The Skill Conspiracy

by Pete Gustin

  I poked around in the menu of my own PCD for a little while, until I found a little application right there on the main screen that I hadn’t noticed before. “PAIR” it said inside an icon with a little pear in it. That was cute. I thought-commanded the program to open, and a little dialogue came up telling me that it was connecting to the paired PCD. Sure enough, a moment later I saw the main screen on Annie’s PCD activate as if she’d unlocked it by pressing her thumb to the screen. Now, the PCD of my own screen was split. Two-thirds of the screen showed me what was on my own device, and the other third was a direct mirror of what was on Annie’s PCD. Along the bottom were icons indicating that I could activate the microphone or the camera on Annie’s PCD, and another one marked “TRACK.” I thought-commanded that one to open, and it brought up a little map on my main screen, showing me a tiny little dot that I’m assuming represented the location of Annie’s PCD. In order to test this out, I got up and took Annie’s PCD up toward the front of the plane. Leaving it there, I went back to my seat, checked my own screen, and saw that the little dot was indeed a tiny bit farther away than it had been before I moved it. I stood up and spun around in a slow circle, watching the dot move around with me, showing the direction of Annie’s PCD in relation to which way I was facing.

  “Cool,” I said quietly.

  Frank had said that these two units were untraceable and untrackable, and that was because all of their GPS functionality had been turned off. That made it so that you couldn’t use the units to give you directions or use them to locate things near your vicinity because technically, the units had no idea where they were. Consequently, no one looking for them would be able to find where they were. This pairing function, however, was going to allow Annie and me to keep in touch and keep track of one another, no matter what. If we got separated, we could just call each other and ask for the other’s location, but without GPS, this little tracking feature could actually be pretty handy. I guess my only question now was, how good was the range on this pairing? Was it only a couple hundred yards like it would be for a paired set of headphones, or was it unlimited? I felt like I should have been able to figure this out, but then I remembered that Dr. K had given the PCDs to Frank after our skill transfer at STU Midtown had taken place, so I could only assume it was something he’d done more recently. I had to wonder what else these things could do.

  No sooner had that thought crossed my mind than a big, huge wave of sleepiness finally washed over me, so I got up and walked over to that cool little leather couch that was along the wall opposite where Annie was sleeping in her seat. I stretched out on it, my legs hanging halfway off the edge, and noticed a screen up on the ceiling directly in my line of view.

  “Cool,” I said to myself, for like the third time about this plane. What? It was cool.

  I grabbed my PCD, thought-commanded one of the local New York TV channels to come up, and then paired the device to the screen mounted on the ceiling, which showed me the feed. I kept the volume routed to my PCD, put it next to my head, and turned the volume way down so Annie wouldn’t hear it. I kept my eyes open for a little bit, watching some program about some new local restaurants in the Village and eventually started to doze off.

  “The identity of the man with the gun has been confirmed to be Alden Heath,” I heard from the speakers built into my PCD as I lay there, almost completely asleep.

  “Huh?” I grumbled out loud, waking up sharply.

  “The woman with him is Annie Crown. The identity of the wounded man they helped to the car has not been released, and his status is unknown at this time.”

  “Annie,” I said louder than I intended, now completely awake.

  “What?” she choked out as she jerked awake in her seat.

  “Look at this,” I said, unpairing my PCD from the screen on the ceiling and pairing it to the first wall-mounted screen I saw, which was directly behind Annie’s seat, across from the little table.

  Annie was facing the wrong way to see it, so she had to spin around on her chair, sitting on her knees, with her elbows on the headrest. At first, it was just the news anchor saying some filler stuff, and Annie gave me a what-the-hell? look, until a picture of her own face came up on the screen, and she actually said, “What the hell?” out loud. I walked over to stand next to her and let her listen to the audio feed coming quietly out of my PCD.

  The video of me waving the gun around seemed to be on a loop, as the anchorwoman was talking. Then, they showed video taken from inside the Union Hall. It must have come from a security camera or something. That looked even worse. It didn’t bother to show Frank shooting the guy who had come in through the door. Instead, it just showed me kicking his dead body back out into the hallway and closing the door.

  “They made it look like I just kicked the guy to death,” I said to Annie, forgetting my own rule about staying quiet.

  She just sat there with her arms folded over the headrest with an expression like she’d just swallowed a rotten piece of tuna fish.

  The report mercifully ended, and I did a little channel surfing to see who else was covering the story. I quickly came across the tail end of a similar version of the story being told on another local New York channel, but as I made my way up to the national news outlets, I couldn’t seem to find it anywhere. That was good . . . I hoped.

  I looked down at my PCD and did a quick search online to see where else the story was showing up. It appeared to be the same way on the internet. A handful of local New York websites were covering it and telling the local public to be on the lookout for these “armed and dangerous individuals,” but I didn’t find anything national about it. I decided that was definitely good, and probably did make sense. Because it was happening to us, and it was all going so horribly wrong, I kind of expected a worldwide APB to be put out on us and for a huge worldwide manhunt to be launched. As bad as the crime was, though—or at least, as bad as it looked on TV—it was just a local New York story, so hopefully that’s where it would stay. For a little while at least.

  I had just finished convincing myself of this and was about to try to run it by Annie when I noticed that the plane was starting to make a rather long and subtle turn to the left.

  “Oh no,” I said out loud.

  “What?” Annie asked.

  I pressed on the little button that was supposed to summon Jenny and waited a moment. Nothing happened, so I pressed it again. Nothing.

  “What are you doing?” Annie asked again, both annoyed and worried.

  “They’re turning the plane around,” I said.

  “Why?” Annie asked, horrified.

  “Why do you think?” I asked a little less kindly than I meant to.

  I grabbed my PCD again and thought-commanded the first local New York news channel we’d been watching to come back up on the screen in the cabin. Sure enough, they had strung together a montage of little snippets of the two of us running through the airport on our way to the private gate. Chief amongst the clips was one of Annie in the jewelry shop, removing her generic Shadez and trying on the designer pair. She was looking right at the camera. Like, right at it.

  “Oh my God,” she said. “It was a mirror. I was looking into a mirror. That wasn’t a camera. At least, I didn’t know it was.”

  “Yeah. It was apparently a mirror with a really high-resolution security camera built into it,” I said.

  Her head flopped down onto her forearms that were still folded atop the headrest of the seat she was kneeling backwards on.

  “It’s okay,” I said, feeling bad about my previously accusatory tone. As I said it, I pressed the little “SERVICE” button a couple more times, trying to get Jenny to come out. Still, nothing.

  The plane kept banking, and I had a feeling Captain George was taking it extra super wide in hopes that we wouldn’t notice that the plane was turning around. It was kind of obvious, so I had no idea how he thought he could possibly sneak it past us—maybe if we were sleeping? The plane was turning. That was a
fact, and the only thing I didn’t know was how far we’d gone and where they’d force us to land. Were they going to take us back to New York, or force a landing at the nearest airport?

  Looking at my PCD, I saw that it had been just over three hours and forty minutes since we’d taken off. I quickly navigated to a little app that showed how far you could travel in any given amount of time by car, plane, or train, and selected “jet.” I set the start location as New York City and hit “GO.” Instantly, a light blue circle came up over the little map I was looking at and, assuming Captain George had indeed been flying us south this whole time, it looked like we could possibly be just south of Florida and the Florida Keys.

  That made sense, because looking out one of the windows, I saw nothing below us but wide open ocean.

  “Are you sure they’re taking us back?” Annie asked.

  “Yeah,” I said, noticing for the first time a little display screen next to the cockpit door showing our current airspeed, direction, and position on a map.

  Wish I’d noticed that a minute ago. Could have saved myself the trouble of doing that whole Web search about travel time and air speed.

  Anyway, we were definitely heading north now, coming back up toward Florida very shortly.

  “Hey!” Annie said, bolting off of her seat, bounding over to the cockpit and knocking on the door. “Hey! It’s not what it looks like. It’s—”

  I hurried over to her and gently took a hold of her arm to stop her from knocking on the door.

  “What are you doing?” she asked me, trying to free her arm and keep banging.

  “Captain George and Ms. Short Sk—uh, Jenny—were probably just told that they had two armed and dangerous criminals on their plane. The door’s obviously locked, and the more you bang on it, the more likely it is one or the both of them are probably gonna pee their pants.”

  “But we’re not dangerous cr—” she started to say, then let out a long sigh and nodded. “You’re right. So, what are we gonna do?”

  The words “I don’t know” were already formed and ready to come tumbling out of my mouth, but I instinctively did a quick survey of our surroundings before spitting them out. Seats, couch, table, mini-fridge, closet. Hey . . . closet. What’s in the closet?

  Near the back of the cabin was a door for the micro-sized bathroom, but in front of that was another door. I opened it, and laughed.

  “What?” Annie asked.

  I laughed harder.

  “What?” Annie asked, caught halfway between being annoyed and wanting to laugh along with me.

  “I think I know how to use one of these,” I said, pulling a parachute off of the top shelf in the little closet.

  14

  “Wheeeeeeee!”

  I’m pretty sure no one actually said “Wheeeee” when they were jumping out of a plane in an attempt to avoid being captured by the law, but I was just trying to get Annie to not be so insanely horrified and petrified so, yeah. “Wheeeeeeeee!”

  There was more than one parachute in the little closet, but seeing as how Annie hadn’t exactly ever done this before, I figured a tandem jump would be the smarter, and hopefully safer, way to go. Unlike Frank, who had rescued me from STU Midtown with a ready-to-go tandem rig, I kind of had to improvise something by using a few pieces from one of the other packs and a strap from one of those seat belt extensions that plus-sized people had to use in airplanes.

  “Ahhhhhhhhh!”

  That was Annie. I guess I didn’t really get her on board with the “Wheeee!”

  I kind of always thought there would be some sort of a safety mechanism in place so that you couldn’t accidentally open the door of a plane while it was in flight, but apparently not. I’d popped that sucker and taken the plunge just as soon as the little display on the wall next to the cockpit showed that we were back over some land. My plan was actually to do a water landing, but within sight of land. I knew that doing a tandem jump on a chute that was meant for just one would result in a relatively fast and thus painful landing if we were to hit solid ground so, yeah, I was aiming for water.

  Good thing the ocean is so huge. Bad thing I didn’t have any real experience to go along with the skydiving skills Frank had passed along.

  “Ahhhhhhhhh!”

  That was me this time.

  The moment we’d jumped out of the plane, I knew we were going fast, but there was really no perspective to the speed. That is, until I looked over and saw a group of clouds nearby whizzing vertically past me so much faster than I thought they would be. We had jumped from almost three times higher than a normal recreational jump. Fun dives would be at about fourteen thousand feet. We were close to forty thousand. It was cold. I couldn’t really breathe, and to make matters worse, Annie’s flailing elbows kept catching me in the ribs. Now I knew how Frank felt when I’d been doing that to him.

  “Ahhhhhhh!”

  That was both of us this time.

  I looked down and spotted land. Knowing it was time to pull the chord, I tried to yell at Annie in order to give her a warning, but that was more than useless. You couldn’t hear anything up here except for the sound of the wind rushing past our ears.

  THWUMP!

  That was the sound of the parachute catching the air and filling to its full spread.

  “Hrrrrrp!”

  That was the sound of my stomach trying to come out of my mouth and me just barely keeping it down.

  If I’d been alone, I would have been able to slow down to about seventeen miles per hour, but with the two of us hooked up on this one chute, we were definitely going to be coming in a little hot.

  There was water below and a beach a little ways off, but I was having a really hard time judging distance. My best guess told me we were going to be farther from the beach than I’d ideally wanted to be, and that we’d have to do quite a bit of swimming in order to make it ashore.

  “Alden,” Annie said in a kind of what-are-you-going-to-do tone.

  “I know,” I said. “I’ll get us closer.”

  She wasn’t what you’d call an awesome swimmer, and I knew she was nervous about how far away from land we were.

  I pulled the steering lines as hard as I could to get us going forward toward the shore. It worked. I could tell right away we’d be able to get a lot closer to shore than I’d originally thought, but with the speed we were still traveling, I wanted us to drop into some relatively deep water.

  At about a couple hundred yards off shore and maybe seventy or a hundred feet above the water, I started pulling on the toggles in a way that would flare the chute, in essence, put on the brakes. It helped, but we were still really heavy and falling way too fast.

  I warned Annie that I was going to let her go, and then pulled the tab on the fat-guy seat belt extension that I’d pirated from the plane to use as a fastener between the two of us. We instantly separated, and she plummeted toward the water. A moment later I pulled on the cutaway handle on the right side of my vest, which instantly separated me from the chute. Funny how I thought I’d been falling quickly before. The sudden burst of downward acceleration almost made me choke on my tongue. It had to be done, though. I didn’t think it would be wise to splash down into the ocean with all of these ropes and lines tangling about me.

  Free from the chute, I only experienced the sensation of free fall for a moment before that sensation was replaced with another one—pain. I had somehow managed to belly flop into the warm ocean water and had the air knocked right out of me. Now, beneath the surface of the water, I quickly figured out which way was up, kicked my feet, pulled at the sea with my arms, and came up spluttering.

  “Alden!” I heard Annie calling as I gulped in my first big breath of air . . . and some water.

  “Hey,” I called out, coughing and not yet seeing where she was.

  “I’m over here,” she said, her voice coming from directly behind me.

  I spun around to see her head bopping up and down atop the gentle undulation of the water and too
k a few strokes over to her.

  “You okay?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” she replied, looking surprisingly calm for someone who had just fallen nearly forty thousand feet. “You?” she asked.

  “I’m good,” I replied, wondering why my face seemed to sting, then realizing that my spectacular belly flop had caused the ocean to basically slap me right in the face. That was going to leave a mark.

  Looking past her, I could see that we were only about a hundred yards from shore.

  “Can you make it?” I asked her.

  “Yeah, but I think I gotta ditch this dumb hoodie.”

  She wriggled out of the souvenir shirt and let it sit there in the water next to her.

  “You want me to grab it and—”

  “No, thanks,” she replied, cutting me off.

  Right. She kinda hated the thing in the first place. Looked like this would be its final resting place, a watery grave.

  My own shirt, while nicer in appearance, and I’m sure far more expensive, was also not going to be very easy to swim in. Pretty sure if I took one more stroke in the thing, I’d either rip off half the buttons or just tear it apart at the armpits. I removed the backpack I was wearing and let it float next to me, then began to undo every button of the shirt. I peeled off the tapered garment and, unlike Annie, kept a hold of it for later use.

  Grabbing hold of the pack I’d just let go of, I unzipped a side pocket and removed a much smaller bag that contained both of our PCDs and Shadez. I didn’t think I’d need the big pack any more, plus, I really didn’t wanna swim with it, so I just let that go and started swimming.

  After only about thirty yards I looked toward the shore and saw that a couple people were standing right at the edge of the beach and pointing at us. A few more yards of us swimming in their direction and I was able to see that they were pointing either video cameras or PCDs at us.

  “Crap,” I said out loud. “Annie!”