Futureland. Part 28

"They call me Blue Nile," the man said.

"Neil Hawthorne. Virtual mid-tech chip a.s.sembly 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 mid-tech production line. They fabricated product enhancements a.s.signed to General Specifix by its parent company, MacroCode. 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 a.s.signment (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 a.s.semble the appropriate chips from the general AI library of MacroCode. The a.s.signment 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 spa.r.s.ely 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 embarra.s.sed by his perpetually sweaty palms.

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

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

"Yeah," Neil said.

The women and Blue Nile laughed.

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

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

"We call ourselves the lost lane," Oura said. "Somewhere along the line we got a.s.signed a special projects t.i.tle 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-s.p.a.ce 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 pa.s.sive 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 a.s.signment. He might not even be in office GEE-PRO-9. He could be in the subbas.e.m.e.nt 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 pa.s.s. 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 n.o.body 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 gla.s.s.

"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 pa.s.sion in her voice. He'd visited the Eros-Haus almost every month to be with the impatient s.e.x-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.