Veneer (28 page)

Jalay fell in a heap at Russo’s feet, dazed.

“Rivera!” The voice boomed over the stunned congregation.

Russo turned along with everyone else and viewed the three men standing at the end of the hallway. There was Principal Ficcone sporting his customary scowl. Flanking him were two generic uniforms, one with his arms crossed and the other with a twitchy hand on his sidearm. Together, they didn’t seem all that imposing, not with the exit only a short sprint down the hall in the opposite direction. They wouldn’t be able to catch him, not with the current traffic jam.

“You stop right there!” The principal motioned to the uniforms.

“No,” replied Russo, raising his voice to the same ridiculous timbre, “
you
stop! Come any closer and I start cutting!”

At the sight of the knife, the mob erupted into panic. It worked in his favor as those in front of him surged towards the uniforms while the rest made off the other way. Looking down at Jalay, he pointed the knife. “I gave you a chance,” he said, before bolting down the hallway.

There were screams from all directions as the students scattered in front of him, some seeking refuge in classrooms. All at once, the veneers in the hallway changed, with the ceiling morphing into a threatening red that undulated in waves. Decorations faded into the distance and were replaced by beige backgrounds with the word
LOCKDOWN
reconciled in large black letters. An alarm ramped up, sounding from above. Russo smiled, amused at the chaos he had created. It was good to inject a little excitement into their lives. They’d talk about him for a long time, talk about where they were when Russo went on a rampage.

Russo’s Rampage, he titled it, and then laughed. They hadn’t seen anything yet.

Turning the corner, Russo saw the windows on the outside doors gleaming. He barreled towards them, legs now under his control and pumping as hard as they could. Although his adrenaline surged, his mind was able to break his escape into a series of easily achievable tasks. Get to the door, get outside, turn left, and head towards the street. Lose them in the neighborhood. It was as good a plan as any.

The outer doors banged into the walls as he pushed through them.

“Where you running off to?”

The voice came out of nowhere so suddenly that Russo stumbled and almost took a header into the grass. Regaining his balance, he slowed and turned to face his interrogator. There was something about the way the man dressed, the way he looked at Russo, that seemed so familiar.

“Do I know you?” asked Russo, between breaths.

“My name is Ruiz and no, you don’t. But the important thing is that I know you. And that I know what you’re after.”

There it was, thought Russo. Even at a distance, he could tell the man’s eyes weren’t normal. “How many of you are there?”

“Enough,” Ruiz replied, lifting his palette and showing it to Russo. “Do you recognize this person?”

Russo smirked at the image of a bruised Deron. “What about him?”

“We have reason to believe you are responsible for his stay in the hospital.”

His face scrunched in disbelief. “What is wrong with you people? You use your magic to solve little bullshits like this?”

“Okay,” said the agent, reconciling a new image onto his palette. “How about him?”

Russo bolted, kicking up the grass as he went. The entire world receded as he put all of his concentration and effort into the picking up and putting down of his feet. Flying across the lawn, he jumped down the five steps leading towards the bleachers, cut through the lacrosse field, and finally made his way off school grounds. He crossed more streets than he could count, turning down alleys and cutting through backyards, until his lungs broke down and refused to continue their frenetic pace. Crumbling to his knees beside a shed in someone’s backyard, he struggled to find his breath.

Feeling dizzy, Russo put his hand on the shed to steady himself. Under his open palm, the veneer shimmered, sparked by something in his subconscious, something his magic mistook for a command.

He couldn’t look away from the newly reconciled wall, couldn’t escape the agent’s reconciled image or the piercing eyes of the late Eric Tavarez.

36 - Deron

Abernathy’s shop wasn’t so much a store as a shrine to dead tech. Deron couldn’t name half of the objects on the warped shelves that stretched from one side of the room to the other, breaking only to allow passage into the back of the shop where Timo was chatting with the proprietor. Timo had joked that Abernathy was old, but not as old as the relics he collected. Now, standing in front of the shelves, staring decades into the past, Deron couldn’t disagree.

He had never seen anything like it, not in the history books or even in the museum in downtown Easton that he visited in sixth grade. There were things on the shelves that seemed to predate reconciliation, like televisions and clocks and some kind of telephone with a built-in display. Looking closely, he saw that all the gadgets were suffering from age, wilting like flowers in the hot sun. Though they retained their basic shape, he could tell just by looking that they no longer functioned. Next to the phones, he found a bin full of little slips of gray metal. Deron extracted one of the slivers and felt the poke of the interface pins on his thumb.

“He’s a curious one, isn’t he?” asked someone from behind.

“Sorry,” said Deron, tossing the tab back into the bin.

The voice belonged to an old man whose face had been corrupted by age. Somehow, the frail mouth still worked enough to speak.

“No matter how many times it happens, I’ll never get over the astonishment on the faces of the newly gray.” He winked at Timo. “Well met, young Bishop. Morten Abernathy, Tech Support.” He grinned at his last statement, exposing a pitted smile.

“Hi,” replied Deron, shaking the man’s frail hand.

His furry eyebrows danced. “I see you’ve discovered slivers.” Reaching over Deron’s shoulder, he pulled out one of the shinier ones. “I bartered these from a scavenger on his way to the northern border. Argentinean, no, Brazilian. You ever been to Brazil, Deron? It’s like going back in time, technologically speaking. The scav said they had only gotten the veneer, what, five years before he got there?”

Timo shrugged in confirmation.

“You know what reconciliation can do to a country,” said Abernathy, gesturing to the wall of discarded technology. “All of a sudden, nobody wants a sliver anymore. So, glut.” He coughed into his elbow and for a second appeared as if he couldn’t stop.

“What does it do?” asked Deron.

“Information delivery, same as anything else. Society was obsessed with information long before I was born, if you can believe that. This little thing went like this here.” He raised his arm and set the sliver down softly on his wrist. “It goes into your skin,” he explained.

“In your world,” put in Timo, “it would be like reconciling a portal on your body.”

“Quite obsolete when the veneer came along, but in its day all the kids had them. We had portals, they had slivers. Same purpose.”

Deron examined his own arm and wondered why anyone would want to embed something in their skin. Just the idea of those pins sticking into his muscles made him shiver.

“Ha!” exclaimed Abernathy. “Look at him! As if a little endotech is such a bad thing.”

Timo smiled. “Cut the kid some slack. He just got back to Kansas yesterday.”

“And you haven’t told him yet?”

“Told me what?” asked Deron, flustered.

“Don’t worry,” said Timo, putting up his hand. “I promised you some information; that’s why I brought you to Abernathy. He’s going to explain your magic.”

“Magic!” The old man stifled a chortle. He pointed an accusatory finger at Timo and said, “And they have the sack to call them schools! A place you go to learn, to discover the secrets of the universe.” Muttering as he walked away, he suddenly stopped and tossed the sliver to Deron. “Put that away, son. You and I need to have a talk.”

Deron replaced the sliver in the bin and shot a questioning look at Timo.

“He’s sensitive,” he explained. “After everything you learn today, keep in mind you’re still young. Abernathy spent half a century in Floren before going gray. Imagine spending your whole life believing in something like the veneer and then one day finding out it’s all been a lie. That’s all the veneer is, Deron. A giant lie that everyone believes.”

“Are you two bajingos coming or what?” yelled Abernathy from the back.

Timo shrugged and led Deron behind the counter to a workbench where Abernathy was searching through a list with his finger. Finally, he stopped and tapped the page.

“Row twenty-six, column fourteen.” He shuffled towards a grid of cubby holes on the back wall. “You’d think after all these years of initiating newcomers I’d just keep one of these on my desk.” Then, to Timo, “Less this year than the year before. And before and before.” There was a sing-song quality to his voice. Suddenly, he belted in operatic fashion, “Every year, every year, less eyes to shed a tear. We can never free them all, save for those that hear our call.”

Timo groaned, audible only to Deron.

Abernathy resumed his normal voice. “No one sings anymore. When I was young, we sang all the time about this and that. My Jessica loved to hear me sing. If I recall...” His speech dwindled as he found the item he was looking for. He made his way down the ladder and then handed a small box to Deron. “Open it.”

Inside, Deron found a sheet of plastic with a speck in the middle of it.

“Impressive, isn’t it?” asked Abernathy, grinning.

“What is it?”

The glee drained from the old man’s face. “Sweet Christopher Pike, son, how old are you?”

“Seventeen?”

Abernathy flashed consternation. “Is that a question? Do they not teach you how to tell your own age?”

“Easy,” interrupted Timo. He put his big hand on the man’s shoulder and looked him in the eyes. “Remember what it’s like, yeah?”

The fire dimmed but Deron could see it wasn’t gone completely.

“Sorry,” sighed Abernathy. “I get old sometimes. Seventeen was... sixty years ago.” His eyes drifted. “Things were different then. They taught us about our Guardian chips. That there’s what you have in your neck. That’s your magic.”

Reflexively, Deron reached for his throat but soon felt a warm finger on the back of his neck.

“Back here,” said Timo, tapping a spot just below the end of Deron’s skull.

“The Guardian chip,” explained Abernathy, walking away, “is the regulator of modern man’s entire life. Its first function was to allow people to interface with virtuality.”

Deron thought back to Destined 4 Death, suddenly unsure of how simply wearing a mask on his face could produce such vivid experiences.

“Over the years, other features were added, some good, some bad. Then one day, they went too far.” The old man rolled something tall out of the corner, draped in a black sheet. Chuckling, he began recounting. “They said that the greatest threat to mankind would be the invention of artificial intelligence.” Stealing a glance at Timo, he added, “So much for mankind, right?”

Timo smirked but said nothing.

“Great minds! Great minds said he or she or it would emerge one day and enslave all of humanity with its superior intelligence. Luckily, that hasn’t happened yet. And why would it? Why do Project A when there is so much more money in Project B?”

“What’s Project B?” interrupted Deron.

“I was coming to—” Abernathy took a few quick breaths. “They called it augmented reality. That’s when you overlay virtual graphics or text on a physical surface. What you call magic is actually a function of your Guardian chip interfacing with your brain, your eyes, and the central network. Remember the sliver?”

“Just show him already,” said Timo.

“This is you,” said Abernathy, pulling the sheet and revealing a human skeleton. “Well, a plastic you,” he clarified. Slowly, he turned the model around until Deron could see the back of it. “The chip lives here.” He pointed to a cluster of wires at the base of the skull. “The tendrils extend throughout the body as far south as the ankles, though at that point they are too small to see. We have intrusion into the heart between these two ribs, mirrored on the other side of the spinal column to accommodate the lungs. And your brain...”

His words became muffled as Deron looked down and reconciled a see-through version of his arm, complete with wires running its length. Shutting his eyes against the veneer, he suddenly felt out of breath.

“Subtle,” said Timo, putting his hand on Deron’s back. He guided him to a nearby chair.

“The truth is never subtle,” argued Abernathy. “It is shocking and bold and there is nothing anyone can do but accept it.” He turned his attention to Deron. “You should be thankful, young Bishop. You are stronger, faster, and healthier than your ancestors, an improved model of your father, of his father, and so on. Did you know the first chips used to be called Georgia chips?”

There was too much uncertainty in his stomach to risk responding.

“After the old state, you see? Georgia was abbreviated GA. And GA stood for Guardian Angel. But at some point, we lost the Angel and got this instead.” He looked around his shop. “And old version of reality. No longer supported.”

Timo cleared his throat. “This is all we have left, Deron. This is our reality now. It was good enough for our ancestors; it should be good enough for us.”

Deron nodded, tried to think of some kind of response that would express the turmoil in his head. He was flawed, he realized, since the beginning. All those years his teachers had told him that it was his magic that was failing, that he didn’t believe in it enough, but the real culprit had been faulty hardware. They made him believe he was different, somehow deficient in his abilities. Disbelief turned to regret and regret to anger; they had all tricked him, lied to him. And they would keep doing it to generation after generation, making innocent kids feel small, making them doubt their worth.

“I’m not deficient,” whispered Deron.

“None of us are,” replied Timo. “Our eyes are open. They’re the ones living in a false world. So none of us can reconcile... is that such a bad thing?” He extended his hand to help Deron up.