Futureland: Nine Stories of an Imminent World

2

The choke plantation was in a large valley between two mountains on Angel’s Island in the East Indian Sea. For many miles the twenty-foot choke plants grew in rows, broad-leaved stalks that spread out from a huge silver and scarlet flower. This flower smelled like a sewer and shed a soft white pollen that was the base for cosmetics used by half the Orient.

All over the valley naked men armed with machetes hacked off the leaves, bound them with the tendrils that spread the root systems of the choke, and carried the bundles to robot-operated flatbed trucks that drove off automatically when their optimum load had been reached.

The sun hovered above the valley, red in the mist of morning. Bits followed his cell mates with an aluminum bucket gathering the silvery pollen bound for production lines in Tokyo, Seoul, and Hanoi. Even through the mask that he was allowed to wear Bits coughed mightily from irritant dust. Choke was named for its pollen’s effect on the respiratory system.

Gnats, black flies, mosquitoes, and fire ants infested the island, but after one bite the snake pack developed a serum based on the convict’s DNA that would make his skin anathema to that species’ bloodlust.

Loki and Moomja worked carrying the bales to the truck. They were young and powerful, enjoying the exertions of their muscles. Loki was an American born in Sweden to a white mother from a black soldier dad. He was thin, with the mischief of his namesake in his eyes, when the snake did not drug him for insubordinance. Moomja was a broad Samoan with murder in his gaze even when he was being drugged for some institutional slight. Jerry, the boy-Adonis, spotted the men with their loads while Needles, Darwin, and Stiles chopped down the five-foot-broad leaves and wrapped them with root.

Stiles was the sole white man. He kept to himself and spoke little. Darwin was the eldest, at forty-seven; he had killed his own mother and never shown remorse. Needles was a drug addict. He stayed up past curfew every night just to get the snake juice that put him in a stupor and sometimes to sleep.

“They can’t exceed the dosage,” Needles told Bits on his first night with the cell. “They changed my prescription six times already. I figure they got pure H in there now and I still got my eyes open till about a hour ’fore wake time.”

They crossed paths with workers from other cells at the robot trucks loading up and sometimes on the paths. This was one of the few times outside of eating periods that Bits had any contact with men from other cells.

The cells were isolated units on broad floors in the bowels of the island. There were twenty-five of these floors and on each one there were over a hundred cells.

A cell was a group of seven men who slept in close proximity and worked together. There were no bars to restrain them, as the snake pack and a circle of light proscribed their mobility. To set foot across the line of the sleep area resulted in a dosage of pain. To cross that line completely put you in a coma. After three comas you were not revived.

“Pretty day, eh?” Darwin said to Bits on the food break after four long hours of work.

“If I could breathe maybe it would be.”

“Yeah,” the elder convict said. “That powder’ll be comin’ up for days. But don’t worry, you’ll switch off with somebody after a week. They can’t let you work longer’n that. That shit’ll kill if you breathe in too much.”