Futureland, page 11
“The alacrity of justice,” Bits said dramatically, “has turned wise men into fools.”
“Say what?”
“I went to Hammerstein the memory man and everybody thought I was going to get my memory erased. But I knew that in his earlier experiments with mem-erasure the good Doctor Hammerstein only succeeded in temporary removal. I got that service. So when they asked me what I knew I could say I knew nothing because that was the truth. I got most of the memories back now. They came as monsters in a dream.”
“So?” Stiles said.
“The scorpion sting froze up the snake pack and gave me time to grab Sella’s computer access. I called a number, downloaded my master virus, and took over the system.”
“That had to set off an alarm somewhere,” Stiles said, looking over both shoulders as he did so.
“Only temporarily. My virus is sophisticated. It translates the current system to its own code and then makes me the master.”
Stiles’s eyes hardened.
“You know why I declined to meet you in the gladiator’s circle, Stiles?” Bits asked.
“Why?”
“ ’Cause I’ve always known that you could kick my ass.” “Then maybe you made a mistake callin’ on me now,” Stiles suggested, taking a step forward.
“Before acting on that will you let me explain something about this system?”
Stiles held up his left wrist and tapped it with a smile.
“Max screen three up,” Bits ordered.
The infinite white wall behind Bits turned bright blue with thousands of small orange boxes broken into various sections.
“Population reports for Angel’s Island,” Bits said. His voice was greatly amplified and seemed to come from all around. Fear crept into Stiles’s eyes. “To the left are the majority of the inhabitants—convicts. Bring up Jerry Tierny.”
Immediately a large overlay appeared in the middle of the convict area. It was titled with the convict’s picture and name hovering about a series of file tabs with the labels criminal history, incarceration history, experimental studies, current status . . .
“I can tell you where he is, what he’s doing, his physioemotional state, and whether or not he has to go to the toilet. I can also activate any function on his snake pack, including the death option.”
“Who’s in those boxes on the right side?” Stiles asked meekly.
“Everybody here is wearing a snake pack, Stiles,” Bits replied, though his godlike voice did not seem to come from his mouth. “The guards, the chaplain, meds, and even Roger.”
“What chaplain?”
“We have a chaplain who prays for us regularly. He comes into our cells when we’re unconscious in our beds. The board of directors of Angel’s Island Inc. are Christians and they ordered a chaplain to be present at all times.
“He has a snake pack too; they all do. It’s why you can’t attack a guard without being shocked silly. The snakes talk to each other.”
“And you’re in control?”
“Do we work together, white boy? Or do you try to jump me and get put in a coma till I say you can open your eyes?”
4 Bits called a general inquisition with twelve convicts, chosen by the qualifications of their files, from all over the prison. He chose those prisoners not deemed homicidal or violently antisocial. He had six Negroes, three Hispanics, two of other races, and Stiles, the international Nazi, to represent the white race.
“We should kill M Lamont and that bitch,” Lines Retain, a credit counterfeiter from the Twin Cities proclaimed. “They killed at least four people I know of. And if you let us see the files, Bits, I bet there’s a lot more.”
There were some grumbles of agreement.
Bits knew that almost five hundred research-related deaths—murders—had been committed by prison officials. That data from these medical experimentation deaths had been sold to research facilities around the world. But he said nothing.
“Escape is our only priority,” argued Nin el Tarniq, the Eros-Haus pimp from Miami. “Killing them will just make the law look harder.”
Bits stifled a cough and said, “The files are mine and I respect their security. I will not let anyone commit murder here.”
“Who made you king?” Edward Fines, a fellow hacker from Cincinnati, wanted to know.
“I did!” Bits replied in an amplified voice that was loud enough to instill terror into the panel of twelve.
“When will the guards start worrying about us?” Stiles asked. “We can’t stay in here forever.”
“Not that long,” Bits said in his normal voice. “But pretty long. Lamont and Sella sometimes have up to thirty prisoners under study. And as long as the staff doesn’t know about us we can make our plans in leisure.”
“If the guards all have snake packs why don’t we just put them to sleep?” Jerry asked.
“Because they have families and friends all over the world. If they stop communicating that’ll set off an alarm. I can control what’s inside the prison, but if they send in soldiers we’re up shit’s creek.”
After many hours the panel came up with a plan. The great cargo planes that picked up the choke every day of the harvest would be hijacked and flown to various ports. There, all seventeen thousand prisoners would have prepaid transportation to the destination of their choice. Angel’s Island had a large bank account from its choke crop and Bits was now in sole control of that wealth. It was decided that everyone would be freed regardless of his crime or disposition toward violence.
“If America won’t claim ’em,” Lines Retain said, “then America cain’t blame ’em.”
Bits would transmit over one hundred thousand C-mails set to a delay of thirty-six hours before being delivered to news organs and families and friends of the Angel’s Island population. Bits also planned to send his displacement virus to every revolutionary organization he could think of, including the Seventh Radical Congress and White World Order.
“Who stays to make sure the prison is secure while we leave?” asked King Theodore, the cult leader who had tried to claim Delaware as a free state.
“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 passports 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 re-made 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 shit,” Fidor said. “That’s the Bits virus, isn’t it?”
“Downloading document 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 constituents.” 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 shit.”
“Haven’t you ever heard of freedom of the press?”
“They got prisons offshore 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.”
“Say what?”
“I went to Hammerstein the memory man and everybody thought I was going to get my memory erased. But I knew that in his earlier experiments with mem-erasure the good Doctor Hammerstein only succeeded in temporary removal. I got that service. So when they asked me what I knew I could say I knew nothing because that was the truth. I got most of the memories back now. They came as monsters in a dream.”
“So?” Stiles said.
“The scorpion sting froze up the snake pack and gave me time to grab Sella’s computer access. I called a number, downloaded my master virus, and took over the system.”
“That had to set off an alarm somewhere,” Stiles said, looking over both shoulders as he did so.
“Only temporarily. My virus is sophisticated. It translates the current system to its own code and then makes me the master.”
Stiles’s eyes hardened.
“You know why I declined to meet you in the gladiator’s circle, Stiles?” Bits asked.
“Why?”
“ ’Cause I’ve always known that you could kick my ass.” “Then maybe you made a mistake callin’ on me now,” Stiles suggested, taking a step forward.
“Before acting on that will you let me explain something about this system?”
Stiles held up his left wrist and tapped it with a smile.
“Max screen three up,” Bits ordered.
The infinite white wall behind Bits turned bright blue with thousands of small orange boxes broken into various sections.
“Population reports for Angel’s Island,” Bits said. His voice was greatly amplified and seemed to come from all around. Fear crept into Stiles’s eyes. “To the left are the majority of the inhabitants—convicts. Bring up Jerry Tierny.”
Immediately a large overlay appeared in the middle of the convict area. It was titled with the convict’s picture and name hovering about a series of file tabs with the labels criminal history, incarceration history, experimental studies, current status . . .
“I can tell you where he is, what he’s doing, his physioemotional state, and whether or not he has to go to the toilet. I can also activate any function on his snake pack, including the death option.”
“Who’s in those boxes on the right side?” Stiles asked meekly.
“Everybody here is wearing a snake pack, Stiles,” Bits replied, though his godlike voice did not seem to come from his mouth. “The guards, the chaplain, meds, and even Roger.”
“What chaplain?”
“We have a chaplain who prays for us regularly. He comes into our cells when we’re unconscious in our beds. The board of directors of Angel’s Island Inc. are Christians and they ordered a chaplain to be present at all times.
“He has a snake pack too; they all do. It’s why you can’t attack a guard without being shocked silly. The snakes talk to each other.”
“And you’re in control?”
“Do we work together, white boy? Or do you try to jump me and get put in a coma till I say you can open your eyes?”
4 Bits called a general inquisition with twelve convicts, chosen by the qualifications of their files, from all over the prison. He chose those prisoners not deemed homicidal or violently antisocial. He had six Negroes, three Hispanics, two of other races, and Stiles, the international Nazi, to represent the white race.
“We should kill M Lamont and that bitch,” Lines Retain, a credit counterfeiter from the Twin Cities proclaimed. “They killed at least four people I know of. And if you let us see the files, Bits, I bet there’s a lot more.”
There were some grumbles of agreement.
Bits knew that almost five hundred research-related deaths—murders—had been committed by prison officials. That data from these medical experimentation deaths had been sold to research facilities around the world. But he said nothing.
“Escape is our only priority,” argued Nin el Tarniq, the Eros-Haus pimp from Miami. “Killing them will just make the law look harder.”
Bits stifled a cough and said, “The files are mine and I respect their security. I will not let anyone commit murder here.”
“Who made you king?” Edward Fines, a fellow hacker from Cincinnati, wanted to know.
“I did!” Bits replied in an amplified voice that was loud enough to instill terror into the panel of twelve.
“When will the guards start worrying about us?” Stiles asked. “We can’t stay in here forever.”
“Not that long,” Bits said in his normal voice. “But pretty long. Lamont and Sella sometimes have up to thirty prisoners under study. And as long as the staff doesn’t know about us we can make our plans in leisure.”
“If the guards all have snake packs why don’t we just put them to sleep?” Jerry asked.
“Because they have families and friends all over the world. If they stop communicating that’ll set off an alarm. I can control what’s inside the prison, but if they send in soldiers we’re up shit’s creek.”
After many hours the panel came up with a plan. The great cargo planes that picked up the choke every day of the harvest would be hijacked and flown to various ports. There, all seventeen thousand prisoners would have prepaid transportation to the destination of their choice. Angel’s Island had a large bank account from its choke crop and Bits was now in sole control of that wealth. It was decided that everyone would be freed regardless of his crime or disposition toward violence.
“If America won’t claim ’em,” Lines Retain said, “then America cain’t blame ’em.”
Bits would transmit over one hundred thousand C-mails set to a delay of thirty-six hours before being delivered to news organs and families and friends of the Angel’s Island population. Bits also planned to send his displacement virus to every revolutionary organization he could think of, including the Seventh Radical Congress and White World Order.
“Who stays to make sure the prison is secure while we leave?” asked King Theodore, the cult leader who had tried to claim Delaware as a free state.
“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 passports 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 re-made 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 shit,” Fidor said. “That’s the Bits virus, isn’t it?”
“Downloading document 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 constituents.” 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 shit.”
“Haven’t you ever heard of freedom of the press?”
“They got prisons offshore 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.”
