Socket 3 - The Legend of Socket Greeny (27 page)

“Forgive me,” Streeter says, finally turning
around. “I’m a little emotional, but you have no idea how many
times we’ve done this. You’re back.”

“I am. Now, you mind telling me what’s going
on.” I thump the refrigerator. “And why we’re in virtualmode?”

He nods at the refrigerator. There’s a
calendar hanging on a suction cup hook with pictures of horses.
There’s a birthday scrawled in one of the days, but it’s the date
he’s referring to. August 6,
4030.

“We’re all long gone, buddy. Loooong gone.”
He points at the couch. “You might want to sit for this.”

“No, I’m good.”

“Well, I’m going to sit.”

He fishes a pizza crust out of one of the
boxes and plunks down. “Yeah, well, two thousand years have passed
since the Great Meltdown,” he says, chewing with his mouth open.
“You see, when you eliminated Fetter, it took a long time for
people to believe what really happened. In fact, no one even knew
who you were, except a few of us.”

“But then how are you—”

“Look, it’s too much to explain, so let me
tell you this: I’m just a copy. Two thousand years ago, I
downloaded all my memories, my entire personality, into a database
because I knew this moment would one day come. I knew that one day,
the human race would want to revive you and they would use my image
to do that. That’s why we’re here, in your living room, the day
before you began to realize your True Nature. You fell asleep on
that couch watching that news report.” He jabs his finger at the
television. “And the next day a shadow came to you in virtualmode
and whispered those life-altering words:
Time to realize your
True Nature.”

It seems impossible. But he’s telling the
truth: We’re in virtualmode. There’s no skin to go back to, I’m
just a digital construction.

“You know,” he says, stacking the pizza
boxes, “you really were a pig.”

“Why?” I say. “Why bring me back?”

“Because we want to say thank you.”

He goes to the kitchen cabinet, throws me a
breakfast bar while he opens one for himself. He drops his hand on
my shoulder. “Like I said, it’s too much to explain.”

He looks. Waits. And then I feel it, the
expansion of my mind, reaching out to our surroundings, feeling the
floor and ceiling, the walls and his body as if the air is water
and the water is my body. I feel his thoughts like floating
bubbles, elements that I can touch with my mind, feel and
experience, see and read.

“Go ahead,” he says. “Take a look, the story
is right there. It’s for you.”

Streeter’s life unfolds like a movie trailer,
highlighting the events that took place after I died.

When I died, technology shut down. Pike had
penetrated the Internet before Fetter consumed him. He was
connected to everything and everyone. That was how he projected his
image into the market. When he was consumed, everything just
died.

The Great Meltdown.

Financial institutions lost track of money.
Government control broke down. Law enforcement became brutal. It
was many years before stability could be established.

And the Paladins were nowhere to be found.
They vanished. Public officials combed through the training
facilities without luck. Servys lay dead on the floor, many huddled
in a corner like a storm had passed through. The Paladins were
nowhere, not even their bodies. They had left this planet without a
hint of what happened. Even the databases had been erased.

The public blamed the Paladins for the
collapse. Even the politicians claimed the Paladins integrated
their technology into the world to stake their claim, so that only
they knew how to run it, but people were now free of their control.
They were actually close to the truth, even though they were
spouting these stories for political advantage.

But there were a few that knew the whole
story.

My mother had survived, along with other
civilians that served the Paladin Nation. But it was Streeter that
crusaded for the truth to be known. He tracked down all the records
of my travels through virtualmode, and since I had been with him
all my life, he had recorded details of my thoughts and actions to
make a complete picture of who I was and what I had done. He had a
hard time believing what I’d told him, that I was a duplicate. In
fact, his memory was a bit cloudy about what happened that day, so
he guessed he might’ve been dreaming some of it up. But when he
looked up the last interaction at the school, when I tried to
locate Pike, he knew he had it right.

Streeter went to visit Scott Teck to find out
what happened, but it was a dead end when Scott and his family
didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. They never saw a
kid with white hair or heard of anyone named Socket. He left them
his contact information, just in case something came up.

But this didn’t slow Streeter down. It was
his diligent skills in information retrieval that revealed the
existence of Fetter. My mother gave him access to the dormant
Paladin databases that had been locked down during the fall of
Fetter. But Streeter found a way to open them up and he discovered
what few people knew.

Humans would have become the food of a
technological god.

Fetter.

Once he had the facts, and not until he had a
complete and exhaustive compendium, did he take it to Congress. But
he was rebuffed by the politicians and lobbyists for those in favor
of reviving virtualmode for the sake of law and order. And profit.
He got nowhere. Nothing could be believed and no one could be
trusted. But he had the facts and passed everything he had to
anyone that would listen. For the longest time, it was just another
conspiracy theory.

Streeter’s life ended before the truth was
accepted. He died at the age of 93. He lived in upstate South
Carolina with his wife, Janette. They had three kids. But before he
died, he developed a virtualmode composite of his personality, so
that if one day the world came to know the truth about virtualmode
and Socket Greeny, he could be there to see me once again.

“You’re a hero,” Streeter says.

I return to the kitchen, back in my sim and
out of his mind. “No,” I say. “I just lived my life.”

“But it was one no other person could
live.”

“I wasn’t a person.”

“You were more than that. You started as a
duplicate, but you transformed, somehow absorbed a portion of
Scott’s soul or humanity or something, I don’t know. But you
weren’t a duplicate in the end, Socket. You were a real life
Pinocchio!” He grabs my arms, firmly. “No machine and no person
could have saved the world. Only you.”

I pull away and lean on the sink to
contemplate this. None of it seems real. None of this
is
real because we’re in virtualmode. But outside the kitchen window,
cars drive down the street and children are playing in their yards,
squirting their father with squirtguns and bombing him with water
balloons. But this is virtualmode. Tightness squeezes my chest. I
don’t want to live in a false world, not again.

“I know this is hard to accept, that we’re
all gone and the world doesn’t look the same. But, please
understand, so many people loved you, they didn’t have a chance to
say goodbye. Couldn’t say thank you. Sorry that they had to live
their life without you.”

I’m squeezing the kitchen counter, the edge
driving into my palms.

“If there’s anywhere you could go,” Streeter
steps next to me, looks out the window, “anywhere in the world
right now, this second, where would it be?”

And the tightness melts. I know where I want
to go. Who I want to see. I let go of the counter.

He goes to the front door and waits. I slowly
follow. And when the door opens, it’s not the street with cars or
the neighbors in the grass. I step onto a stone slab that is
surrounded by a vibrant forest. White wood storks glide in front of
the rising sun. And directly ahead is a broad tree, an ancient
tree, with thick muscled branches. Large, glossy leaves shake in
the canopy among pink blossoms, their fragrance carried on a soft
breeze. There’s no roof on this Preserve, it’s open to the world,
not sequestered in its own environment.

The sunlight glitters on the grimmet tree. I
raise my hand to shade my eyes, to see what’s in front of the
massive trunk. But I don’t see the person there, I feel her. Then I
see her standing there, waiting. Her memories have waited thousands
of years for this moment.

“I brought you back for a lot of reasons,”
Streeter says. “But, mainly, I did it for her.”

Once again, my consciousness expands and I
merge with Chute. I see her life.

The time that followed my disappearance was
difficult. She spent several years in therapy working through the
trauma. She began meditating. Eventually, she pieced her life back
together and found a measure of peace, that she could live in a
world that didn’t make sense. That seemed so unfair.

Tagghet disappeared. Instead of a
professional athlete, she went to college to become a family
counselor. And although her interest was in marriage counseling,
she was still single in her early thirties. Many relationships had
come and gone, but she could not connect with them. None of them
felt right. She knew it was because she was hanging onto a memory
and that she needed to move on, but couldn’t force herself to do
it. She dreamed of me so often that it spoiled all her
relationships. She was confident that one day it would be resolved,
that she would forget about me, that she would accept the loss.

But that changed on her thirty-third
birthday.

She was downtown Charleston with friends,
sitting at an outdoor café that overlooked the market. They were
drinking coffee and planning the evening. One of her friends was
telling the story of a guy she’d met at work. Chute was listening
and laughing and, for the first time in a long time, was just being
herself.

But then she felt something. Something so
familiar, but so distant, like a scent from long ago reminding her
of childhood. On the sidewalk, down the steps and next to the
street, he stood among the tourists bustling along. He was quite
still, unmoved by the pedestrians finding their way around him. He
was staring at her.

She didn’t look away. She didn’t move, not
believing what she saw. She’d dreamed this dream a thousand times,
and if she moved he would disappear. He always disappeared. She’s
barely breathing, afraid she might wake up if she did. She just
wanted to sit there and look at him.

“Annie?” Her friends were staring at her.
“Are you all right?”

He was still there.

So she stood. Each step was slow and steady.
She took one step at a time, her hand sliding down the metal
railing. She stood at the bottom step. The man was near the curb.
Her heart pounded. She wasn’t breathing as she walked closer. Still
she did not wake. Still, he was there.

Her throat tightened. Lips quivered.

She touched his face with one hand. Then the
other. She was looking at the impossible, but there he was. He was
real. He wasn’t a dream.

“It’s me, Chute,” Scott said.

She didn’t answer. She was a rational person,
an educated woman that understood the mind and the tricks it could
play. But there I was, standing in the flesh. It was my face. My
eyes. Brown hair.

She slid her hand to his chest, felt his
heart beating. Somehow, she knew that she hadn’t gone crazy. She
didn’t know how, but she knew that it was me. She pressed her face
against his chest. He hugged her while she wept, tears soaking his
shirt while tourists tried not to look. Her friends were
speechless.

Scott was thirty years old when my memories
unlocked. He was fishing when the first one opened, a memory of
going to a carnival with parents that didn’t look like his. He
ignored it, figured it was a dream. But then another came the next
day. More the next. He remembered people he never met. Then,
walking around the town square, he saw kids skateboarding. He went
up to them and didn’t ask, just took one of their boards and pulled
a flawless heel flip. He had never skated in his life.

The memories burst forth, after that. He had
two lives inside of him and figured he’d gone insane. He sought
therapy and medication, talked with psychiatric professionals and
clergymen. Even went to a Buddhist temple. No one would explain his
condition, tried to convince him it was delusions and no one named
Socket Greeny ever came to visit. But he didn’t go nuts. He
remembered when he merged with me and while it still seemed crazy,
he made peace with it. It was years before he began to accept the
memories as his own, as if he was two people that lived
simultaneous lives, even though they didn’t make sense. He, like
Chute, found some measure of peace. But something was missing, like
there was someone out there that needed him. And that’s when he
decided to find Streeter.

Streeter walked him through the truth. It
didn’t take much convincing because Scott remembered growing up
with Streeter. He remembered that, somehow, Streeter was his best
friend. Streeter helped him accept who he was.
Scott Teck is
Socket. Socket is Scott Teck.

Streeter planned on introducing him to Chute,
but Scott couldn’t wait. Once things made sense, he went to the
market and found her. And when he saw her, he knew that he’d found
what was missing.

They married. Had two children and two dogs
and a horse. Their marriage wasn’t perfect, but it was genuine.
They brought peace to each other, their lives finally complete. And
every year they took a trip around the world with Streeter to a
remote manmade canyon buried in the mountains where barren trees
looked like a graveyard. They journeyed through a weed-choked
approach to an enormous stump where the grimmet tree once stood to
pay homage to a good friend. To a brother. And a love. Chute would
place a rose on the stump and would do so every year until they
were too old to make the journey.