The Skill Conspiracy

by Pete Gustin

  She couldn’t hear me over her ungraceful splash-style swimming.

  “Annie!” I called again.

  “What?” she said, looking annoyed that I had to interrupt her stroke.

  “People,” I said, pointing to the shore.

  “So?”

  I opened up the little baggie with our Shadez in them and told her to put hers on.

  I was pretty sure that all of the water being splashed all around us was going to make it very difficult for any facial recognition software to work, but the closer we got to those cameras, the more I knew we’d need to have their masking technology in place.

  “Ah, crap,” I said.

  “What now?” she asked, getting annoyed.

  “One of my lenses popped out,” I said, after putting on my Shadez and realizing that only half the world was darker than before I’d donned the glasses.

  “Do they still work as facial recognition scrambles?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” I said. “The technology is in the arm of the glasses, but—”

  “Then shut up and start swimming,” she interrupted as she splashed on ahead of me.

  The closer we got to shore, the more people were gathering, apparently waiting to intercept us upon arrival. Being of the swim trunk and bikini-wearing variety of person, I didn’t think that any of these people were members of local law enforcement.

  “Miss your landing spot?” one of the men in the crowd called out as Annie and I made it to water shallow enough that we could stand and start wading our way into shore.

  “Yeah,” Annie replied before I could think of a response. “Smart Guy over here promises to take me for my first tandem dive and dumps us in the water instead of on the beach he’d promised me.”

  She said all this with a smile and a laugh that caused not a few people in the crowd to join in on the laughter, with a couple more of them adding in, “Way to go” and “Good job, buddy.”

  I was a little embarrassed, but it was obviously a much better story than the truth.

  Having had their fun, the crowd dispersed, and I was sure at least one of them was going to post the video they just captured online. Asking them not to do it would have made them want to do it even more, so I just let it happen but knew that we had to come up with a plan for getting off this little island fast.

  15

  In speaking to someone on the beach, Annie learned that we’d apparently landed on Vaca Key. I wasn’t fluent in Spanish, but I knew a few words here and there, and, of course, how to order a beer and ask where the bathroom was, but I did know that vaca meant cow, and that seemed like a really weird name for an island to me. Then again, I think there’s a place in Florida called Boca Raton, which someone once told me means “Rat’s Mouth.” So . . . there is that.

  Anyway, we needed to get off of Cow Island pretty fast. I’m fairly certain that Captain George would have relayed the exact moment we ditched out of the plane to whoever had been telling him to turn around, so the people looking for us would obviously have a pretty good idea of where they should start their search. If the video of us parachuting down into the water didn’t just get sent in a message from one friend to another and instead got posted for anyone to see on the World Wide Web, well, we needed to find a fast boat out of here sooner rather than later.

  As we walked up off the beach and toward what I hoped was a road, I asked a woman passing by, “Hey, do you know where the nearest boatyard is?”

  She shook her head and kept on walking.

  “Boatyard?” I asked, turning to Annie. “Is that what you call it?”

  “No,” she said. “I think it’s called a marina.”

  “Oh, right. Hey,” I said to the next man who came walking past us in a big Hawaiian shirt and brown leather sandals. “You know where the nearest marina is?”

  “They have a glass-bottom boat tour just up the way a little bit,” he said, waving a meaty hand in the general direction of the shoreline.

  “Thanks,” I replied, trying to sound genuine in my appreciation, despite the fact that his information was pretty useless.

  “I think we just need to ask a local,” Annie said. “These tourists aren’t very helpful.”

  “Is that a thing?” I asked. “Do they actually have locals here, or is everyone just on vacation?”

  “I’d assume some people have to live here,” she replied.

  A thought came unbidden into my mind that I should probably take a minute to switch the identities on our PCDs again. It was Jake Kline and Sophia Bowers who had purchased the tickets for the airplane we’d just bailed out of, so it was a safe bet that those names would be popping up on any of the police dragnets, along with Alden Heath and Annie Crown. I quickly explained to Annie what I wanted to do and asked for her PCD. Within just a couple of minutes, we were Randy James and Melissa Gray. This was now the second time that I’d done this, but it struck me all over again how insanely easy it was to steal an identity, if you had the know-how. I mean, that was literally one of the main reasons these things were invented. They were supposed to make this exact kind of thing impossible. I guess it really shouldn’t be all that surprising. I bet that the “people in the know” did this sort of thing all the time. All of us peons, selling our skills, wiping our brains, using our real identities, and playing by the rules, while the people at the top got to do whatever they wanted, when they wanted to, and to whomever they wanted to do it. Just thinking about it made me angry and helped fuel my desire to expose the STU Corporation for the slime balls they were.

  “Done,” I said, handing Annie back her PCD. “You’re Melissa, and I’m Randy.”

  “Who are these people, anyway?” Annie asked.

  “Well, they’re us,” I replied.

  “No,” she said. “I mean, who are they, really?”

  “From what I can tell, and it’s just a bit of an educated guess at this point, they look to be the Identities of people who are within a find friends range of the PCD. By following the right sequence of commands, I’m able to find their devices and clone all of their identifiers onto our devices.”

  “So Melissa and Randy are actual real people who are probably here on this island somewhere?” Annie asked.

  “Probably,” I replied. “This island or maybe the next one over, depending on how close it is and depending on what the range of the PCD is.”

  “That’s weird,” she said, giving a quick little headshake.

  I looked up to notice that the little beach path we had been walking upon had come to an end, and we’d found ourselves on one side of a skinny little road with no homes, businesses, or building of any kind in sight.

  “Great,” I muttered.

  “Which way?” Annie asked, and I just picked a direction and started walking.

  A couple minutes up the road, we found a ramshackle wooden structure that vaguely resembled what you might call a beach hut, but it also resembled a pile of wood and nails. In the little parking lot out front there was a motorcycle and a pickup truck that had almost as much rust on the bed as it did metal. A little plastic sign above the door of the place said BEER.

  “What is this place?” Annie asked me, seeming slightly skeeved out.

  “Not sure,” I replied. “But they apparently have beer.”

  Beer sounded good. It actually sounded really good. Now that the idea of beer had popped into my head, I was actually thinking that maybe like eight of them sounded pretty good.

  “You can have two,” Annie said, apparently reading my mind.

  “Thanks, Mom,” I said sarcastically.

  “When we’re not running from the law, you can have as many as you like. And I don’t know about you, but I’m hungry.”

  The idea of food did also sound pretty good, so, after finding a nice sunny spot to stand in and dry off a little bit, I put my shirt back on and entered the Beer Shack. The place didn’t actually seem to have a front door, just an opening where a door should have been. Inside, it was dark, kind of sweaty
, and mostly empty except for a few bar stools scattered along a bar on the far wall opposite where we’d just come in. Annie and I each grabbed a stool and were surprised when a man who had previously been obscured by a shadow at the far end of the bar spoke up.

  “Nice glasses,” said the sun-dyed man, who was wearing a yellow wife beater tee that I’m sure at one point in ancient history used to be white as he looked at my face.

  “Oh crap,” I muttered out loud, remembering that one of the lenses to my Shadez had popped off during our flight back to Earth.

  I dug into the little bag that had contained the PCDs and glasses and found the lens on the bottom. I took it out, wiped it on my mostly dry shirt, and popped it back into the frame.

  Without expression, Mr. Dirty Shirt asked us, “What’ll it be?”

  I’m guessing he was the bartender.

  “Beer,” I said at the same moment Annie said, “Food.”

  “Both,” Annie added.

  Mr. Dirty Shirt tossed one laminated menu down on the bar between the two of us. As I reached to pick it up, I kind of had to peel it off the top of the bar. It was sticky, just like everything else in here, and since there was only one, I had to hold it up so that both of us could see it. I tried not to laugh, and Annie looked like she was just about ready to get up and leave because the entire food menu consisted of only four things:

  Hamburger

  Cheeseburger

  Hot Dog

  Chips

  “And we’re out of cheese,” Mr. Dirty Shirt said as he turned to walk down to the other end of the bar. As I watched him make his way in that direction, I realized that the weird shadows in this place had actually been obscuring yet another man. This one had been sitting quietly on the customer side of the bar just like us, and while I couldn’t see his face because he was turned mostly away from us, I could see that he was wearing an old, ripped pair of jeans, a loose-fitting black T-shirt and had long, scraggly dark hair flecked with gray. I was literally sitting there staring at him, trying to figure out if he was the owner of the pickup truck or the motorcycle I’d seen out in the lot when it dawned on me that I should probably stop staring at him like a weirdo and maybe actually try to say something.

  “Hey,” was my opening gambit.

  He didn’t respond.

  “What’s good here?” I asked, kind of half-joking because, you know, the menu was so insanely small.

  “I’m busy,” he responded in a low growl of a voice.

  “Oh?” I said, for some reason being incapable of taking a hint.

  “Yeah,” he said, turning his head in my direction for the first time. “Playing Keno.”

  There was no Keno in here. There wasn’t even a single screen, and as far as I could tell, he wasn’t even on his PCD.

  “Okay, then,” I said mostly to myself, then turned my attention back to the bartender. “So what do you have on tap?” I asked him.

  Without responding, he bent down beneath the bar and pulled up a big blue-and-white cooler.

  A cooler?

  He opened the top and tilted the whole thing my way so I could see inside. I didn’t exactly feel like it would be cool for me to start rummaging around in the thing looking for a bottle I recognized, let alone liked, so I just plunged my hand in and grabbed the first bottle I could find amongst the ice and water. As I did, the label fell right off of it, probably because most of the ice had melted long ago, and it had just been sitting there soaking in a cooler full of water for God knows how long.

  “You?” Mr. Dirty Shirt said, angling the cooler toward Annie.

  “I’ll just take a water,” she replied.

  “Don’t got any,” came the reply.

  “Okay, then,” Annie said, reaching her hand in and grabbing a bottle with a label. Didn’t help. I’d never heard of it before.

  “And food?” Mr. Dirty Shirt asked.

  “Burger,” I said.

  “Same,” Annie added.

  Thankfully, the bartender turned to a refrigerator behind him and reached into the freezer section to pull out two pre-packaged patties.

  Wait, if he had a refrigerator, why the heck was the beer in a cooler?

  I could tell it was taking all of Annie’s self-control not to run screaming out of this place. We really didn’t have the time to go looking for something else, and I knew that was the only reason she was still attached to her stool. Plus, I was pretty sure we’d found ourselves a local.

  “You know where the nearest marina is?” I asked.

  “For what?” Mr. Dirty Shirt replied, holding both of our frozen burger patties in his bare hands.

  “Looking to buy a boat,” I said.

  He turned around and opened the door behind him that looked like it led outside.

  I gave Annie a very confused look as he turned and walked out the door without saying a word.

  “What kind?” I heard him ask from out back.

  “A, uh, seaworthy one, I guess. We’re looking to take a trip,” I called to him through the door.

  I heard the sound of a grill being scraped and then smelled lighter fluid.

  A few seconds later he walked back in and asked, “Where to?”

  “Not sure yet,” I replied, at the same instant Annie said, “Colombia.”

  Oh no.

  I tried not to look upset with her, but telling anyone where we were going was not smart, which seemed like a fact I wouldn’t have to specify to her, after all we had already been through.

  Mr. Dirty Shirt didn’t so much as bat an eye, but Biker Guy—I’d decided the guy at the other end of the bar was the one who owned the motorcycle—actually turned his head to look at us.

  “Colombia,” the bartender said flatly as he turned back around to walk out the back door again.

  “It’s just a thought,” I said to him, trying to sound nonchalant as I heard him working the grill.

  Biker Guy returned his gaze to nowhere in particular but eventually did pull a PCD out of his pocket and started messing with it. The paranoid part of my brain had a little panic attack thinking that he somehow knew who we were and was telling the police where we were, while the rational part of my brain told me this guy didn’t exactly look like the kind who would be phoning in helpful tips to the police. Meanwhile, the primal part of my brain was telling me I was really hungry, and even if this guy was going to report us, I was still going to eat a hamburger before I made a mad dash out of here.

  Annie paid Biker Guy no mind and presently stood up on her stool, reached over the bar, and started to fish around for something that was apparently just out of sight. After a moment she pulled her arm back, holding a bottle opener.

  Oh yeah, the beer.

  She popped hers, then mine, and the two of us took a couple small, tentative sips. Then, deciding that the beers were not completely skunked, we tilted them back with a little more vigor.

  Eventually, Mr. Dirty Shirt came back in with two burgers on one paper plate.

  “Help yourself,” he said, nodding to the bottle opener Annie had left on top of the bar.

  “Sorry,” I said as I swallowed my last gulp of warm beer.

  “Another?” he asked as he nodded to my empty bottled and put the paper plate down between the two of us.

  “Sure,” I responded.

  Annie picked up her burger and gave me a look. Her eyes were asking, “Are you sure this is safe?”. In reply, I grabbed my burger and took a big, meaty bite. I was starving, and it had been frozen, right? Frozen beef stays good for, I don’t know, forever? I wasn’t sure.

  Mr. Dirty Shirt opened up the cooler and took out a beer of his choosing for me. Maybe it was the same as the last one. Maybe not, I couldn’t really tell. He popped the top and said, “There’s only one marina on the island. The Vaca Docks, and it’s up the road about a mile or so.”

  “Just the one?” Annie asked between dainty nibbles of her burger.

  “Tiny island,” the bartender said in response.

 
I finished my burger, and Annie finished about as much as she was going to eat of hers, and I thought about staying for another beer, or maybe just to see if my stomach was going to revolt against this food, but realizing that this place apparently didn’t even have a bathroom anyway, it seemed kind of pointless.

  “How much?” I asked Mr. Dirty Shirt.

  “Fifty bucks,” he replied without missing a beat.

  Really? Three beers and two frozen patty burgers added up to fifty bucks? Whatever. I took out my PCD and held it out for a moment, waiting for him to hold his out so I could do the transfer.

  He sighed, walked out from behind the bar, and disappeared out the front entrance. A moment later, I heard a squeaky door open, then slam shut.

  “Ha,” I said quietly.

  “What?” Annie asked.

  “I knew the truck was his.”

  She shook her head at me.

  Mr. Dirty Shirt walked back in, held out his PCD, let me do the transfer, and then walked back behind the bar.

  And that seemed to be it for the conversation, as Mr. Dirty Shirt just stood there looking at us, and Biker Guy had returned to staring at the wall. Annie and I got up and walked toward the doorless opening in front.

  “This way?” I asked, pointing left.

  “That way,” Mr. Dirty Shirt replied, pointing in the other direction. The direction we’d just come from. Figured.

  16

  The beach on this little island was gorgeous. It was filled with that soft white sand that makes you feel like you’re walking on silk. The fronds of the palm trees looked like they’d been set to swaying in a perfect rhythm you might only otherwise see in some animated kids’ movie. From the start of the beach to the edge of the clear blue-green water, this place was a paradise. Everything on the interior of the island, though, as evidenced by the Beer Shack we’d just been at, was gross. The road we were walking along now, if you wanted to call it a road, had probably been paved once about a hundred years ago, and had been left to bake, crack, and crumble under the Florida sun for the rest of its existence. The handful of homes we passed along the way looked more like something you’d see on a TV infomercial full of little kids who “need your help.” I remembered hearing something on some TV show a little while back about the coastal property value of the Keys tanking, due to the fact that water levels were rising, and most of the coastal property today would be the underwater nothing of tomorrow. I hadn’t really thought about how that would impact the local area until I was seeing it for myself right now.