The Skill Conspiracy

by Pete Gustin

  If I didn’t make it out, though, which I understood was far more likely, I knew I’d have an awful lot to answer for. Truthfully, though, I was okay with that. Anyone who’d been watching the news coverage about Annie and me this week probably thought we had just gone on a crazy murderous rampage for no reason whatsoever, but at least if I was caught, I’d have the opportunity to explain.

  I wasn’t really sure which way it would go, but I did know that it was all going to have to go down at the Gala. There was just no way that Annie and I could keep running like this for much longer. We had a quarter-million-dollar bounty on our heads, a giant corporation, a powerful union, and anywhere from one to three governments all looking for us. Those concerns were all for tomorrow, though. Tonight, Annie and I were going to go on a date.

  With our new outfits in hand, I found us a hotel nearby, got us a room for the night, and went there to drop off our new purchases. Those outfits were for tomorrow, and what we had on now wasn’t going to be good enough for the date night I had in mind for the evening, so we headed back out to do even more shopping. Annie was in her glory. For me, she picked out an outfit I guess you could call business casual. Dark slacks, nice shoes, and a shirt just as well fitted but fortunately less still and shiny than the one she had bought me at Trace in New York. For her outfit, she convinced me to let her go with something green, as she had wanted to do with her dress for the Gala. This one was far less flashy and much more appropriate for a regular night out on the town.

  It was going to be just like the night I’d found out my brother was getting me four thousand dollars for the stupid scuba skill. We changed back at the hotel, found a nice restaurant nearby, and ordered whatever we wanted from the menu, not even bothering to look at the prices. We ordered drink after drink with names like Maui Sunrise, Los Angeles Iced Tea, and The Blue Surfer. That last one was sweet as hell, but I didn’t mind at all. I was just this side of drunk and wanted to stay there so I’d be able to enjoy the rest of the night with as many of my faculties that I could still keep working as possible. In other words, I wanted to remember this night . . . just in case.

  When dinner was over and the last neon-colored drink was gone, we walked back to our hotel and took the elevator up to our room. I actually felt bad for the other couple riding the elevator with us because they didn’t understand a single one of our dumb elevator jokes and looked overly happy when the door finally opened to let us off.

  “Oh no. I hope I left my Velcro slippers on the top floor.”

  I don’t know. It seemed funny to us.

  The hotel bed was a king. It looked bigger than a king to me, though, and Annie said they called it a California King. In New York, you’d simply call it “way too big for your apartment,” but it was perfect for us right now. The fancy hotel sheets were almost as soft as Annie’s skin, and after one round atop the cozy bed, we filled up the little Jacuzzi in the bathroom and enjoyed a well-deserved soak. After that, it was back to the bed, where the only thing different from that night in Hoboken that felt like it must have happened a thousand years ago, was that no one was pounding on the floor beneath us, though Lord knows if anyone was down there, they probably wanted to.

  The last time I’d checked the clock it was close to 4:00 AM, and even though I didn’t want this night to end, sleep finally overtook me, and I passed out holding Annie in my arms.

  The next morning, I woke up, switched on the 3D TV opposite the bed, and once again saw my own face looking back at me.

  “Shit.”

  39

  “Someone on the space station must have recognized us,” Annie said.

  “Probably. Maybe. I don’t know,” I replied.

  The local TV news was reporting that Annie and I had just taken a Flyer down from the SS Olympus and had touched down in Long Beach yesterday. They knew the names Sebastian Rojas and Mariana Ortiz, so it was either someone on the Space Station who had recognized us, or possibly maybe someone on the ground crew. Either way, someone knew we’d gone to LA.

  “We gotta go,” I said, pulling back the covers and wishing for like the thirtieth time in the past few days that I could remember to buy more than one change of clothing at a time.

  I put on my comfortable though admittedly not-so-fresh pair of jeans and matched that with the button-down shirt I’d worn last night. Poor Annie had to go with the same outfit she’d been wearing since Bogota, since I had apparently put a rather large rip in her dress the night before during our first enthusiastic moments back in the room. It was either that or wear the new black dress we’d bought yesterday, and that was way too formal to just be walking around in.

  We gathered up everything we had, which wasn’t much, made sure we were wearing our Shadez, and made our way out a side door in the hotel without bothering to check out.

  “Thank God for your stomach,” Annie said as we followed the skinny sidewalk alongside the building away from the main road.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “If you hadn’t gotten hungry on the way up here, you would have taken the Mag Car driver right to the hotel, and then they’d know exactly where we were.”

  “Yeah, well,” I said. “The deli I had him drop us off at is right here in the neighborhood, so we should get as far away from here as quickly as we can.”

  The sidewalk we were on deposited us in a shallow one-car-deep parking lot on the backside of the hotel. It didn’t exactly connect to the rear parking lot of the building next to it, but all you had to do in order to get there was step over a small curb. So, we did that, and kept doing that until we finally ran out of rear parking lots to walk through and got forced out onto the main road. I still didn’t know exactly where to go, but I had a feeling that any direction away from here was fine. I kept my eyes peeled for a bus stop and finally found one about three blocks up.

  When the bus finally arrived and I waved my PCD across the payment strip, I was half expecting alarms to go off and for a police helicopter to come swooping out of the sky. When the only thing that happened was a little light turning green and a small “ding” coming from a tiny speaker, I actually felt myself unclench my ass, which I hadn’t even realized I’d been clenching. Yeah, I definitely needed to put an end to all of this tonight. This really was no way to live.

  We took the bus uptown, downtown, I don’t know, maybe side town. I had no idea which direction we were going. It was just taking us away from the hotel, and that was good with me. We would be going back, though. The Mason-Daye Theater, site of tonight’s gala, was just two blocks away from the hotel. But for now, I just wanted to get as far away from that deli, the hotel, and every other spot we’d been walking around in since yesterday as we possibly could.

  We rode for about twenty minutes and finally got off at a little cluster of shops, one of which looked like they were serving breakfast both inside and out. You might think that food would be one of the last things on my mind at the moment, but after all the weird drinks I’d had the previous night, I needed something in my belly to start soaking it all up. In fact, it was half a miracle I wasn’t currently suffering from a crazy blue hangover. Amazing what a little shot of the-police-might-be-coming-to-get-you induced adrenaline can do for a hangover.

  We took a seat inside the little restaurant, no need for us to be outside and exposed to any more passersby than necessary. Sitting in the back corner of a not-so-crowded restaurant with a booth-divider separating us from the next closest set of diners and making sure to keep our heads buried in our menus was just as good a way to keep hidden as anything else I could think of at the moment.

  “We’re not still going to the Gala tonight, are we?” Annie asked in a quiet voice.

  “Yeah,” I said. “We are.”

  The waitress came over, and I kept my face buried in the menu as if I was still looking over what I wanted to order. Annie did the same, and the waitress just asked if we’d like some water or coffee.

  “Water for me,” I said.

&
nbsp; “Coffee, please,” Annie replied, as we continued to make an awkward zero amount of eye contact with the woman.

  “Actually, I’m going, but maybe it’d be smart if you didn’t,” I said to Annie as the waitress walked away.

  “What?” she said in a much louder voice than the rest of our conversation so far.

  I put a finger to my lips and gave her a slight shh.

  “No way you’re going without me,” she said, much quieter but equally pissed.

  “I’m going to get in front of that STU,” I said. “I’m going to get on TV, and I’m going to show the world what the STU corporation has been doing, but that doesn’t mean you have to be there risking yourself too.”

  I looked at her, and I actually couldn’t tell if she was about to cry, or jump across the table and start pummeling me.

  The waitress came back just then and asked if we were ready to order. Annie asked for some omelet or another, I wasn’t really listening, but I said I’d have the same thing, and we returned to our conversation as soon as the woman walked away.

  “So, what?” Annie said, still sounding pissed. “You want me to just go find a nice, quiet hotel room somewhere, check in, watch the Gala on TV, hope it all goes right, and just wait for you to come strolling back over to the hotel so that the two of us can reconnect after all the danger is over and go on our merry way?”

  “Well, yeah,” I said, trying to sound like I believed that everything was going to go exactly like that, but having a very hard time selling it.

  She did not respond. She just held my gaze with a flat, hard look that was actually making me really nervous. I was kind of expecting her to start making her argument as to why she should be coming with me, but I quickly realized, she didn’t have to. The matter was settled. All I had to do was nod.

  We ate the rest of the meal in relative silence, found a little shop that sold baseball caps, bought two, and pulled them down nice and low over our faces. The Shadez would do their job of fooling facial recognition software, but there was nothing better than a tilted down baseball cap to block your face from any Lookie Loos who might have spotted you on TV.

  We had our plan for the night, but we still had a full day’s worth of time to kill before the Gala got underway. I thought about it for a little while, and as we walked past some more shops and into a larger parking lot area, I noticed a movie theater at the opposite end from where we were.

  I was trying to cover all our bases in our efforts to stay hidden, by suggesting we sit in a big, dark room while wearing our Shadez and baseball caps, but there was still one other little hurdle to overcome. On the off-chance anyone was able to follow the breadcrumbs of our ever-changing identities, I didn’t want to buy our tickets to the movie and leave a digital fingerprint of where we’d been, so, I did what I used to do in high school when I wanted to see a movie and didn’t have any money to pay for it—I snuck us in.

  We sat through one movie, a film about a world where everyone somehow had their innermost wish granted by something they referred to as “The Big Flash.” It revolved around a criminal named Jimmy and a teenage girl named Cindy, who was looking to get revenge on Jimmy for having shot her and killed her father. It was excellent, but when it ended, we still had a ton of time to kill. On top of that, the smell of popcorn was actually making me really hungry again. I hadn’t eaten much of my omelet at breakfast. It had been kind of hard to focus on eating while Annie had been laser-beaming me with her evil stare. It was at this moment that Annie decided to commit her first criminal act of our entire adventure together. After people placed their orders at the concession stand, they’d take a step back and wait for their names to be called, at which point they’d step back up and retrieve their goodies. The teenager behind the counter had called out the name “Mandy” twice when Annie decided to horridly step in and claim the food. I’m not sure where Mandy was, but I was glad she was slow because I very much enjoyed her popcorn and blue Icee drink as we casually walked through the lobby getting ready to duck into yet another film.

  Theater number nine didn’t have a ticket taker in front of it, but we could clearly hear the previews from inside, so we just walked in and got ready to kill a couple more hours. I shared the popcorn that my criminal mastermind of a girlfriend had stolen for me, and we held each other’s slightly sticky hands until the final credits rolled by.

  Even then, neither of us moved until the lights finally came on and I turned to Annie and asked, “You ready?”

  She replied with a nod.

  I bought us both one-day passes to a gym that was in the same plaza as the movie theater. Buying tickets to the theater and sitting there for five hours had seemed risky, but this was only going to take a few minutes before we’d be back on our way, so I didn’t mind the risk.

  Never had two people prepared so elegantly for the Blue Crystal Gala as we were doing right now. Instead of working out at the gym, we both just took showers in the mostly clean locker rooms, put on our formal wear, and called a car to bring us back down to the Mason-Daye Theater.

  40

  “Man, I feel really bad about this. You guys really should have requested something a little fancier,” the driver of our car said to us for like the tenth time.

  We were about a quarter of the way into the horseshoe driveway of the Mason-Daye Theater, and every car in front of us was some form of high-end Mag vehicle. Most were of the luxury type, but there was one speedster-looking two-seater version up by the front door right now. Behind us was an overly large Mag SUV that reminded me of the one we’d commandeered in that city somewhere in Colombia. Us? We were in a light blue four-door sedan with cloth seats.

  “You sure you guys have tickets to this thing?” the driver asked.

  “Yes,” I replied, really only paying half attention to the guy at this point.

  An interminable amount of time later, we finally made our way to the front door, where two men in white shirts and black vests came to open our doors. Immediately on their heels were two ticket takers, who I knew for a fact had not met anyone else at their car. In fact, I could see from here the seats they had vacated, which were behind a small table that was next to the front door of the building. I took a little pleasure in seeing the surprise on their faces when they asked to scan for our tickets and after I proffered my PCD, a pleasant little ding sounded from the PCD of the man, who I’m sure would have been ever so delighted to send us on our way had the ding not sounded.

  Instead, he gave us a gratifyingly cordial, “Right this way,” and directed us toward the red carpet that led up the stairs and into the main lobby.

  There was actual paparazzi all around the red carpet, which gave me that butt-clenching panicked feeling again, but thankfully, after a few of them seemed to exchange quizzical looks, not a single one of them wasted a camera flash on Annie or me. They were only here for the stars.

  Inside, the majesty of the lobby alone was absolutely breathtaking. If I had spent all of Frank’s five million dollars at once, it might have paid for about a third of the marble tile on the floor and two of the marble columns amongst sixteen others that dotted the room. As for the giant fountain with its carved statues spitting water out of various orifices, well, I’m not sure even all of Domingo’s ingots would have paid for that.

  The dinner was being served beyond the lobby in a huge ballroom, where a number of casually intimidating security guards stood, making sure us “regular” folk who only paid a hundred thousand dollars apiece to get in here didn’t accidentally crash their classy meal. Seeing that I’d spotted the dining area, a young woman in a stark white dress wearing a silver nametag that said “Elaine” directed us off to one of the spectacular side bars, where liquor was being served and artists were creating spectacles of their trade.

  While standing in the short line for the bar we’d been directed to, I saw a man sitting in a large pile of sand, creating the most intricate and incredible sand castles I had ever seen. Opposite him was a woman using
a blowtorch to mold and sculpt metal into the form of what I think would eventually become a giraffe.

  “This is amazing,” Annie said, taking in the full opulence and extravagance of our surroundings.

  I nodded my agreement.

  When we got up to the head of the line, Annie and I both unlocked our PCDs to show proof of our “one free drink” and I asked for two of the house specials. A little sign on the bar said, “ask about our house special,” and I apparently like doing what signs tell me to do, especially if the sign looks like it’s been gilded.

  Damn, this place is fancy.

  The drinks were amazing, but they were also just as tiny as they were delicious. Each of our crystal goblets contained an ice cube that was about the size of a golf ball, and I’m pretty sure that if you were to melt the ice, it would have been just as much liquid as the rest of the drink. I didn’t bother to ask how much one of these drinks would have cost to purchase on its own, but I’m sure it would have been a ridiculous number. It didn’t really matter, though. I’d had more than my share of alcohol last night, and I wasn’t here to drink. I was here to do a job.