Futureland. Part 29

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 s.e.xual hara.s.sment. The International Union of Production Workers' rule book clearly stated that physical contact beyond accepted consensual greeting was forbidden in any works.p.a.ce. This meant that even a husband and wife exchanging a hug on work time were liable to get three D-marks each for s.e.xual hara.s.sment.

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 j.a.panese 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 gla.s.ses. "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 gla.s.s-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 pa.s.ses."

"What's an express elevator?"

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

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

3.

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

Neil's apartment had once been the entrance hall to a moderate three-bedroom unit on the fourth floor. He had looked up the floor plan on the free-web before it was discontinued for p.o.r.nography 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 gla.s.s--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 subbas.e.m.e.nt. 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.

"h.e.l.lo?"

"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 a.s.signment 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 a.s.signment kiosk. There was a man in this time, also with a blunt face. Neil wondered if maybe the gla.s.s warped all the attendants' features.

"Yes?" the man asked, obviously suspicious of the off-hour approach.