The Making of Socket Greeny

by Tony Bertauski

  I could feel this.

  It was three steps away from me, a warm glow tugging at my stomach. It felt familiar, like the comfort of home, smells I could remember that were dank and moldy. A cool, humid breeze whispered over my face.

  “Socket?” Chute asked.

  Her voice was on the periphery. I reached out to touch the rippling air, dipped my hand in the ethereal waters to see what was beneath. Chute’s voice faded. The hallway evaporated and my surroundings gave way to damp caves and tropical jungles. And sun and space. One moment I was below ground and the next I was looking at lush foliage and a blue sky, the air warm and thick, the jungle alive and calling me—

  “Mr. Greeny?” Mr. Fattoney was looking at me, his briefcase at his side. A look of suspicion rutted his eyebrows. I was standing in the hallway with my hand out. The rippling air was gone and words wouldn’t come to me. I looked suspicious and guilty.

  Another student high on gear.

  “School’s over, Mr. Greeny. Come along.”

  “We’re waiting for Streeter,” Chute said. “He’s talking to Mr. Buxbee. We’re doing a project.”

  Fattoney’s eyes relaxed with disbelief. We weren’t the type of students to be doing extra credit. Chute, maybe. But not with me.

  Streeter popped his head out of the classroom. “We’re doing a project.”

  Fattoney, aka Fatty, drummed his fingers across his briefcase. Streeter wasn’t helping, but he had a secret weapon.

  Mr. Buxbee.

  The heavyset virtualmode instructor was an adult version of Streeter with eyelids of heavy steel and a lower lip that was always wet and plumped out when he thought deeply. They didn’t just look alike. The two talked in a code half the time. There was a rumor that Streeter was his love child.

  I may have started that rumor.

  “Thank you, Mr. Fattoney,” Buxbee said. “They’re helping with system maintenance.”

  Fatty grunted and went on his way. Is it wrong that felt like a victory? Chute and I waited for Buxbee had a few words with us about system maintenance, his lazy eyes brushing over Chute and me as he dumbed down our assignment for us to understand. Even if we studied, we would never talk like Streeter. I didn’t need to know how a nojakk worked to use it.

  Same with virtualmode.

  BUXBEE’S CLASS WASN’T an ordinary class.

  Instead of plastic molded seats and tiny desks, the lab was arranged with padded recliners to comfort the vacated skin. It smelled clean and sterile. Fake.

  Streeter trotted to the front. Buxbee’s desk—the only desk—had several monitors and a few keyboards and the padded chair royale, the cushiest of them all. Buxbee could go deep several hours at a time and get up without the slightest bedsore.

  Above the antiquated whiteboard, it read The body gives rise to the mind as soil supports the tree. A quote from almighty Buxbee, virtualmode leatherass.

  Streeter fell into Buxbee’s throne. “I’m writing the updates for a new patch. Buxbee’s letting me do the redundant code. And you guys are going to help. Grab a seat before he gets back.”

  Chute looked at me. She didn’t know about Streeter crashing the school’s portal. He made it look like an accident. Really, he did the school a favor by exposing a kink in the system. Buxbee got funding to upgrade and Streeter volunteered to help.

  And now we had the lab to ourselves.

  “I can’t believe he still trusts you,” Chute said.

  “He loves me, he can’t help it. Now strap in.”

  I had already settled in and fished a set of transplanters from the armrest. Chute wasn’t moving.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Updates. Weren’t you listening?”

  “You just want someone to blame when this blows up.”

  “Chute, I’m hurt.” He put his hand over his heart. “Seriously.”

  “I’m out of here.”

  “She’s right,” I said. muttered. “It’d be nice if we knew what you’re going to blame us for before you did it.”

  He looked at me then and her. Sometimes I wondered if he was figuring out our little secret. He sighed and flopped into Buxbee’s giant chair, feet not touching the floor then and said loudly and clearly in case Buxbee or someone was listening in the hall, “We are cleaning up some code, that’s all. I could use an extra pair of minds to help, and we’re a team and I like you guys. You are my best friends.”

  Chute started her walk again. Streeter gave me a big-eyed, open mouthed look. What’d I do?

  I caught her before she made it to the door. It took a few minutes and more than a few looks over my shoulder before I got her to turn around. What did I say to convince her? The same thing I always said, he was doing this with or without us. Without us, he might blow up the world.

  We could be heroes.

  Truth was, she liked trouble, too. It was just harder for her to admit.

  Chute fell in next to me, pulled the hairband from her pony and cursed. Streeter leaned back in the chair, transplanters behind his ears. I fixed one behind my ear, the suction cup kissing the soft skin, and closed my eyes

  The blackness came as I planted the second one.

  My consciousness swam in virtual darkness with no skin, no containment—a formless void between flesh and the digital universe.

  And then I landed.

  My sim formed, this one a generic with limited senses. Around me were the great halls of an ancient library. The shelves were endless, the binders of old books stacked toward a glass domed ceiling where sparrows flitted about. Rows and rows of long shiny tables were lined down the center.

  “What’s this?” Chute said.

  “Main hall,” Streeter said.

  “Yeah, I know that. What’s with the generics?”

  We looked like nude manikins made from stretchy glue.

  “It’s just simpler for us to work, that’s all,” Streeter said with his puppet-slit mouth.

  “Why?” she deadpanned.

  “Look, I thought you’d be thrilled with generics. No weapons or inventory, just arms and legs. You sound like Fatty.”

  The library books weren’t books but packets of code. Most programmers liked to work in familiar environments. Buxbee’s graphical interface was a magical library, a not-so-subtle appeal to our technology-addicted brains that look, kids, books are fun!

  “Where do you want to start?” I asked.

  “We need to clean up my mess first,” Streeter said.

  The tables were scattered with random stacks of books, some neatly squared. Others appeared to have been dumped from a bucket. These were usually bundles of raw code that needed to be sorted.

  “Which one?” I pointed at a leaning tower of hardbacks.

  His black glassy eyeballs looked over our shoulders. The shelves on the back wall were almost empty. Below them was a mountain of books, something a dump truck would leave behind. Tables and chairs had been crushed, broken fragments of furniture tossed across the floor.

  “That?” Chute said. “You did that?”

  “I didn’t do it. Someone did.”

  “Why is Buxbee still even talking to you?”

  “Because of my huge brain.”

  “You did this, didn’t you? You set off a data bomb.”

  “I didn’t do anything.” He said it loudly and clearly because this session was definitely on record. “It looks more like a code explosion to me.”

  “Oh, you mean like a bomb? Because I just said bomb.”

  I stepped through the carnage, debris dusting my whitish shins. The closest book was a thick hardbacked dictionary with bent corners. Code scrolled down the thin pages. I flicked through the color-coded symbols and matched them up without really knowing what it meant, just that it fixed it. Webby strands stuck to my fingers.

  “I want a new sim out of this,” Chute said. “A custom build exactly how I want it.”

  She slung a book over her head. The pages fluttered like a dying kite that caught a sudden updraft. It
found a place on a shelf four stories above them. Streeter stood back from the mess, bouncing his fingers while we sorted through novels, encyclopedias, and atlases. The sparrows near the glass ceiling startled each time a book found its place. There was more to this, we both knew it. We were just waiting for him to announce it.

  “I want to show you something,” he said. “Buxbee said I could.”

  There it is.

  I climbed out of the fray. Despite the sensationless experience, the sim handled nicely, rebalancing itself whenever I leaned too far one way or another. Filling a sim was like driving a car. You couldn’t feel the tires on the road or the brake pads that were doing the stopping, but you knew how to make it go.

  Streeter led us between towering bookshelves. We made several turns until we reached a set of double doors. They weren’t against a wall but rather built into a bookshelf like a grand shortcut. Streeter looked around then mumbled something. A rogue wind rustled pages around us. He engaged a new set of criteria.

  We just went stealth.

  After a dramatic pause, he tugged the weighty doors open. A blast of wind blew us off balance. I strong scent fell over me. It smelled like fallen leaves.

  I can smell.

  Having a sense of anything in virtualmode was advanced coding, but I could smell autumn on the other side of the doors. Streeter stepped to the side. Chute and I walked through the doorway but not into the aisle on the other side of the bookshelf. It was a stone portico.

  Beyond was a futuristic cityscape.

  Metal spires gleamed with sparkling glass; lights flickered along silvery roadways with sliding traffic. The sky was a miasma of floating balloons and hovering gliders.

  “You...” The word limped off my tongue. “You built this?”

  This was an achievement. The details were precise. And the vague sense of smell, the slight breeze across our faces, added to the sense of reality. Even for Streeter, building a virtualmode environment from scratch required teams of sophisticated coders. Streeter did this by himself. Of course he did.

  We stood with our hands on the smooth railing miles above the view, absorbing the wonder of a new world that existed in a digital universe, a virtual world we were seeing with our mind. It wasn’t like we hadn’t done this before, but never with an engagement of senses. And Streeter built this.

  “Can we go down there?” she asked.

  Something seemed off about what she said. I mean, I was wondering the same thing. If we could walk the streets and interact with the inhabitants—real or not—I think we would’ve wept with wonder. This was something spectacular, but to actually be part of it would blow our minds. So it wasn’t what she said, but how she said it.

  Not how she said it. Where.

  She was standing to my right. But I heard her ask the question from the left.

  The realization clicked into place at the same time for both of us. We turned to see three generics standing at the railing and admiring the view exactly like us.

  “No,” one of the sims answered. It was Streeter’s voice.

  “Still,” another sim answered, “you’ve outdone yourself.”

  That was my voice.

  When we turned, the real Streeter was no longer next to us. He was at the far end of the portico, poking his finger into the stone floor. The granite melted around his finger. And then he yanked it across the floor.

  A white square opened.

  The light was bright and clean, a luminescence that caused us to turn away. When our visuals adjusted, Streeter had his finger to his lips and waved us over. With our simulated duplicates chatting on the other end, we looked into the well of light.

  Streeter stepped into it.

  He was swallowed by the light. I looked at Chute. Her featureless sim bland and emotionless, I could feel the doubt. This was what he wanted to show us, not the amazing vista or the sensory engagement. This was trouble. And we couldn’t resist. What didn’t occur to me at that moment was that I was not only smelling autumn and feeling the wind, but I was felt something else—her gripping sense of wariness and the excited swirl of temptation.

  Her emotions.

  It was felt so normal. Maybe it was the overwhelming sensory input that made me overlook something so impossible, but that was how things were changing. The extraordinary became the ordinary. I was feeling emotions from other people, sensing what was about to happen.

  She stepped into the trap door and disappeared into the white. I followed.

  WE PASSED FROM ONE virtualmode environment to another.

  The white faded in one long stroke. The outlines of doors were the first images to arrive. Streeter stood at the center of a circular control panel, hunched over with an intense focus.

  “What are we doing?” Chute said.

  He raked his fingers over a cluster of three-dimensional images and blabbered a line of code. He was in beast mode, tight on time and without the patience to explain what the hell was happening.

  The white doors were arranged side by side in the circular room. Red pigment bled into one of them, accentuating Victorian panels. Streeter pushed aside a control panel and, ignoring the brassy doorknob, stepped through the illusory door.

  A barbarian returned and turned it into splinters.

  In furs and dangling axes, the oversized brute smiled through a matted bush of whiskers. Muscles bulged along scarred arms.

  “Oh, God,” Chute muttered. “This is so stupid.”

  The room thundered. The brutish sim was totally impractical to work a control monitor, the hairy fingers like swollen sausages that often missed a gesture or confused the commands, but this was Streeter’s favorite sim. Had been since we were little.

  Like five.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  He resumed ignoring her, his fully fleshed features now clearly etched with concentration. Chute would become a distraction if she didn’t get some answers. And then there would be a fight and someone’s sim would break.

  “The avalanche,” I said, “was just a distraction.”

  “What do you mean?” she said.

  “He blew up the library on purpose.”

  Streeter muttered to himself.

  “The futuristic city up there,” I continued, waving like it was out there when there was no direction in virtualmode, “is Streeter’s project. I’m guessing Buxbee wants to enter it into a competition or something, but Streeter used it as a distraction to build a back door. So when that data crash made that mountain out there, Buxbee didn’t see him build this little room.”

  “And now guess who has access to the school’s portal?” he said, his voice boom. “And all its illustrious power.”

  “Don’t...” She hated when he talked like that. “Buxbee will disown you.”

  “He won’t find us.”

  “Us?” Chute said. “I think you mean you.”

  “Me, you, it doesn’t matter. This place is temporary. It’ll collapse in a couple of days. Buxbee will never know it was here.”

  “Good for you.” Chute applauded. “Now you’ll be suspended. And yes, I mean you, not us.”

  He smiled blocky teeth. A whiff of greasy breath crossed the room, the olfactory senses he programmed still active. He pulled an ax from his belt and lifted it above his head. I flinched, I’ll admit. Chute did, too. This whole place was confusing. That was the problem with virtual environments this good, they cause reality confusion. He brought the nicked blade down. The control panel shattered.

  The walls began spinning.

  The room had become a giant a roulette wheel and not like one of those carnival rides that glue you to the outer wall. We were marbles bouncing around and looking for a number slot to fall into. My stomach curdled and I resisted vomiting, even though I didn’t really have anything to barf or even have a stomach.

  “Bail out!” Chute screamed, but nothing happened.

  I was about to join in the bail out command when the clicking began to slow. We were sprawled on
the floor when the ride stopped. When it began, there were a dozen doors around the room.

  Now there was one.

  Streeter was still standing. In all the chaos, I hadn’t noticed he was unaffected by the psychotic carousel. Chute and I were pushing off the floor as he meandered toward the door, his steps a little uneven. He hunched over, spread his hand over—the knuckles misshapen and scarred—the center of the door and pushed. It fell like a domino and floated away without a sound.

  In the foggy space beyond, a steel wheel emerged. The details of an enormous vault took shape. He looked back and smiled a crooked, blocky smile.

  “Maybe you should get off,” I said to Chute.

  “Not before I put a whole through him.” She got to one knee but vertigo put her back on her ass. My head was still in a spin cycle. The effects were a little unnecessary, but maybe that was the point. He knew Chute was going off once the vault appeared.

  What didn’t the bail out work?

  We were just a bunch of teenagers. We were curious, rebellious, a taste for trouble. We’d been crossing the line for years, got our accounts frozen, our sims stripped and suspended. Still, it was small change. Teenager shit everyone grew out of.

  I sat down. “Streeter—”

  “Yeah boy.”

  “We can’t do the whole family.”

  “We’re not doing the whole family. Just Jack and brother dickhead.”

  “We aren’t doing anything.” Chute got to her feet.

  “I cleaned Josh out the first time, but he had backup files in the family vault. I’m going to finish the job.”

  “He’s a kid!” Chute shouted.

  “He’s dickhead who tried to take everything from me!” Streeter’s barbarian shook dust from the ceiling. “I was just teaching him a lesson the first time. I knew he had back-ups, you think I’m an idiot? But he wanted to play with the big boys, so now he gets to see. I’m taking everything, Chute. Let him start from scratch. Those are big-boy rules.”

  He was right, in a way. You go in war worlds and all bets were off. Usually it meant stripping points and raiding coffers. Josh made it personal when he started skimming Streeter’s account, siphoning crypto. He made the first move.