Futureland: Nine Stories of an Imminent World

1

Six naked men walked into the weak circle of light in a corner of the great chamber. They weren’t manacled or restrained in any way but their hands hung down at their sides and there was no escape or rebellion in their eyes. Each man had a bulky sack of iridescent blue-green material wrapped around his upper right biceps. The sacks writhed sluggishly, resembling serpents slowly digesting their prey. There was something hard and particular in each sack.

“This is the new meat,” Lieutenant L. Johnson said to the assembly of men. They gave no response. They might have all been deaf as far as Bits knew.

“Vortex ‘Bits’ Arnold,” the lieutenant continued. “He will be number seven in your cell from now on.”

“No more Logan?” a young black man with highly defined muscles spoke up.

“Vortex,” the lieutenant replied harshly.

The young convict, who was completely hairless and who had no scars that Bits could see, lowered his eyes.

“And as long as you can’t keep quiet, Jerry, maybe you won’t mind taking him to the center for a fitting,” the guard said as he punched something into the palm screen attached to his gloved hand.

“Yes, Lieutenant,” the specimen of perfection said meekly.

L. Johnson was not large or strong, and as far as Bits could see, he wasn’t armed either. None of the guards he had seen was armed. Bits didn’t understand why six full-grown men were docile beside this paunchy and arrogant sublife of a white man. The only reason Bits didn’t jump on him was because he was bound hand and foot and floating in a gravity chair.

“Get him to ChemSys,” Johnson said to Jerry. “The rest of you get up to the plantation. We need the whole upper tier harvested before the typhoon hits.” Again Johnson punched information into his palm screen.

Of the prisoners, four were Negro, one was brown and Asian — a Pacific Islander, Bits thought — and one was white. The oldest of the group, a lanky black man somewhere in his forties, showed distaste when Johnson ordered the harvest. The light of anger shone in his eyes. But fast on the heels of that anger came the jab of sudden pain, and then there was nothing — no anger or will of any kind, just resignation as he joined the herd of five moving back across the huge darkened chamber.

Trussed up as he was in the floating chair, Bits watched the men cross into the room. Before them, on the floor, ran a bright green line which they followed until they finally faded into darkness.

Bits was reminded that he hadn’t seen the sun since his conviction for antisocial behavior. It was only his second conviction but the court nevertheless used its prerogative to have him sentenced to a licensing facility that would hold him until it was scientifically proven that he was no longer a threat to society.

They tried him in a Manhattan subbasement, had him transferred at night to the tube train that sped through its mile-deep Synthsteel tunnel at over six hundred miles an hour from New York to the East Indian Ocean. He arrived at night also and was delivered in bonds to the tender mercies of L. Johnson, orientation officer of Angel’s Island, the first and most feared nonnational private prison.

Bits twisted around to see what the orientation officer was doing but he too was gone. It was only Bits and Jerry there in the weak light.

“Got a cig, Jerry?”

The big man grabbed hold of the handle at the back of the chair, which resembled an oversized fancy plastic scoop, and began pushing Bits ahead of him.

“Jerry, did you hear me?”

“No talk in the halls. Follow the pathway given and speak only when spoken to by authority.” Jerry’s words weren’t the soulless mouthings of the zombie he resembled but soft warnings that chilled Bits into hushed tones.

“They got mikes on us?” Bits asked.

Jerry did not respond. He walked along just behind Bits’s left side. The gravity chair, a product of PAPPSI — Polar/Anti-Polar Power Systems Inc. — floated silently down the gloomy hall. The strangeness of the interiors that Bits had seen so far had been due to a trick the architects had come up with. Only things that were meant to be seen received lighting. Doorways, signs, and long baseboard directional lights indicated where you might go and when you got somewhere. Everything else was black as space. The walls and ceiling, even the floors, were coated with a completely nonreflective material that made the inside of the prison seem like the deep of starless space. Every step taken was a step of faith. You’d never see a hole or wall that wasn’t marked. Your feet fell on nothingness. People shone in the darkness as did any object not treated with the nonreflective material.

Also, there was very little, if any, sound to be discerned. Jerry’s bare feet on the floor might well have been feathers falling on a cloud. There were no machine sounds or human voices or even the far-off echo of the possibility of life.

Jerry walked along for nearly a quarter of an hour as Bits figured. He’d asked the naked black Adonis all sorts of questions but the young man just repeated his admonition about silence.

“Who’s this Logan?” Bits asked, remembering the odd altercation between L. Johnson and the kid.

At first Bits thought he was going to get the warning speech again but it didn’t come. There was only silence and space.

“Com’on, guy,” Bits insisted. “Tell me about Logan.”

Silence again.

Bits was getting ready to ask something else when Jerry said, “Logan’s my friend. We carried choke leaves from the upper to the lower terraces after harvesting time. There’s always work for somebody who wants to move choke leaves.”

Choke was the tobacco industry’s answer to cancer-causing tobacco leaves. It was a golden aromatic leaf that made you feel mellow with no effect on motor skills and no cancer in the lungs. Jewel Juarez of the People’s Health Watch had claimed that choke caused the equivalent of psychosis in lab animals after prolonged use but everyone on the net thought that Jewel was just a nutbroad who saw conspiracy in everything.

“He an’ me’d make little soldiers outta the choke twigs and bring ’em down to Loki, Needles, and Darwin. Yeah.” Jerry spoke softly but with feeling. “He was a puzzlemaster, a high planes resister. He proved that even the snake could get bit. Oh shit! Oh no!” The PAPPSI chair stopped moving forward, it wavered a little and was still. Jerry moaned. From the angle of the cry Bits thought that the young man had gone down on his knees.

Jerry’s cries ceased and there was silence and stillness in the boundless hall.

“Jerry? Jerry, you okay, man?”

Abruptly the PAPPSI chair started moving again.

“Are you okay, Jerry?”

Jerry did not answer.

After another few minutes they came to a sign of luminescent green letters that read CHEM/BEHAV-SYS CENTER.

They entered the doorway and were flooded by light. The brilliant yellow ceilings and floors illuminated by Sun Master light grids nearly blinded Bits.

A bulky black man in a pale yellow smock came up to him. “Name and crime,” the man demanded.

Bits thought that he was being asked and was considering a variety of smart-ass answers. But before he decided on one an electronic voice reported, “Vortex, aka Bits, Arnold. Member of the outlawed TransAnarchist Trade Union. Hi-hacking, first degree antisocial code number sixteen point seven.”

“Violence?” the bulky black man asked.

“Not reported. Personal commission unlikely. Mass destruction possibility, antisocial, lethal dose pack recommended.”

Bits was trying to understand where the voice came from. He thought that it might be a file that the man in the smock had accessed before they’d entered. But it was also possible that a microchip with all this data was stored on his PAPPSI chair.

“Take him to the prep area, convict,” the bulky man said.

Again they were going down a featureless hallway. But this hall was the bright yellow of the sun. Bright and shiny and noisy too. Bits could hear the bulky black man’s hard shoes stomping the floor. There were also mechanical sounds and music playing softly in the background.

They came to a broad area that was set up as an infirmary of some sort. There was a waist-high bank of cabinets and an operating table made from shiny metal fitted with manacles for hand, head, and foot. A square-faced black woman, also in a yellow smock, came close to Bits and peered at him dispassionately.

“Boo!” Bits shouted while doing his best to lunge at her.

He got the effect he was after. The woman jumped back, startled momentarily. Then she smiled.

“We’ll fix that soon enough,” she said.

“The justice department wants maximum on this one, Sella,” the man said.

“They want it on all of them, M Lamont,” she replied. Sella wasn’t a pretty woman but she had a figure under the smock and she wasn’t yet forty. Bits wondered how many women there were on Angel’s Island.

“Put him on the table, convict,” M Lamont said to Jerry.

Jerry plucked Bits out of his chair as if he were weightless, slapped him down on the cold metal table and shackled him there. The woman, Sella, pressed a button and the table moved until it held Bits at a vertical angle facing her and M Lamont.

“You may return to your cell, convict,” M Lamont said as he punched something into his glove screen.

Jerry left on silent bare feet.

The woman called Sella and M Lamont went about with electric shears cutting off the andro-suit that Bits had worn for the past three weeks — since his arrest, speedy trial, conviction, sentence, and deportation.

“Why do they call you Bits?” Sella asked while M Lamont prepared a needle.

“What’s that needle for?”

“Don’t you mind about that,” Lamont said as he jabbed the needle into a vein in Bits’s right arm. “You just stay a good boy and this will be the last time you feel any pain at all on the island.”

“Well?” Sella asked.

“Well what?” Bits said while watching Lamont. “Hey, man, what’s that?”

“It’s another needle.”

Sella walked away from them.

“How many’a those things you gonna stick inta me?”

“Four,” M Lamont said. “But don’t worry, you got good veins.”

“Why do they call you Bits?” Sella asked again from somewhere behind.

“Are you a qualified doctor?” Bits asked M Lamont.

“Qualified enough for anything you’ll need, convict.”

Sella approached them with a white enamel cylinder. As Lamont inserted the last needle she unscrewed the canister, taking out a shimmering blue-green sack. Bits could hear glass tinkling inside the bag. Four tubes, each of a different color, sprouted from a single hole in the shimmering skin. M Lamont attached the tubes to the needles and then wrapped the cloth loosely about Bits’s right biceps. The cloth seemed to come alive then as it coiled into a snug grip.

“Ow,” Bits complained.

“That’s the electronic extenders. They go into the nerve system to read your reactions to stimuli,” M Lamont said casually. “The pain should stop almost immediately.”

And it was true. As Lamont spoke the pain subsided.

“What is that thing?” Bits asked.

“It’s a snake pack,” Sella said through sensually pursed lips.

“What’s it for?”

Lamont and Sella smiled to one another.

“Should I show him, M?” Sella asked her co-worker.

Lamont cocked his head in a noncommittal gesture.

“Leave us alone for a few minutes,” she said to Lamont.

He walked away from the table and out of sight. Bits heard a door closing.

Sella took a white metal stool from nearby and set it before Bits. She sat so that her head was at the level of his knees.

“You have a very nice cock, convict,” she said in a matter-of-fact tone.

Bits swallowed hard. He was only twenty-three and easily excited.

Sella pursed her lips again and blew against his genitals.

Bits thought that M Lamont was probably watching from somewhere but he didn’t care. He hadn’t been with a woman since before he went into isolation for his hihacking caper.

“Oh,” Sella said, “I see a little motion there.” She blew again. “I bet I could get it rock hard by just blowing, huh?” She kept blowing and at the same time she put on a pair of prophylactic gloves. “These gloves have a powder on them that’s almost like oil.” She circled the head of his penis with her right thumb and forefinger. He was fully erect just that quickly. She began moving her hand back and forth, lightly caressing the erection.

“Come for me, convict,” she purred. Bits moaned as he felt the unavoidable ecstasy begin. But then there was a sting in his right arm and suddenly his erection went limp. He felt pain in his groin and up his arm into his head. The pain was like an orgasm itself, rising to a fast crescendo and exploding behind his eyes.

Bits screamed and strained against his bonds. The pain rose and exploded again. This time Bits went limp and quivered, thinking that he was on the brink of death.

Sella stood up and said, “Any more questions, convict?”

“What, what happened?”

Sella’s face was like stone when she said, “You are the property of Angel’s Island now, convict. No sex or violence or insubordination will be tolerated. The ChemSys snake pack on your arm can identify almost any antisocial behavior that you might exhibit. It also has an onboard computer that knows where you should be going and what you should be doing. It knows when you should be asleep, when you should be awake, and when you need to go to the toilet. If a question is asked of you and the truth monitor has been activated you will be punished for lying. If you have an erection in your sleep it will be inhibited. If you have an erection when you’re awake it will be inhibited and two or more pain doses will be administered. If you attempt to escape you will be put into a coma.”

“What about my rights, M?” Bits asked, attempting and failing to get irony into his voice.

“You’re thousands of miles from the borders of the U.S.,” she said. “And you have been forsaken. Until you prove that you are rehabilitated your citizenship has been suspended.”

The supreme court had validated the constitutionality of citizenship suspension in 2022.

M Lamont returned then. He went about loosening Bits’s bonds. The young man fell to the floor when he was freed.

“Anything else, convict?” asked Sella, who was obviously the senior of the two.

“Yes,” Bits said as he rose on shaky feet. “I have two questions.”

“What?”

“As fast as these snakes’a yours might be I’m sure they can’t read minds. What keeps me from giving you a death claw to the throat at my fastest speed?”

“From this moment on,” Sella said as she poked at her palm screen, “you will receive a near lethal electric shock if any part of your body comes within eighteen inches of any nonconvict.”

Lamont grinned, undulating his three chins, and reached out a hand toward Bits, who leapt backward.

“You had another question, convict?” Sella asked.

“Yeah,” Bits said, standing straight and trying not to show how shaken he was. “How can black people be like this to other black people? How could you treat me like this?”

Bulky M Lamont chuckled to himself. Sella lifted one eyebrow and smiled.

She said, “You don’t have that to fall back on anymore, convict. Nobody made you break the laws. You’re not black or white, American, or even human, really. You are nothing and that’s how we see you. That’s how we all see you. Now go down this hall and out of the door you entered. You will see a bright blue line. Follow it. It will bring you to your next appointment. If you stray from the line you will receive a pain dosage. If you try to remove the snake pack you will be reduced to a coma. The third time you get a coma-dose you will not be revived.”

He went down the jet-black corridor, following a thin but bright blue line that ran along with red and lavender and green neonlike strings of light. Bits crossed paths with one other naked prisoner along the way. He was a bearded and tattooed white man with a large belly and big muscles. He was following the lavender and orange line that veered off down a different hallway. When they passed close to each other the white man made a silent salute. Bits returned the gesture but maintained the silence. He well remembered what had happened to Jerry and the pain that he felt after Sella’s treacherous embrace.

The blue line stopped at a doorway edged in blue light. The only indication that it was a doorway was the rectangular outline and the fact that the blue line stopped there.

Through the doorway Bits found himself in a bright, pure white expanse that seemed to go on, in all directions, forever. In the center of this expanse was a black desk. Behind the desk stood an elegant white man in a black andro-suit.

Bits looked from the man down to his feet. The illusion was that he stood on a clear glass floor that looked down upon an infinitely distant whiteness. He wasn’t sure how the illusion was maintained, but it was very disconcerting.

“M Arnold,” the tall man said in an official but not unfriendly tone. “Welcome to Angel’s Island.”

Bits felt dizzy. He was afraid to advance the twenty feet or so to the man in black, the spot in an infinite sky.

“Hey,” the convict said.

“I’m the warden here,” the white man said. “But you can call me Roger.”

“Okay.”

“I meet every prisoner when he arrives. I tell them the rules, answer any questions they might have, and then send them on their way. It’s all very civilized here. The guards are unarmed, there’s very little interaction between the staff and the convict population. Weeks might go by and you won’t see one of us.”

“What if I get sick or get mail or something?”

Roger walked around to the front of his desk. He was exceptionally thin but in no way brittle or fragile. He was cleanshaven, with patches of darkness under his eyes.

“There will be no communication with your old life, Vortex. That was forfeit with the suspension of your citizenship. There is no vid input here. No outside. There’s you and your cell mates. There’s me and my staff. There’s work if you want it, and nothing if you prefer. No books or writing pads or church or time. You have been sentenced to limbo and the only hope you have is if we can scientifically certify that you are no longer a threat to your country.”

“H-how do you do that?” Bits asked.

“I don’t do it, you do.”

“Yeah? How’s that?”

“It’s very simple,” Roger said, waving his left hand in the air. “I take it that Sella and M Lamont have explained the rudiments of the snake pack to you.”

In the far-off distance, to the right of Warden Roger, Bits saw something like a passing cloud. It was mostly white but there were pale blue fringes and shadows here and there to define it. He thought that this anomaly was the architect’s idea of art.

“Yeah,” Bits said. “It’s a high-tech shackle. Like my own personal guard.”

“Exactly,” Roger said. “Every time the snake has to discipline you there is a mark registered. If you have to be awakened or if you have to be put to sleep, if you break the sexual codes or talk while on duty. If you approach too close to a guard or stray from an assigned task. Each offense is a mark on the main computer file.”

“One mark no matter what you do?”

“Mostly.” Roger smiled.

“Why’s that?”

“Your freedom,” Roger said, “is a matter of you accruing no points in a span of three years. Follow the rather simple rules we have and you will not be here long.”

“Wake up on time and don’t jack off and I’m outta here in three?” Bits said.

Roger smiled. He tapped his glove screen a few times. “Why do they call you Bits?”

Bits felt the snake tighten almost imperceptibly when Roger made his entry. He knew that the needles were probing him for the truth.

“Computers are run on an eight-bit symbol system. I developed a virus that would force the operating system to reconfigure itself in RAM allowing an external OS to control it. That way, with the slightest window, I could take over almost any computer system by translating it into a code that no one else could read or decipher. I used a simple two-bit differential to offset the resident system. Because I added two bits my friends gave me Bits as a nickname.”

“But then all one had to do was pull the plug and reboot the system to get rid of your smart-virus,” the warden said.

“Yes. If they got to the program within one thousandth of a second. After that algorithms would have been placed in thousands of memory devices attached to the computer. The only way to get rid of it would be to purge all data in all files associated with the system.” Bits smiled. “It would cost trillions of dollars to abort me. No one was willing to pay that price.”

“So you destroyed the intercorporate council’s database of economic affairs because they wouldn’t pay you to ransom their computer?”

“No,” Bits said proudly. “I destroyed it because it was evil. Through that database they were systematically dismantling private property rights around the world.”

“I suppose you know my next question?”

Bits stared at the white emptiness behind the warden.

“I expect you to respond to my questions or else a pain dosage will be applied,” the warden said.

“I don’t know exactly what question you have, Roger. It probably has something to do with how you can obtain my virus or maybe who else knows anything about it.”

“I’d like the answer to both if you please, M Arnold,” Roger said politely.

“I don’t know.” Bits ground his teeth, expecting an explosive jolt of pain. But it did not come.

The warden seemed surprised.

“How can that be?”

“Hammerstein, the memory man.”

“No,” the warden was incredulous. “A scientist like you? The Ripper?”

“My blood for you,” Bits said looking directly into the warden’s eyes. “The process isn’t complete. I remember shreds and I’ve forgotten some things that had nothing to do with the virus. I forgot a whole episode with a girlfriend and many other minor details. But everything I just told you I read in Worldweek. Their science writer understands the system better than I do now.”

“Could you rebuild the system?”

“Given years and a lab, maybe. But I’m twenty-three now. Math is a young man’s game.”

“The Ripper,” the warden said shaking his head.

Karl Hammerstein was the Jack Kevorkian of the twenty-first century. He had developed a process that could erase whole sections of memory. Using radioactive dyes and a chemical targeting system much like the magic bullets developed in cancer cures, Hammerstein claimed that he could locate and erase entire episodes from memory. The process wasn’t exact, and other memories — even facets of a personality — could be lost. The Hammerstein Process had been outlawed in most of the world. Only his hometown, Berlin, allowed the neurosurgeon to ply his trade.

Bits Arnold smiled a sad smile. “My blood for you,” he said again, mouthing the anarchist slogan that he and his fellow revolutionaries had followed.

“Outside of this chamber,” Roger said, “you will find a purple-dotted yellow line. From now on that is your color scheme. It will lead you to your cell.”

“You didn’t answer one of my questions, Roger.”

“What was that?”

“How do I communicate with the prison staff if I never see them?”

“You,” the warden said and then paused for a moment, “don’t see us, but we see and hear everything that you do and say. Just whisper and we will know it.”

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.”

“How long you been here, Darwin?”

“I don’t know.”

“Say what?”

“I don’t even know what day it is, man. Most the time I don’t know if it’s day or night less it’s harvest. Last time I was on the outside they just put a robot space station on the moon.”

“That was over twenty years ago,” Bits said. “You were my age when they put you in here.”

“I guess so,” Darwin said with a sigh. “Don’t matter. I’ma be here till the day I die. They ain’t never gonna let me be free again.”

“What if you go markless?”

“That’s not my sentence, brother. My mama had a red monkey on her shoulder an’ he kept tellin’ her to kill me so I took a shot at ’im. But Mama got in the way’a that monkey and she took the bullet meant for his green eyes.”

“But that’s crazy, man,” Bits said. He felt free to say anything because of the snake pack. The device was so accurate in reading the body’s chemistry that its quick response time made an act of violence almost impossible.

“They say it’s psychotic,” Darwin said with a nod. “That’s why they’re holdin’ me for so long.”

“Because you’re too dangerous to live in society?”

“Naw. ’Cause they testin’ me with the snake. It give me my dosage and I cain’t get it off. If it keep me from doin’ wrong, even thinkin’ wrong, then one day they’ll make it that all people who’s sick will have to wear a snake to be free.”

“Then one day we’ll all wear them,” Bits said with no irony.

“One day,” Darwin agreed.

On the ninth day of the harvest Jerry was stung by a giant tiger scorpion. The venom, faster even than the snake pack, drove the young man crazy with pain. He yelled at the top of his lungs and ran out of the perimeter that defined their harvesting activities. He jumped and hollered, rolled through the ferny underbrush to escape the pain.

Three prison guards appeared, from nowhere it seemed to Bits. When they approached Jerry he leapt at them, socking one in the jaw and pushing another to the ground. He raised a large rock against the third guard but by that time he’d gotten sluggish. Either the scorpion sting was killing him or the snake pack was slowing him down. He fell into the brush and the guards hurried to pick him up and carry him off. It was all over in less than a minute.

“Just like ants,” Bits said to himself.

“Say what?” Stiles, the white man, spoke up.

“The chemical stimulation,” Bits said, still thinking. “Its immediate programmed response. I bet they got those guards wearin’ snake packs under their clothes too.”

“Why you say that?”

“To wake ’em up if they’re sleeping. To make them strong or alert in case of emergency. It’s the technology of production. One day everyone will wear them.”

“Maybe the nigs’ll be puttin ’em on. Maybe them but not the white race. We’ll be pushin’ the buttons and you’ll be liftin’ the weight.”

Bits felt a mild chemical shock in his right hand. The thirty-second warning before punishment for slacking off.

“Why didn’t Jerry go into a coma when he ran past the markers?” Bits asked Darwin as they rode in the back of a robot truck down the tunnel ramp into the prison.

“I don’t know exactly,” the madman said. “But when there’s a medical emergency in a man the snake pack knows and turns off for a while.”

“How long?”

“Maybe two minutes. But it ain’t no help for escape. You got to be on the verge of death to stun a snake.”

Every evening after choke harvesting the men were given a serving of dried soya protein and a square of chocolatelike carob candy. The men of color squatted together, while Stiles moved to his corner composing lines to a poem that he’d been working on for months.

“Who’s this Logan?” Bits asked on one such evening.

The men looked away from him. He was still new and not yet received with full trust.

“This harvest be over soon,” Loki said. “That means another six weeks underground.”

“Maybe,” Darwin said.

“What you mean maybe?” Loki challenged. “It’s always the same number of days. Forty-two and then we’re back upside.”

“Forty-two times wakin’ up,” Darwin lectured. “Forty-two times goin’ t’ sleep. But who knows how much time has passed? They can drug you in your sleep, you already know that. They could add a day or even a week to your nap. They could take a year away from you and you’d never know it. Uh...” The moan escaped Darwin’s lips and his head dipped. “They could, they could...”

Darwin lay back on the mat floor and fell instantly into sleep. Jerry lifted the sleeping figure and carried him to his cot.

Needles chuckled.

“They didn’t hear him,” Needles said to Bits. “His blood just got worked up. Snake pack felt his excitement and put ’im under. But that set off the alarm an’ so a guard’ll be watchin’ us pretty soon.

“Yeah they got our number for the most part. You get too excited, feel the wrong thing, an’ the sand man’s fairy dust just fall down on your eyes.”

“You say for the most part,” Bits prodded. “Is there a hole to hide in?”

“Naw, man,” Needles sighed. “Ain’t no hidin’ from these bastards. No hidin’, no. But every once in a while you have a dude like Logan—”

“Watch it, junkie,” Moomja warned.

But Needles just waved his hand to dismiss the threat.

“Yeah,” Needles said. “Logan was a good dude, good guy, but he could be the coldest muthafuckah you could imagine. He was blood in RadCon5: assassin. One day, upside, he saw a guard twenty feet off. You know that screw’s wife was a widow the second Logan’s stone hit his head.”

“Why didn’t the snake pack juice him?” Bits asked.

“Because he didn’t have no feelin’s. For all the snake knew he was just takin’ a stretch. Uh—” Needles held up a finger. “They puttin’ the H in early tonight.” Then he spoke to the unseen roof, “You need more’n that, Roger. You need a lot more’n that.”

But Needles was flagging. His eyes were going in and out of focus.

“After that Logan took sick. Finally one day he was just gone. Poof!” Needles gestured with his hands to express the magic of it all and then he slumped over into unconsciousness.

Bits wanted to think about what he had heard but he too felt tired as the drug flowed into his veins.

In the middle of the night Bits came suddenly awake. He realized that he had to urinate. He sat up and saw a purple dotted yellow line leading away through a gap in the circle of light. The line led to a yellow outlined urinal.

On the way back he spied two guards on the tier just below. They were carrying a stretcher between them which held the nude body of a white prisoner.

Bits didn’t slow down or allow his heart to race. He just walked back to his cell.

As soon as he put his head down he was fast asleep again.

After the harvest, time was the enemy. As much as eighteen hours of every day was spent in the cell. There were three forty-five minute eating periods when the men were herded into a great cafeteria walled in black. There the men from Level 18 could mingle with prisoners from other cells. Stiles always ate with the Itsies, International Socialists — Nazis on a world scale.

Moomja had a friend named Thomas whom he always ate with. Jerry knew a few young men. They played a gambling game with a foreign coin that one of them had found during harvest. The winner could keep the coin until the next meal, when the game would start over.

“How do you play?” Bits asked Jerry during one of the long idle spells in their cell.

“You bet on a number, either one or two,” Jerry said. He had won the coveted dinner game and had the coin clutched in his hand for the night. “Then somebody flips. We take turns flippin’. If you bet one and it comes up heads, you get a point. If you bet two and it come up tails, you get a point—”

“How you know the difference between a head and a tail on the crazy coin?” Loki asked. “I seen it. You cain’t tell what it is.”

“We just decided on what was what,” Jerry said. “The side got the star on it’s the head. An’ ain’t nobody talkin’ to you anyway.”

“Anyway,” Jerry said, turning back to Bits. “At the end of twenty-five flips the one with the most points keep the coin.”

“What if there’s a tie?” Bits asked.

“Then we have a play-off,” Jerry said, grinning.

“More flipping?”

“Yes sir.”

The cell was round, seven meters in diameter as closely as Bits could figure. There were seven cots spaced evenly around the perimeter. Most of the time Bits stayed in his bed. It was an unspoken rule that no one talked to you if you were on your cot.

The men, with the exception of Stiles, often congregated in the central space. They sang songs, told riddles, and made up long and intricate stories that they had committed to memory.

Time, in between harvests, nearly stopped. The days had no names, the hours had no numbers. There were no seconds or minutes, only spaces spent waiting for the next meal and the next two-week harvest. The only light was the green circle that defined the cell and a weak luminescence that allowed the men to see each other.

There was no physical contact beyond brief handshakes, because any prolonged physical interaction caused a dose of pain.

At first Bits wondered why they hadn’t all gone insane. Why hadn’t the men decided to cross over that green line three times and go comatose forever? Then he began to see.

The snake pack was an amazing and subtle device. It could read sexual excitation and violence in nerve endings; it could perceive biological needs in the blood. But there was more. The snake could also identify anxiety, depression, and even more complex psychological manifestations. It could keep a man from feeling claustrophobia even if he was buried alive, Bits thought.

Slowly, over time, Bits began to feel hatred. It was a new emotion for him. Maybe, he thought, before the mem-job I hated. But he didn’t remember. All he knew was the spite he felt for the snake and its master — Roger.

The snake didn’t keep prisoners from hating. Hate, Bits thought, was good therapy for a man who was buried alive.

He began having dreams about a long, green, luminescent serpent. It would be after him, intent on devouring him. When Bits saw the snake his heart began to race, and then — it was always the same — he would feel a tingling in his arm and the snake’s flesh would evaporate, leaving only an empty skin draped over a grinning skeleton.

Every morning Bits awoke exhausted from the drugs and the unrequited hunger of the snake.

The only things that a convict could look forward to were meals, harvests, free days, and jog time.

Jog time was alotted to every prisoner. It was the optional daily regimen for aerobic exercise, mainly running. There were long black corridors with padded floors where the prisoner could run as long as he kept his heart rate within the range prescribed by his snake pack. The first few times Bits couldn’t run more than ten minutes before he had to stop. When his heart rate fell below the appropriate cardiovascular level the purple dotted line flashed, indicating that it was time to return to the cell.

At the end of three months Bits could run for two hours at a time. These were his best moments, the only times he felt free.

Three weeks after the second harvest a Free Day was granted.

The Free Day, Bits learned, was a random holiday that happened anywhere from seven to twenty times a year. On that fortuitous day there were movies and reading lamps with books and censored magazines; there was a music center for loud Jacker tunes and bedrooms set aside for health-cleared and consenting couples or triples or quads to have nonviolent sex together without black marks or inhibitor injections. Prisoners were free to move about, though only after reserving the time, down the many avenues of colored lights in blackness or up on the plantation grounds. There were basketball games and Ping-Pong and porno shows in 3D vid chambers that played all day long.

One of the most exciting events was the gladiatorial arena — the Circus, as Roger called it — where men fought nearly to the death. Regardless of all the control exerted by the snake packs and the monitoring systems, convicts still developed grudges that taxed their bio-limits and the more expensive drugs dispensed by the snakes. This problem was alleviated by these grudges being settled on Free Day.

The period lasted for twenty-four hours and was followed by a rest period of twenty-four hours more. Bits was first made aware of the holiday when he awoke to a flashing strobe of red light that woke all of his cell mates.

“Free Day,” Jerry said, leaping up from his mat. He was still limping a bit from the scorpion’s sting but the snake pack had saved him.

Soon all the men were up and talking. It wasn’t long before they were voicing their preferences to the void and were off following varied colored lights to their desires.

In less than five minutes everyone was gone except Bits and the white man Stiles.

“You gonna choose or what?” Stiles asked angrily.

“What’s your problem, white boy?” Bits retorted.

“I do what I do without a nig peanut gallery if you don’t mind.”

“Why don’t they put you with the white boys if you’re so unhappy with us, Stiles?”

“Nuthin’ I’d like better,” Stiles said. “But they don’t want all of any in one pot. You got cells up to six white men but there’s still a nig or spic in the cream. That way they got a backup spy if somethin’ goes down.”

“And you’re mad at me?” Bits said with as much sarcasm as he could.

Stiles gave Bits a hard stare and then said, “I could never trust you people. You were born to stab us in the back. It’s you who took our good white world and made it into a mess. Raped our women, stole our jobs.”

Bits paused a moment as if he were digesting the white man’s words. But he wasn’t thinking about what Stiles had said. Bits was a worldwide revolutionary. He defined himself as a class warrior, and though he suffered the pain of racism he did not exclude other races from his side. He knew that over 80 percent of American-backed prisons were non-white. He knew that crime by blacks against whites was negligible compared to the crimes committed by universities and corporations. But he also knew that he could never convince Stiles of their common cause.

“You and me, Stiles,” he said slowly. “It’s you’n me.”

“You wanna fight me in the Circus?”

Bits pointed at Stiles and then at himself, then curled both of his hands into fists at his waist level. He knew that there were computers recording and deciphering every word and gesture, that the computers were linked with vid monitors. At the first sign of rebellion Roger would be warned and either he or Stiles would be transferred.

“Fuck you,” Stiles said, which was his privilege on a Free Day.

“I want to go to a library if you have one,” Bits announced to the powers that be.

Over the next few weeks Bits began to have a different sort of disturbing dream. He would find himself sitting at Roger’s desk, in the faux open sky, doing math problems on a reusable paper-screen. At first everything was going fine, but then the numbers began to wriggle on the screen, becoming three-dimensional, growing red fangs and claws as they did so. They’d jump off of the paper-screen and chase Bits into the blackness of the prison’s interior.

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?”

Sella looked away and said, “How would I know?”

Ninety seconds, Bits thought. When the time comes that’s all I got.

For the next hour M Lamont and Sella read the data transferred to the computer system from Bits’s snake. The triple-chinned shapeless Lamont grunted now and then. Finally the grotesque med got bored, walked away into the distance, and disappeared.

Bits waited for what felt like an hour more before injecting the stinger sack into his left buttock. The pain was exquisite and instantaneous.

“Doctor,” Bits said through gritted teeth. “I seem to be developing a hard lump on my left buttock.”

“What?” Immediately she turned to the screen.

“Please look at it, Doctor,” Bits said with the urgency of pain in his voice.

When she turned to look from the prescribed eighteen-inch distance Bits lunged and grabbed Sella’s hand, squeezing so hard that he could feel bones snapping.

Before she had time to yell he said, “Tell me your access code. You have twelve seconds or I kill you.”

“Sella-118,” the woman gasped.

The count going off in the back of his mind had reached twenty-seven.

A red strobe flashed.

“WARNING IN OP-ROOM,” boomed a mechanical voice.

Bits dragged Sella to the console and saw that she was already signed on.

“Tell it manual,” he threatened.

“Manual,” the woman whimpered, and a typing console with an audiophone unit appeared from the bowels of the machine.

Bits socked Sella in the jaw and began punching numbers furiously. The fire in his buttock was almost unbearable. Words began to appear on the screen: Vid access, Sydney, electronic transfer line...

“WARNING IN OP-ROOM.”

The red light flashed faster.

Bits punched in 14-76T-1187-222.

An image of a green circle appeared on the screen. It broke into eleven equal sections. Twenty seconds went by, thirty.

“Bits displacement system active,” a feminine computer voice announced. “Voice pattern Vortex invoked.”

“End alert status of current system,” Bits said.

The flashing light stopped.

Bits tore off sheets and bound Med Sella to the bed. Then he collapsed on top of her and breathed slowly while the automatic medicine from the snake pack worked to stem the pain and damage from the baby tiger scorpion’s sting.

Later Bits located a tranquilizer pistol in Sella’s bag. He made sure the gun was loaded and then ordered his virus program to summon M Lamont.

Stiles’s eyes lit with amazement when he found that the orange and brown line he’d been ordered to follow brought him to a vast white room where Meds Sella and Lamont were seemingly unconscious and tied to the foot of a bed while Bits sat above them ordering images on a computer like he was a king.

“What the f?” Stiles said.

“We did it, white boy,” Bits said.

“The fuck you say, nig.”

Bits smiled, thinking that a statement like that would have driven him wild with rage in the world outside.

“Truce?” Bits suggested.

“What is this shit?” Stiles replied.

“The alacrity of justice,” Bits said dramatically, “has turned wise men into fools.”

“Say what?”

“I went to Hammerstein the memory man and everybody thought I was going to get my memory erased. But I knew that in his earlier experiments with mem-erasure the good Doctor Hammerstein only succeeded in temporary removal. I got that service. So when they asked me what I knew I could say I knew nothing because that was the truth. I got most of the memories back now. They came as monsters in a dream.”

“So?” Stiles said.

“The scorpion sting froze up the snake pack and gave me time to grab Sella’s computer access. I called a number, downloaded my master virus, and took over the system.”

“That had to set off an alarm somewhere,” Stiles said, looking over both shoulders as he did so.

“Only temporarily. My virus is sophisticated. It translates the current system to its own code and then makes me the master.”

Stiles’s eyes hardened.

“You know why I declined to meet you in the gladiator’s circle, Stiles?” Bits asked.

“Why?”

“ ’Cause I’ve always known that you could kick my ass.”

“Then maybe you made a mistake callin’ on me now,” Stiles suggested, taking a step forward.

“Before acting on that will you let me explain something about this system?”

Stiles held up his left wrist and tapped it with a smile.

“Max screen three up,” Bits ordered.

The infinite white wall behind Bits turned bright blue with thousands of small orange boxes broken into various sections.

“Population reports for Angel’s Island,” Bits said. His voice was greatly amplified and seemed to come from all around. Fear crept into Stiles’s eyes. “To the left are the majority of the inhabitants — convicts. Bring up Jerry Tierny.”

Immediately a large overlay appeared in the middle of the convict area. It was titled with the convict’s picture and name hovering about a series of file tabs with the labels criminal history, incarceration history, experimental studies, current status...

“I can tell you where he is, what he’s doing, his physioemotional state, and whether or not he has to go to the toilet. I can also activate any function on his snake pack, including the death option.”

“Who’s in those boxes on the right side?” Stiles asked meekly.

“Everybody here is wearing a snake pack, Stiles,” Bits replied, though his godlike voice did not seem to come from his mouth. “The guards, the chaplain, meds, and even Roger.”

“What chaplain?”

“We have a chaplain who prays for us regularly. He comes into our cells when we’re unconscious in our beds. The board of directors of Angel’s Island Inc. are Christians and they ordered a chaplain to be present at all times.

“He has a snake pack too; they all do. It’s why you can’t attack a guard without being shocked silly. The snakes talk to each other.”

“And you’re in control?”

“Do we work together, white boy? Or do you try to jump me and get put in a coma till I say you can open your eyes?”

4

Bits called a general inquisition with twelve convicts, chosen by the qualifications of their files, from all over the prison. He chose those prisoners not deemed homicidal or violently antisocial. He had six Negroes, three Hispanics, two of other races, and Stiles, the international Nazi, to represent the white race.

“We should kill M Lamont and that bitch,” Lines Retain, a credit counterfeiter from the Twin Cities proclaimed. “They killed at least four people I know of. And if you let us see the files, Bits, I bet there’s a lot more.”

There were some grumbles of agreement.

Bits knew that almost five hundred research-related deaths — murders — had been committed by prison officials. That data from these medical experimentation deaths had been sold to research facilities around the world. But he said nothing.

“Escape is our only priority,” argued Nin el Tarniq, the Eros-Haus pimp from Miami. “Killing them will just make the law look harder.”

Bits stifled a cough and said, “The files are mine and I respect their security. I will not let anyone commit murder here.”

“Who made you king?” Edward Fines, a fellow hacker from Cincinnati, wanted to know.

“I did!” Bits replied in an amplified voice that was loud enough to instill terror into the panel of twelve.

“When will the guards start worrying about us?” Stiles asked. “We can’t stay in here forever.”

“Not that long,” Bits said in his normal voice. “But pretty long. Lamont and Sella sometimes have up to thirty prisoners under study. And as long as the staff doesn’t know about us we can make our plans in leisure.”

“If the guards all have snake packs why don’t we just put them to sleep?” Jerry asked.

“Because they have families and friends all over the world. If they stop communicating that’ll set off an alarm. I can control what’s inside the prison, but if they send in soldiers we’re up shit’s creek.”

After many hours the panel came up with a plan. The great cargo planes that picked up the choke every day of the harvest would be hijacked and flown to various ports. There, all seventeen thousand prisoners would have prepaid transportation to the destination of their choice. Angel’s Island had a large bank account from its choke crop and Bits was now in sole control of that wealth. It was decided that everyone would be freed regardless of his crime or disposition toward violence.

“If America won’t claim ’em,” Lines Retain said, “then America cain’t blame ’em.”

Bits would transmit over one hundred thousand C-mails set to a delay of thirty-six hours before being delivered to news organs and families and friends of the Angel’s Island population. Bits also planned to send his displacement virus to every revolutionary organization he could think of, including the Seventh Radical Congress and White World Order.

“Who stays to make sure the prison is secure while we leave?” asked King Theodore, the cult leader who had tried to claim Delaware as a free state.

“I’ll stay,” Bits replied, rubbing a painful spasm in his back. “I figure that they’ll have to take me back for a new trial when so many people get the news.”

In the infinite white room, sitting in front of the computer, Bits imagined the guards and staff, even Roger himself, slumped into unconsciousness. The naked forms of Sella and M Lamont were there at his feet. He thought about the robot-piloted cargo jets carrying over seventeen thousand prisoners to major hubs around the globe. They had clothes, fake credit accounts, and fake passports based on their eyescans. Some, he believed, would make it to freedom. The rest would have a solid defense — they were no longer members of the American union and therefore not answerable to the justice system there.

“What are you doing there?” M Lamont said as he rose on wobbly legs. He reached out toward Bits but recoiled at the electrical shock from his snake pack.

“What?” Sella said. “What’s happened?”

“We’re the only ones awake in the whole of this island,” Bits said. “And we all have cancer.”

M Lamont’s eyes went dull.

“What are you talking about?” Sella asked. “Why did Lamont get a shock when he approached you?”

Bits explained everything in a slow painful voice, ending with, “I had the med system duplicate the causes for the cancer you caused in me. The lab is open to you. If there’s a cure we will all live. If not...” He smiled sadly.

United Nations forces entered Angel’s Island on the third day after the escape. They found three hundred seventy-five guards and staff unconscious and unwakeable — victims of the ChemSys snake pack.

Everyone had fallen while going about their duties. The warden was unconscious next to his desk, men slept on toilets or in the long gloomy halls. Two men on guard duty had died from exposure up on the choke plantation.

Everyone else was asleep, except for Sella Lans and Vortex “Bits” Arnold, who were also dead, and Med M Packard Lamont, who was dying in the infirmary.

“What is it?” the doctor who ministered to Lamont asked.

“Subbac cancer,” Lamont moaned. “We were studying it. The convict Bits infected us with it.”

“Subbac... But that’s incurable. Who infected him?” asked the doctor, an elderly Swede.

Lamont did not answer the question. Instead he said, “Bits said that he put a timer on the system. His virus will wake the staff and then erase itself. He said that by then I should be dead.”

The fat under the big man’s skin had dissipated. He was slowly being eaten away by the fast-acting incurable disease.

“He said to tell you that he had the system monitor our deaths because that’s what we liked to do.” And then Lamont himself was dead.

5

Three years later Fidor Esterman and Meena Tokit, employees for the Manatee Tobacco company, were sifting through the Angel’s Island computer records. After an international outcry about the medical practices on Angel’s Island, the Manatee corporation had closed the prison and re-made the facility into a robot plantation. Fidor and Meena, both computer programmers, were two of fifteen people responsible for the plantation operating system, which included four state-of-the-art GE-AI computer systems, sowing, harvesting, and bundling machines, and various robot vehicles.

“Look at this, Meena,” Fidor said. He was seated at the main screen of the central computing system.

On the screen a green circle appeared. It broke into eleven equal sections.

“What’s that?” Meena asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Bits displacement system active,” a robotic female voice announced.

“Oh shit,” Fidor said. “That’s the Bits virus, isn’t it?”

“Downloading document Last File,” the lady robot declared. “Download complete.”

The green segments began sparkling and changing colors. The segments of the green pie swirled together, adding colors and definitions, until they formed the face of a young black man, made old by the ravages of disease.

“Hey,” the man said. “I am very close to death and so I hope you will excuse me if I get right into what I have to say. I don’t know who you are and you might not know me so I’ll start from the beginning. My name is Vortex Arnold. I have no other designation because the United States government has nullified my citizenship and sentenced me here, to the Angel’s Island private prison authority. You may already know all of this. I was able to send out a hundred and fourteen thousand C-mails detailing the practices here and the particulars of our escape.” Bits stopped a moment to rub his left eye. A large, yellowish tear pressed out of his sagging lid. Bits took a deep breath and then another before attempting to speak again. “I think it was probably the largest prison break in the history of the world. Maybe... As I said, I sent out thousands of detailed explanations of this prison and its inhuman practices, with special emphasis on the snake packs that they used on prisoners and guards alike. If this is many years later, which I doubt, and you haven’t seen my report, which is more likely, then there will be a copy available to you at the end of this transmission.

“I tried to send out a C-transmission a few moments ago but I suppose the authorities have received my earlier communication by now and have isolated my signals...”

“Should we be listening to this?” Fidor asked Meena.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I guess we’d better. If anyone is monitoring our system they will believe that we’ve heard the whole thing anyway. If they ask us what it said we should probably be able to answer.”

Fidor touched his large nose and nodded uncomfortably.

“... my earlier messages had information that wouldn’t have been surprising for most people. Maybe many of them would agree with the practices here. After all, there are no beatings, rapes, or dangers to the guards or the guarded. If you follow the rules then you are treated well, well enough for a social deviant. Even if we are political prisoners, what of it? The ruling system, one might say, has the right to protect its constituents.” Bits allowed his eyes to close. He nodded, leaned forward, almost fell from his chair. But then he righted himself. “Protect... But I have done further study. The ChemSys Corporation has signed contracts with the federal government to supply over three million snake packs to the military and mental services by the year 2053. Snake packs used to make soldiers into drones, our mental divergents into brainwashed zombies. Read these reports and ask yourselves how long will it be before schoolchildren will be snaked. The reports are all here, at the end of this file. All here...”

Bits began to fall forward and the screen went to blank green. After a moment two gray option lines appeared. The first was called THE ORIGINAL REPORT ON THE PRACTICES OF ANGEL’S ISLAND. The second option was THE CHEMSYS PROJECTED GROWTH IN THE BEHAVIOR MOD SECTION REPORTS.

Meena and Fidor sat motionless and quiet before the bright green screen.

“Can we delete it?” Fidor asked after a while.

“I don’t know. The controls are frozen.”

“How about severing the power?”

“The emergency systems will override,” the chubby, brown-skinned young woman replied.

“What can we do?” the young man asked.

“Did you excite the virus with an entry?”

“No. I wasn’t doing anything.”

“Neither did I. It must have been the interaction of programs in the system, or maybe a timer that caused this action.”

“So?”

“So no one knows that we were here. We could just leave. Come back later and report a systems glitch. Maybe even somebody else will find it in the meantime.”

They stood together and backed away from the console. They turned as one and walked from the room.