The Making of Socket Greeny: A Science Fiction Saga Read online

I meant it, too. At least until we were bored.

  Her lips were grim, her freckled complexion flushed. I was caught up in her blue eyes, the wrinkles in the corners, the tension in her forehead. She was gorgeous. Always had been. Guys gave her second looks, but we were always just friends.

  I woke up one morning and she changed.

  Some sort of magnetic hypnotism in the way she looked. I couldn’t get enough of her. I believe the health teacher called that hormones. But whatever. Thankfully, she felt the same about me.

  The air wrinkled.

  That was the third time it happened. I chalked up the first two times to stress and weather, but this time it was in the hallway, a watery reflection that bent space. This time it was different.

  I could feel it.

  It was three steps away from me, a warm glow of emotions warping the air, a trapdoor of feelings tugging at my stomach. It was familiar, like the comfort of home but dank and moldy. Drippy.

  It tingled beneath my scalp.

  Twisted my stomach.

  “You okay?” Chute asked.

  Her voice was on the periphery. I wanted to touch the distortion waving in front of me, dip my hand in the ethereal waters and see what was beneath. One thing felt certain.

  It was deep.

  Chute’s voice faded. The hallway evaporated. The school gave way to damp caves.

  Tropical jungles and thick air.

  And sun and space.

  And speed and power and secrets and—

  “What are you doing?” a man asked.

  I had my hand out. The rippling air was gone, and so were the tropical impressions, the deep cave.

  “We’re waiting for Streeter,” Chute said.

  Mr. Fattoney was looking at me, his briefcase at his side, waiting for an answer.

  “He’s in there,” Chute answered for me. “Streeter’s in there.”

  Words wouldn’t come to me. I looked suspicious and guilty, my usual disposition. Mr. Fattoney knew it well.

  “School’s over,” he said. “Come on, let’s go. You probably have chores waiting at home.”

  “They’re with me.” Streeter popped his head out of the classroom. “We’re doing a project.”

  Mr. Fattoney drummed his fingers. He trusted Streeter even less than me, and would’ve escorted the three of us off school grounds had Mr. Buxbee not pushed his way past Streeter. The heavyset virtualmode instructor was an adult version of Streeter: portly and heavy-lidded. His lower lip plumped out when he thought deeply.

  “It’s fine, Mr. Fattoney,” Buxbee said. “Streeter’s doing some maintenance for me.”

  He didn’t say anything about me and Chute, but Mr. Fattoney suddenly lost interest.

  Buxbee had a few words with Streeter, his lazy eyes brushing over me and Chute before he waddled down the hall. “No trouble,” he called back.

  “No, sir,” Streeter lied.

  >>>>>>>>>><<<<<<<<<<

  It wasn’t an ordinary classroom.

  Instead of plastic molded seats and tiny flats of desk space, the virtualmode lab was arranged with rows of padded recliners to comfort the vacated skin during extended journeys into virtualmode. It smelled clean and sterile. Fake.

  Streeter trotted to the front. Buxbee’s desk—the only desk in the room—had several monitors and a few keyboards. Within its confines was the padded chair royale, the cushiest of them all. He could go deep several hours at a time and get up without the slightest bedsore. A virtualmode leather ass.

  Above the antiquated whiteboard, it read The body gives rise to the mind as soil supports the tree.

  A quote from almighty Buxbee.

  “How’d you get Buxbee to let us in?” Chute asked.

  “Sweet talk.” Streeter fell into Buxbee’s chair. “I’m writing the updates for a new patch. And then there was the other thing.”

  “What thing?”

  “Grab a seat.”

  Chute looked at me. She didn’t know about Streeter crashing the school’s portal. He made it look like an accident, but with him nothing was accidental. Buxbee, on the other hand, banished him to cleaning up his mistakes before he was allowed in the upstairs lab, where all the best virtualmoding happened.

  “He still trusts you?” Chute asked. “After that?”

  “Buxbee loves me, he can’t help it. Now strap in.”

  I had already settled into a chair and fished a set of transplanters from the armrest. Chute didn’t budge.

  “I didn’t sweet-talk you in here to stare at my skin,” he said to her.

  “You’re full of it,” Chute said. “You just want someone to blame.”

  “Chute, I’m hurt. Seriously.”

  “Shut up.”

  “She’s right,” I muttered, playing with the translucent transplanters. “It’d be polite to tell us what you’re going to blame us for before you did it.”

  “Et tu, Socket?” He flopped into Buxbee’s giant chair, feet not touching the floor, and said loudly and clearly in case the world was listening, “Listen, we’re going into the main hall and cleaning up some code, that’s all. I could use an extra pair of minds to help, and we’re a team and I like you guys. You’re my best friends.”

  She refused to sit, but since I was already comfortable and Streeter was staring bullets, she relented. He’d boxed her into going so many times that it was senseless to argue. It was either babysit our skin while we went in or go home.

  Truth was, she liked trouble, too. It was just harder for her to admit.

  Chute fell in next to me, pulled the hairband from her pony and cursed. I twirled the transplanters and kicked back. Streeter was already leaned back, transplanter discs stuck behind his ears, eyes closed. I fixed one of my transplanters behind my ear, the suction cup kissing the soft skin, and took Chute’s hand.

  I closed my eyes and felt her soft, warm hand fade into the blackness as I planted the second disc. Later we’d wake up with sweaty palms and stiff joints. For now, my consciousness swam in the virtual darkness with no skin, no containment—a formless void in between flesh and the digital universe.

  And then I landed.

  A new body formed, a simulation of the one sitting in the recliner, this one generic with limited senses of touch and feel. Around us were the great halls of an ancient library. The shelves were endless, the binders of old books packed on each rack that soared ten stories toward a glass domed ceiling, where sparrows flitted about. Rows and rows of long shiny tables were lined down the center.

  “What’s this?” Chute said.

  “Main hall,” Streeter said.

  “Yeah, I know that. What’s with the generics?”

  Our sims were translucent and featureless. We looked like nude manikins made from stretchy glue. This wasn’t our normal.

  “It’s just simpler for us to work, that’s all,” Streeter lied with his puppet-slit mouth. There might as well be a flashing sign around his neck whenever he tried to lie.

  “And what are we doing?” Chute deadpanned.

  “Cleaning up code.”

  The library books were packets of computer code. Most programmers liked to work in familiar environments. Buxbee’s graphical interface was a magical library, a not-so-subtle appeal to our technology-addicted brains that books are fun!

  “I’ll take that row,” I said. “You want to start in back?”

  “We need to clean up my mess first,” Streeter chimed.

  The tables were scattered with random stacks of books, some neatly squared. Others appeared to have been dumped from a bucket. These were usually the bundles of raw code that needed to be sorted.

  “Which one?” I pointed at a leaning tower of hardbacks.

  He shook his head. His sim’s black glassy eyeballs looked over our shoulders. Chute and I turned around. The shelves on the back wall were almost empty. Below them was a mountain of books, something a dump truck would leave behind. Tables and chairs had been crushed, broken fragments of furniture tossed across the floor.
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  “That?” Chute said. “Are you freaking kidding me? Did you build a bomb?”

  “No, no. Nothing like that.”

  “Why is Buxbee still even talking to you?” she said.

  “It was a code explosion.”

  “Oh, you mean like a bomb? Because I just said bomb and you said no, no, nothing like that.”

  “It was… I was working on a new thing and it fell.”

  “Like a bad foundation,” I said. “Root code was corrupt.”

  “Yeah.” He lifted a finger. “But it wasn’t bad.”

  “It ain’t good, Streeter,” Chute added. “That’s going to take you months.”

  “And that’s if we help.” I stepped through the carnage, debris dusting to my sim’s whitish shins. The closest book was a thick hardbacked dictionary with bent corners. Code scrolled down the thin pages. I flicked through the color-coded symbols and matched them up without really knowing what it meant. Webby strands stuck to my fingers.

  “Make that a year,” I said.

  “I help and I get a new sim out of this,” Chute said. “You build me a custom job exactly how I want it, that’s the deal.” She slung a book over her head. The pages fluttered like a dying kite that caught a sudden updraft.

  Streeter stood back from the mess, bouncing his fingers while we sorted through novels, encyclopedias, and atlases. The sparrows near the glass ceiling startled at the spectacle. I wasn’t used to seeing Streeter so normal sized. Despite the generic sim, his mannerisms were crystal.

  He just watched.

  “You a supervisor now?” I said.

  “I want to show you something,” he said. “Buxbee said I could.”

  “Sure.” Chute dropped a biography of American presidents. “Let’s waste more time. I’m in.”

  I climbed out of the fray, my sim stumbling through the mess. Despite the sensationless experience, the sim handled nicely, rebalancing itself whenever I leaned too far one way or another. Filling a sim was like driving a car. You couldn’t feel the tires on the road or the brake pads that were stopping, but you knew how to make it go.

  Streeter led us between towering bookshelves while Chute complained. We made several turns until we reached a set of double doors. They weren’t against a wall but rather built into a bookshelf like a grand shortcut.

  “You ready?” Streeter grabbed the brass knobs.

  “I doubt it,” Chute said.

  After a dramatic pause, he tugged the weighty doors open. A blast of wind ruffled pages. I could smell fallen leaves.

  Smell. I can smell.

  Having a sense of anything in virtualmode was advanced coding, but I could smell autumn on the other side of the doors. Streeter stepped to the side. Chute and I walked through the doorway but not into the aisle on the other side of the bookshelf. It was a stone portico.

  Beyond was a futuristic cityscape.

  Metal spires gleamed with sparkling glass; lights flickered along silvery roadways with sliding traffic. The sky was a miasma of floating balloons and hovering gliders. It was right off the cover of an Asimov novel.

  “Dude.” The word limped off my tongue. “You built this?”

  He nodded. Of course I did.

  This was an achievement. The details were precise. And the vague sense of smell, the slight breeze across our faces, added to the sense of reality. Even for Streeter, building a virtualmode environment from scratch code required teams of sophisticated coders. Streeter did this by himself. Of course he did.

  We stood with our hands on the smooth railing, hundreds of feet above the view, absorbing the wonder of a new world that existed in a digital universe, a virtual world we were seeing with our mind. All was forgiven. Even Chute’s irritation was purged.

  “Can we go down there?” she asked.

  Something seemed off about what she said. I mean, I was wondering the same thing. If we could walk the streets and interact with the inhabitants—real or not—I think we would’ve wept with wonder. This was something spectacular, but to actually be part of it would blow our minds. So it wasn’t what she said, but how she said it.

  Not how she said it. Where.

  She was standing to my right. But I heard her ask the question from the left.

  The realization clicked into place at the same time for both of us. We turned to see three generic sims standing at the railing and admiring the view exactly like us.

  “No,” one of the sims answered. It was Streeter’s voice.

  “Still,” another sim answered, “you’ve outdone yourself.”

  That was my voice.

  When we turned, Streeter was no longer standing next to us. He was at the far end of the portico, poking his finger into the stone floor. The granite melted around his finger. And then he yanked it across the floor.

  A white square opened.

  The light was bright and clean, a luminescence that caused us to turn away. When our visuals adjusted, Streeter had his finger to his lips and waved us over. With our simulated duplicates chatting on the other end, we looked into the well of white light.

  Streeter nodded.

  He stepped into it.

  His sim was swallowed by the light. I looked at Chute. Her featureless sim bland and emotionless, I could feel the doubt emanate in waves. This was trouble. And we couldn’t resist. It didn’t occur to me that not only was I feeling her emotions, but I was sensing them in virtualmode. I should’ve been mildly freaking out, but it just felt normal.

  That was how things were changing. Starting that day, the extraordinary became the ordinary. I was feeling emotions from other people, sensing what was about to happen.

  Special was becoming just another day.

  She disappeared into the white.

  I followed.

  3.

  No sense of falling.

  We passed from one virtualmode environment to another. The white faded in one long stroke. The outlines of doors were the first images to arrive.

  Streeter stood at the center of a circular control panel, hunched over with an intense focus on his hands.

  “What is this?” Chute said.

  “This is the thing I was working on,” he answered. “The real thing.”

  “I thought that was the thing.” She pointed up where the portico was, where the view of the city amazed us, what we assumed caused the avalanche of library books.

  “Sort of.”

  He raked his fingers over a cluster of three-dimensional images and blabbered a line of jibberish. He was in beast mode, tight on time and without the patience to explain what the hell was happening.

  The white doors were arranged side by side in the circular room. Red pigment bled into one of them, accentuating Victorian panels, an ordinary closet door or something less significant. Streeter pushed aside a control panel and, ignoring the brassy doorknob, stepped through the illusory door.

  A barbarian emerged and turned it into splinters.

  In furs and dangling axes, the oversized brute leaned back and let loose a battle cry through a matted bush of whiskers. Muscles bulged along scarred arms.

  “Oh, God,” Chute muttered.

  “I told you!” he bellowed. “Jack and his snot-loving brother can’t wipe me out! I got plans inside plans, baby. Locks inside locks. And they’re going to eat it.”

  “I’m bailing,” Chute said.

  “Not yet.”

  The room thundered beneath his footsteps. The brutish sim was impractical to run a control monitor, the hairy fingers swollen sausages that often missed a gesture or confused Streeter’s orders, but this was his favorite sim. Had been since we were little.

  Like five.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  He resumed ignoring her, his fully fleshed facial features now clearly etched with concentration. Chute would become a distraction if she didn’t get some answers. And then there would be a fight and someone’s sim would break.

  “The avalanche,” I said, “was just a distraction.
”

  “What do you mean?” she said.

  “He blew up the library on purpose.”

  Streeter pointed at me without breaking stride.

  “The futuristic city,” I continued, “was Streeter’s project. I’m guessing Buxbee wants to enter it into a competition or something, but Streeter used it as a distraction to build a back door. So when that data crash spilled Book Mountain, Buxbee didn’t see him build this room.”

  “And now guess who has access to the school’s portal?” he said, his voice shaking the walls. “And all its power.”

  “Buxbee’s going to kill you,” Chute said.

  “He won’t find us,” Streeter said.

  “Us? You know he will!” Chute said. “He catches everything.”

  “This place is temporary. It’ll collapse in a couple of days without a trace. Buxbee will never know.”

  “Then why waste your time?” she asked.

  “Well, for one, I just wanted to see if I could do it. I wasn’t sure I could pull it off, and Buxbee sure as hell wasn’t going to let me build a universal control room on the school’s portal.”

  “Good for you.” Chute applauded. “Now you’ll be suspended.”

  “And two, I want to build something like this at my house. And now I know how. Buuuuuut more importantly, I can do this.”

  He jabbed one of the panels. He smiled blocky teeth. A whiff of greasy breath crossed the room, the olfactory senses he programmed still active, unfortunately.

  “Account restored,” he said. “Those douchebags thought they wiped me out just when I finished this room. God, they have no idea what’s coming. Poor bastards.”

  “Maybe we should let them think they won,” Chute said.

  “That’s one idea. Oooooor…”

  This time he shattered the control center with his wrecking-ball fist. The walls spun, the doors clicking. We stood in the center of a roulette wheel that curdled my stomach.

  “Make it stop!” Chute shouted.

  “Give it a second!” Streeter replied.

  I was about to throw simulated barf and considered shouting a code bailout command that would put me back into my skin. The clicking slowed. When it stopped, one door remained.

  It was blood red.