The Skill Conspiracy

by Pete Gustin

  “Why not go to the police?”

  “They probably won’t believe me.”

  “Why not contact news organizations?”

  “They probably won’t believe me.”

  “Why not—”

  “No one will believe me.”

  That was our biggest problem. The only way to get anyone to believe the truth was to actually prove it to them, and the only way to do that, was to get our hands on an actual STU unit.

  There were only two types of people on planet Earth who had access to STU units. The first, of course, was the STU Corporation itself. The second group of people were the billionaire a-holes with personal STU devices, and I’m pretty sure none of them would be loaning me theirs anytime soon. There was, however, a third group that could, upon request, ask to inspect a STU unit at any time, and that was the Union. The Union guaranteed us a safe workplace, and part of a safe workplace was a well-functioning STU unit, and I knew for a fact that Union reps could ask to inspect them whenever they felt it was necessary. All we had to do was convince them of the truth, get them to request an inspection, and tell them what to look for within the unit. The ability to do a non-destructive transfer really wasn’t even all that well hidden within the coding. You just needed to know what to look for.

  The last fifteen minutes of our commute consisted of a detour to one of the many electronics stores found on every block on Manhattan. Inside Ali’s Electronics we found three pairs of Shadez. The ubiquitous eyewear had been developed as part of the privacy movement that ran counter to the PCD movement. While a PCD made it impossible for a person to do anything online with any amount of anonymity, Shadez were eyewear designed to provide privacy and the coveted anonymity to their wearer by means of scrambling the facial recognition software of any camera. A lot of people wore them, if for no other reason than it just kind of made them feel better. If the big bad “They” really wanted to track you, there were, of course, still other ways to do it, but the simple act of donning a pair of Shadez was at least one little way that people could stand up and thumb their noses at Big Brother. Shadez technology could be built into any pair of eyeglasses or sunglasses, so style could be preserved. We just bought the over-the-counter generic Shadez that, if nothing else, resembled the thick-rimmed gag glasses that looked like they should have a rubber nose attached to them.

  “Why don’t you two go on in, and I’ll stay here to keep an eye out, just in case,” Frank said.

  I agreed, then opened the door for Annie and followed her inside.

  “Hi,” said the not-so-overly-friendly attendant at the front desk. She was a plump redheaded woman who looked to be in her sixties and hadn’t even bothered to look up over her bifocals to see us enter. Her attention was more focused on the screen she was holding in front of her. The sound of digital slot machines was coming from the device.

  “Dammit,” she said after a noise indicating that she had lost came from the little screen.

  “Hi, Alden Heath,” I said by way of introduction.

  She looked up from her screen to glance my way for about a second.

  “I’d like to see my local Rep, please. I’m a member.”

  She had turned her attention back to her game but did spare a moment to ask, “Card?”

  “Sure,” I said. “I’ve got my card right here.”

  I took my Union card out of my wallet and held it out to her. She glanced at it for a moment, then told us to take a seat.

  “What’s this about, anyway?” she asked.

  “A, uh, workplace safety issue,” I said from my seat next to Annie by the wall.

  I saw her put down the screen and pick up a PCD from her desk. She looked at it for a moment, put it down, picked up her game screen again without looking my way, and said, “Someone will be with you in a moment.”

  Since a moment is apparently a little longer than ten minutes, that’s how long Annie and I sat there in silence, waiting to be seen. If Front Desk Lady hadn’t been so engrossed in her digital slots, she might have noticed how weird it was that the two of us were sitting there saying absolutely nothing to one another for that entire span of time. I suppose we could have made some small talk to make a show of it, but it seemed kind of pointless.

  “Mr. Alden,” a voice finally said from the hallway around the corner, followed shortly thereafter by a man in dress shoes, semi-shiny gray pants, a white button-down shirt, and a black-and-blue striped tie.

  “Uh, Mr. Heath, actually,” I said. “My first name is Alden.”

  “Ah, Mr. Heath then,” he replied, extending a hand in greeting. “What can I do for you?”

  “It’s a workplace safety issue,” I said. “Any chance we could talk in private?”

  “Well, there are forms for that, you know,” he said with a well-practiced polite smile. “I’m sure Ginger here can get them for you, and you can fill them out and leave them with her.”

  Ginger, which was apparently the Front Desk Lady’s name, shot Mr. Necktie a look like he’d just informed her she’d be digging latrines for the first platoon in Guam.

  “It’s, uh . . . it’s kind of hard to explain,” I said, stumbling over how I could possibly relay this whole story succinctly enough to make him want to hear more. Fortunately, Annie came to my rescue. She was always better with words than I was, plus, being a psychiatrist, she had a really good way of relating to people.

  “We know you’re busy,” she started to say. “And we really appreciate your time. We’re sorry we didn’t call ahead, but we literally just came from a workplace incident we thought you should know about immediately. It actually impacts all of the STU Donors in the Union, and we’d be really grateful for the opportunity to explain it to you.”

  Her words, plus her smile, apparently did the trick because Mr. Necktie nodded appreciatively and offered to take us back to his office.

  “Thanks, honey,” I said quietly as I reached out and gave her hand a squeeze.

  As we walked down the hallway from which Mr. Necktie had come, the quality of the interior of the building improved dramatically. The waiting area out front was drab, to put it nicely. The paint on the walls was either fading or chipped, the chairs meant for waiting were a little bit on the rickety side, and the part of the hardwood floor that led from the front door to Ginger’s desk had been trod on so many times that it was actually a completely different shade of brown. The hallway we were in now, though, consisted of a white marble floor and wainscoting running along the wall. We passed by one open door that led to a completely state-of-the-art meeting room, and behind another door was an office with a huge and ornately carved oaken desk. Annie gave me a raised eyebrow look, which I returned in kind.

  “So, what can I do for the two of you?” Mr. Necktie asked as he entered one of the open doors, walked into the room, and took a seat behind one of those big fancy desks. The little nameplate sitting on his desk said “Michael J. Wallwork – Local 137.” Ah good, a name.

  “Well, Mr. Wallwork,” I began. “It’s a bit of a long story.”

  Just as I’d done with Annie after we’d gotten into the car with Frank outside Rockefeller Center, I told Mr. Wallwork everything. He looked like he was trying his best to express the appropriate amounts of surprise and dismay at all the right parts of the story, but I eventually realized that the man was probably a good fifteen years older than he looked, and the trade-off for his smooth, wrinkle-free skin was an inability to move a lot of his face muscles. He did manage to keep great eye contact, though. He only looked away a few times, and that was to sneak glances at his PCD, upon which I assumed he was taking some notes. At the end of my story, before he had time to ask any questions, I told him that I could prove that everything I was saying was true if the Union could just request an inspection of a STU unit and follow some protocols, which I’d be happy to lay out.

  “No need,” he said.

  I was stunned. The look on Annie’s face said she felt the same way.

  “Why’s th
at?” I asked after taking a moment to make sure I had heard him correctly.

  “There’s no need to request a unit inspection, I mean,” he replied. “We actually have a portable STU unit right here in our office, right now.”

  “You’re kidding me?” I said with surprise, at the same time Annie said, “No way!”

  “If you think you can make this machine operate the way you say it can, then this is something we really need to see.”

  Mr. Wallwork stood up from his desk, and another man with slightly less shiny pants but an equally nifty necktie appeared in the doorway to the office.

  “Come right this way, Mr. Alden,” the newcomer said, gesturing for us to follow him out of the room.

  I almost corrected him, but then I decided not to bother.

  Annie and I got up, as did Mr. Wallwork, and the three of us followed New Guy down the hall. Eventually, we came to a closed door that had a little silver keypad next to it. New Guy typed a code into the pad and opened up the door. Inside was a room that looked to be about four times the size of Mr. Wallwork’s office. Its only contents were a big white table with four metal legs and four angular-looking metal chairs. On the desk was a slightly thicker-than-normal briefcase.

  “Is that what I think it is?” I asked, feeling both shock and relief wash over me at the same time. If they had a portable STU unit right here, all I had to do was navigate them to the root menu, and the jig would be up for the STU Corporation. This was amazing.

  “It is,” New Guy replied.

  He walked over to the table, opened up the briefcase, and removed two STU Hats from it.

  “Let me just boot it up, and we’ll see if you can do your thing,” he said. “But first,” he said, as I heard the door close behind me. Mr. Wallwork apparently hadn’t followed us in. “Don’t you think your life would be a heck of a lot easier if you just didn’t know this information?”

  Well, that was kind of a weird question. “Yeah,” I said. “It would be, but—”

  He raised a hand to cut me off. “What if I told you that we could just pluck that little bit of information out of your brain, same for your girlfriend here?” he said, gesturing to Annie. “Then the two of you could go back about your business, like nothing ever happened.”

  What? What was he talking about?

  “What I’m saying is,” New Guy continued, “if what you’re saying is true, there are probably a lot of really powerful people out there who wouldn’t exactly want that type of information to get out.”

  Right. I was with him so far.

  “There’s a lot of money in the STU business,” he continued. “All of you Donors make good money for what amounts to pretty easy work. The government makes good money off their additional ten percent tax on STU transfers and, well,” he paused, broke eye contact for a few seconds before locking back onto my eyes, and said, “let’s face it, the Union makes a lot of money off of the way things are too.”

  Huh? Oh . . . crap.

  I looked to Annie, as she said, “They already know.”

  Then, laughter. Genuine, inappropriate laughter. It was New Guy.

  “You two look like you’ve just seen the Grim Reaper.” He laughed again. “It’s no big deal. Really. I wasn’t kidding about helping you to forget you ever knew about any of this. All you have to do is put on this little STU Hat, I press a couple of buttons, and all your troubles go away.”

  “Yeah, but, it doesn’t work like that,” I said.

  “Of course it does,” New Guy said with a renewed smile. “Listen, you don’t want this information. So long as you know what you think you know, the STU Corporation will be after you, the government will be after you. People with limitless resources will be after you. This way,” he said, picking up the STU Hat again and holding it out toward me, “I tell them you’ve forgotten, and everyone lets you be.”

  “Yeah,” I replied. “But like I said, the STU unit doesn’t work like that.”

  “How do you know?” he asked, losing every trace of friendliness, feigned or not.

  “I, unfortunately, know exactly how that machine works,” I said. “You can take some skills out of my head. You can even remove my knowledge of how to work that machine, but you can’t remove the information I have about what it does. That’s just a memory now. The only way you could do that is—” I looked at Annie, my eyes widening as realization hit me. “No.”

  “What?” Annie asked with fear in her voice.

  “No,” I said again, looking at New Guy. “You can’t make us.”

  “What?” Annie asked again with increased alarm.

  “He could override the STU’s passive memory lock-out and send so much memory back and forth between my brain and yours that nothing would make any sense anymore. It’d be like a brain scramble.”

  Annie looked horrified.

  “It’s either that,” New Guy says, “or I could just shoot ya.” He pulled a small gun from a holster I hadn’t even spotted till now and pointed it at me, and then at Annie.

  I instinctively put my hands up in the air, but as I did so, I felt my PCD vibrating in my pants pocket, which, in combination with the sound of a car horn from outside, triggered a sort of déjà vu for me.

  “Duck,” I said to Annie.

  She threw herself to the floor at the same moment I did . . . and then . . . nothing happened.

  I looked up to see an expression of supreme befuddlement on the face of New Guy.

  “What are you two idiots doing on the gr—”

  His question was interrupted by a concussion that literally shook the entire room, maybe even the whole building. I looked up to see the front half of a Mag Dump Truck sticking through the wall of the room. The big beast dump trucks were given Mag tech here in New York City, as to not jam up traffic on the already overcrowded streets of Manhattan, but they apparently also made pretty good battering rams.

  New Guy had been knocked from his feet but was already up on one knee, firing wildly at the Mag Truck. I lost track of how many times he fired, but eventually, I saw that the slide of his gun had locked back, indicating that he was out of bullets. As he reached into a pocket, a single shot came from the Mag Truck, and New Guy fell flat on his back with a stain of red starting to blossom from his chest. It was Frank. He jumped the eight feet or so from the driver’s seat to the ground and shouted, “Come on!”

  He reached up to grab a hold of the retractable ladder, which he’d originally forgone in his leap out of the truck, but just then, the room erupted with the sound of gunfire again.

  One, two, three shots came from . . . I had no idea where. My eyes had been on Frank. He stumbled briefly, but then drew and fired his weapon again in our direction, and then the gunfire stopped.

  “Frank!” Annie yelled.

  Frank sagged against the ladder, then fell down to one knee.

  “He’s hit,” Annie said as she got up and rushed over to him.

  I stood and took two steps toward Frank, but he looked up at me and said in a ragged voice, “Block the door.”

  Only then did I realize that the gunfire that had hit him had come from the doorway of the room. Looking back, I saw a man I did not recognize lying half in the doorway and appearing to be pretty dead. I first kind of shoved him with my foot, then bent down and pushed him out into the hallway and slammed the door behind him.

  “Crap.” There was no way to lock the door from the inside.

  The only piece of furniture in the room was the huge white table, and I had no idea if I’d be able to slide that thing all the way over to the door in order to use it as a wedge. I ran over to the big table, placed my hands on one side of it, then had an idea. I jogged back over to the door, took my PCD out of my pocket, and scanned it over the metal door handle. Accessing a nifty little program on my PCD I’d never even known existed before, I was able to connect with the keypad of the door, lock it, and reset the combination.

  “Cool,” I said out loud, thinking to myself that this Dr. Kertzenh
eim guy had some pretty awesome skills with the PCD. Why wouldn’t he, though? He basically invented the thing.

  “Alden!” Annie called to me from across the room. The plaster and wood beneath where the Mag Truck was stuck in the wall was making a rather alarming series of cracking noises. Frank had obviously driven the Mag Truck along the Mag Rail but jumped off of it when turning the truck into the building. The only thing holding it up off the ground now was the fading strength of that wall itself.

  I ran over to Annie and took a knee next to her and Frank.

  “How’d you know we were in trouble?” I asked Frank, only noticing at the very end of my question that his entire stomach was dark red with blood.

  “Our PCDs are paired to each other,” he said with a smile, followed by a racking cough. “There was a feature on mine that allowed me to hear everything that was happening on your end.”

  That’s not cool, I thought, briefly offended by the invasion of my privacy. PCDs weren’t supposed to work like that. They were only supposed to be able to pair to external media devices, like headphones or a larger display. They weren’t supposed to pair to each other unless both parties explicitly agreed to do so. Then, a different part of my brain realized that it was actually cool, because it had just saved our lives.

  Frank turned to the side, spit up some blood, and said, “You guys gotta get out of here.”

  “What about you?” Annie asked, as banging started to come from the door behind us.

  “You’ve got like thirty seconds before they give up on that door and come running around the outside of the building to come in this way,” he said, gesturing to the truck sticking out of the wall a short distance behind him. Just then, the cracking noise of the wall began to intensify. Without thinking, I grabbed Frank by the shoulders and pulled him farther into the room, all the while calling for Annie to follow us.

  The wall collapsed, and the truck slammed down onto the ground with enough force to actually make me bounce off the ground.