Futureland: Nine Stories of an Imminent World

After an hour Leon was completely lost. The streets curved continually and rarely intersected. Buildings all looked the same. He had no idea if the town went on for miles or if it was just a few blocks that spiraled around. He might have walked past the building he awoke in many times because he couldn’t distinguish one doorway from another.

His head was hurting under the hot sun and he took a seat at what seemed to be an outside café. A woman wearing a lacy blue wraparound top and a deep scarlet skirt came out and put a ewer of water and a thick glass cup next to him. She smiled and disappeared back into the building.

Leon drank and then covered his eyes with his hands, hoping to block out the light that seemed to pierce his brain.

“You’re feeling poorly, Professor?” Axel Bel-Nan asked. He was sitting across the table, wearing the same white doctor’s smock.

“I was wondering if you’d be here.” Leon spoke softly to control the throbbing pain in his head.

“Have you had enough exercise?” the doctor said. “Because you know we have lots of work to do.”

“I don’t have any work with you.”

“You are mistaken, my friend. We have the soul to find. We have that river Styx to cross. We have a god to slay, a universe to conquer, and Father Time himself to visit in his highest tower.” Bel-Nan smiled his crooked smile.

“How did you find me at the library?”

“The frequency emitted by your microstitches. It’s fairly simple to monitor.”

Pain wrenched through the core of Leon’s head. He lost consciousness for a moment.

“Help him, won’t you?” Bel-Nan said.

Hands took Leon by his skinny arms and lifted him. They took him into a doorway. He could smell meat frying and was grateful for the darkness. When they stopped moving there came mechanical sounds and then the feeling of descent.

He opened his eyes just when the elevator had reached its destination. They entered a large room where many people, of all races, bustled back and forth. The center of the room was a depression at least thirty feet across. At the bottom of the depression were four operating tables. On each table lay a human cadaver. One skinless corpse had a spiderlike crown of gold and silver on its head. Whenever the woman sitting at the control panel next to the corpse moved her hand, it moved. When she brought both hands together like a conductor, the body stood up from the table and struck a rather debonair pose for a skinless cadaver.

Leon was dropped into a PAPPSI gravity chair and pushed down a long hall lit by painful fluorescence. He was taken into a room and left there. He was grateful that the light was dim and the air was cool. He didn’t get out of his floating chair or even look around. His pain and exhaustion were so deep that he was asleep almost immediately.

Sometime later he awoke to a green light emanating from somewhere that he couldn’t see. There was also a sound, almost musical, like the long and elastic notes of electronic music, but with clicks and buzzes, bass tones and something equivalent to song punctuating the drawn-out and undulating rhythm.

Leon wasn’t sure if it was the light or the music that had woken him. The room was empty except for a few long tables under cabinets that were shut and locked. Toward the back of the room there was a corner. It was from around this corner that the light and music came.

She was in a transparent coffin perfectly fit for a child her size. Tracie was definitely dead. Her cranberry dress was gone. She was totally nude; even her yellow hair had been shorn. In its place was a deep gash down the center of her skull, sewn back for a funeral that never took place. The music came from various-sized tuning sticks at the foot of the coffin. The green light came from underneath her in what seemed to be migrating waves of a multitude of microscopic life-forms.

Leon slid to the floor and wept until he passed out.