I was with Chute on that. Staying on the flash drive would guarantee no surprises or trouble. Particles trickled around us like colorful grains of sand, filling the white space until we were on the portico once again. It was exactly as we’d seen it, only this time we were voyeurs instead of participants.
The generics were off to the side and frozen in the moment Streeter programmed. Chute and I admired the view.
“So I got it narrowed,” he said.
We went to the middle of the portico and stood around the mysterious footprint. Streeter, shoulders slumped, axes clanging, stared.
“So?” Chute said.
“I ran analysis and nothing.” His voice boomed. “Nothing registered with a footprint of that size and texture.”
Or lack of texture. There were no swirls or wrinkles that would be evident in a normal footprint. But these were sims, so smooth skin wasn’t a dealbreaker. Something about it, though, looked... robotic.
“There’s millions of unregistered,” Chute said. “You’ve got, like, twenty of them.”
“No, there’s something different about this.”
“No, you want something different. If you look, you’ll find it even when it’s not there.”
Streeter called out commands. Animated dials appeared. He punched thick, knobby fingers into various openings and spun them like old rotaries. Time frames advanced in tiny slices. The footprint appeared and disappeared.
“Something’s here,” he muttered. “The data is wrong.”
He slowed down time, slicing it into thinner and thinner segments so that it advanced at a million frames per second. He had a theory with each cycle. First it was something about an underground sect of hackers keeping virtualmode justice. Then it was an alien race, then artificial intelligence, then some Gaia theory he read online.
Each time he cycled through it, I felt a static heat flash prick inside my ears, like air from an exhaust pipe. There wasn’t air in virtualmode; I wasn’t breathing. I wondered if the air conditioner had failed back in the skin.
“Back up,” I said.
Chute had wandered off in boredom. She watched from a distance as Streeter dialed back the sequence. A jagged string of light cut the space right as the footstep disappeared.
“There!” I said.
“What?”
“You don’t see it?”
Streeter shook his head. I told him to slice time thinner. He walked it right up to the edge.
“Right there.”
Chute stared. Streeter looked stupid. They weren’t seeing it. “Thinner,” I told him.
Frustration rattled in his throat. He took that beefsteak finger and dialed. “This is going to take all—”
“Stop!”
And there it was: a kinky thread of static. It was the width of a human hair sizzling white-blue all the way into the sky.
Streeter’s mouth hung open, his blocky teeth peeking through the knotty whiskers. Chute approached warily.
“You see it?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Streeter said. “But how did you?”
“What’d you mean?”
“I mean I got this down to a billionth of a second. And you saw it.”
I didn’t exactly see it. I felt it. It was a static image, yet it teased something inside me like electrical currents carved on the lining of my stomach. But it wasn’t lightning and it wasn’t some dangling electrical wire. It felt like a fissure, as if the universe had cracked and light was leaking out.
A crack in time.
“What is it?” Chute asked.
Streeter didn’t know, but he knew something was hidden in this scene. It wanted to be found.
“What is it?” he asked me.
“How should I know?”
But they knew. They could see the connection. They knew this was all about me. First the vault and now this. True nature was chugging down the tracks.
Streeter sighed. “Let’s take this slow. Um, I guess let’s see if it registers coding. And then—”
An earthquake rattled the world.
Streeter dropped to one knee. We crashed on the stone as the wall behind us crumbled. It didn’t fall down, however. It imploded.
The library was gone.
Instead of endless shelves of books, there were piles of gold coins and glittering jewels. Sitting on the golden nest was a fat, black dragon, wings folded across its back. Obsidian eyes peeked through slits. Saliva sizzled on the floor.
“Are you effing kidding me?” Streeter cried.
The dragon’s laughter loosened stones. “Surprise, dumbass.”
I recognized the voice. It wasn’t some warlock with world domination cred, not a space alien guarding a secret. It was a fourteen-year-old.
Streeter snatched the battle-axes. “Well, abracadabra, mother—”
The first chain hit Streeter in the chin. A spigot of blood gushed from his beard. The next two came out of the fog and hit his wrists like spidery strands of metal. The next two snaked around his ankles. He was hoisted up and spread-eagle, a puddle of blood spreading on the stones.
“You said we weren’t going out!” Chute shouted.
“We’re not.” The words lisped through gaps where teeth had been.
Streeter’s flash drive created this environment. There was no connection to the Internet and Chief ran a tight operation. But there was the kid, the one who prepped the room.
A back door.
It had to be one of Josh’s friends. He loaded a back door into our portal before we dropped in. Chief wouldn’t be looking for it since we didn’t go out. Josh was probably in the next room, laughing his ass off. I knew that because mounds of gold cascaded beneath the dragon’s laughter. It was sim was even dumber than giant barbarian, but he had us.
Nothing stupid about that.
“All right, all right,” Streeter lisped. “What do you want? You want everything? You can have it, jerk off. Clean out my locker, wipe my sims, I don’t care. I’ll spend the rest of my life hunting you down.”
Secretly, Streeter liked the challenge. Starting from scratch would be a drag, but he wasn’t lying. The rest of his life. The chains racked tighter. His joints began popping. He didn’t scream because he didn’t feel it. But he was about to have his favorite sim pulled apart.
“Chief’s going to be pissed you wired his room,” Streeter said as his shoulder dislocated. “Probably never let you back.”
“Shut it.”
“Let’s just call a truce, huh? I love you, you love me. What’d you say, Joshy.”
He hated Joshy.
Josh spit a bubbling wad that ate a hole in the stone. A red-hot pit of coals opened up. “I’m going to take everything. You’ll be a nothing. That’s all I want. And all your crypto, that’s it. I’m not a greedy man.”
The chains began clicking. Streeter was lowered just above the pit.
“Boy,” Chute said. “You’re not a greedy boy.”
He turned his head, the sound of old leather creaking. The body began inflating. Josh closed one nostril with a hooked claw. A stream of liquid blue fire blasted from the other nostril. Before it drenched her in a sizzling bath of flames, I leaped in front of her. When the fire show ended, my sim was charred and crispy. Black flakes fluttered off my arm and a finger broke off. Chute kept me from shattering on the floor.
“You’re burning up.”
She didn’t mean my well done finish. My vitals were spiking. My fever had breached a hundred and four and was still rising. Alarms were about to go off.
“What’s up with them?” Josh asked.
Streeter craned his neck at us. “Ah, they got a thing.”
So he knew. He knew all along, probably before we did. Chute and I were always going to be together. We would have something no one could get between.
Not even death.
“So I’m taking everything,” Josh said. “Just wanted you to know that before I did.”
“You know I’ll never stop coming after you.”
Jo
sh tapped a long claw on the stone, chiseling a hole into the floor. Black, shiny beetles bubbled out, their hardened legs clicking against the granite as they fanned out. The bugs teetered around the pit.
“Take me,” Streeter said. “Leave them. This was all my idea.”
“Oh, I’m taking you. Yeah, for sure. But I don’t really care about you anymore, I just don’t want you to have anything. What I really want is him.”
That curved talon pointed at me.
“Socket?” Streeter said.
“Something’s up with him. The trap in the vault should’ve worked. Whatever he did, I want it.”
I assumed code bail out was locked up. Again. I’d stopped caring at that point. Every time I moved, a chunk fell like baked layers of blackened toast. Just get it over. I’d been feeling that way for quite a while.
“This is so great,” Josh said. “First I’m going to walk those bugs down your throat and out your ass. Then I’m going to duplicate your sims and register them, then I’ll do what I want with them. You’ll never virtualmode again. Having fun?”
“Shut up,” Streeter spat.
The bugs began leaping. He shook them off at first. They crawled through his hair and into his beard. He spit them out, but they kept coming, running up his nostrils, in his ears. He screamed and choked. The walls quivered.
“Your turn.” Josh turned to us.
Next to me, the kinky static line we’d seen before this all when to shit began to glow. It was white hot. Josh didn’t see it. He would’ve forgotten about me had.
Something’s inside it.
“Socket!” Chute was holding me. “You got to rise out. Socket!”
“Hey!” Streeter choked. “Let him off, Josh. Seriously, throw him back. He’s sick!”
This was no joke. My fever was nearing a hundred and six. Alarms should’ve been firing at Chief’s desk and immediately bail me out. But Josh had locked us in and overridden the vitals. In the skin, we were resting peacefully. A life threatening illness was convenient, given our situation.
“Not falling for it,” was the last thing Josh would say.
Columns of black, shiny shells clacked around the hole below Streeter and marched at us. Chute stomped them out, but they flooded up our legs. She screamed. Josh laughed. Streeter bellowed. Despite the terror, a moment of calm wrapped around me, a total sense of everything being in its rightful place. Everything exactly as it should be.
The kinked wire etched the air with branding fire.
My olfactory senses were suddenly fully engaged. The smell of burning insects filled my nostrils. My blackened skin was flaking off, the cracks glowing orange. The insects were smoking as they made their way up my legs. They burst into tiny balls of fire, disintegrating before falling to the floor. Large chunks of my sim fell in great, crusty scabs.
The world shimmered.
“Dude,” Streeter said.
I heard nothing more. My sim devoured the virtual world. I wasn’t on fire. I was the flames. I didn’t consume the world.
I am the world. I am fire.
I was not in the skin. I was somewhere in the ethers. From the dusty ashes, the static line appeared. It beckoned me. Invited me. A fissure in space, a crack in time. Something wanted me to see the secrets it held.
I reached.
Green.
Trees. Sky blue and brown earth.
I stand in the jungle, the sounds of birds calling, creatures scrambling. Dewy leaves dripping. The humid air kisses my cheeks with damp lips. A path lies before me. It meanders toward a massive tree.
I smile.
This is where I belong. Yet my feet are heavy and still. My legs stiff and unrelenting. Pressed into the soil is a footprint, its unique shape matching that left behind on the portico.
In the distance, a flock of brightly colored birds breaks into a swirling cloud, a rainbow of sparrows. Their bodies are oddly shaped, wings snapping sharply. Eyes glowing. But not birds. Below this spectacle are three figures. They are too far away to see details, but one is a dark-skinned man. The other has long hair. The third wears a plum-colored robe that flutters, his silver skin glittering.
“Where am I?” I whisper.
They should not be able to hear me, but here space is irrelevant. There is a connection between us, entangled particles that obey the laws of quantum physics.
“Home,” I hear.
Finally, I found it. I’m not alone. I belong somewhere.
“Soon,” I hear. “You’ll come home.”
The waves grow rough and take the world under where colors bleed and everything drains into the in between. Where I drift.
Home on my mind.
5
A steady bump.
A mechanical whir.
A cloth was pulled from my forehead, replaced with one cool and damp. It smelled clean around me, the sterile astringency of medical precision—but oddly mixed with humid earthiness. Like dirt tracked in.
There was a deep inhalation. It paused before rushing out.
Mom.
She was there, somewhere. I wanted to call for her, tell her I was all right, to drop the worried look that tightened her forehead and weighed down the corners of her mouth. I couldn’t see her, though. I couldn’t see anything. A heavy blanket lay over me. Eyelids sheets of lead.
But I wasn’t on fire.
This didn’t smell like the back rooms of Gearheads. Didn’t smell like my bedroom. It had an orderly feel, oily and gleamy. Occasional whirring, the intensity of bright light.
“Kay?” a voice said.
My mom shuffled to my side, her smart shoes clicking the floor. I didn’t hear a door open or close, but her footsteps suddenly went silent. Someone else besides my mom had been with me, the footsteps damp and sticky. Bare. I felt a shadow fall over my face. A circular bandage was pulled off my neck and replaced with another one.
I had no reason to think this person was male. I couldn’t smell him or even hear his breath. It felt like a he.
There were faded images of Chute and Streeter like seeing them through the wrong end of a telescope. I tried to remember where I was after that and how I got here, where here was. Mom’s footsteps went to the other side of the room. She was joined by a heavy set of boots and a deep voice incapable of whispering. Their words were blurred and indecipherable. They were speaking English, but nothing that made sense.
Mom’s replies were sharp and worried. I imagined her staring from a doorway, arms crossed. She would be an unblinking shell, an armored likeness of herself, a transformation that occurred the day my dad died, a sort of emptying out. She would be staring as if a certain level of concentration could will her wishes into reality. But life operated on life’s terms.
“Status?” a man asked.
“Stable.” I assumed this was the bare-footed assistant fussing with my neck bandages. “A virus has been detected and treated. His temperature is near normal. There is no indication of anomaly or sign of inherent traits.”
Inherent traits?
“He’s not...” Mom’s voice trailed off. She couldn’t finish the thought, so unthinkable it was.
“No. He does not exhibit an expression of time-slicing,” the bare-footed assistant said. “There is no evidence of turning. He is still normal, Ms. Greeny.”
Time-slicing? Turning?
For a moment, it seemed conceivable that I was still in virtualmode. I would’ve believed it had Mom’s presence not been so convincing. Still, I didn’t know what any of this meant.
Normal?
“Keep him overnight.” The man turned and said, “He’s fine, Kay. I know how this looks; I know what you’re thinking. We’ll monitor him, but there’s nothing to be concerned about. Your boy is perfectly normal.”
His exit was decisive. His heavy footfalls disappeared abruptly, as if he was suddenly not there.
Mom was by my side. I felt her hand on my arm, warm and firm. She didn’t shake. The worried look would be etched between her brows, but we
akness would not haunt her. These were the moments she dropped the armor and I saw the mom from the early days.
The mom from before he died.
“I will put him under,” the bare-footed man said, his voice soothing, almost melodious.
Mom’s grip hardened. Then she thanked him and said his name, a name I would one day come to know and trust. A name I would come to love.
“Thank you, Spindle.”
THE DARKNESS OF UNCONSCIOUSNESS passed beneath the scalpel of time. One second I was bathed in antiseptic darkness, the next was the comforting smell of cookies and bread, the sweet fragrance of tea olive flowers in the backyard.
I rolled onto my side, the heavy blanket of paralysis having vanished, and opened my eyes. My mom stood next to my bed like a guardian awaiting my arrival. Worry did not possess her.
Just patience.
“What happened?” were my first words.
“You overdid it.” She chuckled. “How do you feel?”
I attempted to sit up, my head a concrete block. There was a circular spot just above my collarbone that was tender. I had no memory of what had happened or where I’d been. My memories had all been wiped away like words on a chalkboard, ghostly lines barely visible.
“Was I hit by a truck?” I asked.
“Too much fun. I’m going to make you rest.”
“You’ll have to stay home to do that,” I challenged.
A shadow of a smile crossed her eyes. “I’ll take some time off.”
She was nodding. Of course, she’d said that before, even promised. But she never explained herself. There were so many things she was hiding. Why can’t I remember anything?
I didn’t ask her that.
She wasn’t going to tell me just like I wasn’t going to tell her about the flapping in her room and the golden eyes in the backyard. They were secrets.
We were good at keeping them.
I wanted to drop the charade, to strip down to the real. The truth can be dangerous, she once said. And painful.
“Lie down,” she said. “Get some rest.”
She came back with a glass of water and a couple of ibuprofen, then placed her hand across my forehead and gazed at me. She loved me like a mom loved a son, but sometimes I felt like she had to make an effort, that it didn’t come easy. I would discover, one day, it was more than that.
The Making of Socket Greeny Page 5
