Futureland: Nine Stories of an Imminent World
- Автор: Мосли Уолтер
- Год: 2001
- Язык: английский
- Год: Aspect / Warner Books
- ISBN: 978-0-446-52954-9
- Жанр: Научная фантастика
Электронная книга - «Futureland: Nine Stories of an Imminent World». Краткое содержание книги:
The numbers mutated into serpentine equations that breathed fire and crackled with electricity. Soon after the monsters appeared Bits would be injected with a sedative. But later in the sleep period the monster equations would rise again, and be squashed again. Each time the dream would unfurl a little further.
He was sure that this was no ordinary dream, that it was a message. But he had no idea what the significance was.
After many nights the dragons assumed names like Master Slasher, Ten-Foot Stamper, and Gutter Gutter. Bits began a nightly meditation to empower himself, allowing him to make friends with the demons. As he overcame his fears the snake pack’s medications decreased.
After six months of meditation Bits managed to attain a dream state in which he could exist side by side with his monstrous nemeses. Like different species at a watering hole, the calculate-demons and Bits lived a wary truce during his sleep.
Both Moomja and Needles were taken from the cell in that time. Moomja lost over fifty pounds and spent half the time in the infirmary. He became lethargic, unable to rise at the waking hour even with the pep injections from his snake pack. Finally he was led off by a blue and green line which never returned.
Some weeks later Needles started singing an improvised song. It was a blues song with many repeated lines. He insulted Roger and the guards and called Angel’s Island a concentration camp for freedom fighters. Needles sang until the sleep hour and beyond. In the morning he was gone.
Bits hardly noticed these departures. His time was spent studying the lifelike equations. Whenever he thought that he was unobserved he’d make fists at Stiles.
After sixteen Free Days, what Bits figured to be two years and some months, he was ordered by a bodiless voice to follow a red line until he came to his destination.
While he walked he wondered what life was like on the outside. He thought about his mother and brothers, revolutionaries all, and his father the cop. He wondered what Stiles had meant at the last harvest when he came close to Bits’s left side, with the wind blowing in his face, and mouthed, I’m with you.
Had he understood Bits’s offer after all this time?
Bits had tried again and again to beat the snake pack. He awoke at the right time and forced himself to sleep. He followed every order and never spoke when he shouldn’t. He worked hard and slept in silence. In the blackness of the cell at night he spoke softly with Loki and Darwin and Jerry, and the new guys, Everett and Charles. He spoke to everybody but Stiles, whom nobody liked and who liked no one.
But try as he might some infraction always brought him down. Crossing a perimeter, breaking for too long at work. Once he veered too close to a guard and received a shock and a nova demerit which meant he wasn’t allowed to accrue markless days for eighteen months.
After all that time Bits realized that he would never earn his freedom, that he was nothing and no one forevermore. His crime had been too successful, his threat ended his existence in the world.
“Cancer of the lung and colon,” Sella said as Bits lay under bright yellow light on the silvery operating table. “The snake identified it a month before it would have been irreversible.”
There was the sound of success in her voice. Bits wondered, not for the first time, if carcinogens were entered into the prison food and air, if the study of the snake packs was the first step in a much larger plan.
“He’ll need three weeks in solitary for the treatments to work.”
“I thought the magic bullet took only two days?” Bits asked.
Neither of the meds answered his question.
He was treated in a big white room that seemed to go on forever like Roger’s. There was a bed in the room and a console computer in a transparent plasteel casing. Bits received an aerosol treatment from gasses released out of four canisters controlled by the computer system.
When he was attended by guards or the meds, they appeared from thirty feet or more away, approaching like nomadic angels wandering a forever white sky.
Now and again Bits glanced at the computer, never for too long and not at regular intervals either. The vids might be set to watch for his interest in the computer system.
After three weeks of daily treatments he was taken to the infirmary.
“Colon is fit,” M Lamont said. “But the lungs have not progressed far enough. Looks like a subbac cancer. A new regimen is indicated.”
Sella nodded.
“Can I go back to my cell?” Bits asked.
“Yes,” Sella said without looking at him. “You can even work. We will allow the cancer to grow again, so that we can tell exactly what it is. If it’s subbac it won’t take long. The snake will tell us when you are optimum for the next procedure.”
“Another three weeks breathing gas?” Bits complained.
Sella smiled. “No. The next treatment is one shot and then three hours of observation. You may return to your cell now, convict.”
3
“Catch a what?”
“You heard me,” Bits said as he helped Stiles retrieve a fallen bundle of choke.
“What for?”
“With it I can break a hole in the monitoring system.”
“How?”
“That’s my worry, white boy. All you need to do is do it. But remember, nuthin’ over three inches long. And you got to get me a fresh one every other day.”
They were on the hillside and the day was beautiful. Bits had trouble walking because of a pain in his pelvic area. He hadn’t been able to jog since being released from the infirmary.
He’d found a scrap of wrapping plastic from some guard’s lunch on the truck four weeks earlier. He risked another eighteen markless months hiding the plastic under his tongue. He didn’t care if they caught him though. He had never met a prisoner who knew of anyone being released. Some had been transferred to other levels, some had died, many disappeared in the middle of the sleep cycle and never returned. But no one was freed from Angel’s Island because there were no real people there. Without nationality they had nowhere to go.
Three days after his talk with Stiles, Bits was ordered to report to the infirmary. He was so weak however that M Lamont was dispatched to meet him with a PAPPSI chair.
“You shouldn’t be this weak, convict,” Lamont said. “You’re just being a hypochondriac.”
Bits lolled backward and leaned over, hiding his left hand. He was happy to see his old white room, the trim little bed and the console computer, an XL-2500 Decadon.
“Get up and get in that bed on your own, convict,” M Lamont ordered.
Bits did as he was told as best as he could manage. It took him a moment to build up the strength to stand, turn, and fall onto the bed.
“This won’t hurt, convict,” Sella said as she used a laser injector the size of a rifle to deliver the serum to his veins. “But I must tell you, the snake pack has diagnosed you with a strain of subbac cancer.”
“What’s that mean?”
“There’s no bullet for subbacs. They’re a new form of infection. All we can do now is try whatever experimental drug the IDA has approved for testing on prisoners.”
“How do you get this subbuk?” Bits asked, but his mind was elsewhere.
“Lots of soldiers from the Mideast Conflagration of ’25 got it,” Sella said. “It’s made the rounds of permanent residents of Common Ground.”
“How did I get it?”