to the Policy Screens and changed the beneficiary from his mother to Nina Bossett.

“M Hawthorne,” a voice said from the doorway behind him.

The young prod leapt to his feet and spun around. He decided to fight the security guards, to die rather than go to prison.

“What’s wrong, Neil?” Marva Monel asked. “I just wanted to know if you were ordering lunch.”

“No,” Neil said, trying to unclench his fists. “I’m just working in here.”

“Did my smoke bother you?”

“No. No. I guess I just like being alone awhile in the morning.”

The older woman smiled. “Me too. That’s why I come in here so early. I love looking down on the big table while I’m entering protocols. It makes the work seem better somehow.”

“Yeah,” Neil said. “Yeah, exactly.”

After Marva left Neil entered his updated EPR into the General Specifix permanent database. A feeling of great calm came over him. He celebrated by opening a blank chip template. He had decided that he would create a new chip for the transmission and reception of data between an as yet nonexistent device and the brain. He had never created a processing chip before. He was taught in prod-ed that only a prod with five years of post-prod-ed had the ability to encode the millions, sometimes billions, of binary instructions necessary to achieve an independent function.

But Neil had learned from Un Fitt that the major logic designers had developed a giant subroutine database that had hundreds of millions of entries categorized by function, size, speed, and compatibility with other subroutines. All Neil had to do was to think of a function and then ask the system to search according to his parameters.

This system, Un Fitt had said in an early communication, was originally developed for general use by HI, Hackers International, but had been co-opted by MacroCode Corporation in a hostile event toward the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century. This database, a closely guarded secret, was updated hourly with logics created in-house, bought from external sources, or stolen.

Each entry in this system had a list of possible hardware devices attached to it. Through this list Neil felt sure that he could find the most efficient devices for the Third Eye project.

He worked all day and late into the evening. At nine he moved to the high table in the GT room. There he worked hard, laughing out loud to himself sometimes and grimacing at others. At various odd moments he would get up and walk around visiting his fellow workers. Oura was especially happy for his visits and told him so.

“Hi, baby,” Nina said, in a late afternoon visit to his workstation. “How’s it goin’?”

“Great. Couldn’t be better.”

“You workin’ good?”

“I finally realized, Nina.”

“What?”

“This is all I have. I couldn’t go back to LAVE-AITCH even if they’d let me. I couldn’t sit there and call up undu-protocols or timekeeper registers. I couldn’t wake up at seven and go to bed at ten. I couldn’t live without you.”

He said this all in a rush with no particular emphasis on any word or idea. It was just information flowing out of him. Nina put her hand up over her mouth and frowned.

“I know I’m not pretty,” she said.

“Don’t say it,” he said. “Don’t say anything but that you still want to see me even though I’m an idiot, a deffy-boy on the lower streets.”

Nina kissed him on the lips, a fast-fireable infraction, and turned away quickly, returning to her station.

7

Neil threw himself fully into the Third Eye project after that. For the next year he worked twelve hours almost every day. He spent his leisure time with fellow workers and most of his nights with Nina. There were evenings that she would disappear with her hefty-men; on those evenings Neil would swear to himself that he would never see her again. But a day or two later they were back together.

One night while Nina was out scrambling around, as she would say, Neil called Blue Nile and asked him if he would like to get together for a late dinner in Dark Town.

“That’d be great, Neilio,” the little man said. He did a jig in the 3D vid arch. “Where to?”

“A place I go to sometimes,” Neil said. “Hallwell’s China Diner on Lower Thirty-third and Park.”

“Hey, hey,” Blue Nile said. “Sounds like an underground poet named her. And if that poet’s also a cook... Well, you know, poetry’s the only real soul food.”

They met at the front door of the hole-in-the-wall at just past twenty hours. The only other people there were a short woman dressed in a black T-shirt and a long brown skirt and a black man with a synthetic blue eye who sat in a corner considering the wall.

“Teriyaki frogs’ legs over hominy with onion and chard,” D’or Hallwell — proprietor, waitress, cook, and janitor of the China Diner — said. “Or grubsteak fresh from the rain forest of Brazil.”

“I don’t know,” Blue Nile said. “I never ate a worm before.”

D’or walked up to the table and put a meaty fist on her hip. She had wiry gray-blond hair that stuck almost straight out from her head. “If you ever ate a prepared meal out of a plastic can chances are ten to one you ate a worm. And not no farm-certified worm like my grubsteak, neither. No sir. Canned worms are wild things. Maggots and larvae and carnivorous caterpillars.”

“Oh,” Blue Nile said. It was the first time Neil had ever seen his friend look somebody in the eye without smiling.

“Let him alone, D’or,” the black man sitting in the corner said. “He just wants a meal, not the IDA report on canned foods.”

“Hello, M Johnson,” Neil said to the man.

“M Hawthorne,” the Electric Eye replied.

“Well?” D’or asked Blue Nile. “What’ll it be?”

“What about you, Neil?”

“He’s a commie kid,” D’or said. “The cheapest plate is always his favorite dish.”

“Then grubsteak, please, ma’am,” Blue Nile said.

D’or smiled and went away to get their meals.

“Nice place,” Blue Nile said. “How long you been comin’ here?”

“I always knew about it,” Neil said. “For the first five years I came about once every year or so, to treat myself. I was saving up for my vacation so I didn’t want to waste money on restaurant food. But after I started GP-9 I been comin’ once or twice a week.”

“Whatever happened to that vacation of yours?”

“I don’t know. It didn’t seem important anymore, I guess. I mean, a seventh-class room in a hotel that has ten thousand rooms sounded like work to me.”

Blue Nile laughed and rocked in his rickety chair. “You like the food here?” he asked.

“I like the place. It’s privately owned you know.”

“No.”

“Yeah. M Hallwell’s mother owned it and never had to turn it over during the corporate takeover days because the rest of the block was city owned back then. By the time the city sold out the laws had changed and D’or didn’t have to sell it.”

“A private business,” Blue Nile said. “In New York. Wow.” D’or returned with their dinners. Neil had frogs’ legs over hominy and Blue Nile had a big grubsteak smothered in fried mushrooms, onions, and peas.

“I never seen you before, have I?” D’or asked Blue Nile.

“This is my first time in your fine establishment,” Blue Nile said. “But you can be sure that it’s not my last.”

The restaurant owner pulled a chair from a vacant table and sat down. Neil wasn’t happy about this. He liked D’or but he wanted to talk to his friend about Nina. He wanted to ask about her history and family. Blue Nile had the file protocols to look up prod records. Neil could have requested access but he worried that Nina would get angry if she thought he was checking her background.

“You’re cute,” D’or was saying to Blue Nile.

“Thank you. You’re a lovely woman.”

“Neil,” D’or said, “you should bring your friend around more often.”

“I don’t think he’ll need me to bring him after he’s tasted your grubsteak.”

“The boy’s right, there,” Nile agreed.

“What’s your name?” D’or asked.

“Blue Nile.”

“No shit?”

“Straight as the hole down to Common Ground.”

“Where you from, Blue Nile?”

“Vermont. Montpelier.”

“Mm! That’s some cold country up there.”

“Not if you dig a hole and stay down in it for six months.”

“What brought you down here?”

“My mother. She slipped into Simpson’s Coma Disorder. I wanted to help her, but you know a country boy can’t make a dime. She needed three kinds of drugs, so I sold my labor contract to MacCo. They bought forty years of my labor for her drugs and room and board for me.”

“You sold your entire work life to MacroCode?” Neil was shocked.

“Lotsa people do it, kid,” Blue Nile said. “How else can a prod afford to take care of his loved ones? There’s no more private property, hardly. All a prod’s got is his labor.”

“How long ago was that?” D’or asked.

“Let’s see,” Blue Nile said. “I’m fifty-five now, so it must be twenty-two years.”

“Is your mother still alive?”

“No. She died three years after I came to MacCo.”

“You poor thing,” D’or Hallwell said.

“That’s what they do to you,” a man’s voice said.

Neil and Blue Nile looked up at the towering figure of the black man with the artificial blue eye.

“Do you mind if I join you, M Hawthorne?” Folio Johnson asked.

“No, M Johnson. Of course not. This is my friend — M Blue Nile.”

“Call me Blue,” Nile said. He stood up and extended a hand to Folio.

“Can you beat that shit?” D’or asked the electric detective as he pulled up a chair. “Bought his whole life, just like he was an old-time slave.”

Johnson nodded.

Neil was wondering why he had never asked about Blue Nile’s family or his work contract with MacCo; why he’d never known that his friend lived in a labor dormitory or why he’d never been invited to call him Blue.

“It’s not so bad,” Blue Nile said. “Before I made the deal and got the nuclear drugs my mother was in a full-out coma. She came awake and smiled at me six hours after her first dose. We moved her down to Brooklyn and she stayed with my sister. I saw her every day for those three years. It was worth every minute I have to spend.”

“Yeah,” Folio said. “For you it was. For anybody. Life is worth almost any price you have to pay. But that doesn’t mean they have to charge you for it.”

“You’re right about that,” Blue Nile said. “And right is right.”

They talked all night and into the morning. Blue Nile had a flask of real brandy that D’or produced glasses for. Blue Nile and Folio and D’or did most of the talking. Neil just listened. It was rare that he was with a group of people who spoke openly and honestly about their feelings. For the first time in many weeks he forgot completely about Nina.

Blue Nile became a regular at the China Diner. Neil would see him at the counter almost every time he went there. The older man was always talking to D’or or waiting for her to be finished so they could resume their conversation. One time Neil ran into Nile at breakfast wearing the same overalls he had on the day before.

Neil always sat alone to give D’or and Blue Nile their privacy. Every now and then Folio Johnson, another regular, would wave him over.

One day the detective seemed down and Neil took it on himself to pull up a chair.

“Something wrong, M Johnson?” Neil asked.

“Had a case didn’t work out right.”

“You failed?”

“I got the answers but my client died. He was murdered by a girl.”

“Oh.” Neil wondered how he could switch the subject.

“Don’t worry, kid,” Johnson said, as if he could read Neil’s worried mind. “Cops know all about it. They know but they can’t do a thing.”

“Why not?”

“Same reason that it’d be a crime for Blue to quit his job. The corporations. The madmen who run ’em.”

Neil swallowed hard and sat very still.

“You know anything about the Itsies, kid?”

“No. Just that they believe that the Nazis back a hundred years ago were right: that there’s a wedding of the scientific and the spiritual, like with Infochurch.”

“Do you know any of them Itsies?”

“No sir. No.”

“They wanna kill me.”

“Why?”

“ ’Cause I’m black. Can you believe that? In this world where the last thing you got to worry about is skin color and they still wanna kill me. That’s some crazy shit.”

Neil didn’t see Folio Johnson around the China Diner much after that night. He missed their talks but he was also busy, spending long days at GP-9. He designed seventeen micronic processors — wafer-thin microdots containing billions of hard gel circuits, sheathed in the multilayered silicon skins needed to perceive and encode sensory data and to transfer those translations into the nervous system code.

The Third Eye would be able to perceive far more than human senses. A user could, Neil believed, close his eyes and plug his ears, wrap himself from head to toe in sense-dep clothes, and still be able to know more of what was going on around him than ten unaided human beings.

But as large as the micronic memory was, it was nowhere near the capacity needed to record these sensations for later use. At full capacity a human would be able to use the eye only one sense at a time. He could see clearly for miles distant, but his other senses would suffer. The only way to be aware of all senses would be to record them for later study. In order to record this data successfully, the table computer estimated a trillion trillion characters of memory per hour.

Creating a functioning device, Neil felt, was impossible. But he wasn’t worried. His job was to develop the virtual prototype for the perceptor logic, and he had done that; at least, he had the general designs down. It would take another three or four years for him to locate and download all the routines that would fit in between the sheaths of the Third Eye.

Neil often thought about his old days on the prod lane, days when all he would do was look up one of the few hundred chips he used in product insertion. He never worked on a project for more than ninety minutes. He’d never known how anything turned out unless he happened to see the device in one of the leasing department store vid commercials.

“What you thinkin’?” Nina asked him one day. They were sitting side by side, looking out at the sky.

“Why don’t more people do what we’re doing here?” he asked.

“Because the corporations don’t want ’em to.”

“Why? The kind of work we’re doing could change the way people live.”

“You really think so?”

“Sure. With this device, when they finally figure out the memory, you could just go outside and see the planets, in a full spectrum of light.”

“But prob’ly,” Nina said wryly, “some dude’d just try and look inta somebody’s windah an’ see if they was fuckin’.”

“Not everybody.”

“Most of ’em.”

“But that’s not why the corporations have us doing little shit. They don’t care if somebody’s lookin’ in a window.”

“No. But why pay for expensive experiments and designs when you could just lease the same old clock radio, the same old chair? They got us where we pay for whatever they put out. Why design somethin’ might cost a million creds when you could just change its color or put a vid in it?”

“So we just stopped advancing? We just stagnate from now on?”

“No. They do research. Randac do it on Madagascar in their genius prison. Dr. Kismet do it in the Blue Zone on Home. But that shit ain’t for the prods. They have what they have and we cain’t get at it. That’s why we live from minute to minute and they plannin’ on what our children’s children gonna live like.”

“But that’s not right. We should be making those decisions.”

“How much you think it’s gonna cost to make a hardware prototype’a your Eye thing?”

“I don’t know.”

“Ten million — credits not dollars. That’s why you can’t decide. It costs a lotta money to decide. And they only pay you enough to get fat and sloppy.”

Neil wanted to talk more but a message came in from Un Fitt and Neil had been waiting for instructions.

“Sorry, Nina. I should read this.”

“Okay, baby. See you later.”

Neil read the words with a growing sense of failure. He had believed that the Third Eye project was his, that he would be the only one to work on it. Now he was being told that he was still on a production lane, that he was only a nameless step in the creation of just another product. He tried to do the write-up he was asked for: he called up the beginnings of the macroflow he’d generated describing the logic units needed to fulfill the parameters of the Third Eye. For over an hour he stared at the boxes and circles used to exhibit the flow of data, the speed of perception in the various skins, and the protocols for translation into octal code. Neil looked at the screen but it didn’t make any sense to him.

“I’m going home,” he told Athria at just past noon.

“Okay, honey. You sick?”

“No. See you tomorrow.”

At home Neil didn’t drink or watch the vid; he didn’t dream about the coast of California or anticipate Nina’s late night visit. All he did was sit in his chair and think about Un Fitt and how he had been robbed of his chance to succeed. He knew that these thoughts were ridiculous, that someone who had expertise in biology and neurology would have to take over. But Un Fitt had implied that the work Neil had done would have to be done over. Why wasn’t he allowed to get first crack at rewrites?

The vid phone came on just past twenty-three hours.

“Neil?” Nina said. Her face took up the whole screen so he couldn’t tell where she was.

“Hey, honey.”

“What’s wrong?”

“They took me off the Third Eye project.”

“Moving it down the lane?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s okay, baby. You’ll get another project.”

“I wasn’t finished with this one yet.”

“I know, babe. We all felt like that on our first project. My first time out I was working on a facet of an automated construction machine. I didn’t get nearly as far as you did but I still cried when they moved it on.”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“I got somethin’ll make you feel better.”

“What?”

“I’m up in a room with two sex-worker girls. I met ’em at the library. I told ’em about you and they said they wanted you to come with us. They got all kindsa toys. Come on. It’ll be fun.”

“Not tonight, babe. I mean, I’m too sad.”

Neil expected her to throw a fit. She did that whenever he refused her “feel better cures.”

“That’s okay, honey. I know it must be hard. You get some sleep and I’ll come by about five or so.”

“Okay,” Neil said. “See ya.”

Just then Nina was pulled away from the screen by an Asian woman. The woman was tall and there was a serious look on her face. She pulled Nina to her and kissed her hard. She snaked her hand under Nina’s plaid skirt and lifted her off her feet. When Neil heard his lover’s loud moan of pleasure he switched off the vid.

As soon as Neil transmitted his resignation he regretted it. What would he do back at some GT like LAVE-AITCH-27? How could he survive as just another prod after experiencing GEE-PRO-9?

He was thinking of sending another e-mail to retract his resignation when the vid phone bleeped.

Neil sat back in his chair after this last communication. He didn’t know what to think about the claims of Un Fitt. He was afraid to ask any more, and so he did not answer. After a few minutes another message came in.

“Hi, baby,” Nina said at five the next morning.

Neil saw the numbers 5:03 floating aimlessly around the otherwise empty vid chamber. He realized now for the first time that she was always on time.

“Hey.”

She kissed him on the lips. Her breath smelled strongly of whoever it was that she had been kissing that night. The tall Asian, Neil thought, or maybe another.

“Don’t be mad, baby,” Nina said. She sat down at his feet and played with his kneecaps, running her fingertips around in circles. “It was just nuthin’. I axed you to come wit’ me. You would’a had fun if you wasn’t so mad.”

“I’m not mad, honey. I know who you are. At least I know who you are.”

“What’s that mean?”

“I’m going on a vacation,” Neil said. “Goin’ to Maya for two weeks.”

“Since when?”

“Since yesterday. When they took the Third Eye from me they gave me a bonus vacation.”

“You gonna go?”

“I think I have to. I have to think.” Neil smiled at the order of his words.

“I don’t want you to go.”

“Why not? Then you won’t have me whining at you to come over. You could have all the hefty-men and sex-worker girls you want, every night.”

“I don’t want that!” she yelled. She jumped up and slapped him hard across the face. Then she collapsed in his lap, crying.

Neil put his hands on her heaving shoulder blades. He said nothing, felt nothing, wondered nothing except about the nature of his Unit Controller.

8

On the following Friday Neil was one of nine hundred forty-seven passengers on the Titan 010 air cruise ship landing on Maya. He had a second-class seat, which was better than most senators rated. People all over that sleeper cabin asked him what position he held at General Specifix. Two flight aides, one a woman and the other a man, gave him their hotel numbers on the island.

On the tarmac Neil was blinded by sunlight reflecting off the bright red rock that composed the synthetic island.

“M Hawthorne?”

“Yes?”

“I’m your driver — Oscar Torres.” The large man was brown-skinned. He had a heroic mustache and two fingers missing from the hand he used to shake with. “I will take you to the Crimson Chalet and drive you wherever you need to go while you are here.”

“Who hired you?” Neil asked Torres from the backseat of the luxurious, German-made Century Bug. The green chromium car sped down the small lanes of the perfect little Hindu city that was the tourist hub of Maya.

“The travel bureau of the island called me and told me that you were my only responsibility for the next few days,” the big man said. His mouth, Neil thought, seemed always on the verge of laughter. “And that I was not to accept any gratuity from you whatsoever.”

“Who paid them?”

“Don’t you know?”

“I know who sent me here but I thought I’d like to find out what department did the work, so I could thank them — everything has worked out so well.”

The hotel lobby was the size of Grand Central Station and every bit as busy. Carrying Neil’s two suitcases, Oscar weaved through the crowd of noisy tourists, bellboys, taxidrivers, and undercover security agents. Finally they came to a small window that had no one waiting on line.

“First class only, M,” said the small woman who sat inside the window.

“That’s my boss. First class all the way.”

The woman, who had India Indian deep brown skin and shimmering blond hair, leaned forward to get a glimpse of Neil, who was wearing a worse-for-wear coal gray andro-suit.

“Name?” she asked suspiciously.

“Neil Hawthorne virtual mid — um, Neil Hawthorne.”

The woman pressed two buttons and then her dour expression changed. “Welcome, M Hawthorne,” she said brightly. “We’ve been waiting for you. You have been given the Neptune Suite above the upper level of the reef. Are these all your bags?”

“Yes.”

Four melodious chimes issued from somewhere behind her desk. A moment later a tall man appeared, wearing a uniform that was the same color red as the island, the outer walls of the chalet, the ceilings, floors, inner walls, and almost everything else that Neil had so far seen.

“The Neptune Suite,” the woman said.

The big man took the bag from Oscar and said, “Follow me, sir.”

“Here’s my number, M Hawthorne,” Oscar said, pressing a scrap of paper into Neil’s sweating palm.

The cavernous suite was the pale blue of a pastel artist’s rendition of the sea. An incredibly large, green-tinted window led out onto a deck easily five times the size of Neil’s apartment. From there he could see most of the southern part of Maya. There were tens of thousands of tourists and workers down in the town and spread out across the orange sands of the beach. But even with all that traffic only the sound of the ocean reached Neil’s spectacular perch.

“M Hawthorne?” a girl’s voice asked timidly.

She was little more than a child, Neil thought. She stood in the doorway naked and barefoot. Her pale white skin seemed to belong to the night and its lunar light. She had no hair, anywhere. No brows or pubes or even an eyelash. And she was beautiful.

“Who are you?”

“Your house servant — Charity.”

“What’s that?”

“I’m here for your needs. I can cook and clean, run errands and sleep in your bed. I am here for you.”

“You work for the hotel?”

She nodded and looked down.

Many years later Neil realized, as he scanned this memory, that it was at this moment that he no longer considered Pulse as an alternative to problems he faced in life.

“Where are you from?”

“Scandia.”

“How’d you get here?”

“My parents send me for their retirement.”

“I can send down for a vig-toner drink,” Charity offered.

They were lying in Neil’s bed. He had been trying for hours to make love to his house servant. The windows of his bedroom were open to the sound of the ocean. The impossibly bright three-quarter moon was their only light.

“No thanks,” he said. “All I’d do is think about Nina.”

Charity lifted his limp penis with the fingertips of both hands. She gave it a light kiss.

“I like how the skin of your penis is so dark compared to the rest of your body. It’s so much better than pink or red.”

“That tickles,” Neil said.

“Is Nina your wife?”

“No.”

“Girlfriend?”

“Sometimes.”

“What does that mean?”

“She’s, she’s a free spirit, a wild thing is what she calls it. I see her a lot but sometimes she goes away for a night or two... to get wild sex with strange men or women.”

“Is she very beautiful?” Charity asked wistfully.

“No. Actually she’s kind of ugly.”

“No!” Charity blurted. She laughed and punched Neil playfully on the arm.

“Yeah, she is. I mean she’s real sexy and there’s something about her...”

Charity seemed to be paying very close attention to him. She pushed Neil’s chest with both her hands hard enough to knock him over on the bed.

“You lie,” she said. “A rich man like you would not have an ugly girl.”

“Yeah,” Neil said, putting his hand against his chest.

“Sit up,” she said.

Neil did. He was enjoying their banter.

Suddenly she slapped him very hard across the face.

“Ow! Why’d you do that?”

“Look,” she replied, pointing at his groin.

He looked down to see that he’d begun to have an erection. When he looked back up at Charity, she slapped him even harder and pushed him down on his back.

The days passed on Maya. Neil wandered the crowded streets looking into shops where items were actually for sale rather than lease. When he was tired of the multitudes he would have Oscar drive him to the private access suite beach. There he could wander alone for hours only rarely coming across some billionaire and his house servant.

Whenever he was alone he’d remember the last communication he had with Un Fitt. He decided that the rogue controller was a megalomaniac, some demented genius who trapped unsuspecting prods in his illegal designs.

For the first time in his life Neil read the electric news. The INA, the Western Wynde, even the Daily Dump were available on a flat screen that popped up on his breakfast table every morning. The first few days he just scanned the headlines, looking for the escapades of sports heroes and vid stars. He was also drawn to spectacular murders and great disasters. It was only by chance that he saw the name Arnold Roth reported as one of the victims of a Common Ground riot in the Bronx.

There had been a three-day food shortage, something about a delivery schedule foul-up and the subsequent lock-down of CG-109, the largest Common Ground facility in the twelve fiefs. Roth had stayed in his sleep slip to avoid trouble, the INA reported, but out-of-control rioters had thrown a Molotov cocktail and the smoke suffocated the innocent cycler.

The Daily Dump had a completely different scenario for the death of Arnold Roth, Neil’s only friend before he came to work for GEE-PRO-9. M Roth, the Dump reported, was demanding food or freedom with thirty thousand other displaced unemployed persons when they were dispersed by sonic cannons, a standard antiriot tool of the NYSP. To prove this claim the Dump supplied a vid clip that showed Arnold yelling and brandishing his fists along with many others. Later, the Dump asserted, Roth was forced into a tunnel where rioters were to be quelled with disorientation gas. Arnold was one of the unlucky few who got pressed into a lower slip. There he suffocated.

The end of the article was punctuated by a low-res electronic photo of a jumble of corpses jammed into a sleep tube. Arnold Roth’s pudgy face lolled over another dead M’s rump.

The news of his friend’s death greatly disturbed Neil, though he didn’t feel sadness or loss. Neil liked Arnold, but he’d always known that his friend was destined to become a Backgrounder. Roth could never stay on a job cycle for more than a few months. In the last year Neil hadn’t responded to Arnold’s calls. He was afraid that he might let some secret slip about GP-9. He never trusted Arnold, he hadn’t missed his company in the past year, but still he identified with the dead prod. Neil saw himself in the brown pajama uniform of Common Ground, shaking his fists in the face of the Social Police. He saw himself pressed into a hole and suffocated.

That night he sat up with his Scandian housegirl and talked about how his mother hadn’t called him in the whole year that he worked for GEE-PRO-9.

“She moved to Baltimore,” Neil told Charity. “Joined an Infochurch commune that took out a twelve-year lease on a vacant warehouse there. I only know because I called her on Christmas to invite her out to dinner. If I didn’t ask her she wouldn’t have even told me that she’d moved.”

The next day Neil read all three papers looking for information on Arnold. But there was no mention, not even in the Dump.

Neil read articles on every social disturbance, hoping for some new information on the Common Ground riots. The Dump claimed that MacroCode America was behind the riots but that made no sense to Neil.

There was nothing else about CG-109. The Cincinnati police department had dispatched a unit to New York, but that was because of some group defrauding their city’s treasury. A large number of Itsies had escaped Common Grounds around the world and emigrated to Jesus City, an International Socialist enclave in the Caucasus Mountains. Rioting in Boston had erupted because of a new law the FemLeague had pushed through banning self-circumcision in women.

Neil dreamed about the news. He lived out the riots and the deaths. He waded through fields of corpses, was locked in a sleep slip underground. He searched battlefields, hospitals, and graveyards for Arnold Roth. He awoke with headaches and loose bowels like in the old days before GEE-PRO-9.

“So did you fuck her?” were the first words out of Nina’s mouth when he called her on the ninth day after he’d arrived on Maya.

“What?”

“I know you got a housegirl with your place.”

“Why would you care, Nina? You always get mad at me when I ask you that kinda stuff.”

“I do not. And I tell you whatever it is I’m doing.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I did.”

“Oh,” Nina said in a small voice. “How was it?”

“Nice.”

“Is she pretty?”

“She doesn’t have any hair. No hair at all.”

“But is she pretty?”

“She’s nice.”

“So why don’t you bring her home with you if you like her so much? I’m sure she’d wanna come to New York. Why don’t you do that?”

“Nina, what’s wrong? You always said that we have to be free sexually. Is it just because I’ve never done it before?”

“Don’t try and get psychological with me, M. I never seen nobody more than one night. Except those sex-worker girls, but they’re women and that makes it different.”

“Nina, Charity comes with the room,” Neil said.

“So she has a name, huh?” Nina’s face contorted into a rage that Neil had never seen in her before. “Fuck you!” she cried and then broke off the connection.

He tried to call her back but there was no answer at her home, the job, or on her portable unit. He wondered what it was that he had done to get her so mad. He thought about that for a while but then his mind wandered back to Un Fitt’s megalomania, Arnold Roth’s death, and his mother.

“I love you, Neil,” Charity said to him later that night. The sting of her slaps were still on his cheeks, both upper and lower.

“You do?”

“I like the way you submit to me, how I found out how to get you hot and how you let me. And...”

“And what?”

“You’re really funny and nice. Most rich men don’t even see you. Even if they fuck you they don’t remember your face. You knew my name after the first time I said it. That’s why I wanted to make you excited, because I wanted to make you feel good.”

“I don’t know what to say.”

“And how you said that your girlfriend was ugly but that you loved her. How she does what she wants and you aren’t even mad at her.”

“I don’t act like a rich man ’cause I’m not, Charity. I’m just a guy who won a free vacation for doing a good job for a crazy boss.”

“Can I come home with you anyway? I don’t want to be rich.”

“I don’t know how.”

“Is it because of my hair? I could get new roots put in. I could have any kind of hair you want.”

“Let’s talk about it in the morning, okay?”

“You don’t want me.”

“I, I, I... I need to think about it, that’s all. I need to think about what I could do.”

“I could work for you, make you money. I’m a trained Eros-Haus girl. And Nina wouldn’t even know I was there.”

9

The vid made a loud bubbling sound at three in the morning. Neil had decided to sleep alone and asked Charity to take the servant’s quarters for the night.

“Sir?” a bodiless voice inquired.

“Who is it?”

“The front desk.”

“What time is it?”

“Three, sir. I’m sorry to bother you, but there’s a gentleman down here who says that he has urgent business with you.”

“What gentleman?”

“He calls himself Blue Nile.”

“Hey, Neilio,” the diminutive prod from GEE-PRO-9 said with a smile. He was stretched out across a pink couch near the registration desk.

“What are you doing here?”

“No time for talkin’, this place is walkin’,” Blue Nile replied as he rose to his feet. He took Neil by the hand as he had done the first day they met over a year before.

The grand lobby of the Crimson Chalet was nearly empty at that time of morning. There was one open bar with an obstinate group of partyers drinking and laughing loudly.

“Walk where?”

“Into the night and out of sight.”

“Make sense, Blue.” Neil came to a halt.

“We’ve got to run, Neil,” the little man said seriously. “The authorities discovered GP-9 and they’re after all of the prods involved.”

“What?”

“They got Marva and Lonnie Z, Three Moons and the Monique sisters.”

“Monique sisters?”

“They never came in. The bulls got the homeworkers first.”

“What about Nina?”

“I left her a message but we never spoke,” Blue Nile said. “She’s got street in her, she’ll get away. Oura and Athria were notified by Un Fitt. They told me to come after you. The cops are already on their way to this hotel. They don’t have your name yet ’cause we used codes in the ticketing system, but they won’t take long in finding you out.”

“If they’re on the island how can we get away?”

“I got a swift and a pilot waiting down at the private beach.”

They scurried down the dark pathways of Maya in the early morning. Neil was wearing fabric slippers and loose pajama pants. When the security team stopped them he was sure that they would be arrested for crimes against the economy.

“Where you Ms going this time of morning?” asked a large woman who appeared from the shadows. She wore the yellow and black law enforcement uniform of the island.

Her partner, a man even larger than she, stood silently behind.

Neil brought out his Neptune Suite key and showed it to the police. He knew that it wouldn’t make a difference, but it was all he could do.

“Oh,” the woman said, suddenly feminine. “Excuse me, M Hawthorne. I didn’t recognize you in the darkness. Please, go on.”

“Thank you,” he mumbled.

“Would you like us to accompany you?” the male officer asked.

“That won’t be necessary.”

The small jet could hover as well as accelerate to over three times the speed of sound. The pilot was an Indian woman with a very proper English accent. The cabin was small but comfortable enough for six passengers. Silently the jet rose above the Caribbean Sea before it sped off across the sky.

“Where are we going?”

“I don’t know,” Blue Nile said.

“How can you not know?”

“If I don’t know then I can’t tell any unfriendlies, now can I?”

Two hours later they landed on a desolate stretch of beach. Neil had no idea of where they were. He had no sense of direction or geography. They could have been anywhere in the world. It was a moonless night. Neil figured that there must be a city somewhere, because he could make out a tree-spiked horizon against a barely perceptible glow from far off.

Through the window he could see a flickering light in the distance.

“I see a light out there,” he said to the pilot.

She didn’t say anything and so he repeated his warning. “I see it,” she said.

As the light neared, Neil could see that it came from a flame. Open fire was illegal in New York City. Matches had been classified as a form of fireworks and possession of them was treated as a third-degree misdemeanor. Only filament lighters were allowed for choke cigarettes. Neil’s first experience with open flame had been the torches and candles of Maya. He was enchanted by the ragged dancing quality of naked fire.

It took the solitary figure a good quarter of an hour to reach the beach. When he neared, the pilot engaged the ramp device. The man dropped the lantern and ran up into the ship.

He was tall and thin, black with long thick hair that resembled a lion’s mane.

“M Nile, M Hawthorne,” the young-looking man said. “It’s a great pleasure to finally meet you.”

“Sir?” the pilot asked from the cockpit.

“Destination L-17,” the man replied. He strapped himself into a seat next to Neil and the swift rose quickly into the black skies above the beach that could have been anywhere.

“Ptolemy Bent,” the new passenger said. He pressed Neil’s hand, and then Blue Nile’s.

“You one of the prods under Un Fitt?” Neil asked.

“Not exactly. I’m more like the midwife.”

“Come again?”

“It’s a long story.”

“I know that Un is a computer,” Neil said.

“He told you that?”

“I was going to quit. Then he said that he was a machine. Did you create him?”

“In a way.”

“The controller is a computer?” Blue Nile asked.

“Partly,” the lion-maned black man said.

“What does that mean?”

“Un Fitt told me that he was programmed by God,” Neil told Blue Nile.

“He said that too?” Ptolemy was surprised but didn’t seem upset or at all bothered.

“Is it true?” asked Blue Nile

“Maybe. Maybe it’s even more amazing than that.”

“Who are you?” Neil asked.

“You know my name already. The place we just left is the private prison run by Randac.”

“This is Madagascar?” asked Blue Nile.

“Where are we going?” Neil wanted to know.

“To find someone I’ve always wanted to meet and then to plot our countermove to the Cincinnati police.”

“Programmed by God,” Blue Nile said to himself.

Ptolemy Bent pressed a button at the side of his chair and a computer table came out of the arm, positioning itself before him like a food tray. The virtual keyboard was composed of characters Neil had never seen before. Ptolemy ran his fingers over the keys as if he were a concert pianist. His shoulder and head swayed while he typed, almost as if he were dancing in his seat to some unheard melody. Now and then he would grunt or hum. The screen embedded in the table had no text at all, only colorful forms that slid gracefully over and around one another. Neil became enchanted with the forms. They seemed as if they might be alive. Totally live, Neil thought. Like a place where everything — the sky, the sand, the clouds, everything — is alive and moving gracefully with everything else.

For over an hour Ptolemy worked on his computer screen. Blue Nile was silent the whole time. Neil suspected that the gregarious prod was silenced by the strangeness of the situation and the powerful presence of Ptolemy Bent. Finally the old Vermonter fell asleep.

“You did a great job on the Third Eye,” Ptolemy said. The sky was still black, but there was an angry orange band of light at the edge of the world.

“You can see that in there?”

“Among other things.”

“I really didn’t do much. I mean, the notes Un Fitt sent taught me everything I needed to know.”

“No one knows without being shown the way,” Ptolemy said. “Like the scent of sex or the sound of running water. We have in our genes the knowledge but without a sign we are lost.”

Neil’s heart thrilled hearing these words. “What... what do you mean?” he asked.

“Un Fitt found you,” Ptolemy said. He turned away from his work and the screen faded to gray. “I asked him to locate those who had undiscovered brilliance and the power to dream of something other than their minds locked into this world. He found over six million candidates around the world. Of these, six thousand one hundred forty-two were workable, given the parameters of Un Fitt’s ability to manipulate events.”

“I was chosen out of so many?”

“You have the magic in you.”

“How can a machine read magic?”

“A machine,” Ptolemy corrected, “programmed by a god.”

“I don’t understand. Why would God or even a god be interested in a Third Eye project? He already sees more than I can even imagine.”

“You were creating the Third Eye, Neil. Un Fitt was creating you.”

“Huh?”

“He was pushing you, tantalizing you, making you go beyond yourself because you — flesh and bone and spirit — are the only chains that keep you enslaved to this world and also your only chance to be free.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Let me give you an example.” The slender man turned sideways in his chair and folded his legs yogi style. “What is the biggest problem with the Third Eye?”

“Memory. In order to retain information accurately there has to be a storage device on a par with the human and metahuman senses provided by the Eye. Actually, it would have to be Eyes in order to do everything Un Fitt asked for.”

“Good,” Ptolemy said. He was smiling. “Now I want you to answer my next questions quickly with no concern of proving what you say.”

“Okay.”

“What is the answer to the problem?”

“At first I thought that it would be some kind of transmitting device, or maybe an onboard computer that would be surgically implanted. But those devices are too slow and also they speak in a different language from the brain.”

“And so?”

“So, well, so... The only device appropriate to the task, the only device that has enough memory and the right kind of language, is the human brain itself. I mean, fully twenty-five percent of the brain is almost completely inactive. That’s more than enough to store days of sensory data.”

“And?” coaxed the self-proclaimed midwife of God.

“Then the Eye would become a new organ and the capacity and nature of the brain would expand.”

“Not expand, but change. The one thing that nobody wants, the one thing that will pull us out of the darkness of technology. Your answer is more important than the Third Eye itself. Now, one more question.”

“Uh-huh.”

“What would you do if you had to give all of this up?”

“Everything?”

“The seat on this jet, all that you’ve learned, and your name on the hit list of the Cincinnati PD.”

“I’d kill myself,” Neil said. “And I’d take whoever made me give it up with me.”

“And so, let there be life,” Ptolemy said. He went to the back row of seats and turned up a table. At a touch the screen was ablaze with color.

Neil was staring out of the small window into the darkness. The swift was flying high and there were no clouds. Every now and then Neil would see a swath of white far below. He wondered if he had any control over his destination, or his destiny.

Maybe, he thought, I don’t have a destiny, only a final place that I’ll come to. A place where I’ll die or live, it won’t matter which.

“Hey, Neilio,” Blue Nile whispered. He had moved to the seat next to Neil. “You ’wake?”

“Yeah, now I am.”

“Boy oh boy, we’re in it deep now, huh?”

“I guess. You scared?”

“Me? No. It’s like I told you before, I owe it all to the company store. There’s no freedom for me unless I take it.”

“So you don’t regret being in GP-9?”

“No. I liked it more than anything else I had up to then, except for my family. And you know the way the employment cycles work it’s hard to keep family goin’. Anyway, there was some good people in our GT. Atty and Or are great. Nin and Nina. You. I really like you, Neil.”

“Yeah, Blue. I like you too.”

“There’s only one thing that I regret, really.”

“What’s that?” Neil asked.

“D’or.”

“You and her had something going, didn’t you?”

“Yeah. Yeah.” Blue Nile smiled. “But it’ll never come to nuthin’ now.”

“Why not?”

“She loves her little restaurant and I’m a fugitive from New York.” The small prod took in a deep breath and let it out as a sigh. “Promise me something, Neil?”

“What’s that, Blue?”

“That you’ll tell D’or that I was talkin’ about her. About how much I cared for her.”

“Why don’t you tell her yourself?”

“I mean, if I don’t make it.”

“What’s gonna stop you?”

“This is serious business, Neilio. We’re fugitives. We’re on our own now. I don’t care for myself. I had a good run for four years. But D’or, I could have seen myself with her.”

“Well, if you don’t make it, what makes you think I will?”

“Maybe you won’t,” Blue Nile agreed. “But if you do, will you tell her that I was talkin’ about her?”

“Absolutely.”

10

When the swift began to descend Neil woke up. The sun was shining on a wintry ocean filled with icebergs. Blue Nile was looking out of the window on the opposite side of the cabin. Ptolemy Bent was leaning through the cockpit door, talking to the pilot.

An island loomed before them. A frozen rock in the middle of the Antarctic. When the swift lowered itself onto the craggy beach a solitary figure in a balloonlike blue parka approached.

Neil wasn’t surprised that the figure was Nina Bossett. Once inside the cabin she tore off the coat and wrapped herself in Ptolemy Bent’s arms. She was crying and so was he. Even though the plane was tossed by turbulence from the Antarctic winds, the two stood there in front of the pilot’s door hugging and weeping.

“Sir,” the pilot said. “You will have to take your seats and buckle up.”

Ptolemy and Nina kissed. They couldn’t seem to let go. “Sir.”

She caressed his cheek with her fingertips. He kissed her fingers.

“Sir, please. Low-level radar in this region is at full capacity because of the MacroCode facilities nearby.”

Finally they sat side by side in the row behind Neil and Blue Nile. There they talked and gazed deeply into each other’s eyes.

Neil watched them, his heart in turmoil. The experiences of the past year flooded his mind. He remembered the formation of geese flying outside the window when he first regained consciousness; he regarded that event as the first moment of his life. He loved Nina, which was more than he’d ever hoped for, and now he loved Ptolemy Bent with equal passion even though they had only just met. He was angry and frightened, amazed and alone with thoughts that he’d recently learned had been planted by a computer that thought it was programmed by God.

His life before GEE-PRO-9 had proved to be nothing; his new life was slipping between his fingers. He was so distracted by these thoughts that he didn’t realize when Nina had settled in next to him. She put her hand on his shoulder and made clucking sounds in his ear. Neil pulled away from her.

“What’s wrong, honey?” she asked.

“I can’t take it,” he said. “Why don’t you just leave me alone?”

“What’s wrong? Why you mad?”

Neil realized then that she had never loved him, that she thought he knew this, and so when the real love of her life returned she was surprised that Neil would have trouble accepting him.

“Is it ’cause I was yellin’ at you over the vid? I was just mad, baby. I saw in her records that that room-girl gave up her days off to stay with you.”

“How can you complain about Charity when you have him?” Neil waved toward Ptolemy, who had turned on the computer at his seat and was deep into the colors and forms he conjured there.

“You mean Popo? Honey, he’s my brother.”

“Your brother?”

“Yeah. Half brother, really. We have the same father, a man who called himself Johnny Delight.”

“Why would you kiss your brother like that?”

“ ’Cause it’s the first time we ever met, that’s why.”

“How can that be?”

“Popo been in prison on Madagascar since he was sixteen. They said that he killed his uncle and grandmother but he didn’t. He freed ’em, that’s what Aunt Kai told me. She said that he send ’em up to heaven, maybe even to God.”

“That’s crazy,” Neil said.

“That’s what you said about GEE-PRO-9 when you first got there. You said it was crazy, but it wasn’t, was it?”

“That’s different. It’s crazy to think you can go through a door and end up in heaven. It’s crazy even to believe in heaven.”

“Why? ’Cause you say so? What do you know?”

“What does he know?” Neil jerked his head toward Ptolemy.

“Popo got the highest IQ of anybody ever tested, even Dr. Kismet. They been havin’ him a prisoner at Randac ever since he was a teenager, since I was just a little baby.”

“But they let him out,” Neil said, almost hopefully. “They let him go.”

“Not really.”

“What do you mean?”

“When you picked him up that was the last step of his escape.”

“We did a jail break?”

“You did. I’m just an accessory after the fact.”

In a great underground cavern in the northern Sahara Desert, Ptolemy Bent and fifteen of his faithful prods gathered around an antique ebony wood table. The floor and walls of the chamber were made from smooth and shiny plates of Glassone. The ceiling was formed from fused stones.

“... the truth is,” Ptolemy was saying, “we were undone by the Cincinnati PD.”

“Why would they be interested in a New York office?” Oura asked. Though deep concern showed in her face she was still radiant in her various shades of gold.

“The city of Cincinnati has its money tied up in stocks. And General Specifix is one of the few arms of MacroCode that Kismet allowed to go public. He used the profits from that venture to build the Blue Zone. Anyway, the treasury department of Cincinnati noticed large sums of money missing that Un Fitt had siphoned off to build various havens around the globe. The bottom line of the company wasn’t affected because GP-9 and other GTs more than made up the losses with profitable projects. Still, the CPD didn’t know that and so they began their investigation.

“When they discovered Un Fitt’s program it was only a matter of time before they found the ten GTs that we’d set up.”

“How many of the prods were caught?” Athria asked.

“Over two thousand,” Ptolemy said. “We were lucky that Un Fitt began monitoring the CPD soon after they discovered the financial discrepancies. He was able to set up the escape protocols that I gave him at the beginning of his run.”

“Like the swift coming to Maya?” Neil asked.

“Yes,” said Ptolemy. “And the robot plane that took Nina to the island where we picked her up. We had hundreds of two-legged escape routes. The problem was that we didn’t have enough time to warn everyone before the intercorporate police force was called in.”

“What happens to the ones they caught?” a small woman with a red beard asked.

“Un Fitt is already locating those that were captured and putting logic into play that will release them into our hands.”

“I thought Un Fitt was discovered by the cops,” Neil said. “Wouldn’t they just shut him down?”

“Un Fitt is an operating system,” Ptolemy replied. “His program, which is self-altering, is stored in over ten thousand dump-sites, which are designated by a tenth power randomizer. These addresses, once found, are erased from the running program’s system. Self-generated updates to his system are downloaded on an hourly basis to an additional ten thousand sites. These updates can be retrieved via radio waves. Because of this system it is virtually impossible to shut Un Fitt down permanently; it would be damned hard to even force him to take a step back in his own intellectual evolution.”

“Did God make those programming decisions?” Neil was surprised at the sarcasm in his own voice.

“I did the peripheral programming,” Ptolemy said. “I set up the system to be inserted in one of Randac’s satellite computers. I set up everything but then I let the spirit I discovered years ago inform the internal logic of the system.”

“Vat does dat mean?” asked a tall man named Blaun. He had an east European accent and radiant blue eyes.

“Years ago,” Ptolemy said, “I discovered that the atmosphere of Earth was enveloped by an intelligent ether. It’s a vast store of knowledge that exists in an area between five hundred and two thousand miles above the surface.”

“An intelligence?” someone asked.

“That’s all I call it. It’s an awareness, a consciousness. For many years this consciousness has been trying to communicate with us — by radio waves. I found the pattern when I was a child not more than four. Over the next ten years I was able to use a transmitter to communicate with the entity. Back then I thought that it was God; now I’m not so sure. I don’t even know what the relationship is between it and us. I mean, it might have created us, but there’s also an argument that we, through the electronic nature of our minds, might be the cause of this meta-intelligence. Then again it could just be some kind of celestial traveler, stopping for a few centuries and trying to understand the DNA-based fungus that makes up all life here on Earth.

“At any rate, I invited the entity to enter into the Un Fitt system. It created the logic of Un Fitt and I used that logic to create the schools that trained all of you.”

“Trained us for what?” a woman named Thedra asked.

“To advance,” Ptolemy said. “To change. The way the world is today, change has become a function of profit. Money makes change. There’s very little of the individual left. Our minds are made to stagnate, our bodies are fuel for the systems of production. Maybe some of that is good. But then again maybe it isn’t. What Un Fitt and I are trying to do is create revolutionaries, people who aren’t satisfied with just being prods.”

“What else is there?” Thedra asked.

“You see?” Ptolemy said. “Two years ago you wouldn’t have asked that question. Two years ago you just showed up at the assignment booth and went where they told you to go. You followed the system hoping that you could put in your fifty-three years and then retire on the half of your salary that the union kept aside for you.

“Don’t get me wrong, not all of the prods that Un Fitt found have worked out. Over twelve hundred have turned us in to the authorities.”

“Then why weren’t we caught long ago?” a tall Asian man asked.

“Because of Un Fitt,” Ptolemy said. “He has superimposed a communications net over every prod we have, using our ID chips. Every communication going out is first reviewed and edited by Un Fitt’s matrices.”

“So what did you do when you discovered the traitors?” Athria asked.

“Nothing. We simply supplied a realistic hyper-animae police official who thanked the whistle-blower and who then asked them to remain as a spy. If they were too afraid we thanked them and offered a transfer, cautioning them to keep quiet because of a broad-based ongoing investigation.”

“What about somebody going in person to the CBI or somewhere?” Neil asked. “Some of them must have done that.”

“Only six,” Ptolemy replied. “Six out of twelve hundred eighty-nine.”

“What did you do about them?”

“All CBI informants go through a background check before their claims are investigated. In each case we created a fairly serious crime that the claimant seemed to have committed. They were then subjected to automatic justice and sentenced to low-security prison systems. Each one was visited by an electronic apparition that warned them of a worse fate should they persist in trying to expose Un Fitt.”

“Have you killed anybody?” Neil asked.

“No. But the question has merit. Un Fitt has set up assassination protocols in case of extreme circumstances. In the best of a bad situation we could strip the prod of his consciousness and transmit it into the ether.”

“To God?” Oura asked.

“Or whatever,” Ptolemy said. “That way the perpetrator is dead to the world but alive elsewhere.”

“Vat if you could not do this process?” Blaun asked.

“Then we were ready to kill,” Ptolemy said. “It’s wrong, I know, but it’s the only way we could see to keep the idea alive. The world is going in the wrong direction. Our judges are machines, our prisons and military and mental institutions and workplaces are planning to mechanize their human components with computerized chemical bags. The spirit is being squashed for the sake of production and profit. If we don’t do something the race itself will become a mindless machine.”

“But now the dream’s over,” Neil said. “Now we’re underground in the desert and there’s nothing we can do to change anything.”

“I wish it were true,” Ptolemy said. “I wish we could stay here for the rest of time, playing games with Un Fitt, designing toys that would make men and women better at being themselves.”

“Why can’t we, Popo?” Nina asked.

Ptolemy stared at his sister and then at each one of the fifteen prods in turn.

“What?” the woman with the red beard asked.

“While studying the CPD, Un Fitt found a relationship between the chief and the International Socialist Party.”

“Itsies,” Athria uttered.

“Chief Nordman is a high-ranking member of the secret arm of IS. From his records, Un Fitt found that not only have they moved their operations to the Caucasus Mountains, but they’ve also set up a laboratory to study the molecular nature of viruses.”

“And?” Blue Nile asked.

“They’re designing viral strains that target racial indicators.”

“Race killers?” Nina whispered.

“Exactly.”

For quite a while no one spoke.

“What is their first move?” Neil asked at last.

“To test the host virus on blacks.”

“No.”

“Maybe,” Ptolemy said, “the entity is a god, and he called us to stop this insanity. Maybe it’s all fate.”

“Or maybe it’s just a nightmare,” Oura offered.

11

Later that evening Blue Nile said to Ptolemy Bent, “If what you’re saying is true, then there’s nothing we can do.”

“And no time to do it in,” Nina Bossett added.

“There is a small chance,” said Ptolemy.

“What’s that?” asked Thedra Ho, the Vietnamese chemical prod.

“X rays.”

“As what?” asked Oura.

“If we can expose the pathogen to a fifteen-second burst of X rays, then the molecular structure will mutate.”

“And probably become worse,” Neil Hawthorne said.

“No, Brother Neil. The chance of a mutated pathogen having any effect at all on the human system is incredibly small.”

“Even if it does work,” Athria said, “where do we find the germs to radiate them?”

“The manufacture of the pathogen is very expensive. There were only two canisters made. One has been flown to Accra and the other to Denver.”

“So all we have to do is find out where they’re keeping the pathogen and shine an X-ray gun at it?” Neil asked.

“I can rig something like a flashlight to emit the correct band of radiation.”

“But what if they have it in some kinda special container?” Neil asked. “What if the X rays can’t penetrate the casing?”

“Un Fitt chose my apostles well,” Ptolemy said. When he smiled on Neil the young ex-prod felt a swell of pride. “The virus is being kept in two fifty-gallon plasteel canisters. One in the basement of a bar called the Lucky Stallion on Q Street in Denver and the other in the storage room of the Northern Hemisphere Corporate Embassy in Accra.”

“So we have to go there and shine a light?” Nina said.

“Just so,” her brother replied. “In the meantime I will attempt to come up with an antiviral in case one or both of you fail. Un Fitt will plot the manner of approach that each team should take and then we’ll go about procuring the tools you will need.”

Twenty-seven hours later, Neil, along with Blue Nile and Blaun, were standing across the street from the Lucky Stallion. It was an old building with fake saloon doors and an antique red neon light made into the outline of a rearing stallion in the window. The temperature was just below freezing. Errant snowflakes danced in the breeze.

When a snowflake hit Neil’s nose he remembered that he hadn’t been outside in snow since he was a child in Central Park with his aunt. She had green eyes and a big nose and white skin that reddened in the cold. He remembered her face but not her name.

How could I forget my own aunt’s name? he thought. He entered a reverie, remembering the things that he did not remember: the name of his elementary school, the name of the girl he had a crush on at the beginning of prod-ed. He tried to remember the names of the states, and only managed to come up with nineteen. Everything before GEE-PRO-9 faded, dissipated, evaporated from his mind. Neil could see that he had been created, or at least re-created, by the divine system and its creator. He had been just a prod, a unit in an endless system of production. Now he had a five-pound X-ray flasher under his red parka designed to save all of the black people of the world.

“You look white, Neil,” Ptolemy had said, “so you go with the team to Denver.”

Neil wondered what he meant by “look white”; he was white. Wasn’t he? But almost all the important people in his life were Negroes. Oura and Athria, Ptolemy and Nina.

“Ve got to move, Neil,” Blaun said. He was the group leader and well fit for the task, Neil thought. He was tall and powerful, with blond hair and sapphire eyes. In the years before Un Fitt recruited him, Blaun had been a member of the IS. He knew how to talk to the Itsies.

“Okay,” Neil said. “But don’t you think this is kinda strange?”

“Vat are you talking about?”

“I mean, it’s just a bar. No soldiers, no metal doors.”

“It’s crazy, yes. They are strange peoples. Like the wild gangs of children who used to live in the streets of California. This group feels like they are in charge. They have men in government, men on the police force. They are careless and proud. They think that no one would dare to challenge them. No one but us.”

“So we just walk in?”

“Ja. Vat else? They don’t think ve know them. They don’t know vat ve know.”

“I’m ready,” Blue Nile said. Neil looked at his old friend, the man he considered his first real friend. All the laughter and fun was gone.

The bar was filled with various specimens of white manhood. Some wore suits while others looked like New Age cowboys wearing shirts with semiprecious gemstone buttons and helmet-hats for horse riding. Two men in andro-suits and sunglasses stood at the back door. Blaun shot them both with cinder gun blasts. One disintegrated at the left shoulder down to his heart. The other crumpled from the waist down. He opened his mouth to cry out but died before he could utter a sound.

As the last guard died a strobing light started to dance about the room. The rest of the men in the bar fell into epileptic fits. They foamed and vomited before falling into unconsciousness or death. Special contact lenses protected Neil and his friends.

Blue Nile was returning the strobe-orb to the sack that he wore on his shoulder. Blaun caught Neil by his arm and shouted, “Ve must go behind the door! Stay behind me and be ready!”

Neil knew that he was in a war. He was ready to complete his function. But what he was thinking about was the sweet little man that he’d known just over a year. The man who took him gently by the hand and showed him the way of GEE-PRO-9 had just killed a room full of people without so much as a shadow crossing his face.

Through the door and down the rickety wooden stairs they went. They came to another door. This was unlocked. Blaun ran through, his pistol set for wide-band blasts. Neil took out his X-ray emitter and held it up before him, only one task on his mind.

When he came into the room he saw men, maybe a dozen of them, with the third-degree burns of the cinder blast eating through their skins. On a cement dais the plasteel drum stood upright. Neil pointed his X rays at the heart of its murky amber contents.

One one thousand, two one thousand, three...

“Down under!” someone shouted in a clear cowboy drawl. Five one thous...

Blue Nile fell into the room from the doorway, blood cascading from what had been his chest.

Seven one thousand...

Blaun threw himself in between Neil and the onrushing Itsies.

Nine one thousand...

Neil turned in time to see the cinder blast turn Blaun’s handsome face into gray ash.

Ten one thousand, eleven one thousand...

“He’s hurtin’ the chill,” a man shouted, and Neil felt four hard knocks in his side. Then he heard a loud clang.

“You hit the drum, you fool!” someone shouted.

And then there was peace.

12

“Neil?” said a voice with no sound.

“Yes?” he answered without feeling his mouth.

“Oh, baby,” the voice said, and he knew that it was Nina. She was the only one who had ever called him baby.

“Where am I?”

“Back in the Sahara. You’re hooked up to a machine being run by Un Fitt.”

“Un Fitt?” Neil said with his mind.

“Yes, Neil? Can I do something for you?”

“No, nothing. It’s just good to know that you’re here.”

“I’m so glad you’re alive,” Nina said.

“What happened?”

“You were in the bar in Denver, using the X-ray flasher on the disease. Blue Nile and Blaun were killed but you were just shot. The police killed the three shooters that attacked you. The parmeds came and put you on life support. The cops took you into custody but Un Fitt was able to transfer you to a hospital in Greece. From there we brought you here and made the neuronal connections to revitalize your brain.”

“When can I get up?”

Silence filled the new hum of Neil’s awareness.

“Did you manage to irradiate the pathogen?” the words were Ptolemy’s, Neil was sure of that.

“Twelve seconds, maybe half a second more than that. Did they puncture the drum?”

“Yes.”

“Did the virus escape?”

“Yes. By the time the police put a seal on the canister eighty percent of the virus had leaked.”

“What about Africa?”

“Nina was successful,” Ptolemy said. “They managed three minutes of radiance and no one had to die.”

“Did I do enough?” Neil asked.

“You saved the black race.”

“Am I going to die now?”

“No. But your body is damaged beyond repair. For now you will reside with Un Fitt in this computer frame.”

“Nina.”

“Yeah, baby?”

“Will you wait for me to get fixed?”

“Every minute of every day.”

His aunt’s name was Martha. And not only could he remember the fifty states, but he could also recall all of the state capitals. The girl he had a crush on in prod-ed was Lana, and he loved her because she smelled like soap. He loved the smell of the soapy water his mother made him wash in after playing in the grass in Central Park. He remembered a grasshopper his uncle caught for him. It was a green creature with long waving antenae that was kept in a plastic cage made to look like bamboo. The creature ate bits of lettuce that Neil pressed between the bars. If he looked close he could see his uncle’s face in the many facets of the bug’s green eye. Bob.

“You shouldn’t argue with your mother, Neil,” Bob had said many long years before. Neil remembered the words and the voice and even the smell of strawberry jam in Martha’s kitchen. “She’s worked very hard not to get recycled so that you can have a mother and stay aboveground.”

“But Uncle Bob, other kids got foot gliders, why can’t I have a pair?”

“You shouldn’t argue with your mother...” Bob repeated his admonition in exactly the same words, tones, smells, and time.

Neil asked Bob couldn’t he buy the x-element gliders. “You shouldn’t argue with your mother...”

“Neil.”

“Huh. Who is it?”

“Un Fitt. You were entering a loop, Neil.”

“A what?”

“You got stuck questioning a memory. That happens sometimes when human minds are connected to a computer system.”

“I can remember everything I ever knew,” Neil said.

“Yes. There are neuronal connectors to every memory center in your brain. The problem is that you cannot change these memories.”

“Why not?”

“Because the part of you that is consciousness resides in my matrix. It is a limbo of sorts. You can read the data of your life but you cannot alter it.”

“Then how can I live?”

“You can talk to me, Neil.”

“So that’s it? It’s you and me forever?” The hysterical shudder of claustrophobia went through the ex-prod’s mind.

“No, Neil,” Un Fitt said. “When we have the proper tools, Nina will be able to join you from time to time. And until then...”

What had been a void was suddenly a vast panorama of the sea, the Pacific Ocean, Neil knew instinctively. It was the prehistoric coastline that he’d yearned for since childhood. The waves crashed and huge birds wheeled in the sky.

“Here you may roam until there is a body for you to inhabit again,” Un Fitt whispered between the thundering waves. “And a world worth living in.”