Socket 1 - The Discovery of Socket Greeny (2 page)

“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 reports 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!”

Streeter could’ve knocked her halfway across
the tundra, if he wanted to. Sometimes he did, but most of the time
he let her get it out of her system. Sometimes I broke it up and
sometimes I watched their spats play out and they always ended with
one of them damaging the other’s sim and then cursing each other
for all the trouble. This time, I didn’t do anything because I was
feeling it. I felt Chute’s muscles tense, Streeter’s knees throb.
And this time I stopped them not by stepping between them. I
stopped them with a thought.

[Stop.]

Chute was in mid-strike, ready to put a hole
through Streeter’s right lung, when the thought struck her and her
body obeyed as if the thought was her own. She looked around, like
someone had whispered it to her, but I simply willed her to step
off Streeter. Streeter looked up, his scraggly beard powdered with
snow. They could feel something, too. They could feel me inside
them. And then they watched my stomach begin to rebuild itself,
regenerating simulated flesh, filling the holes in my chest until
my body was whole again.

Streeter got on his knees and looked at
Chute. “I owe you an apology.”

“I didn’t do anything.” Her mouth barely
moved. “How’d you do that?”

The shadow walked up behind her and through
her and stood between us, its ghostly form snapping in the wind. I
sat up and looked at my hands, unsure if this was virtualmode or a
dream.

“Do I know you?” I asked the shadow.

Streeter and Chute looked at each other.
Streeter said, “I think he’s having a stroke.”

“Socket, are you all right?” Chute asked.

But I didn’t hear her words. I felt them,
understood them like they were my own. I penetrated everything in
this world, felt the tree limbs blowing on the mountaintops and the
squatty warriors emerging in the distance again. I was everything
except the shadow. I got up without much effort, like I levitated
onto my feet.

[You’ve known me your entire
existence.]
The thought was in my head, but it was not mine. It
came from the shadow that had no face.

“Did you do this to me?” I raised my hand,
rubbing my fingertips. “Are you making this happen?”

“You’re starting to worry me.” Chute stepped
through the shadow and stopped so the two were superimposed, making
her fair complexion a shade darker. “We need to get you back to the
skin.”

“Yeah, get off the crazy train, Socket,”
Streeter huffed, gripping the staff with both hands. “I’m going to
need some help for the next wave.”

“Who are you?” I asked.

The shadow didn’t gesture, shrug or say
anything. It remained superimposed over Chute’s worried expression.
Whatever she said after that was lost in the wind. The familiarity
of the shadow had a taste and a smell, some sort of presence not
generally associated with one of the five senses. I felt it like a
thought or an intuition.

“Did you heal me?” I asked.

[You were never broken.]

“Socket, you’re freaking me out, here,” Chute
said.

“I ain’t got time to wait for him to come
back.” Streeter charged past me and my crazy rambling. The tiny
Nordic warriors were black as tar, staining the snow as they shoved
through the drifts. They were close enough to hear their snarling.
Streeter let out a war cry, the same one he let loose before every
clash, the same howl that Chute said made him look like a drama
queen, and charged ahead to meet them head-on, bringing down the
spiked club to crush the first one’s skull.

Something squirmed in my belly. I had the
vision of a bright star twinkling inside my stomach. A spark that,
for a moment, blinded me. I felt my mind wrap around it and fuse
with it.

And then things slowed.

Things stopped.

I could see in 360-degrees as if every
particle of snow that hung sparkling in mid-air like tiny Christmas
ornaments were my eyes. I did that. I was the one that willed the
world to stop, for the wind to die and everything in it to take a
timeout while I could think. I didn’t intend for things to actually
stop, but that’s what I wanted and that’s what happened. I took one
of the snowflakes between my finger and thumb, studying the
crystalline detail. It began to melt and water dripped down to my
knuckle.

It was dead silent. Dead still.

The shadow was standing in front of Chute.
Without the wind, his form shimmered like smoky particles loosely
clinging together. I opened my mouth trying to figure out what the
familiar flavor was, trying to figure out just who the shadow was.
And then a thought came from somewhere deep inside, some place that
had been stored in the lockers of a three-year old toddler when I
was in a bathroom and smelled the scent of a man shaving at the
sink. It was a safe smell. The man rinsed the razor and smiled down
at me.

I couldn’t bring himself to say it, couldn’t
say the word that I identified with this essence I was experiencing
because the man that was shaving was dead. He died when I was
five.

“What the hell is going on? Is this some sort
of goof?”

I reached for the shadow but my hand waved
through the wispy form and as it did the essence tasted stronger,
tingling all the way to my stomach, wrenching me with a helpless
sense of falling, almost dropping me to my knees. But the essence
was unmistakable. Father.

[The time has come to know who you
are.]
The thought had a distinct tone, but it was unlike the
voice I remembered as my father’s.
[For you to know your true
nature.]

Time wasn’t to be measured in that still
moment. The hands on a clock would not be moving. At some point, I
stepped forward and merged with the shadow and the essence filled
my emptiness, those pockets I did not know existed. Emptiness that
yawned inside and sometimes pissed me off, made me sad and pissed
me off at being sad. Emptiness for my dad dying and emptiness that
he left me to figure things out on my own. Emptiness for having to
look at the emptiness in my mother’s eyes. Emptiness that left me
awake at night staring at the ceiling wondering what the hell was
the point of living. And now I didn’t feel those things. I felt so
present. So complete.

When the ground trembled, I realized I’d
closed my eyes. The shadow was no longer there. And the ground
continued to shake. The snow vibrated and the statue-like sims of
Chute and Streeter shook, too. I no long felt connected with them
or the rest of the environment.

On the horizon, the ground broke open and
snow spilled inside a widening crevasse that snaked towards me,
ripping the ground like God had grabbed both ends of the world and
decided to pull it apart. I watched the rip race under my feet. The
falling sensation was back in my stomach because this time I was
falling for real, down into the empty blackness that tasted like
essence, that sixth sense, only this time it tasted steely and
hard.

Blackness was all there was. No sim. Just
falling.

I felt the hot needles of my sweaty skin
sticking to the armrests of the study hall chair. I opened my eyes
back in my skin. A silver ball hovered in front of me. Its surface
gleamed like polished metal with a red eyelight beneath the
surface. “The three of you must follow,” the lookit said.

I was firmly planted in the seat, but still
felt the falling.

“Justin Heyward Street,” the lookit
announced.

“You know, middle names are so unnecessary,”
Streeter said, sitting forward and rubbing the feeling back into
his face.

“Anna Nancy Shuester,” the same lookit
announced. Chute quickly did the same as Streeter.

“Socket Pablo Greeny.” Its red eyelight shot
right into my eyes. “The three of you are to follow.”

Honestly, I still wasn’t sure where I was. I
gripped the armrest like my chair had been dropped from a cargo
plane. I was still trying to return to my skin. I felt out of
sorts, like half of my awareness was somewhere else. Back in my
sim?

The lookit wasn’t going to wait. It was about
to call security when the room suddenly erupted. All the
virtualmoders sat up, groaning and cursing, ripping the discs from
behind their ears. The lookit’s eyelight was spinning, recording
the hundreds of study hall sound infractions. It blazed around the
room trying to get control, then called for security and returned
to the front row. The substitute teacher was watching a music
video, looked up and closed his laptop.

“The three of you must follow,” the lookit
repeated.

I could barely feel my legs when I sat
forward. Chute hooked her finger around mine and led me up the
steps like the living dead. The queens, rats, burners, gearheads,
jocks and goths and anyone else that couldn’t thought-project into
virtualmode looked up from their laptops and tablets and stared at
us. Virtualmoders were all back in their skin.