The Skill Conspiracy

by Pete Gustin

  “Yeah,” I said and nodded, not sure if she was looking for a good review or something.

  Apparently already aware that we had come up here with no bags and no belongings whatsoever, Gabby simply Velcro-stepped her way across our tiny little room, opened the door, and offered to lead the way. No sooner had the three of us stepped out into the hallway than the old Aussie and his daughter-aged girlfriend appeared from around the bend.

  “Oy,” he called out. “Where you all headed?”

  “Early departure,” Annie said.

  “But the good news is,” I chimed in, “that we’ll be taking your advice on The Flyer, and we’ll be taking one of those back down to the ground.”

  “Aw, jealous,” the man said with a big grin.

  “I thought you were taking a Flyer down to Mahi Mahi?” I said.

  “Bora Bora,” he replied. “But that’s tomorrow. Now’s now, and I’m jealous right now.”

  The man was wearing his usual big grin, but his girlfriend was looking at me with an odd expression. I pondered it for just a moment and realized that it was just as likely she was looking at me funny because we were leaving this once-in-a-lifetime and amazingly expensive vacation early as it was that she’d seen our faces on the TV and recognized us. In fact, it was probably more likely that she just thought we were weird for leaving, but it once again reinforced the decision I’d made to get us off this thing as soon as possible.

  The two of them rip-rip-ripped past us, and we set off in the other direction, back toward where the Elevator had deposited us and where the Flyers were stored.

  There was no skill transfer needed for this. No skill of any kind at all, apparently. All we had to do was let the crew strap us into the thing, and less than thirty minutes later we’d be getting greeted by a crew in Long Beach, California, next to the Queen Mary. We had asked to be sent directly down to Los Angeles, but apparently, they thought this was close enough. God forbid you pay a million dollars for a ride and they actually take you exactly where you want to go.

  “Front or back?” another short man in a staff shirt was asking me. I was feeling pretty sure they deliberately hired short people to work here because it somehow saved them money in weight-transport on the elevator.

  “Huh?” I asked.

  “Do you want to sit in the front or back?”

  I looked to Annie and she shrugged.

  “Both seats will essentially have the same view upon reentry,” Gabby said from up near the front of the craft. “As you can see, the rear seat is actually set up a little higher, so the view is completely unobstructed by the seat up front.”

  “Cool,” Annie said. “I’ll take the top seat, then.”

  “The one in the back?” the shorter man who had been speaking to me asked, just to confirm.

  “Yeah,” Annie said, looking at me to see if I had any objections.

  I did not.

  I hadn’t really looked very closely at the Flyers when they were attached to the side of the Elevator, but they were pretty cool little vehicles. It looked like someone took a really skinny Lamborghini and cross-bred it with the little space car that George Jetson from that really old cartoon used to fly around in. The exterior was gun-metal gray and actually had what looked to me like a black racing stripe down either side. Upon closer inspection, though, I’d realized that the “stripes” were actually strips of solar panels.

  With no further fanfare or instruction, we hopped up into the Flyer and began getting strapped in.

  “You guys might wanna take your glasses off for the first part of the ride,” the shorter gentleman suggested to us after he had tightened up the last harness. “It can be a little bumpy to get started.”

  “No, thanks,” I said. No way I was taking off my Shadez at this point.

  “They’re corrective lenses for both of us,” Annie said from behind me. “And I don’t think either of us wanna miss even a little bit of this.”

  “Okay,” the man replied. “But either make sure they’re on good and tight, or you keep a hand on ’em until you break through the atmosphere.”

  “How will we know when that happens?” I asked.

  “Well, for starters, the ride will get a lot smoother, and then, you see this little display panel in front of you?” he asked, reaching up into the cockpit and pointing at the little black screen right in front of me. “It’ll say, ‘atmosphere entered,’ once you reach the upper atmosphere.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Well then.” You really didn’t need to know anything to take this ride.

  The final checks were completed, the canopy of the vehicle came down, sealing us in, Gabby and her coworker exited the room, and a countdown began both on the screen in front of me and audibly through some speakers that were in the Flyer.

  Five, four, three, two, one.

  I was bracing to get launched out of the space station, then I realized when the countdown got to “one,” the only thing that happened was that the door to the bay we were in started to slide open.

  “Oh, right,” I said quietly. “We can’t exactly go shooting out into space if the door’s not open.”

  Annie didn’t reply to my vocalization, but I’m sure she knew I’d just realized I’d thought of something dumb and eventually figured it out on my own.

  The door opened, and we were left staring out at a view consisting half of the black emptiness of outer space speckled with tiny pinpricks of light from far-off stars, and half with the big blue-and-white globe of the Earth below.

  I felt the Flyer coming to life around me as the engines seemed to warm up in preparation for departure. Another little countdown began, and in three, two, one, I heard a clonk noise, and the Flyer came up off of the ground and started moving toward the open door.

  “This is awesome,” I heard Annie saying from just behind me.

  “Yeah. It is.”

  37

  We were on fire. Or at least, that’s what it looked like from my vantage point within the cockpit.

  “Whoooooa,” I heard Annie saying from behind me.

  We were in, what I would consider, to be the extra turbulent part of the ride, and it looked like a thin layer of fire had sprung up all around us on the exterior of the Flyer. Beyond the gossamer layer of flame, the surface of the Earth and the western coast of the United States was resolving into focus. Within a matter of moments, the flames melted away from our craft, and the bumpiness of the ride smoothed out considerably. For a moment, I could have sworn that the readout for our speed on the little monitor in front of me said just over seventeen thousand miles per hour, but that seemed crazy. Then again, the continent that had seemed so very far away just a moment earlier appeared to be getting closer and closer by the second.

  I think what I was looking at now was probably the lowermost part of California, maybe San Diego, or maybe even Mexico. Before I had time to really try to think about it, I felt a not sudden, but certainly noticeable deceleration as our downward movement seemed to level off and our lateral movement increased. As a result, the coastline began whizzing by, the ocean on our left and land on the right.

  “How’s your tummy, Alden?” Annie asked mockingly.

  “Actually, not bad,” I replied, and I wasn’t lying. Before today, this type of sudden and extreme movement would have had me reaching for the barf bag, but it seemed that our little trip to outer space had actually toughened me up a little bit.

  Annie laughed, and our little shuttle slowed even further, then rotated so that we were looking only at the land. We seemed to just be hanging in the air for a moment, then all lateral movement ceased, and the ship slowly started to descend. In front of us, a little bit off to the left was a huge boat.

  “It’s the Queen Mary!” Annie said. “This is so cool.”

  We jetted forward just a little bit, the monstrous boat shifting out of my field of view, as I watched a helicopter take off from maybe the length of a football field away. This seemed to be a pretty busy area, and here we wer
e, just dropping in on it with our little spaceship.

  “Mr. Rojas, Ms. Ortiz, welcome to Long Beach,” a man’s voice said to us from the speakers within the cabin of The Flyer.

  “Thank, uh, thank you,” I said, a little surprised at the sound of the voice.

  “You’ll be touching down in just a moment, and if you could, just stay right where you are. Don’t try to remove your safety harnesses, and we’ll have a crew ready to take you out quicker than a shooting star can cross the horizon.”

  What was that, space humor?

  “Okay, we’ll stay put,” Annie replied.

  I heard a whirring sound that reminded me of the sound an airplane makes when it’s extending its landing wheels, and, sure enough, we seemed to hit the ground just a moment later and compress a little bit on what I could only assume were the shocks attached to the wheels.

  “And we have touchdown,” said the voice on the radio, as if we didn’t notice that we had just landed. “Stand by.”

  Three men were already jogging across the concrete toward our little ship and arrived alongside us in moments. As soon as they did, our canopy began to rise, and two of the men set up stepladders of differing heights, one right next to my spot in the cockpit and the other taller one next to Annie. The two men stepped up onto the ladders and began unstrapping, unbuckling, and detaching us from all the safety gear we’d been cocooned in.

  “I know you two were only up there for less than a day, but gravity is still going to feel pretty funny as soon as you try to stand up, so go ahead and take it easy,” the man unstrapping my harnesses said. “You need any help, you feel even the slightest bit woozy, dizzy, or queasy, you let either me, Marco, or Danny here know, and we’ll help ya out. My name is Andrew.”

  I nodded, and Andrew gave me his hand and told me to stand up slowly.

  “Whoa,” I said as all the blood apparently drained out of my head, leaving me both dizzy and temporarily blind. My vision had gone instantly black but was already returning from the edges in.

  “Can you see me?” Andrew asked. The blindness was apparently not an uncommon thing.

  “Yeah, I can now,” I replied. “Just lost ya for a second there.”

  Vision returned, I planted my feet and got ready to follow Andrew up, out, and onto the little ladder.

  I took the one big step up and seven little steps down feeling like I weighed about four hundred pounds each time my foot contacted something solid. Once both my feet were on the ground, Marco or Danny, I wasn’t sure which one, helped Annie out of her seat and down onto the ground next to me.

  “Whoa,” she said, instantly reaching for me to lean on. “Heavy.”

  “Yeah,” I replied. “Get off. You’re making it worse.”

  I was half-joking but did actually feel a lot better when she let go of me so I could suffer

  “Sure,” I replied. under just my own natural Earth-gravity weight.

  “The Olympus Corporation did arrange for a car to take you two the rest of the way up to Los Angeles,” Andrew started to say. “This time of day it shouldn’t take any more than thirty minutes or so, but I’d suggest you guys can just take a seat in our visitors’ lounge for a few minutes, maybe have a drink of water and just walk around a little bit until you get your bearings. Hopping right into a car after a trip like that is a pretty sure way to guarantee the regurgitation of your last meal.”

  A part of me wanted to play the tough guy and tell Andrew that we’d be fine, but the other part of me, the part that contained my stomach, decided to take him up on his offer.

  Annie and I, holding hands mostly for the sake of mutual support, followed the three men across the landing area and into a small one-floor building. Inside, a woman was standing behind a long desk off to the left. To the right was a large lounge area with seats, couches, and 2D TVs on the wall.

  “How ’bout that water?” Andrew asked once we’d gotten inside.

  One of the other two men dashed off and disappeared into a doorway that was behind the woman at the desk. Moments later, he returned holding two plastic bottles of spring water.

  “Thank you,” Annie said as she took hers, and I did the same.

  Just then, Andrew seemed to have gotten a message on his PCD because he reached into his pocket and gave it a quick look.

  “Good news,” he said. “Your thirty-minute ride just turned into a five-minute one. Olympus has sent you guys a Mag Car, and as soon as you’ve got your bearings, you just let Maria over there know, and she’ll get one of us to bring you a golf cart and get you over to the Mag Car pick-up location.”

  Maria was apparently the young woman behind the desk, so I gave both her and Andrew a nod and said, “Will do.”

  We didn’t need long, just a few minutes or so to practice walking, standing, and sitting. I also used my PCD to check the availability for tickets to the Blue Crystal Gala and was just about to buy a pair when I decided this might be a good time to once again change our identities.

  I worked on my own PCD first and came up with the identity of one Mr. Gerry Callahan. I didn’t exactly look super Irish, but it was certainly better than Sebastian Rojas, so I stuck with it. I was just about to ask Annie for her PCD, then remembered about that screen share thing I’d done so long ago and gave that a try. Sure enough, I could log into her PCD and grab her a new identity without even having to physically hold her device. That was kind of weird, but either way, I now found myself standing next to Clare Jacobs instead of Mariana Ortiz.

  “Cool,” she said after I told her about her new identity. “I like that name.”

  I then went back onto the site for the Blue Crystal Gala and purchased us two standing room tickets for a mere one hundred thousand dollars each.

  “Bargain,” Annie said sarcastically.

  I gave it a couple more minutes and actually tried hopping up and down a few times, and when I was certain that the action wouldn’t make me feel like my insides were coming out, I gave Maria the heads-up that we were ready to go, and she shot Andrew a message to let him know.

  Just a couple minutes later, we were on a little golf cart headed toward a big luxury Mag Car that would be taking us up to LA.

  “A girl could get used to this,” Annie said as the Mag Car driver opened the door and let her in.

  “Yeah, well, don’t,” I replied.

  From the moment we’d left the STU Donor Union headquarters until now, we had spent a total of four million four hundred forty-two thousand four hundred dollars. It was a ghastly amount of money to have burned through in three and a half days, and with what I wanted to do at the Gala tomorrow night, we probably wouldn’t have enough left to get a meal at Taco Bell when it was all over. Right about now, it was all or nothing.

  38

  The only thing I’d eaten in the last day was the little breakfast in Bogota and a few bites of that freeze-dried stuff I’d had up in the cafeteria of the SS Olympus, so I was pretty darn hungry. We were in the back of the luxury Mag Car heading up to Los Angeles, and the only sounds you could hear as we glided above the street-level traffic were the ones coming from my grumbling stomach. I was originally going to look for a hotel near where the Gala was to be taking place the next day and ask the driver to take us there, but instead, I called up a little map of the area on my PCD, found a deli, and asked him to drop us off there instead.

  The drive into LA was quick and uneventful, which I was thankful for. We got dropped off at the deli, and a few minutes later, with an Italian sub in my stomach, I could focus on the task of remedying the fact that I did not own a black tie, or a tuxedo for that matter, that I could wear to the black tie affair that was the Blue Crystal Gala. All I had right now was a pair of jeans, a novelty Polo from the Space Elevator, two old socks, and some well-used boxers, and that obviously wasn’t going to cut it.

  I referenced my little map again and found a men’s clothier a couple blocks away, which reported to “sell suits for formal occasions.” Inside the trendy little sh
op was rack after rack of all the latest styles in suits alongside a smaller but even more expensive selection of tuxedos. I let Annie pick out the one she liked most and declined the offer of tailoring, as the one off the rack seemed to fit pretty well anyway.

  Inside a woman’s clothing store one street over, Annie picked herself out a stunning black silk dress. She’d actually had her eye on a gorgeous seafoam green dress, low cut in the front and already perfectly tailored for her shape. As much as I really wanted to see her in it, I had to tell her to go with the black one instead because the less visible we were, the better. We had to be there, but didn’t really want to be seen being there. I felt like the green dress would have attracted a lot of eyes, which was the opposite of what we needed right about now.

  Neither of us had ever been to an event like the Blue Crystal Gala before. The closest thing I guess would have been our respective high school proms, but in reality, a high school prom was to the blue Crystal Gala as a ’96 Chevy was to a brand-new luxury Mag Car. The top tier tickets to the event were a quarter-million dollars apiece. For that price, you actually got a meal. Yup, a full-on sit-down five-course meal. What did you get for the hundred thousand dollars per ticket we had bought? Hors d’oeuvres. Oh, and one drink. You can’t forget about the one drink that comes with your ticket. After that, though, it’s a PCD bar, and you pay as you go. I guess I didn’t really need any booze, though. Come to think of it, I’d probably be so nervous that keeping anything down was going to be a bit of a challenge. The Blue Crystal Gala was televised live every year as a way to help raise even more money for the four rotating organizations it supported. They always had top musicians, great comedians, and even artists creating some spectacular pieces live and on the spot. One year I’d tuned in to watch a speed painter recreate a radicalized version of the Mona Lisa in ninety seconds. The crazy part was, you didn’t even know what he was painting until he flipped the canvas one hundred eighty degrees, then finished the last few brush strokes with a flourish. It was very impressive. I saw on the program that Arthur Jade’s skill transfer was also going to be a part of the live broadcast. The description said it was going to feature a display of Mr. Jade’s archery skill before the transfer and a display of the newly acquired skill from the winner of the bidding immediately after the transfer. I was planning on being there in front of that portable STU when the cameras were rolling. Then, I’d show the world what a gift these machines could really be to humanity. After that, I was hopeful that some of the skills I’d acquired from Frank would allow me to pull one last rabbit out of the hat, so that Annie and I could escape and disappear, knowing that with the secret out, there would be no reason to keep chasing us.