The Socket Greeny Saga
Tony Bertauski
Smashwords Edition
Copyright © 2011 by Tony Bertauski
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
This book is a work of fiction. The use of real people or real locations is used fictitiously. Any resemblance of characters to real persons is purely coincidental
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* * * * *
DISCOVERY
For the search
TRAINING
For the lost
LEGEND
For the truth
* * * * *
I
Virtualmode: an alternate reality where there is no pain. No consequences. No fear. A place that is numb and safe.
Not cold, but empty.
D I S C O V E R Y
No Rime or Reason
Your entire life can change in one day.
It’s not like my life didn’t need it. Basically, I lived a life of killing time. I was zoning out on a steady diet of video games and energy drinks. The only thing that made school even slightly bearable was getting into a fight at the end of the day. Sometimes, the sound of a crunching nose made life worth living. Even if it was mine.
The day my life went inside-out started like any other day. I got to study hall just before the bell rang. Chute was reclined with her eyes closed and the transplanter discs behind her ears. Her red ponytail was hanging over the seat. Streeter had already crossed over. He was lying back with a grin on his face and his fingers laced over his belly.
I stuck the transplanters behind my ears. They sucked at the soft skin under my earlobes. My small hairs stood up and a spot quivered in my head like a tuning fork. The numbing took over.
There were no lights in the darkness behind my eyelids. No colors. A deadening sensation oozed down my neck and consumed me. Sound faded and the outside world drifted away. Temperature became non-existent. I left my skin behind and my awareness—whoever I am — was drawn into the Internet and transplanted into virtualmode.
For the moment, I drifted in darkness with the falling sensation. This was the place where most people failed to enter virtualmode. They couldn’t handle the drifting. Virtualmoders knew how to ride the in-between like a wave.
I entered my sim that looked pretty much like my skin, except for the hair. I liked my sim bald. Back in the skin, my hair was past the shoulders and white as snow. Don’t know why it didn’t have color.
Darkness took form. First, there was an empty room with lumpy, colorless furniture. The gray walls turned into wood paneling with frosty windows. Cheap sofas, frayed rugs covered the floor and monstrous deer heads looked down from mounts, their glassy eyes reflecting the fire in the hearth. Above the fireplace was an enormous moose head.
The flames flickered over the dry wood, occasionally licking the old stone around it. The top of the mantel unfolded and a tiny woman, blond hair and sweeping curves, stepped out and crossed her perfectly smooth legs.
“Can’t feel the heat?” she asked. “Upgrade your gear with Dr. Feelers’ tactile attachments. Dr. Feelers puts you in control of the nervous system inputs, you can feel as little or as much as you like. Fire too hot? Turn it down by—”
“Off.” Chute’s sim was taller than her skin. It was leaner and more dangerous. “Dr. Feelers don’t work,” she mumbled, even though she was rubbing her hands in front of the fire.
A giant barbarian came out of the next room with a wooden chair that looked tiny in his hand. Streeter’s sim was ten feet tall, muscles bulging off his neck and rippling down his arms with a bloody axe dangling from his hip. I always thought he should just go the whole nine and wear a loincloth. Dude was four feet tall in the skin, the shortest high school sophomore who ever lived, but in virtualmode he was a god.
He kicked the sofa away to make room and sat in the chair that groaned and splintered but somehow held him. Control panels emerged from the floor and wrapped around him like mission control.
“What’re we doing here?” I asked.
“We’re going to get our kill on.”
“I just got pardoned for fighting. We get caught, just stamp my suspension.”
“Don’t worry, Buxbee’s out of town.” Streeter’s rich voice vibrated off the walls. “That substitute has no idea where we’re going. I set up a false scenario. As far as anyone’s concerned, we’re reliving Desert Storm for history class.”
I looked at Chute. “Did you know we were doing this?”
“He didn’t tell me. If you were in class on time, he wouldn’t have told you, either.” She turned her head, the ponytail whipping around. “That’s the way he does it.”
“All right,” Streeter sang to himself. “If you’re wondering where we are, I hacked us into a world—”
“Whoa, wait a second.” Chute held up her hand. Her sim looked like it had never seen the sun. “I don’t think we need to be hacking into anything, Streeter. You got caught last time and we don’t need to be wandering around some protected world while we’re in class!”
His bushy eyebrows knitted together like enormous caterpillars. “First of all, I didn’t get caught last time, someone ratted me out. And they couldn’t prove I hacked anything so, technically, I wasn’t caught. Secondly, stop being a wuss. Right, Socket? Right?” He smacked me with a fist the size of a basketball. “We’re in, we’re out, no harm, no foul or whatever else jocks say before a game. We’re not getting caught. Besides, this place is one hell of a ride. I hacked in the other night just for a little taste and me likey.”
I didn’t care one way or the other. I never wanted to admit it to Streeter, but I was getting a little bored of virtualmode battles. So was Chute, I could tell. But Streeter lived for it so I shrugged.
Streeter smiled. “All right, good. This place is called the Rime. It’s a bunch of twelve-year olds with rich parents. I say we vaporize their asses down to bare data and harvest all their experience points. They aren’t worth shit, but who says we can’t have a little fun.”
“Twelve-year olds?” Chute said. “Seriously?”
“Yeah, seriously. We ain’t got time for a real battle. It’s just a little quickie, come on.”
The monitors lit up. Streeter scanned them, mumbling to himself as he surveyed the environment outside the cabin. Chute was already sitting on the couch with her arms locked over her chest checking her emails. She wasn’t going to talk, so I figured I’d check mine, then changed my mind. There’d just be a thousand unread emails and I wasn’t going to read them. Besides, there was likely a video message from Mom with the worn out face telling me she wouldn’t be home tonight. Again. So I sat next to Chute and zoned out for a while.
“You all right?” Chute said.
“Yeah, I’m all right. You?”
“Something’s bothering you.”
Life was bothering me, but I couldn’t explain that to her. It was just one of those days, but I could never hide it from Chute. She looked right through me.
Streeter clapped his hairy-knu
ckled hands that sounded like paddles and smiled, his teeth big and square and chipped. “Let’s shred some twelve-year-old ass.”
“Don’t say it like that,” Chute chimed.
Our clothes shifted and changed, turned white, speckled with browns and blacks and hung like rags. A battle staff appeared in Chute’s hands. Evolvers materialized on my belt, simple handles that looked less threatening than Chute’s pole but, once activated, transformed into any weapon I visualized.
A clean-cut kid appeared at the door. “Are your weapons weak? When you need to destroy and do it fast, think the Canonizer.” He held up a pistol with an oversized barrel. “It’s rapid, compact, and requires a fraction of the code—”
We walked through the apparition and his cheesy weapon onto the front porch. The boards were gray and weathered like the sky. The cabin was buried in a dense forest. A narrow path at the bottom of the steps carved between the snow-crusted trees. My breath came out in long clouds.
I could feel all the way back to my skin and it felt cold. Maybe it was my imagination or maybe I was just nervous. Or maybe things were about to get really weird.
D I S C O V E R Y
Shadowplay
My guts were everywhere.
I was staring at a gray sky streaked with snowflakes blowing like tiny bullets, remembering two words. True Nature. Someone whispered them into my ear just before something happened.
Everything seemed so unreal, like time was moving in slow motion. The sky was like a steel sheet that concealed the sun. It looked cold. There were shouts and the howling of wind but even that was blotted out by a high-pitched whine inside my head like I’d been knocked out with a concrete block.
Putty-like goo bubbled and burped from gaping holes in my chest and my stomach was just plain gone. Instead of intestines, the ground was splattered like someone dropped a brick in a bucket of paint.
Just my sim. For a second, I forgot I was in virtualmode, afraid that was my skin smeared on the ground. Why am I still here? If I died in battle, I should’ve been kicked back to the skin. And why can’t I remember anything?
I was on a frozen tundra with snowy dunes rolling all the way to the horizon and pointed snow-capped mountains in the far off distance, but where I was laying it was bare ground like some sort of fiery meteorite filled with gray gooze exploded. There was a shadow in the white landscape, slipping among the scoured snow drifts like a tattered ghost fleeing the scene of a crime. Suddenly, a giant blocky-toothed barbarian was leaning over me, his face criss-crossed with pink scars. Streeter’s lips were moving but I barely heard the words.
“Bail out! Code bail out!”
A girl slid across the ground and elbowed him out of the way. Somehow, her cowl stayed pulled over her head but her red hair spilled out. “Get us out of here, Streeter!”
“What’d you think I’m doing?”
“You’re standing there with your thumb up your ass!” She cradled my head and bit her lip against the wind that was biting back. “I told you, Socket, I told you,” she said, not so quiet, “I told you we shouldn’t let him hack us in here. I told you something would go wrong.” She held up her hand, my guts dripped off in the wind. “You knew it, too.”
Maybe I did, but I always felt like something was wrong. With me. With the world. Everything.
Streeter was screaming and cursing. Something wasn’t working. Bail out always took us back to the skin. “I told you, Streeter,” Chute shouted, “now those Rimers got us locked in here until they shred our sims to goop! We’ll be lucky if they don’t report us to the cops!”
“Just shut up, let me think for a second!”
Streeter stomped around, muttering to himself, thinking out loud before falling on the ground and hunching over something in his hand.
“What happened?” My voice echoed in my head.
“We don’t know,” Chute answered. “Something exploded.” She glanced down at my farting chest wounds. “We don’t know how that happened.”
The shadow ghost was back, playing peek-a-boo in the snow as it weaved in and out of the ground, its body flapping madly. I pointed at it now standing beside Streeter but Chute pushed my hand down. “Try not to move, it’s only going to screw up your sim. It’s going to take like a month to fix as it is.” She bit her lip again but not against the wind, this was more about Streeter.
“That thing.” I nodded at it. “Who is that?”
She looked. “What thing?”
“That shadow.”
She looked again but only shook her head.
“He’s delirious.” Streeter was now sitting with his legs folded, poking at something in his hand.
“It’s right there,” I said, pointing again.
“Look, there’s no shadow sim.” He waved his hands right through it. How could he not see it?
“It’s right next to you.”
“You’re brain damaged. Shadow sims can’t stabilize in this environment, so just relax, I’ll get us out of here.”
“You better,” Chute said.
“You’re such a wuss,” he replied.
“And you’re dead meat if you get us suspended.”
“Relax, we’re not going to get caught by that lame-ass substitute, he doesn’t know his bunghole from a hole in the ground. I guarantee he doesn’t know how to monitor virtualmode activity. And the cops would be here already if the Rimers were going to report us, so just freaking relax, all right.” He snorted, shaking his head, thinking wuss.
But they were missing the obvious. There was a shadow standing right in front of us and only I could see it. And now each time the shadow moved, I felt a tug somewhere inside, all the way back to my skin that was sitting in study hall.
Chute closed her eyes, shaking her head. I took her hand. She was probably reclined in the study hall with the same worried frown crunching the freckles between her eyebrows. I could almost feel her skin tense up. And then I realized I could feel it. I could feel her hand cupped inside mine. It was warm and shaky. And the bits of sleet and snow stung my cheeks. Each time I felt the tug of that shadow moving around, I could feel more, like I was a vessel filling up from the inside.
I should’ve been having a full-blown freak out. Feeling something in virtualmode? But I felt Chute’s fingers scratch me as she lifted my head. I could smell the fragrance of her hair snapping in my face like fine whips.
“This is weird,” I said. “I can feel you.”
“What?” Chute put her ear closer to my lips.
“You guys want to stop playing boyfriend/girlfriend for like two seconds and help me?” Streeter said.
“I’m sorry,” Chute shouted, “do you need some help? Here.” She scooped up a handful of liquid guts and splattered it along Streeter’s backside. “Anything else?”
He looked over his shoulder. “That really wasn’t necessary.”
While those two argued, I rubbed my fingertips together, feeling the brittle texture of my fingerprints and the arctic wind bite my exposed skin. My senses sharpened quickly, but it went beyond that. I felt the ground under my back and the snowflakes drive across the snow drifts, like I was becoming part of the environment, plugging into the ground. I sensed the surroundings like they were my own body and the cold was no longer cold and the wind no longer windy because I was the cold and I was the wind. I felt the shadow sweeping around me. It felt so familiar, like seeing someone I once knew.
I felt the ground tremble. Felt the bodies growing from the frozen soil beneath the blanket of snow before I actually saw them emerge like blackened sunflowers.
I yanked Chute’s flapping sleeve and jerked my head in the direction of the disturbance. She looked over, sat up straighter. The wind knocked her hood off; her long hair whipped sideways. “We’re screwed.”
The sunflowers transformed into small, stout warrior thugs with beards and bushy eyebrows with battleaxes and long swords they gripped with sharpened claws. There were a hundred of them that slowly worked toward us through the
snow. Seemed like the wrong sort of warrior sims to have in a world of snow drifts, but they’d get to us eventually.
Streeter leaped up and pulled his staff out of the snow. It was as thick as a tree trunk topped with spikes with bits of skin and hair and brains. He looked at the sky like he was studying the weather then bowed in prayer. An electrical field crackled around the spikes and dark clouds rolled out of the gray sky like smoke pushing through holes from the other side. I could feel my hair stand on end. Streeter rammed the staff on the ground and lightning bolted down, frying every one of the tiny warriors in their tracks, leaving behind smoldering holes.
“That’s called a shit storm,” he said.
“There’s more coming,” I said.
“Yeah, well I can’t keep pulling lightning out of my ass, it takes too long to power up.” He jerked his head at Chute. “Why don’t you do something?”
“What do you want me to do?” Chute answered. “I’m a healer.”
“Oh, yeah. I almost forgot.” He stared at my dripping chest cavity and rolled his eyes. “You’re doing great.”
“That’s it.” She was on her feet reaching into her sleeve. Streeter held out his hands, not trembling or in surrender but begging her to rethink. Chute pulled a long, slender staff from her sleeve, impossibly long to fit inside her cloak, and spun too quickly for the barbarian to do anything. The pole flexed under the velocity of her swing and it cracked on the back of his legs, making a sound like a textbook dropping flat on a desk.
“Socket!” Streeter dropped on his knee. “You better stop her!”
“I’ll show you how much I suck!” Chute dropped three more quick shots on him, deftly avoiding his half-hearted attempt to snatch her. She flipped over him and drove the staff into his back, driving him face first into the snow. “Who sucks now, douche bag!”
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