The Making of Socket Greeny: A Science Fiction Saga

by Tony Bertauski

  “Be careful, son,” she said.

  Son. She never called me that.

  I tapped my cheek and called her name. The call clicked in nonresponse. She was too busy to answer. Or maybe sleeping for once.

  Something rustled in her room again.

  I was back on high alert.

  I grabbed an old Wiffle ball bat and nudged her door open with my foot. Once again, all was in order. I eased into the room and went through another inspection under the bed and in the closet. Even peeked through the blinds. This time the cats weren’t there.

  Maybe if I turned up the television, I wouldn’t hear it again.

  The glass of water was still on her nightstand. I stopped in the doorway. A small black flash drive was next to it.

  That wasn’t there before.

  7.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Streeter said. “Tell us when Chute gets here, okay? Thanks.” He closed the bedroom door. “Here. Take these.”

  I opened my eyes and stared at the ceiling. Streeter stood over me with a glass of water and two white pills. I threw my weight forward to escape the cushy embrace of the beanbag, the vinyl covering sticking to my arms.

  “Gramma said take them both,” he said. “Wanted to ask your mom if it was okay, but I said she was busy.”

  I chased the pills with heavy gulps and collapsed. My hair was plastered to my forehead. The plastic chair felt like a pot of boiling water.

  “You go to a doctor?” Streeter asked.

  “No. I’m fine.”

  “Yeah, you look great.”

  “I just… I’m a little warm. Allergies or something.”

  “Like allergic to air? Allergic to breathing? Living?”

  “You want me to go?” I attempted to crawl out of the bag. “You can do this by yourself.”

  “No, no. Not what I’m saying. Just wondered if you’d been. Pills should take care of it and, you know, you can always go tomorrow.”

  I rolled back into the pocket and sucked on an ice cube. I didn’t want to go to the doctor. I should’ve, but then I’d have to call Mom and then she’d ask all kinds of questions. This happened every once in a while, anyway. I’d get a fever and then it’d be gone, like some sort of heat wave on the inside. Mom used to say it was growing pains, but I never heard of anyone having juvenile heat flashes.

  I stopped telling her about them a long time ago.

  The doorbell rang.

  “She’s late,” Streeter growled.

  He went to let Chute inside, but his gramma beat him to the door. Five minutes of exuberant conversation went by. No one came over to Streeter’s house without going through the grandparent gauntlet.

  I dug the flash drive from my pocket and turned it over. I’d never seen that around the house. It was short and black. No markings or manufacturer’s logo. Just a blocky little memory stick that wasn’t there when I walked into Mom’s bedroom the first time.

  I heard strange noises in the room, I found a mysterious flash drive, I was running a fever, and Mom had been at work for almost a week. This all seemed suspicious, but at the time that was all it was. Just a weird day.

  A weird life.

  “Whoa.” Chute walked into the bedroom. “You all right?”

  “Fine.”

  She dropped on her knees and put her hand on my forehead. “You’re hot.”

  “Thanks.”

  “No, I mean you have a fever.”

  “I just took something.”

  “What are you doing?” Streeter closed the bedroom door.

  “Socket’s sick.”

  “You a doctor?” he said.

  “He needs one.”

  “He’s fine. Grandma took his temp; he’s overheated, that’s all.”

  “He’s got a fever.”

  “So what? I get them all the time, take a pill and get some rest. Probably a virus and there’s nothing you can do about that, right, Socket?”

  “He needs rest.”

  “Looks comfortable to me. You comfortable, Socket?”

  “No, I mean we shouldn’t be doing this, not today.”

  “Look, we’re not running a marathon, Chute. We’re just spending an hour in virtualmode. He can handle it; he’s a big boy.”

  “We stop by a CVS,” she said. “Run a medical scan. If it says he’s all right, we go. If not, we don’t.”

  “We’ve got one of those. If he checks out, are we good?” He didn’t wait for an answer and left the room in search of the home medical scanner, a device that he would manipulate into saying what he wanted it to say. I knew that because I’d seen him hack the thing into staying home sick when he was just fine.

  Chute closed the door. “What’s going on?”

  “Nothing. I’m fine, really.”

  She continued staring. I felt my temperature rise. Everything felt wrong, but how could I tell her that without dragging her into it.

  That’s how I felt.

  Sometimes I felt a bit guilty for falling in love with her. There would come a day that I blamed myself for dragging her into all the trouble. It would be my fault that she would suffer so much. If I could just ignore her, walk away from my feelings, then she’d have a different life without me. Would that mean it would be better? Or just different?

  It didn’t matter.

  I couldn’t walk away from her any more than I could wish away the fever.

  “Let’s just do this,” I said. “Streeter booked the room and wants us to come along. We look, we go home, everybody’s happy. We’re not running a marathon.”

  “You need sleep, Socket.”

  She was right about that. But going home wasn’t going to solve that problem.

  “Here we go.” Streeter marched in with a small leather pouch, unpacking the contents and slapping them across my forehead and arms. A few seconds later, he turned the tablet toward Chute.

  “Slight fever,” he said. “Nothing abnormal.”

  His voice cracked a bit. Chute caught it, too. He was holding something back. Later I’d learn my fever was almost a hundred and three. It would get up to a hundred and seven. That was impossible. My organs would be shutting down. Streeter would later confess that the device was broken, that he’d hacked the software too many times.

  Still, he knew something was wrong.

  “He’s not going to die,” Streeter replied. “The scan said he’s fine.” Streeter shook the tablet. “When did you become such a drag, Chute? You’re a virtualmode kill queen.”

  “This isn’t virtualmode.”

  “Yeah, no shit. What’ve you got there?”

  He was talking to me, but I’d zoned out while those two did their dance. This was going to drag out until dinnertime, and I was getting tired.

  “Hey, ponytail.” Streeter pointed at the flash drive. “Where’d you get that?”

  “This?”

  “Let me see.”

  “It’s blank.”

  He wiggled his fingers. I tossed it like a pebble. I’d already plugged it into a laptop and there was nothing on it. The mystery seemed to die after that. Mom brought computer stuff home all the time. The flash drive had to be hers; I just didn’t see it when I first walked in her room.

  And the flapping sounds were just laundry, right?

  “Where’d you get this?” Streeter asked.

  He studied it like a jeweler sizing a diamond. I told him, but he didn’t believe me. I decided not to tell them about the flapping and the cats in the backyard, their eyes glowing from the tree.

  “I found it,” I repeated. “I told you, it’s just a blank.”

  “It needs a virtualmode port, ding-dong,” he said. “You don’t have one of those at home.”

  I hadn’t noticed. Streeter mumbled about advanced USB ports that I couldn’t read, something used in virtualmode code writing. Then he dug a set of VR goggles from a drawer and strapped them on.

  “Let’s go,” Chute whispered.

  “I can hear you,” Streeter whispered back.

/>   Honestly, I felt better now that I was out of my house. Sitting around made me worse. I’d rather be busy with a fever than staring at a television with a fever.

  “Huh,” Streeter grunted.

  “What?” I asked.

  “It’s empty.”

  “Yeah. Like I said two seconds ago.”

  “Yeah, but you don’t have a VR drive to read this.”

  “Still empty,” I repeated.

  He turned toward me, with oversized goggles swallowing the top half of his face. “For a second there, I thought you were special.”

  “Never said I was.”

  “You’re a gift to humankind, Socket Greeny. Look at that hair.”

  I crawled out of the beanbag and stripped the ridiculous goggles off his head. He blinked heavily, cussing me out for throwing his gear around.

  Grandma called, asking if we were ready.

  Chute wasn’t happy about it, but she went with us. We were just going down to Gearheads for a couple of hours, that was all. We weren’t running a marathon. But that would’ve been easier.

  I left the flash drive in the room.

  >>>>>>>>>><<<<<<<<<<

  “Need some help?” Streeter called.

  “No.” Chief was sorting through a spill of papers. “Your room’s ready.”

  “Who peed in your coffee?”

  “I’m tired of cleaning up messes. Don’t you go making one, too.”

  “We’re not going out.” Streeter held up his flash drive, all the data we’d be parsing was on it, not on the Internet or in the cloud.

  “What’s wrong with him?” Chief said.

  “Who, Socket? He’s got ebola.”

  “Yeah, no drinks, Socket,” he said.

  I chugged the ginseng tea Chute bought, her natural approach to boosting immunity. Chief could evidently still see my death aura.

  “And don’t infect my gear.” Chief turned his back on us.

  Streeter led us into the back rooms of the former massage parlor, the small spaces excellent for leasing to virtualmode teenagers instead of pervy businessmen. The hallways were narrow and dim and cold enough that a glass of ice would last all day. Chute rubbed her arms. Ahead, a kid about our age opened a door.

  “What’re you doing in there?” Streeter asked.

  “Getting your room ready.” He held the door open.

  “You work here?”

  “Just started.”

  There was no reason not to believe him. Chief didn’t let people wander around the rooms, and he hired high school kids all the time. We believed him.

  And that would make all the difference.

  There were four oversized chairs arranged in a short line and all facing the same direction, like a movie would play on the mustard yellow wall. It smelled like cleaning solution and bath salts. Streeter fell in the front chair and passed back a slide box of our own personal transplanters we fixed to the connectors.

  Never lease transplanters, he always said. They suck.

  I was more concerned about the perverted spirits lurking in the walls than transplanters sipping on our nerve lines. I dropped in the chair behind Chute, the plastic cover crunching under me. Her head popped over the back like a puppet.

  “How you feeling?”

  “Better,” I lied. “The drink was good,” I lied again.

  “Stop chatting,” Streeter called. “We got an hour and we’re running low on credits because of douche bag.”

  Douche bag being Jack and his brother.

  The clatter of Streeter’s flash drive found a port in the chair’s control panel.

  The lights dimmed.

  Breathing slowed.

  I considered leaving the transplanters on my lap and closing my eyes, but he’d come out for me. I was curious, but I was also tired. There was no way anyone would guess what we’d find. My whole life would play out that way, just an endless display of surprises.

  All the way to the end.

  Just before I went inside, the space at the front of the room wrinkled in the curious heat wave. I pulled out and searched for it, seeing nothing this time. When I planted the transplanters the second time, the air remained still.

  Chute was already inside, her sim an animated version of her skin, complete with the red ponytail. She was staring at Streeter the barbarian, who was dialing a hovering display of controls.

  “We better not be going out,” she said.

  “We’re not,” he said. “We’re staying on my data stick.”

  I was with Chute on that. Staying on the flash drive would guarantee no troubles.

  Particles trickled around us like colorful grains of sand, filling the white space with details of our environment until we were standing on the portico once again. It was exactly as we’d seen it, only this time we were voyeurs instead of participants.

  The generic sims were off to the side and frozen in the moment Streeter programmed. Chute and I admired the view while he fussed.

  “So I got it narrowed down to this,” he said.

  We went to the middle of the portico and stood around the mysterious footprint. Streeter, shoulders slumped, battle-axes clanging, stared at it like a dead end.

  “So?” Chute said.

  “I ran an analysis on it and came up with nothing.” His voice boomed off the walls. “There are no sims registered with a footprint of that size and texture.”

  Or lack of texture. There were no swirls or wrinkles that would be evident in a normal footprint. But these were sims, so smooth skin wasn’t necessarily unusual. Something about it, though, appeared… robotic.

  “There’s got to be millions of unregistered sims,” Chute said. “You’ve got, like, twenty of them.”

  “No, there’s something different about this.”

  “No, you want there to be something different. If you look for something, you’ll find it even when it’s not there.”

  Streeter called out commands. Animated dials appeared in front of him. He punched his thick, knobby fingers into various openings and spun them like old rotary phones. Time frames advanced in tiny slices. The footprint appeared and disappeared as he went back and forth.

  “Something’s here,” he muttered. “The data is wrong.”

  He slowed down time, slicing it into thinner and thinner segments so that it advanced at a million frames per second. He hypothesized a theory with each cycle. First it was something about an underground sect of hackers keeping virtualmode justice. Then it was an alien race, then artificial intelligence, then some Gaia theory he read online.

  Each time he cycled through the footprint, I felt a static heat flash prick inside my ears. The air was coming from an exhaust pipe. There wasn’t air in virtualmode; I wasn’t breathing. I wondered if the air conditioner had failed back in the skin.

  And then I saw it.

  “Back up,” I said.

  Chute had wandered off in boredom. She watched from a distance as Streeter dialed back the sequence. A jagged string of light cut the space right as the footstep disappeared.

  “There!” I said.

  “What?”

  “You don’t see it?”

  Streeter shook his head. I told him to slice time thinner. He walked it right up to the edge.

  Flash.

  “Right there.”

  Chute stared. Streeter looked stupid. They weren’t seeing it. “Thinner,” I told him.

  “That’s all I got,” he said.

  “Then slower.”

  Rocks of frustration rattled in his throat. He took that beefsteak finger and dialed a semitransparent control disk ridiculously slow.

  “This is going to take all—”

  “Stop!”

  And there it was: a kinky thread of static electricity. It was the width of a human hair that sizzled white-blue all the way into the sky.

  Streeter’s mouth fell open, his blocky teeth peeking through the bushy whiskers. Chute approached warily.

  “You see it?” I asked.

  T
hey nodded.

  “Yeah,” Streeter said. “But how did you?”

  “What’d you mean?”

  “I mean I got this parsed down to a billionth of a second. And you saw it.”

  I didn’t exactly see it. I felt it. It was a static image, yet it teased something inside me like electrical currents carved their initials on the lining of my stomach. But it wasn’t lightning and it wasn’t some dangling electrical wire. It felt like a fissure, as if the universe had cracked and light was leaking out.

  A crack in time.

  “What is it?” Chute asked.

  Streeter was shaking his head. He didn’t know, but he knew something was hidden in this scene. It wanted to be found.

  “What is it?” he asked me.

  “How should I know?”

  “You found it.”

  “I just saw it.”

  But they knew. They could see the connection. They knew this was all about me. First the vault and now this. True nature was chugging down the tracks.

  What the hell am I?

  “Well.” Streeter sighed. “Let’s take this slow. Um, I guess let’s see if it registers voltage. And then—”

  An earthquake rattled the world.

  Streeter dropped to one knee. Chute fell into me. We crashed on the stony floor as the wall behind us crumbled. It didn’t fall straight down, however.

  It imploded.

  The library was gone. Instead of endless shelves of books, there were piles of gold coins and glittering jewels. Sitting upon the golden nest was a fat, black dragon, wings folded across its back. Obsidian eyes peeked through leathery slits. A yellow-fanged smile dripped saliva that sizzled on the floor.

  “Checkmate,” it said.

  “Oh, good god,” Streeter cried. “Are you effing kidding me?”

  The dragon’s laughter loosened stones that teetered in the remains of the walls.

  “How’d you get in here?” Streeter shouted.

  “Magic, dumbass.”

  I recognized the voice. It wasn’t some warlock from another world, not a space alien guarding our newly found secret. This was a fourteen-year-old asshole that wanted revenge.