Chute stumbled toward him. There was nothing she could do. She was in a generic, no weapons or skill sets. Streeter was fully fleshed. He put his hand out as she neared and thumped his chest, effortlessly keeping her at arm’s length. His stomach gurgled and he began to gag. His cheeks turned purple, his eyes bulging.
I’d seen him pull this gig before.
He cupped his hands and opened his mouth. An egg came out dripping with slime. I would’ve been nice to cut off the olfactories. Chute fell back and dry-heaved. I held it together until he wiped his lips with the back of his hand, sticky goo smearing his hairy forearm, and cracked the egg. Inside a layer of dripping mucus was a metallic ball
“Wait,” I said.
Something didn’t feel right. Again with the intuition telling me something was off. There were legal issues. We could be arrested, fined, have our accounts terminated, or just grounded for life. Hacking a family account was playing by a new set of rules
But it was more than that.
Was it because it was too easy? Or did it have something to do with the strange rippled air I’d seen in the hallway, the odd flashbacks of caves. Maybe I was losing it, infected with data worm of paranoia that would cripple my sim mode. No one knew when the line between reality and virtualmode was blurring and reality confusion first began.
I held up my hand but Streeter wasn’t listening. We were operating in a thin slice of stealth mode where Buxbee couldn’t see us and our actions weren’t traceable. There was no time to debate the consequences. He tossed the hack ball. It stuck to the vault door, began to slide and slowly came to a stop.
The room shuddered.
Steam wafted in the nasty, rotten egg tendrils. My vision blurred and my chest burned. A strange side effect since I wasn’t really breathing and these weren’t my actual eyes. This could be the start of reality confusion. A hole dissolved around the hack back, the stainless steel surface beginning to glow. The wheel began to sag.
Thoomp.
A red-hot hole was left behind. In a moment, the vault door would melt like candle wax and Streeter would have digital access to everything that family owned: finances, heirlooms, documents, family secrets. Everything. Even if he left all that untouched, if he just dragged out Josh’s account and torched it like gasoline-soaked tissue, the family was not going to be happy. It really didn’t take intuition to see that they would look for us. They would find us.
We crossed a line.
“What have you done?” I said.
A moment of stillness filled the room. The hissing fell quiet like a fuse burning to the very end, that moment between anticipation and world-wrecking destruction. Streeter’s bushy eyebrows pinched together. He took one thundering step.
There were times I would wonder if I just bailed out at that moment, none of this would have happened to me. But that wasn’t true. Everything would’ve unfolded exactly as it did, just a different route on the same journey. It started like a distant train, the rumbling of steel wheels beneath our feet.
The hurricane arrived.
A fierce vacuum whistled through the hole. Streeter teetered and ripped an axe from his chest, driving it into the floor before the gale force sucked him inside the vault. His spike-studded boots carved tracks in the floor, only the iron spike of his battle-axe held him.
“Code bailout!” His voice was a distant, useless call.
Chute and I clung to the remains of the command center post in the center of the room. Our generics looked like wind-swept flags clinging to a post. Her slit mouth jawed in frantic puppet motions, but the words were gobbled up by the howl.
This is a trap.
Jack said it would get worse when he handed Streeter the phone. Josh knew Streeter would come for him. He planned for him to, baited him, played him. These were big boy rules.
He was going to win.
Using both axes, Streeter walked his way toward us like an ice climber caught on Mt. Everest. The floor tiles shattered with each swing. The flesh on his cheeks strewn in g-force waves, his barbaric beard flattened across his neck when the first tendril snaked out of the vault—a whiplike creature with head or appendages, just a needle-sharp tip. It sniffed around his boots then reared back.
And plunged into his back.
I expected it to come out his chest and begin blending his precious sim into random bytes. Instead, it seemed to plug into him. He began to quake, eyes rolled back, mouth spasming. A second and third snake emerged like babies following their mother’s lead.
One drove into Chute’s thigh.
I reached for her and nearly lost my grip. If I could grab hold of it and let go of the post, my weight would unplug her. I’d be sucked into the vault, but the portal might also overload and automatically bail us back to the skin. My sim would be shredded but what did I care? This was a generic. And even if it drained my account, it wasn’t the end.
I got my hand around it, the skin slick and scaly. I squeezed tightly and grabbed on with both hands, sliding down its length like a zip line carrying me across the room. Streeter grabbed the back of my neck and pinned me to the floor. His hand quivered like voltage pumping through his arm. I didn’t have a chance to help.
The third tentacle hit me.
Its tip wiggled wormed into the soft putty of my generic. It spread like arteries and a low level of current tickled my head. It was downloading me. Passwords, crypto, levels, sims, worlds... it was taking everything I had acquired in vitualmode. There was nothing we could do about it. We were there illegally. There would be no revenge. Our virtualmode lives were about to be blanked.
Checkmate.
The room went dark. The tentacle advanced down my legs and through my arms. It branched up my neck, reached my head, and began to suck out deep memories from my subconscious.
Holy shit.
There was no time to think, no way to analyze what was exactly going on. Data theft was one thing, but memory theft? What were they going to do with that? Maybe they were planning to erase us, leave our skins empty and comatose, make an example of us. We could stop it. We were going down, all three of us. And then it happened.
Pop.
It all went silent. No sound. No form. I hovered in a nowhere void of blackness with no eyes, no mouth. A sensation of falling, but the wind did not blow. Just falling.
And endless blackness.
The dank smell of a cave returned, the vision of what I had seen in the hallway. There was the scent of trees and the rustling of foliage. And then objects. Every spectrum of light fluttered around me in a bright array of mad leather flapping, a storm of red, orange, silver, blue, purple... colors of every possibility swarmed in a merging swirl of vivid pastels. Something grabbed my arm and it was over.
It was all over.
THE EMERGENCE BEGAN.
That slow return to the skin, the consciousness finding its way back to the physical world, the nervous system tingling, ears stuffy. This was slower than usual.
I awoke in paralysis, staring at the tiny constellations in the ceiling tiles. Sensation returned in thick, bubbling waves, my skin a wet bag of sand in accelerated gravity.
Perfect silence filled the classroom
It seemed to extend throughout the entire school. I could feel the building breathe through the ventilation ducts, could feel electricity hum in the walls.
Am I still in virtualmode?
No. There was too much sensation for this to be to be alternate space. But what if virtualmode had full sensation? What if there was touch and taste? Smell? Streeter had somehow made that happen in a faint sense, but what if it was full-on? How would I know I was awake?
Chute.
Her fingers were clawing the armrests, fingernails digging into the cushion like hooks on a ledge. I snatched the transplanters from my neck, an electrical pulse tugging inside my head. The floor tipped, a ship riding a rogue wave to the crest. I grabbed onto her before falling back.
Her eyes danced beneath the lids. Molars grinding.
“Hey! Hey!” I gently slapped her cheek. “Come back, Chute.”
Ripping the transplanters off wouldn’t hurt her, but she would puke on rising out. But nothing was working. I took hold of the cords. Her teeth were about to crack under pressure.
“Chute,” I whispered.
“Hhhuuuuuuuuuuu!” She swallowed a long-awaited breath.
“Hey,” I said. “Skin, skin, you’re back.”
Her eyes were blank, focus dialing. She looked around. “What happened?”
Her head bobbed in a steady rhythm, her tongue fat and lethargic. I could sense the heavy blood circulating through her veins, bubbles of sensation tickling her gums. Did I really feel that?
I wanted to hug her.
“What the hell you doing?” Streeter said.
I collided with an empty chair. The floor had levelled out—no more ship at sea—but my legs weren’t all the way back.
“You almost got us killed!” I shouted.
“What? You don’t die in virtualmode, dummy.”
“Are you insane? I’m not even talking about getting arrested for attempted identity theft. Do you know what those things were doing to us?”
“Data siphons, yeah. I know.”
How could I explain the feeling of my memories getting tapped? Did he not feel that, too? Or the strange dream of the cave and colorful objects, the thing that grabbed me? I decided not to throw that out there.
Call it a hunch.
“It was a trap.” He raked the transplanters from behind his ears and turned to the monitor. “I know that now. No need to drama queen this, take it easy.”
“That was a trap,” Chute said.
“I already said that. What were you two doing anyway?” He wagged his finger and frowned.
“She was having trouble coming out.”
“So you climbed on her lap?”
“I fell—that doesn’t matter! What the hell happened?”
A long stare, then he went back to tapping the keyboard. “Give me a second.”
“I felt like I was...” She touched her throat.
It was hard not to hold her hand. That was rise-up shock in her eyes, like a diver surfacing too quickly. It took a while for the consciousness to settle back in the skin. I’d been there many times, like pieces of you still left behind. I decided to tell him about us, right there.
“That’s weird.” He leaned into the monitor, danced on the keyboard, and scrolled through several panels. “We’re clean.”
“What’d you mean?”
“We’re clean. Nothing happened.”
“Nothing?”
“No, that’s the record. It says none of what just happened... happened.”
He went back to searching. I reached out for Chute. She took my hand and squeezed.
“Where’d you go?” she asked.
“Huh?”
“You disappeared. It was just Streeter and me...”
She was the first one dragged into the vault. But I was already gone—there one second, gone the next. The snake that had me wriggled like a beached fish.
“How’d you do that?” she said.
“Yeah,” Streeter added. “How did you? We were locked in.”
“I... I don’t know. You’re the one who dumped us there. You tell me.”
Apparently they didn’t dream of a cave and colors. There was something I was forgetting, or something I didn’t want to tell them. Something that felt real.
Did someone pull me out?
“All right, folks.” Buxbee made us all jump. “Time to close up shop. You’re going to be late for dinner.”
We hadn’t bothered looking at the time. Two hours had passed. Later, Streeter told us that we’d only logged forty minutes in virtualmode, even with stealth mode accounted for. Over an hour was missing. There was no way Buxbee wouldn’t see the anomaly. We hustled for the exit.
That was it.
The next day Streeter went back to the lab. Buxbee went about his business like nothing had happened. The weird thing was this: the mountain of data we had gone in to fix was gone.
Every single book was shelved.
3
Rain drizzled from the shop’s awning.
A shiver slipped beneath my jacket. I held two to-go cups of coffee. Even on sunny mornings, it was a hard climb out of bed. I had a counsellor that once said I was depressed, that there were treatments for that. I told him life sucked, was there a pill for that?
A maroon sedan pulled up. Chute got out. Her sister waved before pulling away. I handed her a cup. After a sip and some standing around, she said, “You all right?”
“Haven’t slept much.”
Mom hadn’t been home since the thing in Buxbee’s lab. She did that sort of thing, but not for three days I spent the nights binge-watching and waking up every hour.
“Want to stay out here and freeze?”
“For now.”
She shivered against me. “Want to talk about it?”
“Not really.”
I didn’t feel like myself. Ever since Buxbee’s lab, my skin just didn’t feel right. I felt sort of trapped in a wool cocoon. If I had to put it in words, it felt like I was leaving. Weird to say it that way, but that was it.
I couldn’t tell her that.
A car stopped at the curb. We waved at Streeter’s grandma. He pointed at the cups.
“Get me one?”
“You don’t drink coffee,” Chute said. “What was so important?”
“You got a hot date or something?” He stared at our shoulder contact. We were leaving clues like bad criminals. He played the idiot detective.
“Shall we?”
It was warm inside Gearheads.
It was a public hub, a gamer’s delight. Nothing shady. That was the only way Chute was going to show up. No tricks. You’ve got to see this, he told us.
The store smelled like newly pressed plastic and old carpet. A slumping guy was behind the counter, his hair thinning all over his head. He looked like a man losing a fight with gravity.
“Chief,” Streeter said.
They talked tech while Chute and I stood back, something about transplanter updates and world wide conspiracy. I was thinking Chute and I could slip away without anyone noticing.
“Use one of your rooms?” Streeter asked.
Chief looked at his computer. “Get you in tomorrow.”
“Just need a monitor.”
“A monitor?”
“Need some anonymity. Nothing big.”
Chief sighed. For a second, it appeared he would say no. “Just, uh... all right. No hacking, racking or stacking. No duplications or ratting.”
“We’re not going out.”
“Then why you here?”
“I don’t need eyes.”
Chief appeared to think twice about giving one of his portals to Streeter. No one came to just to use a computer, you came to go under and go out.
“Gum it up,” Chief said, “and you pay.”
We followed Streeter into the back. The virtualmode rooms were behind closed doors. They varied in size, from solo rides to group outings. We went to a room where curved monitors were stationed against the walls. It was a poor man’s way to virtualmode—three dimensions without immersion.
“Over here.”
Streeter led us to the corner and turned the monitor so a couple of totally soaked ten-year-olds couldn’t see. He plugged in a drive.
“Somebody messed with Buxbee’s library,” he said.
This wasn’t news. We charged a vault and somehow nothing happened?
“Watch.”
He looked over his shoulder. We watched our generics working on the mountain of books before Streeter led us out to the balcony. After gawking at the view, we came back to the library.
“That’s it?” Chute asked.
“Don’t you think it’s strange?” Streeter whispered. “Someone went to a lot of effort to rebuild the time line so that no one knows what happened?”
“You left our duplicates on the balcony.”
“Those were shells programmed to stand there, not go back and clean up all the code. I’m not saying automated clean up in hard to do, it’s just planned for us to dip that vault and bounce back. I didn’t plan that.”
“If you want to send someone a thank you card, I’ll sign it. Bye.”
He grabbed her arm. “Something’s going on, admit it.”
“Oh, I’m admitting it. And now I want to leave it alone.”
He grabbed her again. “Just... one more thing.”
He ran it again. This time he zoomed the view on our generics as we walked out to the portico, the futuristic cityscape twinkling in bright detail. Our generics went to the left with no hint of us sneaking off to the right. And then I saw it.
The wrinkled air.
“See that?” Streeter jabbed at the monitor.
I was nodding and he was waiting for me to say something. I was about to tell them about seeing that in the hallway and under the bleachers.
“You saw the footprint?” Streeter said.
“Footprint?”
He rolled the footage back and pulled the view toward the stone floor. A few keystrokes slowed the action. A heat-sensitive overlay changed the scene.
“This is it,” Streeter said. “I was running diagnostics to figure out where all that missing time went and got lucky right... about... there.”
The timestamp measured the footprint lasting two milliseconds. It was a damp impression of a bare foot just after the heat wave. Streeter wasn’t making the connection, just the strange appearance of a footprint
Or didn’t see the heat wave.
“Someone came in under cloak and rewrote everything. They saved our ass. The question is why would they do that?”
“No, not a question,” Chute said. “Just a thank you.”
“Whoever did this has real power. Think about it, if it wasn’t for this, we might’ve been arrested.”
“You admit it! You almost got us arrested!”
The kids looked over. Streeter pulled her closer and leaned in. “Okay, you’re right,” he said just above a whisper. “I got us in the shit, but why did someone bail us out, huh?”
The Making of Socket Greeny Page 3
