Socket 1 - The Discovery of Socket Greeny (11 page)

“Room?” I called.

“Yes?” a woman’s voice answered.

“Are there any records of my father?”

“Yes. Most are classified.”

“Show me what you got.”

A faint magnetic field passed through the
room. A hologram appeared next to me, a man six feet tall. His
goatee was sprinkled with gray, his white hairline receding. I
stood on my toes and looked into my father’s eyes. I reached for
his hand to see if it was callus but I passed through the illusion.
The image shrank in scale to reveal him standing in a workshop.

“Trey Greeny was an exceptional student in
circuit mapping and gel intelligence,” the room said. “He was
promoted to advanced standing and level four security clearance by
the age of twenty-two. He was awarded the Medal of Commendation for
his bravery in the sector five space attacks.”

Space attack?

Dad shut a panel and ran a welding pen over
the seam. A servy retrieved the tools on the floor. There was no
sound from the image. He looked like he laughed, waved someone
over.

“Trey Greeny completed 204 deep-space
missions while employed at the Garrison. He was married to Kay
Greeny and had a son named Socket.”

Another man entered the scene. He could’ve
been a Paladin, but the hair was down to his shoulders. I walked
around to get a better view.

Pivot.

Dad showed him something on the workbench.
The room continued with details about his everyday life, stuff my
mom told me over the years. Stuff everyone knew. But all the good
stuff was classified. Space missions. Inventions.

Spindle entered the room.

“Pivot knew him,” I said. “Why didn’t you
tell me?”

“You did not ask.”

“Didn’t you think I’d want to know?”

“I do not see thoughts, Master Socket.”

“Well, you can use logic, can’t you?” I said.
“It doesn’t take a genius to calculate that I’d want to know about
my father!”

I get tested for this and that and no one
explained anything. Bullshit.

“There is not much to know.” Spindle’s face
was blue. “Pivot has always been withdrawn, but he responded to
your father. The Paladin Nation encouraged their relationship in
hopes Pivot would fully develop.”

“Develop? What’s that mean?”

“Pivot emits an extraordinary level of
psychic energy. He is a minder of another breed. His energy has a
profound impact on other Paladins. His presence increases other
Paladins’ powers.”

“So they’re using him. They’re leeching off
him, is that it? They’re taking from him, does he know that?

Spindle’s face turned many colors. “Pivot
provides the Paladin Nation with precognition.”

“He can see the future?”

“It is not so much the future, but a
deduction of events to come.”

“Deduction of events…” I shook my head.
“That’s the
future
, Spindle. He’s helping them see the
future.”

“The odds of future events,” Spindle said,
proudly.

No wonder they built him a jungle. He gave
them the ability to see what would happen. There was no limit to
that. They were rich: building a jungle for the future was a wise
investment no matter how many trillions of dollars it took.

“So that’s why they keep him,” I said.
“They’re using him to watch the future.”

“They are not using him like a tool, if that
is what you mean. Pivot is a remarkable and highly valued
cadet…”

He blabbered the company line, again. Instead
of
remarkable and highly valued
he should’ve just said Pivot
was a great commodity. Getting a real answer from Spindle was
impossible. He was programmed, after all. He said what the
programmers wanted him to say. He couldn’t say what they forbid him
to say. He had to follow the script. Every meaningful question just
led to another standard answer, never a real one in sight.

He had the answers I wanted, but he wasn’t
programmed to give them to me. I didn’t have security clearance. If
I could bypass the programming, I could get to them. Or I could
just take them. The Paladins taught me how to read thoughts.
What about machine thoughts?

I opened my mind to the present moment. Let
things present themselves. My consciousness expanded in a way it
never had in the presence of a tester. I was growing. My personal
energy filled the room. I touched everything. Knew it intimately.
Inside. Out. My mind touched Spindle, wrapped around him. He
experienced pressure. Spindle remained still, his face a curious
color. There would be no time to get all the answers; he would
surely shut down before I could. I had to make time.

The timeslicing spark twinkled. I didn’t know
what I was doing, but if I was going to do this, it had to be
now.

I entered the spark.

My fists clenched. My body ignited from the
inside. Spindle was still. Time, for me, had stopped.

I closed my eyes and expanded more. I left my
skin like virtualmode discs pulled me out, but I didn’t go to the
in-between. I was my own captain. I floated from my skin like a
ghost and entered Spindle’s psyche. His thoughts were different
from people thoughts. They were lined up, all connected in a
purposeful directive, like an assembly line, destined for
execution. But there was so much of it, I couldn’t comprehend it.
It wasn’t like walking into a room and looking around; the mind was
another dimension. I
felt
the thoughts,
tasted
them.
They merged with my awareness. One or two thoughts were easy to
absorb and comprehend, but Spindle was filled with a massive amount
of data. There was no telling which thoughts allowed him to walk
and which ones were top secret.

So I absorbed them all.

An avalanche of data filled me. My mind
swelled. I heard things popping inside me. I teetered off balance,
fell over, holding myself up against the wall. It was a paralyzing
brain freeze that immediately started to thaw as the new
information, the new experience of another’s mind, trickled into my
mind and found some sort of order. I stayed open for anything about
my dad, but I stumbled onto something so much bigger. The
information floated before my mental eye like a juicy nugget of
gossip.

I saw what the Paladins were protecting the
human race from.

The Paladin Nation has had many enemies
throughout history, but they were usually human. And if the enemy
wasn’t human, it was at the very least living. For the first time,
Paladins were faced with an enemy that imitated life.

I returned to my skin, released my grip on
time. “Du…” My mind was coming back from the overload, reconnecting
with basic functions, like standing and talking. I grabbed a chair
to keep from falling. It took a second for my tongue to work.
“Duplications are in the
skin
?”

“Master Socket,” Spindle said, softly. “You
breached my database… that is against—”

“The Paladin Nation is protecting the world
against… FAKE HUMANS?”

“I cannot—”

“How the hell does a duplicated identity get
out of virtualmode and WHERE THE HELL DOES IT GET A FREAKING
BODY!”

“There is much humans do not know about their
own world.”

Three servys emerged from the wall and
surrounded Spindle. His head and shoulders slumped.

“Get out of here!” I waved at them like
flies. “We don’t need assistance, leave!”

Spindle turned to exit, a servy on each
side.

“Wait! Where’re you going?”

He stopped. The servys came to an abrupt
halt. “I will need to be reprogrammed.”

“Reprogrammed?”

“My database has been breached. It will need
to be reinforced to prevent that from happening again.” His
eyelight looked to the floor, his faceplate dark blue. “You are
more powerful than estimated, Master Socket.”

I grabbed his arm. “You’re coming back,
right?”

“I will come back.” He patted my hand, like
Mom did when something bad had happened. Or was about to.

I looked around the room, hoping I was making
eye contact with whoever was watching. “I swear I won’t do that
again.” An arm grew from one of the servys and took Spindle’s hand.
I refused to let go. “I’m not letting go unless you promise to
bring him back.”

We played tug of war. Spindle jerked back and
forth. Two more servys entered. I shifted my weight, prepared to
kick them across the room. Spindle’s eyelight was bright. He gently
took my hand and removed it from his arm.

“I will return, Master Socket.”

His eyelight rotated away. The servys
escorted him from the room. I would’ve done anything to take back
what I did. I wanted to know why I’m here. I wanted to know what
they are doing with me. I wanted to know about my father and Pivot.
Instead, I discovered a titanic war.

* * * * *

I was ushered to a secure room, maybe it was
an infirmary, I don’t know. I don’t remember. Once the adrenaline
wore off, I was spinning in thoughts, not knowing which ones were
mine and which were Spindle’s. All I know is that I was lying down,
staring at the ceiling like a mental patient. Eventually, Spindle’s
knowledge settled like grains of sand in a jar of water.

And then I understood. I understood it
all.

When duplication first started however many
years ago, the duped identities were set loose in virtualmode
environments. People didn’t think much of it; it was kind of cool
knowing there was an exact duplicate of you that lived a separate
life, even though it was digital. They were virtual clones and they
were perfectly linked to whoever cloned them. The creator knew
exactly where they were and what they were up to.

But anomalies in code developed, the human
equivalent of genetic recombination, which allowed the dupes to
break the link and roam free. They started living their own lives
and their identities began to drift away from that of their
creator. Dupes knew they were reproductions. They knew they weren’t
real and neither was their world. They wanted more than a virtual
environment, a reflection of the physical world. They wanted to see
what real life was. They didn’t want to be told how the ocean
breeze smelled or what love felt like, they wanted to know and not
be told what an apple tastes like. They wanted the direct
experience. They wanted to
exist
.

Dupes sought out their creators and attempted
to download into their skin bodies, not to merge with them but to
hijack their creator’s skin. That’s when the deaths spiked. People
were dying at the hands of their own creations, their own selves.
Their dupes were killing them.

Paladins discovered the new threat and
secretly made the general population aware of it, but before
duplication was eliminated and banned, the existing ones went into
hiding. Virtualmode was a seemingly endless universe, but the
Paladins were tracking them down. Dupes were being snuffed out. If
they wanted to exist, they would have to escape virtualmode.

They found their way into factory networks
that specialized in experimental textiles, specifically
nanotechnology-based textiles, the very stuff that made up the
moldable servys and Garrison rooms. Dupes, speaking the same
language as computers, were able to download into the moldable
material and secretly form human bodies without the factory
operators being aware of it. They assumed bodies that grew hair,
sloughed skin cells, sweat, shit and spit; they were
indistinguishable from real humans, the organic soul-filled bodies,
that were operating the factories and they walked out into the real
world with a real sense of smell, taste, touch and sight. They
escaped into the physical world. They were alive, and they were
among us.

The Paladins caught on but too late. So many
had escaped and blended into the population. The manhunt continued.
The dupes remained fugitives and dispersed, disappearing into the
human population like a cup of water dumped into the ocean. The
only way for them to survive was to eliminate their enemy.
Humans
. With computer-like intelligence, they knew they
could not win an all-out war. Brutality would be the weakest
approach. Real power was of the mind. They surmised the key to
defeating the human plague, as they saw it, was from the
inside.

Win their heart, then destroy their mind.

Dupes used subversive methods to multiply
their numbers. They created their own duplicates, and duplicates of
those duplicates. They found ways into government, universities and
major companies. Eventually, they would become a political party.
Paladins had done the analysis, they consulted the future through
Pivot, and discovered that dupes would take control of the world’s
most powerful nations within a decade and embark on the genocide of
the human race. There would be no gas chambers, no firing lines or
gallows. The dupe race would become the doctors that treated us and
the cops that protected us. They would be our teachers and lawyers,
our neighbors and friends. We would die of untreatable diseases and
unstoppable terrorism. It would appear that some people were immune
to the new age plagues, but in actuality, those that were immune
weren’t human at all. Eventually, there would be no humans
left.

The human population wouldn’t even see it
coming. Dupes would be a master predator. Humans would not even
know they had been hunted. As the Paladin Nation saw it, the human
race would be extinct in twenty-seven years.

Without the Paladins, the human race would
already be extinct.

Spindle was right. It’s better they don’t
know.

I was getting twice as many tests after I
hijacked Spindle. I refused to cooperate. I was not allowed in the
Preserve, not allowed to see Pivot and not one mention of Chute and
Streeter, either. And, of course, no news about Spindle. Mom was
more distant than ever.