Futureland. Part 30

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 ident.i.ty 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 gla.s.s," Blue Nile said.

"What?"

"It's a two-way gla.s.s. 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 pa.s.s to ride it?"

"GEE-PRO-9," Blue Nile said, his blue eyes twinkling, city lights s.h.i.+mmering 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 s.h.i.+t."

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 ident.i.ty 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 a.s.signment 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 cus.h.i.+on 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 GEE-PRO-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 n.o.body'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 doc.u.ment. 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 cla.s.sroom 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 impa.s.sive. 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 gla.s.s 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."