The Skill Conspiracy

by Pete Gustin

  The novelty of watching a STU transfer take place anywhere other than within a STU facility had attracted quite the crowd, and as soon as the transfer was over, a new block of ice was delivered to Mr. Jade on the ballroom floor. Having just acquired the skill of ice carving but never having practiced it before, his first attempt at carving a simple three-dimensional star received only slightly less applause than his next attempt of carving a canoe, which he immediately had filled with expensive, imported Russian vodka.

  Mr. Jade admitted in court that he never even attempted to use the skill ever again after that initial night, so for him, it truly was a frivolous purchase. Meanwhile, Juliette Hanson claimed that after some lengthy amount of time, she was eventually able to reacquire the skills needed to carve ice, but due to the trauma she suffered in having the skill taken from her in an inebriated and vulnerable state, she was never again able to reacquire the creative artistry that went along with the skill. As a result, she was never able to find work at a level she had been used to before the transfer took place. At different levels of the judicial system, the lawyers for Ms. Hanson had been seeking remuneration in the millions and were also seeking to have portable STU devices banned, and other restrictions put on transfers that took place even within STU facilities. In the end, Ms. Hanson received no money, and no laws were changed. She had signed a legally binding contract printed out by the portable STU unit that had been written, vetted, and certified by all of the top lawyers in the country. The contract was abhorrent, but it was also legal.

  “If only,” as Mrs. Kertzenheim had said, they had been using STU technology to accelerate the training of young doctors and researchers instead of using it to fleece young women out of skills they needed to make a living just to acquire a party trick, then maybe someone would have figured out a way to fight the terrible disease that was, in those very moments, attacking her. “If only” her husband hadn’t succumbed to greed, then maybe his wife would still be alive. The words “if only” had driven Dr. Kertzenheim to want to make a change, to make a difference moving forward. A change that he knew would put his life in danger.

  After she died, though, Dr. Kertzenheim found that he really didn’t care about his own life very much anymore. Life without his wife of nearly fifty years really didn’t seem worth living to Dr. Kertzenheim. He did know, however, that if he was going to be able to make the changes he needed to make, he would have to be able to stay alive to do it.

  A good friend of Dr. Kertzenheim’s by the name of Tom Preston, who was another billionaire, had business dealings that took him to all of the most dangerous parts of the world. Dr. Kertzenheim had heard Tom speaking on a few different occasions of the ex-Navy Seal who traveled with him and had saved his life on four separate occasions. Privacy being at such a premium in this modern age of PCDs and no internet anonymity, Tom had told Dr. Kertzenheim that the way he got in touch with the military man was by purchasing a scuba skill that would take place at STU midtown.

  “There’s only one on the menu in the whole damn city,” Tom had said. “Nobody ever buys it, so the man wearing the Donor Hat will be your man. After that, I assume that for you, getting access to your Donor won’t be hard after the transfer is done.”

  Dr. Kertzenheim being Dr. Kertzenheim and having all the access he could ever want inside any STU facility in the world, was given a physical description of the ex-Seal and decided he’d just confront him after the transfer was over by simply walking through the doorway into the Donor room. Unfortunately for the both of them, the nervous, scruffy-haired man Dr. Kertzenheim found on the other side of the doorway after his transfer took place didn’t look anything like the man Tom had described to him.

  8

  Frank only drove the car east for about a mile or so, during which time I tried to fill Annie in on everything I knew. Everything. I told her why I got all weird about seeing Dr. Kertzenheim on the TV, how I’d seen him during my skill transfer, the half mil that he had paid me, but only with the threat that I had to keep it a secret from everyone, and then how I’d just learned that skill transfers didn’t need to wipe out the memory of the Donor. Also, how Man Number Two had shot Mark after I showed him the non-destructive transfer, and how Man Number One was about to shoot me right before Frank crashed through the window and rescued me.

  “What?” was all she had to say at the end of my whole story.

  “To which part?’ I asked in reply, knowing it was an awful lot to absorb.

  “All of it, but mostly the part about you single-handedly figuring out how to do a one-way non-destructive skill transfer.”

  That was actually the one part I was pretty sure I did understand. Everything else seemed crazy. The information about the non-destructive transfer was oddly clear in my mind, though.

  “When Dr. K was in the Recipient room,” I started to explain, “he must have set up the unit to send me some skills that he felt he needed to pass on. That is the only thing that makes any sense.”

  “Yeah?” Annie said dubiously. “Don’t you have to be thinking about the same skill in order to make a transfer happen . . . and isn’t it impossible for a Recipient to send anything to a Donor?”

  “The STU Hats are the same for the Donor and the Recipient,” I said. “Same Hats, just a different set of keystrokes on the computer. I’m guessing Dr. K set up our session himself and allowed a two-way transfer. As for sending me skills I wasn’t directly thinking about, you actually only need to be thinking about the same skill initially, so that the STU can create a baseline sync, or an apples-to-apples connection between the brains. In the beginning, we were both thinking about scuba diving. After that, the STU Donor can send along any skill he or she wants, providing the unit is set up for a multi-skill transfer, and again, I’m guessing that’s how he set up the Hats for our transfer.”

  “Okay, then,” she said sarcastically.

  I looked at her blankly, then said, “What?”

  She laughed and said, “Well, you’re obviously right or you just became really good at making up stories because that was a lot of information.”

  I was pretty positive I was right.

  “So who’s this guy?” she asked, turning her attention to Frank in the front seat.

  “I’m the guy Dr. Kertzenheim was trying to connect with at STU Midtown.”

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “You happened,” Frank said with more than a hint of irritation.

  “Dr. K was using a rather specific protocol I had set up for anyone interested in contacting me about private security work. The standard scuba dive cert is something anyone can get in two days for like two hundred bucks, but I had it listed for five grand so no one would ever in a million years choose it unless they were trying to find me directly.”

  “Five?” I asked. “My brother told me I was getting four.”

  “Who’s your brother?” Frank asked.

  “Brandon, the agent who was selling the skill.” Turning to Annie, I said, “That jerk cheated me out of a thousand bucks.”

  “Oh, don’t worry,” Frank said. “That jerk is probably dead by now. Either that or being held hostage until your unlucky ass surfaces, at which point they’ll use him to try to get you to come out into the open.”

  “What?” Annie and I both said in surprise.

  “The only reason you made it out of STU Midtown, and the only reason we just got out of Rockefeller Center, is because the STU Corporation was keeping this small and contained. What you’ve got in your head, they don’t want getting out. As soon as we got away back there, you can bet your ass they changed their priorities from small and contained to highly important and do-what-it-takes.”

  “Oh crap,” I said, thinking about my brother. “But wait. Brandon took his commission from his last STU sale and went on an African hunting safari with our dad. The prick’s always wanted to kill some big animals for some reason or another, and since he doesn’t actually have any real friends of his own but didn’t want to go
alone, Dad was his first and only travel-buddy option.”

  Annie shook her head in disgust, as she always did when we talked about Brandon.

  “Well then,” Frank said. “Maybe they’re safe for now, but they’ll be looking for them . . . and they are most definitely looking for you.”

  “So, what do I do?”

  “We’ll talk about it in a bit.”

  Frank parked the car and led us to another subway entrance. Annie desperately wanted to ask me about a million questions, but Frank said we shouldn’t discuss any of it out in public. For close to an hour we followed Frank—we changed trains four times, all the while riding in complete silence because the only things any of us wanted to say had to be kept quiet. Eventually, we surfaced somewhere in Harlem, where Frank wound us through some streets that led us to a rather out-of-the-way brownstone. He grabbed his PCD, swiped it in front of the panel next to the door that unlocked the mechanism, and then led us down into the basement.

  “Where are we?” I asked.

  “Safe,” Frank replied. “For now.”

  The basement was a little studio apartment. A bed, a two-seater couch, a tiny little kitchen, and a door to what I assumed was the bathroom.

  “Can I?” Annie asked, motioning toward the door to the bathroom.

  “Sure,” Frank replied.

  Annie stepped into the restroom, and after the door was closed, Frank reached into one of his kitchen drawers and tossed me a PCD.

  “It’s untraceable,” he said. “Dr. K gave me that one and this one too,” he said, reaching into his pocket and pulling out his own PCD. “That was the first time we spoke. He said we could use them to communicate with each other without fear of being spied on or tracked.”

  “Then why the heck did he give you both of them?” I asked.

  “He didn’t, or at least, I don’t think he meant to. He handed me this one, and I found the one you’ve got sitting on a workbench at my shop after he left. Yours is still paired to Dr. K’s identity, though. You’ll have to wipe it.”

  A PCD being paired just meant that it was synchronized to a person’s thumbprint and brainwaves. No one but the owner could access any of the information on it. Wiping it was easy, though. So long as no one had reported a unit lost or stolen, you could wipe a PCD by holding down the tiny little pin button on the back and clicking yes to the “are you sure?” prompt.

  Knowing how tiny that button on the back was, Frank already had a bent paperclip ready for the task, so I grabbed the clip, pressed the button, wiped the unit, and paired it to my own thumbprint and brainwaves. I’d considered for just a moment trying to see if Dr. K had left any info on it, but these things were as secure as secure gets. If a unit wasn’t paired to you, you couldn’t even get past the login screen. Now that this one was mine, though, I was able to log in and find my way to the boot menu to double-check and see if GPS monitoring had indeed been turned off. It was.

  Frank shook his head and gave me a wry smile.

  “What?” I asked.

  “I’m guessing you didn’t know how to root around in the boot menu of a PCD yesterday, did you?”

  “No,” I replied, as Annie came out of the little bathroom.

  “Know how to do what?” she asked.

  “Just another bit of technical know-how Dr. K apparently put into Alden’s head,” Frank replied. “Did he also happen to provide you with a plan, or maybe next steps on what to do with this information you’ve got?”

  “Me?” I asked, shocked. “I thought you would know what to do.”

  Frank laughed. “I was just supposed to keep him alive long enough for him to do whatever it was that he was planning to do.”

  “Wait,” I said. “You’re not in on the plan? He didn’t tell you what to do?”

  Frank laughed again and shook his head. “I barely even had time to talk to the guy,” he said. “Thanks to your brother, I had no idea the good doctor was even looking for me until he showed up at my shop last night.”

  “How did he find you?” Annie asked.

  “No idea,” Frank replied. “But he showed up at my shop in Brooklyn, dumped this whole bit of info about non-destructive STU transfers on me, and then sent me five million dollars in advance, saying it’s payment for me to keep him alive long enough to get the information out there.”

  “Five million!” Annie’s eyes widened.

  “Yeah, and I was supposed to get another five when the job was done,” Frank continued.

  “Supposed to?” I asked. “You mean ’cause, he’s dead now?”

  “No, I mean because I didn’t actually take the job,” Frank replied. “I told him I wanted to do a little research first. I’m not just gonna accept work from any lunatic who shows up on my doorstep. I was going to get back to him earlier today, when all of a sudden I get a call from him on my PCD.”

  “How’d he get your—” I started to ask, but Frank cut off the question by raising his hands in mock surrender.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “But he called me and said the offer still stood but that now I had to keep Alden Heath alive.”

  “Me?” I asked, dumbly.

  “Yes,” Frank said flatly. “You. Next thing I know, Dr. K gets killed and, being the curious kind of guy that I am, I decide to track down this Alden Heath guy—yes, you—and I find you over in Hoboken getting into a Mag Car with two goons from STU Midtown.”

  “I can’t believe he gave you five million dollars before you even accepted the job,” I said, fully aware that it was completely irrelevant to the story, but a number like that was the type of thing that got stuck in my head. “All I got was five hundred grand.”

  “Yeah, well, you being there was just an accident,” Frank said. “Dr. K was actually trying to hire me.”

  “So, you’re taking the job now?” Annie asked.

  “I guess so,” Frank replied. “I mean, I did take his five million dollars. Not like I had a choice in the matter, but I do have it. Plus, I certainly don’t mind having the opportunity to kick the STU Corporation in the nuts. I’ve never really been a big fan of corporate greed, and unnecessarily mind-raping people to make a profit is kind of one of the worst things I think I’ve ever heard of, if you’ll excuse the terminology.”

  “Great,” Annie said. “So what do we do?”

  She asked this while looking at me. I didn’t know what to do. I hadn’t ever wanted this information Dr. K had stuck in my head. I just wanted to make a quick four grand—which apparently, should have been five—finish up my latest guitar training, sell it, and move on with my life. That was apparently out of the question now, though, so Frank ordered us a pizza, and we started talking it all over.

  The ex-Navy Seal kept telling me to let my mind wander and see if Dr. K had buried some sort of plan in my head that might magically rise to the surface. He didn’t. That was impossible anyway. I had nothing.

  Time passed, and the three of us talked ourselves silly. Annie suggested we just post the info online. I knew that wouldn’t work, though I could see why she might think so. What she wasn’t taking into consideration was the fact that the internet was where everybody went to post all sorts of lunacy. The whole idea behind the PCD was supposed to cut down on that type of thing, but it didn’t. Some fifty years ago or so, the government decided that anonymous posts were bad for the world, or something like that. They wanted to make it so that you couldn’t just go online, post some random nonsense, and hide behind a fake avatar. Along came the PCD. The little solar-powered device that fits in the palm of your hand is your personal connection device to everything digital, and the only way to access the World Wide Web. It was convenient as hell, accessible by brainwave connection, and of course, automatically put your own personal digital thumbprint on everything you did online. If you wanted to go on the internet and say aliens are putting mind control substances in your kid’s cereal, cool. You can do that, only thing is, you’re gonna have to put your name to it. Your name and all your contact informat
ion as well. So, you can say whatever you want online, but just know that someone might reply, or in the case of more serious matters, Someone (with a big fat capital S) might come knocking on your door. It did cut down on internet craziness, but not by as much as you’d think. If we were going to go online and say that the STU Corporation was needlessly erasing skills out of people’s brains, we’d need to come up with some proof.

  “You know who should really know about this?” I asked rhetorically, as an idea finally popped into my head. “The STU Donor Union.”

  “Yeah?” Frank asked.

  “Yeah,” I replied. “The STU Donor Union is huge. They’re big, they’re powerful, and they really look out for their members. Any time I ever felt like I was getting mistreated or was getting a raw deal, they were on it immediately. Imagine how pissed they’ll be if they find out the STU Corporation has been erasing their members’ brains totally needlessly.”

  I looked to Frank and then to Annie. I waited for a moment and then looked back at Frank.

  “Yes? No?” I asked, looking for some sort of feedback.

  “Like I said, I’m just here to keep you alive,” Frank said. “If you think the Union can help, then we should give it a try. If they can’t, we’re gonna have to get on the move soon. STU’s gonna catch up to you sooner or later.”

  Annie shrugged in indifferent agreement, as if she still hadn’t fully processed why we weren’t on our couch, immersed in the nature on television. With no better ideas and no objections from either of the other two, we set off on another roundabout subway adventure, this time to the STU Donor Union headquarters in Lower Manhattan.

  9

  Two and a half hours later, Annie, Frank, and I were standing on the stoop to the STU Donor Local 137 Union Building in Lower Manhattan. It didn’t actually take us two and a half hours to get there. We first spent more than an hour of that time continuing to argue over different possible courses of action.