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:
“Hi, Lenny,” Tracie said in the dream.
Leon was a child too. They were sitting on the ground near a Morningside Park bench. Chamomile was flowering up through the cracks in the asphalt, stingless bees gathered their pollen.
“Do you wanna come on down t’ my house?” Leon wasn’t surprised to hear himself speak in the deep southern accent of his childhood. He was a child after all, playing with his best friend Tracie in the park.
Tracie shook her head vigorously. “I can’t. Not till you go swimming with me.”
“How come?”
“I don’t know,” the blond child said. “But it’s about the park.”
Leon noticed that it was fall. The leaves were turning. They must be maples, he thought, because their leaves are so red. Just then he saw a gang member run from behind one tree, cross the road, and then hide behind another trunk. Another man with a gun followed.
“It’s our park,” Tracie’s voice said.
There came that gurgling scream.
“What’s that?” Leon asked fearfully, but he wasn’t sure if he meant the gang member and robber or the scream.
“That’s just my mom,” Tracie replied. “She’s always screaming like that.”
The dream replayed itself again and again until Leon came to anticipate every event. Sometimes the gang member chased the robber. Sometimes he could make out Tracie’s name in the scream.
4
“Your daughter called,” Dr. Bel-Nan said the next day at their regular appointment.
“Yeah,” Leon said. “She a good girl.”
He was sitting on a medical table, on waxy paper, in his underwear.
“She’s worried about you.”
“Yeah.”
“Do you know why she’s so worried?” Bel-Nan asked. He was studying an X ray of Leon’s brain on a wall-size passive computer image that appeared as a complex acrylic painting. No light shone from behind the screen, but if Bel-Nan touched any specific point that area was enlarged by ten and overlaid on the broader image.
“No, sir. I don’t.”
Bel-Nan checked image after image, sometimes increasing the subject of his study a thousandfold.
Meanwhile Leon sang, “What you gonna do when the pond goes dry, honey...?”
After fifteen minutes of study and song Bel-Nan turned and asked, “Have you been to the park lately, Professor?”
“I was up there yesterday. Kickin’ back, takin’ it slow.”
“You seem to be speaking in a... a... I don’t know how to say it,” Bel-Nan said.
“Dreamt I was a boy last night,” Leon said with glee. “When I woke up I remembered how I talked back then. They called it ignorant where I went to school so I weaned myself off of it. But you know it kinda tickles me to go back to it a li’l bit. Yeah, just a li’l bit.”
“Is that how you spoke to the little girl, the one you met in the park?”
“Not in the park, no.”
“You saw her somewhere else?”
“In a dream I did. In a dream about the park.”
“What was she wearing?” the doctor asked, seemingly distracted by something he’d seen in the X ray.
But Leon wasn’t fooled. The question was wrong even for a psychiatrist to ask.
“What you lookin’ at, Doc?”
“What? Oh, uh, nothing, really. I mean, I’m looking to see if the microcircuitry has begun to dissolve. You see,” he said, building confidence as he spoke, “the time it takes for the sheath around the circuit to melt away should be enough for the brain to have generated its own neural links.”
Anyone who watched the Med-channel knew about the micro-nerve-bonding process. It involved computer circuitry made from a blood by-product that was compatible with biological processes while temporarily performing complex computer functions. The inventor, Carmine Giampa, was now senior vice president of MacroCode International.
“You don’t say,” Leon said, as if this were the first time he’d heard of such a miracle.
Bel-Nan picked up the sarcasm and cut short his medical lecture.
Leon dressed and went with Bel-Nan to an ultramodern office. All of the furniture was constructed of transparent plasteel accented here and there with the odd stroke of color. It was the kind of furniture that went out of style quickly.
“How long the lease on this furniture you got, Doc?” Leon asked.
“You must tell me about the girl in the park,” Bel-Nan said. His ugly smile was gone, his hair tied back.
“Why? She’s just a child.”
“Did you dream about her before you met her?”
“That would be crazy, now, wouldn’t it?”
“You haven’t answered the question.” Leon could see the doctor’s hands clenched under the transparent desk.
“No. I dreamed about her for the first time last night.”
“Did she seem like a normal child? Was she, how old was she?”
“Twelve. Yeah, just about twelve.”
“But you said that it was a little girl.”
“I’m sixty-two, Doc. I think’a my own daughter as a baby.”
Bel-Nan was rubbing the tips of his fingers together under the desk.
“Why would you think I dreamed about a girl and then I met her?” Leon asked.
The two seconds of blank expression on Bel-Nan’s repulsive face convinced Jones that he was about to hear a lie.
“The recording process in the microcircuitry,” the doctor said, “sometimes switches events. The system of recording is linear instead of the random-emphasis method of biological memory. Sometimes an event might be misrecorded when the sheath starts breaking down. You know, memories in two places.”
“I got to go, Doctor.”
“I don’t think that’s advisable,” Bel-Nan said.
“Why not?”
“I’d like to keep you under observation for a night or two.”
“I’ll be happy to, Doc,” Leon said. “But not tonight. Tonight I’m meetin’ a friend to play a game of chess.”
The ugly smile returned, tinged with bad intentions.
“What’s this friend’s name?”
Leon stood up. “What’s your real name, Doctor?”
The smile vanished.
Leon turned away and walked out the door.
“Come back, Professor,” Bel-Nan called. “I’m afraid that I can’t let you leave.”
Bel-Nan’s office was on the eighteenth floor of a forty-floor building. There was an express elevator which stopped only at floors 1, 18, and 35; this to speed up traffic for those who didn’t mind walking a few floors up or down.
An elevator car was waiting.
The ground floor was a vast chamber of Synthsteel and glass. There were two hundred feet for Leon to walk to the entrance. He moved quickly through the sparsely populated room. A line of four people waited to walk through the Data Detectors — the system that checked IDs against the possession of unlicensed property, and also for weapons, warrants, and labor truantism.
Each person passed between the slender copper-studded glass poles without incident. But when Leon passed through an alarm was set off. Two large guards emerged from a kiosk in the plaza and approached him.
“Excuse me, M,” a brawny, redheaded white man said. He was followed by a lanky young man who was white-haired.
“What’s the problem, M?” Leon said without a stutter.
“Seems like somebody put a hold on your ID,” the large redhead said in a friendly manner. “Maybe you left your briefcase or something like that.”
“I didn’t have anything,” Leon said. “It must be a mistake.”
“It’ll just take two minutes,” the guard assured.
Both men wore the bright red T-shirts that meant private law enforcement. The lanky man had yellow trousers and the redhead wore black. These colors meant that the larger man was the superior officer.