by Pete Gustin
“What?”I shouted back to her. “What!” It was no good, though. I just stood there, staring alternately at Annie and at the television camera in front of me, not knowing what to say or do.
All of a sudden, I felt a slight vibration from my pants pocket. It was my PCD. Like Pavlov’s dog, I reached for the thing before I even knew what I was doing. I was still holding the gun to Mr. Jade’s back, but with my other hand I tried to look at my PCD, but the damn spotlight was making the screen hard to see. I brought it a little closer to my face and saw that it was a text from Annie.
Talk, was all it said.
Talk? What? Wait. Yeah, she was right. I needed to talk. I needed to explain what I knew. I just-I just . . . I had no idea how. I just wish I had the skill with words and the skill with people that Annie had. If she were up here, she could explain it.
No sooner did I have that thought than I felt a little itch that I instantly recognized to be coming from the inside of my skull. It was there . . . and then it was gone, and all of a sudden, I knew exactly what to say.
“My name is Alden Heath, and the STU Corporation has been lying to us for years. One of the original designers of the PCD and board member of the STU Corporation by the name of Dr. Kertzenheim—”
I stopped. Right in the middle of my sentence, I stopped. How in the hell did I all of a sudden know exactly what to say? How was it that all of a sudden, I had a keen sense of what the security guard in front of me was feeling?
Annie. This was Annie’s skill. But how?
I smiled. Then I laughed. That seemed to make Mr. Jade a little extra jumpy, but I told him it was going to be okay. With my PCD still in my left hand, I quickly logged onto my public profile page and used my mind to start typing out a couple paragraphs worth of information.
It was the PCDs. All this time, Annie and I had been carrying two of them around, and it didn’t even occur to me to inspect them any further than I had.
“My name is Alden Heath,” I said into the camera. “A little while ago, I found out that the STU Corporation has been lying to us for years. Skill transfers do not need to erase the skill from the Donor. It’s a lie. It’s a lie, and it’s holding humanity back. It’s also making a very small group of people a whole lot of money, which is why they don’t want you to know about it. I’m inviting everyone watching this right now to log onto my public profile page @Alden Heath and follow the instructions I’ve just posted. PCDs work on the same basic bit of technology that STU transfer units use. At least, in the basic way that they can access our brains and brainwaves. If you follow the instructions I’ve put up on my page, you’ll be able to pair any two PCDs together and share any skill you’ve acquired with anyone you’d like.”
I sensed more than saw that the security guard closest to Mr. Jade and I had grown furious and was ready to make a move. I hesitated for a moment, thinking about how amazing my Annie was that she could read people so well. In that brief instant of hesitation, the guard managed to reach down, pull up his pant leg with one hand, and grab a gun from his ankle holster with the other.
I wasn’t going to hurt anyone else if I could help it, so instead of firing my gun at the man’s head like my instincts were telling me to do, I pointed it at the spotlight and pulled the trigger, causing everything to go black just an instant before he fired his weapon at me.
Epilogue
SKILLS MENU
All of the skills listed below are free of charge, and we encourage you to share them with as many people as you may find who would like to acquire them:
CPR
First Aid
Physical Therapy
Parenting
Conflict Resolution
Public Speaking
Languages (ask for availability)
Safe Driving
Basic Auto Repair
The following set of skills can be acquired free of charge at your local community college campus for anyone interested in pursuing these fields of work and study:
Medicine
Biology
Computer Engineering
Psychology
Pharmacology
Physics
Bio-engineering
Mechanical Engineering
Agriculture
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It had been one year to the day since the Blue Crystal Gala in Los Angeles, where Alden Heath had revealed to the world the secret of free, open, and non-destructive skills transfers. Many had theorized that the founding father of STU technology himself, Dr. Harold Martin, knew exactly what his technology was capable of, and that his protégé, Dr. Andrew Melikin, had caused his mentor’s death in order to prevent him from sharing his gift with the world. Consequences for the people and organizations who had followed in Dr. Melikin’s footsteps in monopolizing this technology for their own personal gain were coming slowly but surely. Alternately, the gains humanity had been able to make over the past three hundred sixty-five days had been unparalleled in the history of humanity.
With the ability to share and acquire valuable skills instantly and at no cost, major advances in the fields of medicine, agriculture, engineering, and space exploration had already been coming fast and furious. The entire educational system as humanity had always known it would soon be receiving a major overhaul. In short, the entire world had changed for the better, in large part due to the courage of one man and one woman.
The video taken of Heath’s last moments at the Blue Crystal Gala had been analyzed more times and in more ways than JFK’s Zapruder film. Conspiracy theories had only been aided by the fact that Los Angeles city officials claimed that, according to the wishes of his own will, Heath’s body was cremated the same night of the Blue Crystal Gala, and thus, no one had been given the opportunity to give witness to his corpse. Annie Crown was seen on a number of different cameras in and around the Mason-Daye Theater immediately following the event that had been captured live on national TV, but her trail had gone completely cold sometime shortly before midnight that night, and no law enforcement agency in the United States or beyond had ever reported being able to pick it up.
Of course, supposed sightings of Heath and Crown were reported almost every day. Photographs of the two rendered less clear than even the worst shots of Big Foot himself by Shadez technology could be found on hundreds of sites online. As they were, the pictures could be of any man and any woman wearing a pair of Shadez, but the photos most often seemed to come from tropical spots all over the globe, with the man sitting on a beach playing guitar and the woman close by his side. Whenever a video was posted purporting to be of Heath and Crown, a very specific song starting with a little blues riff in E was always heard to be coming from the guitar, though it was impossible to tell if the audio was original, or if it had been dubbed in by someone just trying to get themselves a lot of clicks. You’d be surprised just how many people now had the skills to make cleverly edited videos.