Broak sped up, banked toward the dome. The servys gathered in front. Broak juked left, spun right and sprinted wide. The servys reacted and changed their defensive arrangement. The stick flexed in the momentum of Broak’s swing and the tag flung off the end, splitting a tiny gap between the servys, through the dome and into the green cube.
Goal. I guess.
Broak set up another play. The servys changed formation. Broak scored again, this time from thirty yards out. This happened over and over. Different formation, different attack. Same result. Each move was more difficult than the one before. Each shot more precise.
Why are we watching tagghet?
The servys formed a defensive wedge. Broak hunkered down like a bowling ball looking for the pocket. He spun left, then right, and just before he made contact, bounced wide left. The servys were set for a collision and unable to respond quickly enough to stop him. Broak was all alone, except for the one servy that intercepted his shot. Broak followed it with the stick over his head and chopped with both hands.
“I ORDERED YOU TO FOLLOW DEFENSIVE FORMATION 2B WEDGE!”
The servy retreated. Broak pummeled it again. And again. The club sank deeper with each blow, blobs spurting with each hack. It tried to evade every swing, but lost navigational direction and went in circles. Broak speared it through the center and twisted. The servy split open, spilling goo all over. Broak stomped the remains.
The remaining servys gathered in front of the dome, their eyelights bright red. Broak dropped the club and waved them off. They quickly dispersed into the trees.
A small hovercraft emerged from a path. A man in uniform handed Broak a towel. Broak held out his hands and the man in uniform sprayed them with a small bottle. Broak wiped his hands on the towel. The man gave him a second towel and Broak wiped his face. They spoke. The man stood rigid while Broak replied forcefully, banging his fist on his own leg. The man listened; said something back. Broak looked around, scanning the trees. He wiped his face, looked again. He knows we’re watching. He nodded to the man. They got onto the hovercraft and left.
We waited a long time and no one moved. Pivot finally walked onto the field. The grimmets followed in a flurry. The gray material was melting like snow in August. Pivot scooped up the remains. He took my hand, dropped it in my palm. It was sticky. Cold.
Dead.
It was only a machine. There was no life to mourn. But Pivot sat there on his knees, head bowed. Maybe it wasn’t the death he lamented. Maybe it was the killer. He didn’t bring me to see tagghet, after all. Understand your environment.
He took the gray substance from me, placed it on the ground. By the time we stood, it was gone. Pivot looked at me, his face warm. I heard no thoughts. He spoke no words. He just looked at me with cloudy eyes. He was warning me, but more than that, teaching me. Respect life, was that it? Respect it in all forms. Those servys were afraid while they watched Broak gut one of their own. They raced off the field when they were released.
When Pivot seemed satisfied, he walked away.
D I S C O V E R Y
Orphans, Take II
“I can’t ride that,” I said.
Three jetters lay on the ground. One hummed to life when Pivot stepped on it, hovering several inches off the ground. He drifted across the field.
“Why not?” Sighter asked.
“Because I don’t know how.”
“Lame excuse.”
“Why can’t we just go on foot?” I said. “It seems stupid to ride these things. Besides, we’ll have to stay on the paths, and what’s the use—”
“Just step on it.” Sighter flew over me. “And stop whining.”
Pivot was already on the other side of the field. I stepped on the jetter. It bobbed under my weight, shifting back and forth to keep me upright. My feet magnetically locked onto the surface.
“All right, I’m on it,” I said. “Now what?”
“You know how to virtualmode, correct? It’s simple thought projection. Focus on a command and the jetter will respond.”
I closed my eyes, visualized going forward.
“And don’t close your eyes. You want to see.”
He wanted to add dumbass to the end of that sentence. I tried it again and this time I floated up. The jetter teetered side-to-side. I held my hands out like a beginner, but already I felt more connected to it. I opened my mind, like reading thoughts, and mentally merged with the jetter. I kept my arms out, just in case, and crept over the field. By the time I reached the trees, I sped up and came skidding to a stop.
“Oh, man. This is easy.”
“Your head is growing by the second,” Sighter said.
I was going fast enough to die. The jetter was magnetically rooted to my feet. Pivot was ahead of me. I followed in his leafy wake. We stayed on the main paths then took the narrow ones. Pivot carved the turns like breaking waves. The grimmets filtered through the trees. There was one close encounter with a low-reaching branch, but other than that it was balls out blazing.
When we reached the far edge of the Preserve, we dismounted and climbed a narrow path up the rocky face, above the canopies. The ledge angled up and twice switched back. We were several stories up and kept going. I didn’t think much about falling. Somehow, I felt safe and in control near Pivot, like he could do something if I did.
The path ended at an alcove several feet deep and sheltered from above. From our vantage point, we were well above the Preserve. White birds glided over the treetops. A blanket of fog lay in some of the low areas that looked like clouds. Miles away was the entrance to the Garrison.
The grimmets perched on nooks and crannies jutting from the rock. We sat on the ledge, dangling our feet. Pebbles chipped off, took flight to the bottom, glancing off the cliff along the way. The sun was behind us, changing the color of the sky from blue to purple and red. Pivot’s face was turned up, his cheeks rosy orange. I could stay here forever and watch the shadows grow, feel the sun go down and wait for it to come back up. I don’t know how long we were up there. We didn’t speak. We just shared the moment in seamless silence until the sky was no longer glowing.
There was gentle pressure on my head, then I saw an image in my mind. The face of a woman. Her hair was bound at the back of her head, strands of gray poking out. Wrinkles cut her face. Her smile was much like his, quiet and undemanding.
“Your mother?” I asked.
He looked directly at me. The pupils engulfed the faded blue irises. It was like looking into his soul, a pathway through the solar system, deep and black and limitless. He reached out and closed my eyes. A dream appeared as clearly as if I were there. The woman was with a man. They were sitting on a beach around a smoldering fire. The water lapped near their feet and the fire hissed. A boy with blond hair, barely old enough to be out of diapers, slapped a stick twice his size in the water, wading out deeper and deeper.
The boy ran but the dad scooped him up, slung him over his shoulder like a duffel bag. The woman wrapped him in a blanket. The family watched the sun paint the sky.
What happened to them?
The scene dissolved. The mom and dad’s face turned gray and lifeless. They died, but how and why I couldn’t tell. Did it matter? I mean, they were dead and he was alone. That’s how I felt. My father died, didn’t matter how, just that he was gone. And Mom? Part of her died, too. At least I had a mother. A broken one was better than none at all.
Another vision began.
I saw my mom standing in my bedroom. I was five years old and fast asleep. Mom knelt next to me and dropped her head. She was sobbing. I never saw her cry, not once. Not at the funeral and never after. The dead zone took care of that. But in the vision she cried so hard my bed shook. She took my little hand and held it to her cheek.
I opened my eyes. “How do you know all that?”
He looked up, humming a song in his throat. It sounded familiar. Felt soothing, like a lullaby. He didn’t answer my question. Somehow, it seemed he knew me better than I knew
myself. Maybe he didn’t know what happened, he simply showed me a memory that was buried in my mind. He uncovered it for me to see.
How many other things were buried inside me?
D I S C O V E R Y
Inside the Machine(s)
I woke the next morning in a bed. No trees. No sky. Just a white ceiling. The visions from the Preserve were still fresh. I revisited the memories, over and over. It only made me long for escape, but I couldn’t stop recalling. I could still envision the vast treetops and settling fog and the sun casting strange colors in the sky. Mother crying.
“Room?” I called.
“Yes?” a woman’s voice answered.
“Are there any records of my father?”
“Yes. Most are classified.”
“Show me what you got.”
A faint magnetic field passed through the room. A hologram appeared next to me, a man six feet tall. His goatee was sprinkled with gray, his white hairline receding. I stood on my toes and looked into my father’s eyes. I reached for his hand to see if it was callus but I passed through the illusion. The image shrank in scale to reveal him standing in a workshop.
“Trey Greeny was an exceptional student in circuit mapping and gel intelligence,” the room said. “He was promoted to advanced standing and level four security clearance by the age of twenty-two. He was awarded the Medal of Commendation for his bravery in the sector five space attacks.”
Space attack?
Dad shut a panel and ran a welding pen over the seam. A servy retrieved the tools on the floor. There was no sound from the image. He looked like he laughed, waved someone over.
“Trey Greeny completed 204 deep-space missions while employed at the Garrison. He was married to Kay Greeny and had a son named Socket.”
Another man entered the scene. He could’ve been a Paladin, but the hair was down to his shoulders. I walked around to get a better view.
Pivot.
Dad showed him something on the workbench. The room continued with details about his everyday life, stuff my mom told me over the years. Stuff everyone knew. But all the good stuff was classified. Space missions. Inventions.
Spindle entered the room.
“Pivot knew him,” I said. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“You did not ask.”
“Didn’t you think I’d want to know?”
“I do not see thoughts, Master Socket.”
“Well, you can use logic, can’t you?” I said. “It doesn’t take a genius to calculate that I’d want to know about my father!”
I get tested for this and that and no one explained anything. Bullshit.
“There is not much to know.” Spindle’s face was blue. “Pivot has always been withdrawn, but he responded to your father. The Paladin Nation encouraged their relationship in hopes Pivot would fully develop.”
“Develop? What’s that mean?”
“Pivot emits an extraordinary level of psychic energy. He is a minder of another breed. His energy has a profound impact on other Paladins. His presence increases other Paladins’ powers.”
“So they’re using him. They’re leeching off him, is that it? They’re taking from him, does he know that?
Spindle’s face turned many colors. “Pivot provides the Paladin Nation with precognition.”
“He can see the future?”
“It is not so much the future, but a deduction of events to come.”
“Deduction of events…” I shook my head. “That’s the future, Spindle. He’s helping them see the future.”
“The odds of future events,” Spindle said, proudly.
No wonder they built him a jungle. He gave them the ability to see what would happen. There was no limit to that. They were rich: building a jungle for the future was a wise investment no matter how many trillions of dollars it took.
“So that’s why they keep him,” I said. “They’re using him to watch the future.”
“They are not using him like a tool, if that is what you mean. Pivot is a remarkable and highly valued cadet…”
He blabbered the company line, again. Instead of remarkable and highly valued he should’ve just said Pivot was a great commodity. Getting a real answer from Spindle was impossible. He was programmed, after all. He said what the programmers wanted him to say. He couldn’t say what they forbid him to say. He had to follow the script. Every meaningful question just led to another standard answer, never a real one in sight.
He had the answers I wanted, but he wasn’t programmed to give them to me. I didn’t have security clearance. If I could bypass the programming, I could get to them. Or I could just take them. The Paladins taught me how to read thoughts. What about machine thoughts?
I opened my mind to the present moment. Let things present themselves. My consciousness expanded in a way it never had in the presence of a tester. I was growing. My personal energy filled the room. I touched everything. Knew it intimately. Inside. Out. My mind touched Spindle, wrapped around him. He experienced pressure. Spindle remained still, his face a curious color. There would be no time to get all the answers; he would surely shut down before I could. I had to make time.
The timeslicing spark twinkled. I didn’t know what I was doing, but if I was going to do this, it had to be now.
I entered the spark.
My fists clenched. My body ignited from the inside. Spindle was still. Time, for me, had stopped.
I closed my eyes and expanded more. I left my skin like virtualmode discs pulled me out, but I didn’t go to the in-between. I was my own captain. I floated from my skin like a ghost and entered Spindle’s psyche. His thoughts were different from people thoughts. They were lined up, all connected in a purposeful directive, like an assembly line, destined for execution. But there was so much of it, I couldn’t comprehend it. It wasn’t like walking into a room and looking around; the mind was another dimension. I felt the thoughts, tasted them. They merged with my awareness. One or two thoughts were easy to absorb and comprehend, but Spindle was filled with a massive amount of data. There was no telling which thoughts allowed him to walk and which ones were top secret.
So I absorbed them all.
An avalanche of data filled me. My mind swelled. I heard things popping inside me. I teetered off balance, fell over, holding myself up against the wall. It was a paralyzing brain freeze that immediately started to thaw as the new information, the new experience of another’s mind, trickled into my mind and found some sort of order. I stayed open for anything about my dad, but I stumbled onto something so much bigger. The information floated before my mental eye like a juicy nugget of gossip.
I saw what the Paladins were protecting the human race from.
The Paladin Nation has had many enemies throughout history, but they were usually human. And if the enemy wasn’t human, it was at the very least living. For the first time, Paladins were faced with an enemy that imitated life.
I returned to my skin, released my grip on time. “Du…” My mind was coming back from the overload, reconnecting with basic functions, like standing and talking. I grabbed a chair to keep from falling. It took a second for my tongue to work. “Duplications are in the skin?”
“Master Socket,” Spindle said, softly. “You breached my database… that is against—”
“The Paladin Nation is protecting the world against… FAKE HUMANS?”
“I cannot—”
“How the hell does a duplicated identity get out of virtualmode and WHERE THE HELL DOES IT GET A FREAKING BODY!”
“There is much humans do not know about their own world.”
Three servys emerged from the wall and surrounded Spindle. His head and shoulders slumped.
“Get out of here!” I waved at them like flies. “We don’t need assistance, leave!”
Spindle turned to exit, a servy on each side.
“Wait! Where’re you going?”
He stopped. The servys came to an abrupt halt. “I will need to be reprogrammed.”
“Reprogrammed?”
“My database has been breached. It will need to be reinforced to prevent that from happening again.” His eyelight looked to the floor, his faceplate dark blue. “You are more powerful than estimated, Master Socket.”
I grabbed his arm. “You’re coming back, right?”
“I will come back.” He patted my hand, like Mom did when something bad had happened. Or was about to.
I looked around the room, hoping I was making eye contact with whoever was watching. “I swear I won’t do that again.” An arm grew from one of the servys and took Spindle’s hand. I refused to let go. “I’m not letting go unless you promise to bring him back.”
We played tug of war. Spindle jerked back and forth. Two more servys entered. I shifted my weight, prepared to kick them across the room. Spindle’s eyelight was bright. He gently took my hand and removed it from his arm.
“I will return, Master Socket.”
His eyelight rotated away. The servys escorted him from the room. I would’ve done anything to take back what I did. I wanted to know why I’m here. I wanted to know what they are doing with me. I wanted to know about my father and Pivot. Instead, I discovered a titanic war.
I was ushered to a secure room, maybe it was an infirmary, I don’t know. I don’t remember. Once the adrenaline wore off, I was spinning in thoughts, not knowing which ones were mine and which were Spindle’s. All I know is that I was lying down, staring at the ceiling like a mental patient. Eventually, Spindle’s knowledge settled like grains of sand in a jar of water.
And then I understood. I understood it all.
When duplication first started however many years ago, the duped identities were set loose in virtualmode environments. People didn’t think much of it; it was kind of cool knowing there was an exact duplicate of you that lived a separate life, even though it was digital. They were virtual clones and they were perfectly linked to whoever cloned them. The creator knew exactly where they were and what they were up to.
Socket 1-3 - The Socket Greeny Saga Page 8
