Josh.
“Yeah?” Streeter snatched the battle-axes from his chest. “Well, abracadabra, mother—”
The first chain sprang from the floor and hit Streeter in the chin. A spigot of blood gushed from his beard. The next two came out of foggy air and hit his wrists like spidery strands of metal. The next two snaked around his ankles. He was hoisted above us and spread-eagled, a puddle of sim-blood dripping on the stones.
Josh the dragon had only blinked.
We were so screwed.
“You said we weren’t going out!” Chute shouted.
“We’re not.” Streeter’s lips were fat, teeth missing.
“Then how’d he get in here?” she countered.
Streeter’s flash drive created this environment. There was no connection to the Internet. Chief ran a tight operation; there was no hacking in his club.
But there was the kid. The one that prepped the room.
He loaded a back door.
Chief wouldn’t be looking for it since we didn’t go out. Josh was probably in the next room, laughing his ass off. I knew that because mounds of gold cascaded beneath the dragon’s laughter.
It was a stupid sim, dragon and coins. But he had us.
Nothing stupid about that.
“All right, all right,” Streeter lisped. “You win. What do you want? You want everything? You can have it, jerk off. I’ll just hunt your ass down another day.”
“Say it,” Josh roared.
“Say what?”
“I win. Say it.”
“I win,” Streeter said.
The chains racked tighter. His joints began popping. He didn’t scream because he didn’t feel it. But he was about to have his favorite sim pulled apart.
“You win,” he said.
“Louder.”
“You win! You win, all right! I’ll post it on the boards and put the word out, you win, all right? Just let me down.”
“I’m not letting you down.”
“Well, what do you want?” Streeter whined.
“I want it all.”
“You know, Chief is going to be pissed when he finds out you wired his room,” Chute said. “Probably never let you come back.”
“You can shut up,” Josh said.
“She’s right,” Streeter said. “Let’s just call a truce, huh? I love you, you love me. What’d you say, Joshy.”
He hated Joshy.
“I want the spoils.” Josh spit a bubbling wad that ate a hole in the stone beneath Streeter. A red-hot pit of coals opened up. “I’m going to take everything from you and you’ll be nothing. I’ll be king. I’ll be a rich man.”
The chains began clicking. Streeter was lowered just above the pit, his fingers scratching crumbs from the steaming edges.
“Boy,” Chute said. “You’ll be a rich boy.”
The smile dropped off the dragon’s lips. He turned his head, the sound of old leather creaking. The body inflated like a balloon. Josh pushed one nostril closed with a long, hooked claw. A stream of liquid blue fire blasted from the other nostril.
I leaped in front of her and was drenched in a sizzling bath of flames. When the fiery shower ended, my sim was charred and crispy. Chute put her hands on my cheeks.
“You’re burning up,” she said.
“I know. Fire does that.”
That wasn’t what she meant. My vitals were spiking in the skin. My fever had breached a hundred and four and was still rising. And it had nothing to do with the dragon breath.
“What’s up with them?” Josh asked.
“Ah, they got a thing.” Streeter craned his neck.
So he knew. He knew all along. He probably knew before we did. Chute and I were always going to be together. We would have something no one could get between.
Not even death.
“I’m taking everything,” Josh said.
“You know I’ll never stop coming after you.”
Josh tapped a long claw on the stone, chiseling a hole into the floor. Black, shiny beetles bubbled out, their hardened legs clicking against the granite as they fanned out in thick streams.
“I’m counting on it,” Josh said.
The bugs teetered around the pit. “Take me,” Streeter said. “Leave them alone. This was all my idea.”
“Oh, I’m taking you. Yeah, for sure. I don’t really care about you anymore, I just don’t want you to have anything. What I really want is him.”
That curved talon pointed at me. And the blackened eyes glittered.
“Socket?” Streeter said.
“Something’s up with him. The trap in the vault you so stupidly walked into should’ve worked. Something about him.”
“That’s what I said!” Streeter shouted.
“Get us out of here!” Chute screamed.
I assumed code bail out was locked up. Again. And, quite frankly, I’d stopped caring at that point. Every time I moved, a chunk of my sim fell like baked layers of blackened toast. This was all stupid anyway. Just get it over.
I’d been feeling that way for quite a while.
“This is so great,” Josh said. “I’m going to walk those bugs down your throat and out your ass. Then I’m going to duplicate your sims so I can play with them later. I’ll own your registered identities and do what I want. You’ll never virtualmode again. How you like them crackers?”
“Shut up,” Streeter spat.
The bugs began leaping. He shook them off at first, but there were too many. They crawled through his hair and into his beard. He spit them out, but they kept coming, running up his nostrils, in his ears. He let out a warrior’s roar. The chains shook; the walls quivered.
“We’re going to have fun.” Josh turned to us.
Next to me, the kinky wire began to glow. It hadn’t occurred to me that Josh didn’t see it. It was white hot. He would’ve forgotten about me had he seen it. But it wasn’t glowing.
Something’s inside.
“Socket!” Chute was holding me. “You got to get off; you’re over a hundred and five!”
“Hey!” Streeter choked. “Let him off, Josh. He’s sick!”
This was no joke. My fever was nearing a hundred and six. Ordinarily, alarms would be firing at Chief’s desk. I would be immediately bailed out and taken to a hospital. But Josh had locked us in and overridden the vitals. On the outside, we were resting peacefully in the chairs.
“Not falling for it.” That was the last thing Josh would say.
The bugs came for me.
Columns of black, shiny shells clacked around the hole below Streeter and marched at us. Chute stomped them out, but they flooded up our legs.
She screamed.
Josh laughed.
Streeter bellowed.
Despite the terror, a moment of calm wrapped around me, a total sense of everything being in its rightful place. Everything was exactly as it should be.
The kinked wire etched the air with branding fire.
My olfactory senses opened fully. The smell of burning insects filled my nostrils. My blackened skin was flaking off, the cracks glowing orange. The insects were smoking as they made their way up my legs. By the time they reached my waist, they burst into tiny balls of fire, disintegrating before falling to the floor.
Large chunks of my sim fell. Great, crusty scabs shattered on the floor.
The world shimmered in waves.
“Dude,” Streeter said.
I heard nothing more.
My body burst with the force of a thousand volcanoes. Flames devoured the world.
I was the flames. I consumed the world.
I am the world.
Does fire see itself as fire? It is just fire.
I am fire.
I just am.
Nothing existed but ashes. Yet I was not in the skin. I was somewhere in the ethers of virtualmode. From the dusty ashes, a broken line appeared.
Glowing white hot.
It beckoned me.
Invited me.
A f
issure in space, a crack in time. Something wanted me to see the secrets it held. True nature was on the other side.
I reached.
Green.
Trees. Sky blue and brown earth.
The smell of life.
I stand in the middle of a jungle, the sounds of birds calling, mammals scrambling. Dewy leaves dripping.
The humid air kisses my cheeks with damp lips.
I have never felt anything so beautiful. So loving.
A path lies before me. It meanders toward a massive tree.
I smile.
This is where I belong. I want to see this, be this. Yet my feet are heavy and still. My legs stiff and unrelenting. Pressed into the soil is a footprint, its unique shape matching that left behind on the portico. A signpost that I have arrived.
In the distance, a flock of brightly colored birds breaks into a swirling cloud, a rainbow of sparrows. Their bodies are oddly shaped, wings snapping sharply. Eyes glowing. But not birds.
Something other than birds.
Below this spectacle are three figures. They are too far away to see details, but even from this distance their shapes are distinguishable. One is a dark-skinned man. The other has long hair like mine: long and light-colored but not white. The third wears only a plum-colored robe that flutters, his silver skin glittering.
“Where am I?” I whisper.
They should not be able to hear me, but here space is irrelevant. There is a connection between us that no space can separate, entangled particles that obey the laws of quantum physics.
“Home,” I hear.
The world turns watery. Tears brim in my eyes. “I don’t want to leave.”
“Soon,” I hear. “You will come home soon.”
I think I am crying because I taste home. Finally, I found it. I’m not alone.
I belong somewhere.
8.
A steady bump.
A mechanical whir.
A cloth was pulled from my forehead, replaced with one cool and damp. It smelled clean around me, the sterile astringency of medical precision—but oddly mixed with humid earthiness. Like dirt tracked in.
There was a deep inhalation. It paused before rushing out.
Mom.
She was there, somewhere. I wanted to call for her, tell her I was all right, to drop the worried look that tightened her forehead and weighed down the corners of her mouth. I couldn’t see her, though. I couldn’t see anything. A heavy blanket lay over me, my body unresponsive. Eyelids sheets of lead.
But I wasn’t on fire.
This didn’t smell like the back rooms of Gearheads. Didn’t smell like home. It had an orderly feel. Something oily and gleamy. Occasional whirring, the intensity of bright light.
“Kay?” A deep voice called my mom.
She shuffled at my side, her smart shoes clicking the floor. I didn’t hear a door open or close, but her footsteps suddenly went silent.
Someone else was with me.
Instead of hard-soled shoes, the footsteps were damp and sticky. Bare. I felt a shadow fall over my face. A circular bandage was pulled off my neck and replaced with another one.
I had no reason to think this person was male and not female. I couldn’t smell him or even hear his breath. It felt like a he.
I remembered fire and ashes. There were faded images of Chute and Streeter like seeing them through the wrong end of a telescope. I tried to remember where I was after that and how I got here, but it was all so fuzzy.
So gray.
Mom’s footsteps returned but remained on the other side of the room. She was joined by a heavy set of boots and a deep voice incapable of whispering. Their words were blurred and indecipherable. They were speaking English, but nothing that made sense.
Mom’s replies were sharp and worried. I imagined her staring from a doorway, arms crossed and toe pointed. She would be an unblinking shell, an armored likeness of herself, a transformation that occurred the day my dad died, a sort of emptying out. She would be staring as if a certain level of concentration could will her wishes into reality. But life operated on life’s terms, not on her desires.
What’s wrong with me?
Footsteps started toward me.
“Status?” a man asked.
“Stable.” I assumed this was the bare-footed assistant fussing with my neck bandages. “A virus has been detected and treated. His temperature is near normal. There is no indication of anomaly or sign of inherent traits.”
Inherent traits?
“He’s not…” Mom’s voice trailed off. She couldn’t finish the thought, so unthinkable it was.
“No. He does not exhibit an expression of time-slicing. There is no evidence of turning. He is normal, Ms. Greeny.”
Time-slicing? Turning?
For a moment, it seemed conceivable that I was still in virtualmode. I would’ve believed it had Mom’s presence not been so convincing. Still, I was unfamiliar with any of these diagnoses.
I was normal.
“Keep him overnight,” the man said. He turned and said, “He’s fine, Kay. I know how this looks; I know what you’re thinking. We’ll monitor him, but there’s nothing to be concerned about. Your boy is perfectly normal.”
His exit was decisive. His heavy footfalls disappeared abruptly, as if he was suddenly not there.
Mom was by my side. I felt her hand on my arm, warm and firm. She didn’t shake. The worried look would be etched between her brows, but weakness would not haunt her. These were the moments she dropped the armor and I saw the mom from the early days.
The mom from before dad died.
“I will put him under,” the bare-footed man said, his voice soothing, almost melodious.
Mom’s grip hardened. Then she thanked him and said his name, a name I would one day come to know and trust. A name I would come to love.
“Thank you, Spindle.”
>>>>>>>>>><<<<<<<<<<
The darkness of unconsciousness passed beneath the scalpel of a time surgeon. One second I was bathed in antiseptic darkness, the next was the comforting smell of cookies and bread, the sweet fragrance of tea olives in the backyard.
Home.
I rolled onto my side, the heavy blanket of paralysis having vanished, and opened my eyes. My mom stood next to the bed like a guardian awaiting my arrival. No worried look possessed her.
Just patience.
“What happened?” were my first words.
“You overdid it.” She chuckled. “How do you feel?”
I attempted to sit up, my head a concrete block. There was a circular spot just above my collarbone that was tender to touch. I had no memory of what had happened or where I’d been. My memories had all been wiped away like words on a chalkboard, ghostly lines barely visible.
“Was I hit by a truck?” I asked.
“Too much fun. I’m going to make you rest.”
“You’ll have to stay home to do that,” I challenged.
A shadow of a smile crossed her eyes. “I’ll take some time off.”
She was nodding. Of course, she’d said that before, even promised. But she never explained herself. There were so many things she was hiding. Why can’t I remember anything?
I didn’t ask her that.
But she knew why, just wasn’t going to tell me just like I wasn’t going to tell her about the flapping in her room and the golden eyes in the backyard.
Secrets. We were good at that.
I wanted to drop the charade, to strip down to the real and see the mom from before Dad died. The truth can be dangerous, she once said. And painful.
“Lie back down,” she said. “You need rest.”
She came back with a glass of water and a couple of ibuprofen, then placed her hand across my forehead and gazed at me. She loved me like a mom loved a son, but sometimes I felt like she had to make an effort, that it didn’t come easy.
She missed Dad, I believed.
I would discover, one day, it was more than that. Much more.
>>>>>>>>>><<<<<<<<<<
Someone was watching.
“You dead?” Streeter asked.
I ached all over. It even hurt to smile. “Not yet.”
“How you feeling?” Chute was kneeling on the other side of my bed. It was her hand on my arm now.
“Like roadkill.”
She caressed my bicep, squeezed my shoulder, and looked at me adoringly. Streeter shook his head.
“Where’d you go?” he asked.
“Give him a sec, will you?” she said. “He just woke up. Take these.” Chute passed me a glass of water and two ibuprofen. I’d been asleep long enough to take two more. “Your mom went to the store. She’ll be right back.”
She watched me down the water then left to get more. I smacked my lips. Streeter was still shaking his head.
“So you know?” I asked.
“Dude. Like dating your sister.”
“Yeah, it’s nothing like that.”
His lips curled, eyes squeezed shut. He clutched his stomach and dry heaved an avalanche of disgust.
“All right, all right,” I said. “Relax.”
He kicked the bed. “You better not screw us up.”
He was afraid of losing her. Once you cross the girlfriend-boyfriend line, friendship was no longer an option. But how could I tell him that Chute and I were made for each other, that we’d be together to the very end. Yeah, that sounded naïve emo. Not in this case. I could feel it.
I could feel a lot of things.
The front door of the house opened. Mom was home with groceries and Chute was helping. We could hear them talking.
“So where you been?” Streeter asked.
I looked off and tried to remember. Memories were still elusive. Like catching fog with your fingers, there was nothing to grasp. All I could do was shake my head.
“Gearheads,” I said. “Last thing I remember. And fire.”
“Ha, yeah. Fire. A lot of that. You burned it down.”
“Gearheads?”
“No. You burned down virtualmode. All of it, bro. Chief’s entire network is cooked. He kicked us out for life.”
“Wait, what?”
“It was so worth it. Everything Josh had is toast. I mean everything. Whatever the hell you plugged in, it followed his sim back to his account and fried it all. It was awesome.”
The Making of Socket Greeny: A Science Fiction Saga Page 6