Socket 1-3 - The Socket Greeny Saga (48 page)

I walk along the room, the doorways won’t
open. Pon’s not here. Maybe he went through one of the doors, but
I’m not going to make this into a game of Hide and Seek. Those
doors could go anywhere. I turn to go back to the club, but the
archway is gone. In its place is a blank space.

I slam my fists on the wall. “Where are you,
goddamnit?”

There’s a silver podium now in the center of
the room. It wasn’t there when I entered, as if it magically
appeared, identical to the one in the lobby. My reflection is
perfectly clear on its surface. I dip my fingers in it, my image
ripples. The taste of aluminum tings in my mouth.

And then the podium opens to my
awareness.

The room spins like a carnival ride. Data
courses through my fingers, ticking through my nerves like grains
of sand, expanding my awareness, filling me with thoughts and
images. My mind grows out the top of my head like tentacles. The
air whistles as they swing around. More emerge from the back of my
head, then along my neck and back.

I wrap them around the podium and smash it
into the ceiling. Now
this
is telekinesis. My True Nature.
This is what the Trial is about. I’ve been released from my body. I
am pure power. And Pon thinks he can hide from me?

ME?

The podium crashes, its post spiking into
the floor, fragments twinkling around the room. I plunge my
slithery mind into the podium. The surface splashes. Currents of
information surge through me. I let my awareness absorb it.
Become it.

I’m everywhere, like the multi-faceted
vision of an insect. There are thousands of virtualmode rooms
throughout the underground of Charleston and they’re all connected
to the room of mirrors. It all starts here.

It all starts with me.

I am the room. I am the conduit.
I am
everything.

The rooms are filthy little prison cells
with patrons lying on piss-stained mattresses. Their bodies are
wasting away and forgotten. Maybe I know these people like I knew
the ones in the lobby but I don’t pay attention. I don’t care. None
of them taste like Pon.

I go room to room, sniffing with my mind,
searching for the one soul I came for, the one that will quench my
thirst. I need to find Pon. I can bring him back, I can send Pike
away. If he would just stop hiding.

PON!
My thought shakes the walls.
DON’T RUN FROM ME!

The corridors are networked like an ant
colony. My awareness spreads throughout. I can taste the foul flesh
of the gear-addicted voids. I plunge deeper. It’s colder and the
rooms are smaller. The voids are shriveled and weak, but I storm
past them. Room after room, life after life, I taste them all. And
when there are no more rooms, when there’s nowhere left to look,
nothing left to taste, it’s clear to me. He’s gone.

POOOOOONNNNN!

The gear-addicts quiver, twitching to life.
They moan like babies pulled off their mommy’s tit. I feel their
cries inside me, but ignore them. They want to go back to their
virtualmode life of dreams and fantasy and I don’t give a fuck what
they want. I hate them. They’re the ones filling me with rage. It’s
them. It’s their fault.

“Come, you shitbags.” The walls crackle.
“Come and see what you’ve become.”

I absorb their essence, interweave through
their minds and bodies until I’m one with them. They’ll come with a
simple wish. A single thought.

I open my eyes back in the circular room.
The podium is shattered at my feet. The reflections on the walls
and doors are crystal clear, the hazy fog lifted from the polished
mirrors. My face looks back in every direction.

Come.

They cling to their beds. But I have no
mercy. If I’m going to drown, they can join me.

Come to the light.

The first body falls through a door on my
right. I feel him smack on the floor like wet meat. His skin is
gray. What’s left of his long white hair is frayed and matted over
his face.

“Please,” he moans. “Leave me.”

He tastes old and neglected. Forgotten. He’s
wasted, near death, but somehow he won’t die. He paws at my
feet.

“Please…”

I’ve got every intention of wasting him, but
there’s something so familiar about him. His heart patters and I
feel it in my chest, fluttering with fear. I feel the cold floor
beneath his palms, the sting of air on his oozing wounds. When he
moves, it stirs inside my gut like a spear twisting and
breaking.

Who is this?

I hook my finger under his chin. The hair
falls from his face.

I fall back a step.

Me.

He reaches a clawed hand. It’s my voice.
“Please…” The word slips from his cracked lips, but I feel them
rattle in my throat. I feel his pain and loneliness.

Another body falls into the room and there’s
stabbing pain in my knees. He sits up, throws his hair back, and I
look directly at my face again. Three more tumble in like the
living dead and they’re all me. I feel each of them, all their
pains and fears swirling in my stomach.

I thought they were just voids hiding from
life, but they’re me. And now I can see them and feel them. I’ve
become them. And now I want them to go back. I want to forget.

“Go.” I flick my hand like that would make
them disappear. “NEVER SHOW YOUR FACE AGAIN!”

But they keep coming. Some older. Some have
longer hair, others missing teeth. They climb over each other,
cling to me, tear at my shirt. They wail and cry, each moan
vibrating in my throat until I don’t know if it’s them or me. I
don’t know which ones are reflections and which ones are real.

Who am I?

I try to disconnect, try to wish them dead,
but they won’t die. Their hearts thump in my chest.

“GET AWAY!”

A burst of telekinetic energy slams them
against the walls. The mirrors crack. I push with all my will and
the cracks run beneath my feet.

I push harder.

They have to go back. I close my eyes,
mumbling incoherently, listening to them scream, feeling their
bodies squirm. One of them steps out of the crowd, impervious to my
will. He comes closer. I open my eyes.

Pon.

He’s motionless, hands behind his back. Eyes
placid. There’s no trace of Pike’s menace inside. But he’s
unconcerned about the hell I’ve uncovered. Hopelessness howls
inside me and everyone in the room moans like they feel it, too.
Collectively, we stare at our mentor. We wait for him to speak.
Wait for him to save us, to lead us out of this forsaken place. But
he does nothing.

And it’s all so hopeless.

I hate him.

He’s going to leave me again. He’s going to
watch me drown.

I wrap my hands around his neck, press my
thumbs into his windpipe. I squeeze until the tendons ridge from my
wrists. Pon’s face quickly darkens. His eyes bulge, but he doesn’t
resist. He gives himself to me.

And I squeeze the life from him.

I pull him close to look deep inside his
eyes, to watch him die. The pupils are bottomless. Soulless. I feel
him with my mind, taste his waning essence. It’s not the essence of
Pon I taste. Nor is it Pike. It’s something so much more familiar.
Something I’d forgotten. And then I see the reflection in his black
eyes, the reflection of my own face.

I hold him out at arm’s length. Pon’s face
has become my own.

I’m strangling me.

I am my own master.

“Don’t.” The strength drains from my hands.
“Don’t do this.”

The floor crumbles beneath me and I fall. I
hold onto the edge but can’t climb out. Below my dangling feet is a
mine shaft. Its bottom disappears in the darkness.

Pon is back, standing over me. He doesn’t
offer a hand as I slide from the edge. He doesn’t reach for me as I
fall into the darkness. And as I slide down the ever-tightening
shaft, the light above becomes smaller. I descend ever deeper. Ever
colder. And before the opening above disappears from sight, people
are watching. It’s not the voids. It’s Mother. It’s Chute and
Streeter. They watch. The walls cave in around me.

The earth crushes me. And before the last
gasp of air leaves my lungs, I can utter only a word. It’s the
single word that I heard myself mutter in a cold dream weeks
earlier. A word that seems stuck inside.

Help.

T R A I N I N G

eborn

The hole is a funnel. The deeper I sink, the
tighter it becomes. There is no hope. Only sinking.

And pain.

Slimy mud shoots up my nostrils and packs my
sinuses. It courses down my throat and fills my mouth. There’s no
space to gag, no way to puke the fluid forced into my stomach, into
my ears.

Things snap. Muscles tear. If there was
space to wish for death, for unconsciousness, I would’ve called for
it, cried for it, begged for it, but I know only agony. There’s no
escape. No way out.

Falling. Forever. And ever.

Open,
a voice calls.

No. I won’t open, not to this torment. I
won’t allow this misery. I fought all my life. I’ll resist to the
end.

But what if there is no end?

I have to get out, back to the top. Mother’s
up there, she saw me slip into this trap. She had to be digging
after me. I just need to give her space to find me, to pull me out,
to take me back to where I was. The way I was.

I pull my awareness inward. What’s left of
my flesh I could pull to the surface, we could still save it, we
could rebuild it just like it was. I just need space. I focus
inward, find the timeslicing spark glittering brightly. It’s
smaller and brighter than ever. I wrap my awareness around it and
call on its power. When every bit of me is pulled inside, I pull it
tighter still. I’ll blow the earth away. I will escape.

Allow,
the voice says.

NO! There is no space for allowing! I need
to escape the pain!

I release the pressure of telekinetic energy
quaking inside the timeslicing spark and sonic waves rumble through
the planet. They’d feel it in Australia, at the bottom of the ocean
and the top of Everest. The force will trigger landslides and
tsunamis, the universe will feel my wrath. I’ll destroy in the name
of freedom.

But light doesn’t shine from above.

In one cascading moment of utter
annihilation, my body is completely crushed. My organs spew. My
cries lost in the silence of obliteration.

And yet, death does not come.

I remain fully aware, buried alive. My body
couldn’t be functioning, yet I feel every nerve. I feel the burning
suffocation of my lungs and the crushing pain. Utter devastation.
There are no boundaries to my body anymore yet I can’t escape it.
Every thought of struggle, each movement of resistance flares with
fiery agony. And every thought of escape brings more pain.

More weight.

More hurt.

(sob.)

My cries echo throughout eternity,
throughout all that has been and all that ever will be. It brings
impressions and memories, flavors of my past; fleeting images of my
youth scroll past. Each episode carries its own flavor. Some
bitter, others sweet. As I experience each one, they release their
energy, revealing their essence.

The mirrors are clear.

I am complete.

I see clearly.

Listen,
the voice says.

I listen. I open.

I allow.

I begin to thaw, percolating through the
earth’s pore space, trickling deeper, filtered of impurities,
finding the resting aquifer of my True Nature.

Water flows.
The essence of bitter
sadness transforms into sweetness. I expand, no longer my body
because I no longer exist.
Being
is my body.
Existence
my True Nature.

I expand until thoughts are no longer. There
is just being.

I just am.

Humming in the great, endless void of
space.

Galaxies emerge in spinning wheels. Planets,
stars, black holes and light spread out before me. I’m not separate
from them, I am them. I can traverse the entire plane of existence
simultaneously because I’m not separate from anything.

All the possible pasts and all possible
future events exist in the present moment. The future paths spread
out like endless veins on the fabric of existence. I could return
to any path of my choosing.

Come.

The voice calls from everywhere. Calling me
back from another dimension. Yet, if I want to stay in this
blissful moment, I can remain for eternity. But something draws me
to follow.

I answer.
Yes.

My answer rings through the heavens. The
stars sparkle with renewed life, like points poked through a dark
cloth. I recede from the endless expansion of knowing, focus into a
point in space and time.

There is earth below my feet.

A coyote calls.

I raise my hand.

A fire burns within a ring of stones,
illuminating cacti and desert. Beyond the light, in the fringe of
darkness, is a man. His hair is long. I can’t see his face, but I
know his presence.
Pivot.

It was his voice guiding me, willing me to
open and allow. To come.

Another figure emerges next to him. His
silhouette is unfamiliar, but not his essence. I know this man,
too. I have known him all my life. This man steps into the light.
His face is unshaven and a familiar smile lights his face. It’s a
smile that’s not on his lips, but in his eyes.

“Hello, son,” my father says.

T R A I N I N G

The Last Resolve

The fire popped between us. Orange light
danced across my father’s face, casting deep lines at the corners
of his mouth. He pushed his hand through his hair and let the gray
locks filter between his fingers. Something swelled inside me.