by Pete Gustin
The Skill Conspiracy
Pete Gustin
Copyright © 2019 by Pete Gustin
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Epilogue
For Maggie Carpenter.
As Annie is always there for Alden, Maggie is always there for me. Neither Alden nor myself would ever get very much done without these strong and amazing women in our lives.
“I’m not even supposed to be here today.”
Dante, Mall Rats
Prologue
All I ever wanted to do was teach myself how to play guitar, head on down to the STU Corporation, and have them hook my brain up to a little machine that would transfer my guitar-playing skill to another person willing to pay me thirty-five grand. Then, I would take the money, pay some bills, and go on a little vacation with my girlfriend, Annie. It was a nice life. It was an easy life. Now, however, I was up here on this stupid tourist trap space station getting vertigo looking down at Earth and trying to see if I could spot any of the three different countries I was wanted in, for murder, smuggling, assault, grand theft, and a laundry list of other stuff I didn’t actually do. Yeah, right about now, I should be practicing making the transition between a full G chord and a full A, but instead, I needed to figure out how to steal a ridiculously expensive little piece of technology tucked away inside this space station, so I would be able to clear my name and get everyone to stop trying to kill me and Annie. How did this big brown snowball of crap start rolling downhill in my direction? Greed. Greed of the STU Corporation, greed of the government . . . and we should never forget, the greed of my jag-off travel agent slash skill salesman brother, who basically started this whole thing by going off-menu and skimming an extra thousand bucks for himself on top of his commission. So, the story needed to start there, I guess.
SKILLS MENU
All skills listed below are final sale with no refunds issued. Skill Recipients can receive the skills via direct brain transfer at the Midtown Manhattan STU Corporation building only. Full Payment is due at time of purchase. For other skills available at other locations, ask your agent.
Downhill Skiing
Proficient - $25,000
Intermediate - $35,000
Expert - $50,000
Olympic Athlete (certificate of medal provided upon request) - $500,000
Hunting
Basic Skills (tracker and guide still required for most safaris) - $30,000
Expert - $75,000
Professional (including full set of survival skills for extended solo tracking safaris) - $250,000
Surfing
Proficient - $25,000
Intermediate - $40,000
Expert (including big wave surfing) - $100,000
“I don’t see anything listed here for scuba diving,” said the well-dressed man in the wood and leather chair seated opposite Brandon Heath, a travel agent and skill salesman with Adventure Plus Skills.
“Well, you don’t really need to buy that as a skill, Mr. Kertz. I know of two different local companies that offer intensive weekend classes, where you can get fully certified for scuba in just two days.”
“I know,” Mr. Kertz replied. “My time is limited, though, so I’d rather spend what free bits of it I have enjoying myself and not studying coursework. I was told you had a scuba skill available at this agency.”
“We do,” Brandon said. Far be it for Brandon to ever try to talk a client out of spending money, but the scuba skill on the Adventure Plus Skills menu was quite literally the cheapest thing they offered, and it wasn’t even close. The skill had originally made its way onto the menu at a price of $75,000 because an ex-military man with full Navy dive certification was the Donor. After selling the skill, though, which, of course, is a one-way transfer that removed the skill from his own brain, transferring it to his Recipient, the military man had just gone and taken a weekend dive certification class, and instead of changing the whole menu, Adventure Plus Skills had just removed the 7 from the price of the skill and changed the original $75,000 price to $5,000. All agents were instructed to notate that the skill was now recreational level only, and no longer came with military certification. To Brandon, the commission on this skill was barely even worth his time.
“If you’re looking for water adventures—” Brandon started to say, but was interrupted by the now impatient Mr. Kertz.
“What I want is the scuba skill.”
“Right,” replied the disappointed travel agent, who, thinking fast, came up with a plan to score himself a quick thousand bucks on the deal.
He placed his thumb on his Personal Connection Device, PCD for short, connected with his brother, Alden, and began using his brainwaves to send a message to him.
Wanna make a quick four grand? Brandon asked by thinking the message and having it sent out to his brother via his PCD.
Sure, came the reply a few moments later.
You planning on going scuba diving anytime soon?
No. Why?
I can get you four grand for the skill, if you’re willing to part with it.
Cool.
After reading the message, Brandon placed his palm over the PCD, and the screen went dark.
“Good news,” Brandon said with a big salesy smile to Mr. Kertz.
“Yeah?” Mr. Kertz said with a skeptical tilt of his head.
“You’re all set.”
“You’ve got my scuba skill?”
“All set to go whenever you are.”
“And it’s coming from the same man who originally offered the Navy Seal cert?”
“Of course,” Brandon lied with no remorse. All Skill Donors who worked within the framework of the STU Corporation were anonymous by law, so there was no way Mr. Kertz would ever know that Brandon had just swapped out the former military man with his full-time Skill Donor brother, Alden. “He doesn’t have the full Navy dive certification anymore, you understand.”
“I know,” Mr. Kertz replied. “The basic diving skill will be just fine.”
“Great,” Brandon said with a smile.
“And since I’ll be in the ocean, let’s throw in an intermediate surfing skill as well. I’ve always wanted to try that.”
“Excellent,” Brandon said, doing his best to hold back his ever-widening grin as he mentally calculated his five-percent commission on the $40,000 surfing skill plus five
percent on the $5,000 scuba skill, and the extra grand he’d be pocketing, since he told Alden it was only being purchased for $4,000. Add that to the actual cost of the trip that Mr. Kertz was going to book, and it would be just enough to put Brandon over the top for that African safari he’d been wanting to take.
1
It was a full seventy-four years ago when Dr. Harold J. Martin flipped the figurative switch on the first ever Skills Transfer Unit and gave over his full, complete, and considerable skill set in the fields of human biology and bio-engineering to his protégé, Dr. Andrew Melikin. Dr. Martin had, of course, died just three days later, and while it was a personal tragedy for his friends and family, the passing of the founder of the technology didn’t slow the progress of this new science one bit. All of his skills in the field had been passed to his protégé via direct brainwave skill transfer, and the work went on without missing a beat.
The Skills Transfer Unit, or STU for short, said like “stew”, could have its lineage traced back to the computers that used to allow amputees to control mouse pointers and keyboards with just their minds. By simply donning a head-mounted device, a computer would in essence be able to read the thoughts and intent of the wearer of the device and perform simple tasks, such as moving a mouse around a screen or typing on a keyboard. This early discovery was to the STU as the invention of the wheel was to the car. That is to say, the technology still had a very long way to go, but the first building blocks had been laid.
Over time, these simple devices became more and more sophisticated, capable of carrying out more and more complicated tasks. Eventually, people were able to “teach” their computers facial recognition of everyone they knew just by wearing the device and looking at different pictures of their friends, family, coworkers, and acquaintances. In the year 2072, the first commercial retail instance of the software was put to use when a sports performance institute by the name of Sports Science Unlimited used twenty different professional basketball players to “train” a computer proper free-throw technique. For the consumer, all they had to do was film themselves shooting a half dozen free throws, and within minutes the computer would systematically begin adjusting their stance, posture, hand position, and follow-through to better match the input given to them by their twenty experts. In essence, one group of people would teach the computer, then the computer would teach someone else.
Eleven years later, this technology was put to use in a globally accepted standard adopted by the jewelry industry. Gauging the value of gems had for centuries been a “skill” that should, at its essence, be more objective than subjective. People being people, however, there were always extenuating circumstances that could swing a value this way or that. To once and for all create a true standard for this industry, bio-engineers used over one thousand expert and master jewelers from all over the world to train their computers to analyze, evaluate, and eventually set a price for rare gems. When the program went to market, all anyone had to do in order to determine the “true” value of a gem was provide their computer with a 3D view of the gem in question. Whatever value the program assigned the gem was agreed to universally as the “true” value of that gem.
It was Dr. Harold J. Martin who first theorized that instead of having brains teach computers, that maybe you could teach brains to teach other brains. By this time, the entirety of the human brain had been mapped, just as the human genome and DNA had been mapped as well. Scientists had spent years mapping how the brain learned, acquired, and retained new information. They studied the physical and chemical changes that occurred within the brain as new skills were learned and new experiences were had. By the time Dr. Martin was beginning his research, science knew exactly what part of the brain would change, and how it would evolve when it was learning different things.
Dr. Martin’s goal was to isolate new brain structure and chemistry resulting from the acquisition of very specific skills and then “graft” them onto another person’s brain, thereby instantly providing the new brain with a skill that had taken anywhere from hours to days, or even years, for the host brain to develop. Memory was the tricky part. In grafting a new skill, there was no need to also graft every memory from the host brain that had been made during the time of the learning. For instance, if you wanted to graft the skill of piano playing, you needed only to transfer the brain changes that resulted from the actual piano lessons and piano practice, and not from the day-to-day experiences that were occurring during the time the skill was being acquired. Dr. Martin solved this issue in late 2091, by learning how to isolate passive and active memories and associating the active ones with the skills being acquired in order to form a more fully transferable skill. Passive memories were those of the day to day—waking up, eating breakfast, going to the movies, and things like that—which were completely irrelevant to the learning of a skill. The active memories were the ones you were intentionally trying to store, and in matching up the formation of active memories with the specific parts of the brain that were changing during skill acquisition, Dr. Martin had created his skill template. Now, the big question was, how to transfer that template to another brain.
This is where the old tech of moving a mouse with your brainwaves came into play. Instead of wearing one headset that was attached to a single computer, a Skill Donor and Skill Recipient would each wear one of the headsets that were bridged by a Skills Transfer Unit.
The skill template from the brain of the Skill Donor would be mapped and then transferred directly to the brain of the Skill Recipient. Dr. Martin had theorized early on that the process could take days to complete. No one was more surprised than he, when in tests done on primates, the skill set transfer seemed to be almost instantaneous. In the same way that the brain can “rewire” itself to learn simple things, like the name of a new acquaintance, it apparently had very little difficulty rewiring itself to learn new and complicated skills when the appropriate input and stimulus were provided.
In early experiments, Tut the chimp was able to transfer his sign language skill set to another chimp named Arthur in less than thirty seconds. That’s all it took, just thirty seconds, and Arthur was able to communicate in sign just as proficiently as Tut, who had taken years to learn the skill.
The advances were coming fast and furious, and Dr. Martin seemed to have almost an intuitive understanding of these breakthroughs he was developing. It seemed that almost every single theory he postulated about the science would eventually be proven true. It was unfortunate then, that in his seventy-third year of life, Dr. Martin’s health began to decline dramatically. While his advances had been astonishing, there was still much work to be done, and from the prognosis his own doctors were giving him, Dr. Martin knew that he wouldn’t personally have enough time to see them through.
So, in a very unsanctioned and frankly very illegal experiment, Dr. Martin set up the very first STU designed for human-to-human transfer and prepared it to send skills from his own brain to that of his protégé, Dr. Andrew Melikin. Martin’s goal was to be able to transfer a lifetime of skills acquired in working with human biology and bio-engineering to the younger Melikin, so that he’d be more capable of finishing his work and safely sharing it with the world. The experiment, rushed as it was, ended up being a success, with one glaring exception. While Dr. Melikin did acquire an entirely new skill set, including insights he’d never had before, Dr. Martin apparently lost all knowledge of human biology and bio-engineering. Instead of doing the computer equivalent of a copy and paste, the process actually performed a cut and paste. Dr. Martin had been a notoriously poor note-taker, so much about his early work was never known, and try as he might to solve the “cut-paste” issue as it came to be known, Dr. Melikin went to his grave many years later a much wealthier man due to the commercial success of his technology, but having never solved that particular problem.
This cut-paste issue didn’t stop use of the technology from spreading like wildfire. People seemed to be more than happy to have the opportunity t
o earn rather exorbitant sums of money just for giving up a particular skill they had acquired. In fact, whole industries had grown up around it. A skill could not be properly mapped unless it was learned by someone with an “adult” brain. Mapping and copying the more elastic child brain onto a more fully formed adult one would never take, but anyone over the age of twenty was allowed by law to learn any skill they chose, and then sell it to the highest bidder willing to pay whatever the going rate may be. Some called it easy money and made it their entire career, learning and selling the same skill or multiple skills again and again. Others made it their retirement plan, using their skills to make a living right up until they wanted to stop working, then they would sell the skill off to a willing Recipient. Other people? They called it the downfall of the human race.
2
“Cool,” I said out loud.
“What’s up?” Annie asked.
Annie’s my girlfriend. We’ve been together for two years and a day. I know this because she reminded me that yesterday was our two-year anniversary right at 11:59 PM. She busted my balls about me forgetting, but in a very playful way. She’s cool like that.