Futureland. Part 14

"I'll stay," Bits replied, rubbing a painful spasm in his back. "I figure that they'll have to take me back for a new trial when so many people get the news."

In the infinite white room, sitting in front of the computer, Bits imagined the guards and staff, even Roger himself, slumped into unconsciousness. The naked forms of Sella and M Lamont were there at his feet. He thought about the robot-piloted cargo jets carrying over seventeen thousand prisoners to major hubs around the globe. They had clothes, fake credit accounts, and fake pa.s.sports based on their eyescans. Some, he believed, would make it to freedom. The rest would have a solid defense--they were no longer members of the American union and therefore not answerable to the justice system there.

"What are you doing there?" M Lamont said as he rose on wobbly legs. He reached out toward Bits but recoiled at the electrical shock from his snake pack.

"What?" Sella said. "What's happened?"

"We're the only ones awake in the whole of this island," Bits said. "And we all have cancer."

M Lamont's eyes went dull.

"What are you talking about?" Sella asked. "Why did Lamont get a shock when he approached you?"

Bits explained everything in a slow painful voice, ending with, "I had the med system duplicate the causes for the cancer you caused in me. The lab is open to you. If there's a cure we will all live. If not . . ." He smiled sadly.

United Nations forces entered Angel's Island on the third day after the escape. They found three hundred seventy-five guards and staff unconscious and unwakeable--victims of the ChemSys snake pack.

Everyone had fallen while going about their duties. The warden was unconscious next to his desk, men slept on toilets or in the long gloomy halls. Two men on guard duty had died from exposure up on the choke plantation.

Everyone else was asleep, except for Sella Lans and Vortex "Bits" Arnold, who were also dead, and Med M Packard Lamont, who was dying in the infirmary.

"What is it?" the doctor who ministered to Lamont asked.

"Subbac cancer," Lamont moaned. "We were studying it. The convict Bits infected us with it."

"Subbac . . . But that's incurable. Who infected him?" asked the doctor, an elderly Swede.

Lamont did not answer the question. Instead he said, "Bits said that he put a timer on the system. His virus will wake the staff and then erase itself. He said that by then I should be dead."

The fat under the big man's skin had dissipated. He was slowly being eaten away by the fast-acting incurable disease.

"He said to tell you that he had the system monitor our deaths because that's what we liked to do." And then Lamont himself was dead.

5.

Three years later Fidor Esterman and Meena Tokit, employees for the Manatee Tobacco company, were sifting through the Angel's Island computer records. After an international outcry about the medical practices on Angel's Island, the Manatee corporation had closed the prison and remade the facility into a robot plantation. Fidor and Meena, both computer programmers, were two of fifteen people responsible for the plantation operating system, which included four state-of-the-art GE-AI computer systems, sowing, harvesting, and bundling machines, and various robot vehicles.

"Look at this, Meena," Fidor said. He was seated at the main screen of the central computing system.

On the screen a green circle appeared. It broke into eleven equal sections.

"What's that?" Meena asked.

"I don't know."

"Bits displacement system active," a robotic female voice announced.

"Oh s.h.i.t," Fidor said. "That's the Bits virus, isn't it?"

"Downloading doc.u.ment Last File," the lady robot declared. "Download complete."

The green segments began sparkling and changing colors. The segments of the green pie swirled together, adding colors and definitions, until they formed the face of a young black man, made old by the ravages of disease.

"Hey," the man said. "I am very close to death and so I hope you will excuse me if I get right into what I have to say. I don't know who you are and you might not know me so I'll start from the beginning. My name is Vortex Arnold. I have no other designation because the United States government has nullified my citizenship and sentenced me here, to the Angel's Island private prison authority. You may already know all of this. I was able to send out a hundred and fourteen thousand C-mails detailing the practices here and the particulars of our escape." Bits stopped a moment to rub his left eye. A large, yellowish tear pressed out of his sagging lid. Bits took a deep breath and then another before attempting to speak again. "I think it was probably the largest prison break in the history of the world. Maybe . . . As I said, I sent out thousands of detailed explanations of this prison and its inhuman practices, with special emphasis on the snake packs that they used on prisoners and guards alike. If this is many years later, which I doubt, and you haven't seen my report, which is more likely, then there will be a copy available to you at the end of this transmission.

"I tried to send out a C-transmission a few moments ago but I suppose the authorities have received my earlier communication by now and have isolated my signals . . ."

"Should we be listening to this?" Fidor asked Meena.

"I don't know," she said. "I guess we'd better. If anyone is monitoring our system they will believe that we've heard the whole thing anyway. If they ask us what it said we should probably be able to answer."

Fidor touched his large nose and nodded uncomfortably.

". . . my earlier messages had information that wouldn't have been surprising for most people. Maybe many of them would agree with the practices here. After all, there are no beatings, rapes, or dangers to the guards or the guarded. If you follow the rules then you are treated well, well enough for a social deviant. Even if we are political prisoners, what of it? The ruling system, one might say, has the right to protect its const.i.tuents." Bits allowed his eyes to close. He nodded, leaned forward, almost fell from his chair. But then he righted himself. "Protect. . . But I have done further study. The ChemSys Corporation has signed contracts with the federal government to supply over three million snake packs to the military and mental services by the year 2053. Snake packs used to make soldiers into drones, our mental divergents into brainwashed zombies. Read these reports and ask yourselves how long will it be before schoolchildren will be snaked. The reports are all here, at the end of this file. All here . . ."

Bits began to fall forward and the screen went to blank green. After a moment two gray option lines appeared. The first was called THE ORIGINAL REPORT ON THE PRACTICES OF ANGEL'S ISLAND. The second option was THE CHEMSYS PROJECTED GROWTH IN THE BEHAVIOR MOD SECTION REPORTS.

Meena and Fidor sat motionless and quiet before the bright green screen.

"Can we delete it?" Fidor asked after a while.

"I don't know. The controls are frozen."

"How about severing the power?"

"The emergency systems will override," the chubby, brown-skinned young woman replied.

"What can we do?" the young man asked.

"Did you excite the virus with an entry?"

"No. I wasn't doing anything."

"Neither did I. It must have been the interaction of programs in the system, or maybe a timer that caused this action."

"So?"

"So no one knows that we were here. We could just leave. Come back later and report a systems glitch. Maybe even somebody else will find it in the meantime."

They stood together and backed away from the console. They turned as one and walked from the room.

The Electric Eye.

1.

Folio Johnson was sitting at his usual table at Hallwell's China Diner on Lower Thirty-third Street reading the Daily Dump on a tiny pocket screen. The high-res zircon imager was eight centimeters square and could display a maximum of five hundred lines of data at one time. Where most people decreased the display mode to eight or twelve lines per screen, Folio, with the help of his blue synthetic eye, read at maximum density. First he read the general International News Agency (INA) stories that the Dump supplied. There had been a 14 percent decrease in murders topside--above Common Ground--in the past ten-day span. The Mars colonization program was continuing even though the voters had made it clear in the monthly Internet poll that they did not want their tax money used in that way.

The Dump was an unauthorized news agency run by Pacific Rim anarchists and so a back story was supplied for each INA release. The murder rate in Common Ground had increased over 97 percent in the last three spans due to political unrest. This unrest had been caused, the anarchists claimed, by outside agitators paid by MacroCode America. The increase in crime was used to convince the White House that an interplanetary colonization plan would ease the burden on the labor cycles and reduce the cost of policing.

"What do you think, D'or?" Folio asked the small woman who stood behind the counter.

"About what?"

"You think Kismet wants to make Mars his new home?"

"You readin' that Dump again? One day they're gonna put you in the ground over that s.h.i.t."

"Haven't you ever heard of freedom of the press?"

"They got prisons offsh.o.r.e that link you up to a chemical bag can make you into jelly if you sneeze outta turn," D'or said. "That's what I heard."

D'or Hallwell's blond-gray hair went straight out from her head, making her look quite mad. She wore a black T-shirt and a long, dark brown skirt every day while serving Chinese-American food to anyone who stopped by her eight-seat hole-in-the-wall.

"You scared, D'or?"

"Fear is the tenth intelligence quotient," she said. "All the scientists say so. The more you're scared of what can hurt you, the smarter you are."

"Then I must be a la-la fool and you my face in the mirror."

The small restaurateur shook her head and smiled. Johnson mimicked her movements and expression. She moved her head to the right and Folio matched it with a leftward nod. When she put her hands to her head he followed suit. Then they both laughed.

"Excuse me," a man said.

Folio and D'or both turned to the door.

A slender young man stood there in a black and yellow checkered andro-suit with no blouse or tam. His skin was pale and his blond hair so fine that it set Folio's teeth on edge.

"Bok choy, tofu, and oyster sauce is all I got today, M," D'or said without apology. "Chicken and frog strike'll last at least another twenty-four."

"Are you M Johnson?" the blond man asked. "The investigator?"

D'or turned away and walked through a door that led to the kitchen.

"Who's askin'?" was Folio's reply.

The man approached the detective's table and sat down, uninvited.

"A man named Lorenzo gave me your name for fifty general credits. I need someone to do something for me. He said that you were my man."

Folio's blue eye had already searched the man for eavesdropping devices. Now he was probing for anything else: the influence of drugs, rapid heartbeats, or synthetic implants. All he perceived was synthol and lime flavoring, a lot of it. It was surprising this man could stand up or compose a coherent sentence.

"Well?" asked the drunk. "Are you M Johnson?"

"What's your name?"

"Spellman. Charles Spellman. I live on Upper Park, at a Hundred and Third."

"So, M Spellman, what did you tell this Lorenzo?"

"Are you Folio Johnson?"

"I, M Spellman, am an unaffiliated citizen. Not from Common Ground and not off the employment cycle. This is my office and the woman who owns this restaurant is my friend. It's one of only five independently owned restaurants in all the Twelve Fiefs of New York."

"I don't understand you."

"I'm not really here. Neither is this bistro. If you have something to say then say it"--Folio Johnson fluttered his fingers--"to the air. But don't ask any questions. Save them for the upper avenues."

"I don't . . ." Charles Spellman said and then he stopped. "I mean, I understand what you're saying. I mean, I am on the employment cycle, though I've been lucky enough to avoid Common Ground. But I belong to a club. We call ourselves the Seekers. It's ten guys, only guys, who get together now and then to exercise our minds."

Johnson's blue eye was busy searching the public data-banks for Charles Spellman and his men's club.

"Um," Spellman said when he realized that the private detective wasn't going to ask anything, "we get together, like I said, and talk about ideas. We come from all kinds of different business backgrounds. I lease and insure ancient Greek artifacts. Coins, busts, earthenware. Regular kinda stuff. Mostly I deal with interior decorators for corporations but I also have a few private clients . . ." Again Charles Spellman paused, expecting some kind of question.

Johnson silently went through the e-docs that described Spellman's service, Alexander's Bounty. He had customers around the world and offices on Middle West Broadway, Lefrak Avenue, and Rodeo Drive. He was an employee but his cousin Mylo Spellman owned the business.

"The others do different things. Leonard Li is an accountant for Mobil Fuels and Brenton Thyme makes lenses for s.p.a.ce exploration. Do you need to know more?"

"I don't need to know anything, M," Johnson said. "And nothing so far has been important enough to say."

"The Seekers ask questions, like I said," Spellman continued. "Sometimes we ask theoretical questions about physics or genetics. Sometimes there are social questions, like for instance Does labor define citizenship?" The antique dealer seemed to think that this last question might get a rise out of Johnson, but when Folio didn't respond he continued, "There is a theory that the right combination of bright minds can yield genius if the group maintains both rigor and sociable relations. It's like playing the lottery, only with the contents of our minds, you see?"

"Uh-huh. Somebody lost his mind and you need someone to go find it?"

"Somebody's been killing us, one by one."

"Who?" Unconsciously Johnson leaned forward, blue gleaming from his black and angular face.

"I don't know. First it was Laddie McCoy, two months ago while he was taking a midnight job on the arch above Central Park."

"They said it was White Noise thugs who wanted his pocket med-computer," Folio read from a report downloaded into his eye.

"How do you know that?" Spellman asked.