A hand grips my arm and shakes me. My breath is hot. Sensations return to my body, still too heavy to move, but I’m lying on a soft cushion. My eyelids crack open just enough to see the green fabric of the couch only inches from my nose. My eyes close, once again, but the hand shakes me and feeling begins rushing through my body with pins and needles.
I roll onto my back, see a ceiling above. My lips are sticky, my throat swollen and tight. I take a deep breath and loosen the stiffness in my chest. I’m stretched out on a couch and across from me, over a coffee table littered with empty pizza boxes, is an identical couch with a short boy sitting on it. He has one leg crossed over the other with his hands folded on his lap.
“Take your time,” he says.
The room is familiar. A television is above a fireplace, a news reporter discussing a protest that’s going on behind her. There are two doors behind the boy. The one on the left is my mother’s bedroom. The other is mine.
“Can you sit up?” he asks.
My skin is tingling, but I’m able to move my feet. My right foot thuds on the floor and I’m able to push up on my elbow. My head is like a sandbag. I let my left leg drop and use the momentum to sit up. My balance sloshes between my ears.
“That’s good,” the boy says. “You’re doing good. Now, when you’re ready, stand up and look around.”
I move my lips but the words won’t come out. Who are you?
“Don’t force it, it’ll come. Give it some time. For now, just look around and let things come back. And when you’re ready, tell me your name.”
My name? I… I don’t know my name.
The house feels empty. I’m staring at the bedroom doors. My mother’s door is closed, but mine is partially open. I ease my weight forward, slowly, letting the balance shift and settle. My long hair falls over my face. White hair. I’ve got white hair. My legs are still slightly numb, and my bones made of lead. I squeeze the armrest and stand up like I’m a hundred years old. Blood seems to crash into the bottom of my feet and I’m standing on nails. I close my eyes and remain still until more feeling comes back, enough that I stand upright.
The kitchen is behind me with dirty plates piled in the sink and books and papers and cups with dried orange juice covering the kitchen table. I look back at my bedroom door and slide my foot across the carpet. The next step is a little bigger, a little higher, and I let go of the couch. I go around the clothes scattered on the floor and grab the doorframe and peek inside. It’s more of the same, with dirty clothes and magazines. The walls are covered with rock bands. A skateboard is upside-down, half under my bed.
I haven’t skated in forever.
“Soc…” The first syllable scratches my throat. The boy turns on the couch, his frog-face peeking over the back. “Socket?”
He smiles. “That’s right. Your name is Socket.”
I’m not convinced, but it sounds right. And my mother, if I open her door, she won’t be in there. She’s rarely there. Always at work. Where did she work? I remember a mountain, that’s all.
The house feels empty, the walls saturated with loneliness. And even though light fills the room through several windows, it feels dark. I’ve been here before, but now it all feels new. And if my mother’s at work, where’s my father?
I grab the door and take a deep breath. Another memory is coming, that of a funeral. He’s dead. He’s been dead a long time.
“What’s going on?” I ask.
“Let the answers come back.” He stands, gesturing to the fireplace. “Walk around, explore. See what you remember.”
The mantel is filled with pictures, all in different frames, big and small. I take my time walking around the couch, sliding my hand along the wall until I touch the ledge of the mantel. They are family photos. It seems I’ve seen family photos on a wall, once, but it wasn’t this home. It was another house I once lived in, like another life. These photos have a little kid with short white hair. And that would be me. But the other people, a woman with short brown hair and a gruff looking man, both smiling.
“Mom and Dad,” I whisper.
I go down the line, pausing at each of them, but it’s the one at the end that I pick up. We’re at a carnival and I got this giant pink cloud of cotton candy and I’m holding my father’s hand and my mother’s laying her head on his shoulder. I can feel the humid night air, remember the lurch in my stomach when we go on rides, and seeing my parents hold hands like teenagers. It wasn’t long after that…
“Do you remember how he died?” the boy asks.
I shake my head. I’m not sure I want to remember because that’s when the happiness died. When life became work. When my mother stopped smiling.
“You remember?” the boy asks.
The boy’s face is clearer, now. I’ve seen him before, like a thousand times before. I remember when he was smaller than that, a little kid. I remember him…
“Let it come,” he says. “This is a memory boot, like a computer. It just takes a few minutes to reload, but you need to stay open.”
Computer?
Something jars loose a tangle of thoughts, releasing a wave of sadness. Something I can’t quite comprehend, but the answer is in the room. The answer is the short kid, now standing next to the couch, staring at me expectantly. My head shakes and a chill starts somewhere in my chest, shockwaves reverberating outward. I grab the mantel, pictures crash on the floor. I hold on with both hands as the room begins to turn.
Images flood through my mind, of mountains and jungles, weapons and sterile white rooms. My mother is there. Kay. Kay Greeny. She has a name, she is there, with me. I’m stretching open, about to burst. The mantel creaks in my grip.
“Stay open,” the boy says.
The room is spinning like a carnival ride and I don’t know if I’m still standing or pressed against the wall. There are faceless mechs and men with white eyeballs and colorful little dragons and flying discs…
“Hold on, Socket.”
Outer space. A black planet. The Paladin Nation.
I was one of them. Am one of them. But something else. What am I?
WHAT AM I?
I’m not real.
I barely hear his voice this time, it’s so distant. I’m fading away, my body becomes heavy again. The world crumbles. The television trails off. I’m going somewhere else, again. And the images of my past follow me, asking me to return to my body, next to the mantel. It’s Streeter, that’s who that boy is. My best friend. And then I remember everyone else. Mom and Dad, Spindle, Pon, the Commander… I remember. But I’m leaving my body.
“Stay open,” Streeter shouts from a million miles away.
The tunnel is closing on me, and I remember, like I’ve done this a thousand times, that I’m going back to sleep, going back to the light. Until one voice and a single word stops me.
“Socket,” Chute says.
My eyes flutter open. I’m staring up from the floor; Streeter’s face is over me, his hands on my cheeks. A hopeful expression relaxes on his face. He waits.
“You did it.” He backs away, gives me space. “You’re back.”
The heaviness has left me, and my senses have returned. I smell the stale pizza crusts on the coffee table and hear the flies buzzing around the room, feel the ache of an empty home. I get up, feel the fabric of my clothes, the itch of my skin. The room is in perfect detail, but something is wrong. Something about the solidity.
Streeter latches onto me, throwing his arms around my mid-section and picking me up in a bear hug. “YOU DID IT!”
He knocks the wind from my lungs. I hold my breath until he lets go and walks off, wiping his eyes so that I don’t see his face. Memories continue to trickle back, the remnants find their way in slow fashion, rounding out the details of my life. My best friend is composing himself next to my bedroom door.
I go to the kitchen, touch the table and feel the memory of eating dinner with my mother, watching her sip coffee with a plate full of untouched food. My mind expands
to the filthy sink, remembering the mess I made to get her back for ignoring me. She hated me because my father died, like it was my fault. I realized, at the end of my life, she rejected me for other reasons. More than that, I realize what feels so wrong about the house. These are not walls around me. This isn’t my skin.
“Forgive me,” Streeter says, finally turning around. “I’m a little emotional, but you have no idea how many times we’ve done this. You’re back.”
“I am. Now, you mind telling me what’s going on.” I thump the refrigerator. “And why we’re in virtualmode?”
He nods at the refrigerator. There’s a calendar hanging on a suction cup hook with pictures of horses. There’s a birthday scrawled in one of the days, but it’s the date he’s referring to. August 6, 4030.
“We’re all long gone, buddy. Loooong gone.” He points at the couch. “You might want to sit for this.”
“No, I’m good.”
“Well, I’m going to sit.”
He fishes a pizza crust out of one of the boxes and plunks down. “Yeah, well, two thousand years have passed since the Great Meltdown,” he says, chewing with his mouth open. “You see, when you eliminated Fetter, it took a long time for people to believe what really happened. In fact, no one even knew who you were, except a few of us.”
“But then how are you—”
“Look, it’s too much to explain, so let me tell you this: I’m just a copy. Two thousand years ago, I downloaded all my memories, my entire personality, into a database because I knew this moment would one day come. I knew that one day, the human race would want to revive you and they would use my image to do that. That’s why we’re here, in your living room, the day before you began to realize your True Nature. You fell asleep on that couch watching that news report.” He jabs his finger at the television. “And the next day a shadow came to you in virtualmode and whispered those life-altering words: Time to realize your True Nature.”
It seems impossible. But he’s telling the truth: We’re in virtualmode. There’s no skin to go back to, I’m just a digital construction.
“You know,” he says, stacking the pizza boxes, “you really were a pig.”
“Why?” I say. “Why bring me back?”
“Because we want to say thank you.”
He goes to the kitchen cabinet, throws me a breakfast bar while he opens one for himself. He drops his hand on my shoulder. “Like I said, it’s too much to explain.”
He looks. Waits. And then I feel it, the expansion of my mind, reaching out to our surroundings, feeling the floor and ceiling, the walls and his body as if the air is water and the water is my body. I feel his thoughts like floating bubbles, elements that I can touch with my mind, feel and experience, see and read.
“Go ahead,” he says. “Take a look, the story is right there. It’s for you.”
Streeter’s life unfolds like a movie trailer, highlighting the events that took place after I died.
When I died, technology shut down. Pike had penetrated the Internet before Fetter consumed him. He was connected to everything and everyone. That was how he projected his image into the market. When he was consumed, everything just died.
The Great Meltdown.
Financial institutions lost track of money. Government control broke down. Law enforcement became brutal. It was many years before stability could be established.
And the Paladins were nowhere to be found. They vanished. Public officials combed through the training facilities without luck. Servys lay dead on the floor, many huddled in a corner like a storm had passed through. The Paladins were nowhere, not even their bodies. They had left this planet without a hint of what happened. Even the databases had been erased.
The public blamed the Paladins for the collapse. Even the politicians claimed the Paladins integrated their technology into the world to stake their claim, so that only they knew how to run it, but people were now free of their control. They were actually close to the truth, even though they were spouting these stories for political advantage.
But there were a few that knew the whole story.
My mother had survived, along with other civilians that served the Paladin Nation. But it was Streeter that crusaded for the truth to be known. He tracked down all the records of my travels through virtualmode, and since I had been with him all my life, he had recorded details of my thoughts and actions to make a complete picture of who I was and what I had done. He had a hard time believing what I’d told him, that I was a duplicate. In fact, his memory was a bit cloudy about what happened that day, so he guessed he might’ve been dreaming some of it up. But when he looked up the last interaction at the school, when I tried to locate Pike, he knew he had it right.
Streeter went to visit Scott Teck to find out what happened, but it was a dead end when Scott and his family didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. They never saw a kid with white hair or heard of anyone named Socket. He left them his contact information, just in case something came up.
But this didn’t slow Streeter down. It was his diligent skills in information retrieval that revealed the existence of Fetter. My mother gave him access to the dormant Paladin databases that had been locked down during the fall of Fetter. But Streeter found a way to open them up and he discovered what few people knew.
Humans would have become the food of a technological god.
Fetter.
Once he had the facts, and not until he had a complete and exhaustive compendium, did he take it to Congress. But he was rebuffed by the politicians and lobbyists for those in favor of reviving virtualmode for the sake of law and order. And profit. He got nowhere. Nothing could be believed and no one could be trusted. But he had the facts and passed everything he had to anyone that would listen. For the longest time, it was just another conspiracy theory.
Streeter’s life ended before the truth was accepted. He died at the age of 93. He lived in upstate South Carolina with his wife, Janette. They had three kids. But before he died, he developed a virtualmode composite of his personality, so that if one day the world came to know the truth about virtualmode and Socket Greeny, he could be there to see me once again.
“You’re a hero,” Streeter says.
I return to the kitchen, back in my sim and out of his mind. “No,” I say. “I just lived my life.”
“But it was one no other person could live.”
“I wasn’t a person.”
“You were more than that. You started as a duplicate, but you transformed, somehow absorbed a portion of Scott’s soul or humanity or something, I don’t know. But you weren’t a duplicate in the end, Socket. You were a real life Pinocchio!” He grabs my arms, firmly. “No machine and no person could have saved the world. Only you.”
I pull away and lean on the sink to contemplate this. None of it seems real. None of this is real because we’re in virtualmode. But outside the kitchen window, cars drive down the street and children are playing in their yards, squirting their father with squirtguns and bombing him with water balloons. But this is virtualmode. Tightness squeezes my chest. I don’t want to live in a false world, not again.
“I know this is hard to accept, that we’re all gone and the world doesn’t look the same. But, please understand, so many people loved you, they didn’t have a chance to say goodbye. Couldn’t say thank you. Sorry that they had to live their life without you.”
I’m squeezing the kitchen counter, the edge driving into my palms.
“If there’s anywhere you could go,” Streeter steps next to me, looks out the window, “anywhere in the world right now, this second, where would it be?”
And the tightness melts. I know where I want to go. Who I want to see. I let go of the counter.
He goes to the front door and waits. I slowly follow. And when the door opens, it’s not the street with cars or the neighbors in the grass. I step onto a stone slab that is surrounded by a vibrant forest. White wood storks glide in front of the rising sun. And directly ahead is a b
road tree, an ancient tree, with thick muscled branches. Large, glossy leaves shake in the canopy among pink blossoms, their fragrance carried on a soft breeze. There’s no roof on this Preserve, it’s open to the world, not sequestered in its own environment.
The sunlight glitters on the grimmet tree. I raise my hand to shade my eyes, to see what’s in front of the massive trunk. But I don’t see the person there, I feel her. Then I see her standing there, waiting. Her memories have waited thousands of years for this moment.
“I brought you back for a lot of reasons,” Streeter says. “But, mainly, I did it for her.”
Once again, my consciousness expands and I merge with Chute. I see her life.
The time that followed my disappearance was difficult. She spent several years in therapy working through the trauma. She began meditating. Eventually, she pieced her life back together and found a measure of peace, that she could live in a world that didn’t make sense. That seemed so unfair.
Tagghet disappeared. Instead of a professional athlete, she went to college to become a family counselor. And although her interest was in marriage counseling, she was still single in her early thirties. Many relationships had come and gone, but she could not connect with them. None of them felt right. She knew it was because she was hanging onto a memory and that she needed to move on, but couldn’t force herself to do it. She dreamed of me so often that it spoiled all her relationships. She was confident that one day it would be resolved, that she would forget about me, that she would accept the loss.
But that changed on her thirty-third birthday.
She was downtown Charleston with friends, sitting at an outdoor café that overlooked the market. They were drinking coffee and planning the evening. One of her friends was telling the story of a guy she’d met at work. Chute was listening and laughing and, for the first time in a long time, was just being herself.
But then she felt something. Something so familiar, but so distant, like a scent from long ago reminding her of childhood. On the sidewalk, down the steps and next to the street, he stood among the tourists bustling along. He was quite still, unmoved by the pedestrians finding their way around him. He was staring at her.
Socket 3 - The Legend of Socket Greeny Page 20
