Streeter meandered toward it, his uneven steps shuffling side to side. He hunched over, spread his fat hand in the center and pushed. It fell without hinges and floated without a sound.
In the foggy space beyond the doorway, a steel wheel began to emerge. Slowly, the details of an enormous vault took shape.
He looked back and smiled a greasy, blocky smile. Enter big trouble.
“Maybe you should get off,” I said to Chute.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Socket knows,” Streeter said. “Right?”
We were just a bunch of high school outliers with a taste for a little trouble. Emphasis on little. But every addiction starts out small. We’d been crossing little lines of trouble for years.
This was big.
“Jack and Josh’s family account,” I said.
“Yeah boy.”
“No,” Chute said. “We can’t do the whole family.”
“I’m not going to do the whole family, Chute,” he sang. “Just Jack and brother dickhead. I cleaned Josh out the first time, but he had backup files hidden in the family vault. Now it’s time to finish the job.”
“That dickhead is a kid!” Chute shouted.
“That dickhead tried to take everything from me!” Streeter’s barbarian voice shook dust from the ceiling. “He wants to play with the big boys, then he plays by big-boy rules.”
He was right, in a way. You get into the virtualmode war worlds and all bets were off. That was where Jack’s little brother double-crossed Streeter. Technically, Josh did nothing wrong, but these were big-boy rules. Which meant no rules. Streeter had wiped him clean.
He was about to do it again.
Streeter thumped his chest and belched. That also shook the timbers. His stomach gurgled and he began to gag. His cheeks turned purple, his eyes bulging. In the skin, that was a sure sign of choking. But I’d seen him pull this gig before.
He cupped his hands and opened his mouth. A slimy lump oozed off his tongue. Streeter wiped his lips with the back of his hand. Inside a layer of dripping mucus was a metallic ball—a hacker’s tool that gestated inside his sim until it was needed.
“Sayonara to the Jack and Josh show,” he said.
“Wait!” Chute shouted.
She felt the same dread I was feeling, I was thinking. Something wasn’t right here. There were legal ramifications, sure. But it was more than that. Was it because it was too easy? Too perfect? Or did it have something to do with the strange rippled air I’d seen in the hallway, the odd flashbacks of caves.
It was possible I was just starting to lose it, that the line between reality and virtualmode was blurring and I was beginning to suffer from reality confusion, a brain disease that developed in adolescent virtualmoders.
But something was off.
With a no-look move, Streeter tossed the mucus hackball. It splattered once off the floor and rolled through the doorway. When it made contact with the vault door, the room shuddered.
Streeter laughed.
Steam rose off the hackball. A hole dissolved around the stainless steel surface. The wheel began to sag.
Thoomp.
The hackball disappeared.
A red-hot hole was left behind. In a moment, the vault door would fall off and Streeter would have digital access to everything that family owned: finances, heirlooms, documents, secrets. Everything. Even if he left all that untouched, if he just dragged out Jack’s and Josh’s accounts and torched them like gasoline-soaked tissue, the family would not be happy they were hacked.
They would look for us.
They would find us.
We crossed a line.
A moment of stillness filled the room. The hissing around the melting vault went quiet. Streeter’s laughter trailed off. His bushy eyebrows pinched together. He took one thundering step and peered closer.
Perhaps if we’d called a code bailout at that moment, nothing would’ve gone wrong. It would have stopped what was about to happen to me. Maybe.
I doubt it.
It started like a distant train, the rumbling of steel wheels beneath our feet. That lasted a second or two before the hurricane arrived.
A fierce vacuum whistled through the hole.
Streeter teetered against the gale force. In one fluid motion he ripped an axe from his chest and drove it into the floor. His spike-studded boots began sliding. Slowly he was drawn toward the doorway, and only the iron spike of his battle-axe held him steady.
“Code bailout!” His voice was a distant, useless call.
Chute and I clung to the command center. The rivets popped at the base, the metal pedestals bent. Our lightweight sims were pulled into comical horizontal positions like gravity-defying acrobats. Her slit mouth jawed in frantic puppet motions, but the words were gobbled up by the howling vacuum.
It’ll get worse.
Jack said that when he handed Streeter the phone, said it would get worse. Because this was a trap. They knew Streeter had backup accounts, knew he’d come for them.
This was waiting.
Using both axes, Streeter walked his way toward us, shattering the floor tiles with each swing. The flesh on his cheeks was strewn in g-force waves, his barbaric beard pulled flat. He was reaching for the command center when the first tendril snaked out of the vault.
Like a poison-tipped whip, it thudded through Streeter’s backside. I expected to see it come out his chest, but it plugged inside him. He began to quake, eyes rolled back, mouth spasming.
There was no avoiding the second one.
It hit Chute in the left thigh. I reached for her and nearly lost my grip. If I could grab hold of that demonic cord, perhaps my weight would pull it out of her, would’ve given her some extra time for the portal to overload and automatically bail her back to the skin.
The third tentacle hit me.
Its tip wiggled inside my sim. It spread like arteries and began downloading. Passwords, currency, accomplishments, sim worlds… everything.
They would take it all from us because that was what we were about to do. And there was nothing we could do to stop it. We were there illegally. There would be no retribution.
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.
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 was around me, but the wind did not blow.
Just timeless falling.
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.
At first there were colors.
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 around me in a merging swirl of vivid pastels.
Something grabbed my arm.
They were gone.
4.
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.
But this was slower than usual.
I awoke in paralysis, staring at the tiny constellations in the ceiling tiles. Sensation returned as molasses, my skin a wet bag of sand in an atmosphere of accelerated gravity.
Perfect silence filled the classroom that seemed to extend throughout the entire school. I could feel the building breathe through the ventilation ducts, could feel electricity hum in the walls.
The air was thick and congealed; tension crackled.
Am I still in virtualmode?
No. There was too much sensation to be artificial space.
But what if virtualmode had full sensation? What if there was to
uch and taste? Smell? Streeter had somehow made that happen in a very faint sense, but what if it was full-on? How would I know I was awake?
Asleep?
Something vibrated. A row of stones was chattering. Then grinding.
Chute.
Her fingers clawed the armrests, nails digging into the cushion like a crumbling ledge. Feet dangling. A thousand-foot drop below.
I snatched the transplanters from my neck, the impulse of electrical teeth uprooting my brain. The floor tipped, a ship riding a rogue wave to the crest. I grabbed onto her before flying across the deck.
“Chute.”
Her eyes danced beneath the lids. Molars grinding.
“Hey! Hey!” I gently slapped her cheek. “Come up, Chute.”
Ripping the transplanters off wouldn’t hurt her, but she would puke upon emergence, the equivalent of being shot from a cannon.
But nothing was working.
I took hold of the cords and pressed my cheek against hers, skin hot and moist. Jaws flexing. Her teeth were about to crack under pressure.
“Chute,” I whispered.
“Hhhuuuuuuuuuuu!” She sat up and nearly knocked me to the floor, a drowning victim swallowing a long-awaited breath
“Hey,” I said, calming her. “Hey, you’re here. You’re here.”
Her eyes were blank, focus dialing, no longer lost in the void between skin and sim.
“What happened?” she asked, trembling.
Her head bobbed in a steady rhythm, her tongue fat and lethargic. I could sense the heavy blood circulating through her veins like lead, bubbles of sleep tickling her gums. Did I really feel that?
I wanted to kiss her right there, draw her into an embrace until we fell asleep.
“What the hell you doing?” Streeter said.
I jumped up and collided with an empty chair. The floor had levelled out—no more ship at sea wobbling—but my legs were still rubbery.
“You almost got us killed!” I shouted.
“Relax,” he said, still staring at the more-than-friends scene he just witnessed. “You don’t die in virtualmode.”
“Are you insane?” I said. “I’m talking about getting arrested, a permanent record for hacking and identity theft.”
“Yeah. Sorry about that.”
“Damn right you are. That was a trap. You know that.”
“I know it now.”
“You walked us right into it. The…” I shook my hands, the creepy memory of tentacles searching my body and scratching my brain. “That wasn’t right, Streeter.”
“Yeah, I know. I was there.”
He raked the transplanters from behind his ears and turned to the monitor.
“That was a trap,” Chute said.
“He already said that. What were you two doing?”
“I was… she was having a seizure. Her eyes and her teeth… I didn’t think she was coming up.”
“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.
“Streeter?” Chute stood up. “What happened?”
“I don’t know! Give me a second.”
“I felt like I was…” She touched her throat.
“You can’t die in virtualmode, all right. Worst that can happen is we lose sims, so both of you relax.” He leaned into the monitor, danced on the keyboard, and scrolled through several panels. “That’s weird.”
“What?” I asked.
“We’re clean.”
“What’d you mean?”
He hammered the keyboard and began muttering.
“Streeter,” I said, “what is it?”
“We’re clean. Nothing happened.”
“Nothing happened? You are insane.”
“No, that’s the record. It says none of what just happened happened.”
He went back to mad ramblings. Despite what he saw when he got back from the skin, I reached out for Chute. She took my hand and squeezed.
“Where’d you go?” she asked.
“Huh?”
“You disappeared,” she said. “The three of us were getting inhaled and then you were gone. It was just Streeter and me hanging on.”
She went on about ropes, as she called them. She was the first one to the hole, the ropes pulling her through like a cartoon. She couldn’t feel her feet when she got back to the skin.
“How’d you do that?” she asked.
“Yeah,” Streeter added. “How did you do that? They locked us out of bail out. How’d you get back to the skin?”
“I don’t know.”
He squinted at me.
“Don’t look at me like that,” I said. “You tell me what happened. You dumped us in that trap, remember?”
Those weren’t ropes. They were tentacles. I didn’t know what the hell they were experiencing when they rooted inside their sims, but apparently they weren’t falling through a field of colorful confetti and trees.
There was something I was forgetting, or something I didn’t want to tell them. Something that felt real. Something that grabbed my arm.
Did someone pull me out?
“All right, folks.” Buxbee’s booming voice made us all jump. “Time to close up shop. Your parents probably have dinner waiting.”
We hadn’t bothered looking at the time. Two hours had passed. Later, Streeter confirmed that we’d only logged forty minutes. That meant over an hour was missing.
“Okay, then.” Streeter surrendered the captain’s chair to Buxbee. “Guess we’ll see you tomorrow.”
There was no way Buxbee wouldn’t see the anomaly. Nothing got past him. We hustled for the exit, a quick escape that might buy us the night before his punishment rained down.
“Streeter!” He froze us in the doorway.
“Yes, sir?”
“Thank you for the hard work.” Buxbee rested his arms on his Buddha belly. “You’ll make your way back into my good graces before long.”
“Right. Good.”
We really didn’t know what he was talking about until the next day when Streeter logged into the virtualmode library. The mountain of books we had gone in to clean up was missing.
Like we finished it.
5.
Rain drizzled from the shop’s awning.
A wet shiver slipped beneath my jacket. I held two to-go cups of coffee to my cheeks and coughed. Even on sunny mornings, it was a hard climb out of bed. Some days, I just didn’t see the point. 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?
I don’t think so.
A maroon sedan pulled up. Chute got out and leaped for cover. Her sister waved from the driver’s seat.
“That for me?” Chute asked.
I handed her a cup. She cradled it beneath her nose and closed her eyes. After a sip and a smile, she said, “You all right?”
“Yeah,” I muttered.
“Convincing.”
“Haven’t slept much.”
That was an understatement. Mom hadn’t been home since our detour in Buxbee’s lab. That was three days ago. She often went on work excursions, but never spontaneously. And not for three days. I spent the nights binge-watching. I doubted she was sleeping, either. It was the way she operated.
“Go inside?” Chute asked.
“Not yet.”
“Want to stay out here and freeze?”
“For now.”
She shivered against me, her hand brushing against mine. “Want to talk about it?”
“Not really.”
“Your mom?”
A lump swelled in my throat. I hated when that happened. The lump, sure. The emotion on my face, too. How did Chute read me so easily?
“Where is she?” she asked.
“Where do you think?”
“She’s all right, you know.”
“Think?”
“Kno
w.” She leaned in harder, the warmth of her shoulder bleeding through my jacket. Her finger hooked around mine; she rested her head on my shoulder and sighed.
I told her what was really wrong.
That I didn’t feel like myself. Ever since Buxbee’s lab, my skin just didn’t feel right. I felt sort of shrink-wrapped in a wool blanket, a worm transforming inside a cocoon. Over-the-counter meds wouldn’t change it. Or hot showers. If I had to put it in words, it felt like sadness. Sadness because I was changing. I was leaving. Weird to say it that way, but that was it: I’m leaving.
I’d known Chute all my life, but felt like I just met her.
I couldn’t tell her I was leaving.
“What do you think Streeter wants?” she asked.
“I don’t know.”
He insisted we meet at Gearheads.
Gearheads was a public hub, a gamer’s delight. Nothing shady went down inside Gearheads, too many restrictions. No tricks, Streeter said. That was the only way Chute was going to show up. No tricks. His message was critical, he said. Even with a tropical storm making less sense out of getting out of bed, we had to meet him. We had to see this.
I saw a familiar car pull into the parking lot and shrugged. Chute picked up her head, but we remained shoulder tight. The car stopped at the curb. We waved at Streeter’s grandma when he hopped out of the passenger seat.
“Get me one?” He pointed at the cups.
“You don’t drink coffee,” Chute said. “Why are we here? What was so important?”
“You got a hot date or something?” He stared at our shoulder contact. We were leaving clues like bad criminals wanting to be caught. He played the idiot detective that didn’t want to know.
“Socket’s not feeling well,” she answered.
His gaze lingered on me before he pulled open the door. “Shall we?”
It was warm inside Gearheads.
The store smelled like newly pressed plastic and old carpet. A handful of gamers were scoping out the latest virtualmode gear, most of them head-nodding Streeter as he passed. A slumping guy was behind the counter, his hair thinning, glasses thick. He looked like a pile of melting flesh. Could be Streeter in thirty years.
“Heeeeeeey,” he said. “How is it, Streeter?”
“Chief,” Streeter acknowledged.
They talked tech for a few minutes while Chute and I sipped our cooling cups of joe. Someone joined them to debate the newest transplanter update, and I was thinking Chute and I could slip down to the coffee shop without anyone noticing.
The Making of Socket Greeny: A Science Fiction Saga Page 3
