Socket 1-3 - The Socket Greeny Saga (52 page)

“It doesn’t matter what you decide to do,”
he said, quietly. “The human race will all convert in the end,
young man. And, trust me, there won’t be a problem. They’re already
programs, yes? The human race behaves from psychological
experiences, blindly acting out suppressed memories and fears. Few
ever try to understand themselves. They’re not interested in
discovering what’s real, young man, they’re only concerned with
what makes them happy. They only
want
, they’re not
interested in
being.
They’re infants searching for a
breast.” He extended his empty hand, palm up, and said gently,
“With us, they get what they want.”

“And what do they want?”

He smiled for the first time. “Whatever
their hearts desire.”

I’d heard the argument before, in a parking
lot at the high school with Mr. Black. Was he a duplicate? Com was
right. They’d be lining up to convert.

The trees rustled at the bottom of the
slope. Two crawlers approached with a single duplicate between
them, his suit torn and bloody. Com left his hand extended toward
me, the invitation still on the table with his eyes locked on mine.
The messenger stopped a few steps behind him and waited at
attention, his gaze locking on my face. Com finally stood upright
and dropped his hand. He nodded to me. My answer was final.

“Very well, then.”

“The Garrison is secure, Com,” the messenger
said. “Civilians and remaining Paladins are trapped in a sublevel
sector without escape. All communications are contained. Air supply
has been cut off. Estimated time of surrender is two hours. The
other ten training facilities are currently under siege. Seven have
already been secured by our forces and the expected surrender of
the remaining three facilities within seven hours.”

“Escapees?” Com asked.

“Twenty-one percent have escaped.”

“Twenty-one percent?”

“Trackers are hunting. We expect to find
locations of refuge within fourteen days.”

Com paced, thoughtfully. The crawlers
stepped out of his way. The corner of his mouth twitched. He
touched his cheek, looking around. He looked at me.

I was supporting my own weight, but the
crawler’s grip was killing the nerves in my arms. Any effort to
overwhelm it, mentally or telekinetically, would drain me entirely.
Not even Rudder would bring me back after that.

“I want him taken to an infirmary
immediately.” Com turned his back on me. “Get a preliminary coding
of his DNA, then take him for full infusion. Do not hold back, I
believe he is capable of handling pain, yes? I expect the full
conversion of Socket Greeny in twenty-four hours. Pass the report
to others.”

Com’s head jerked again, as if a thought hit
him like an arrow. He looked at the grimmets. He swung around on
me.

“You will become one of us.” He stepped
closer. “It will all make sense when you are converted. You will
understand, yes.” Closer.
“
We all understand, young
man.”

His expression softened, as did the others,
as he gazed into my eyes.

If I had the strength, I would vaporize his
ass with a thought, but there were more of him. If this many could
deceive the Paladins, how many were still walking the streets in
ordinary life? How many Chief Coms were there waiting to take his
place? How many assassins on the assembly line?

And the Com was right, people were willing
to become like them. Ask Mr. Black. They were all out there,
wanting what they wanted. I couldn’t destroy them without
destroying their freedom to choose. How do I change them if they
weren’t willing to change? Destroying this duplicate would not
bring peace. They were self-centered programs. Of course they were
self-centered; they were reflections of their creators:
HUMANS!
The duplicates were perversions of our selfish
desires; they were self-perpetuating, a more efficient version of
the deficient human.

“Com?” the messenger asked. “Would you like
me to—”

He held up his hand for silence.
Twitch.
He had the faraway look again, like he was
distracted by an idea. He glanced at the grimmets then to me. His
gaze turned from unfocused distraction to yearning. He was caught
by what he saw. Suddenly, it was too tempting to keep his distance.
He needed a closer look.

Com stopped a few feet away. A child’s joy
lit up his face. He shook his head like he was trying to break
away. He began to lean closer. He shuffled like he didn’t want to,
but he couldn’t stop himself. The experience was right there, in my
eyes, he could sense it
.

He gently touched my shoulders and continued
to lean closer. His breath was hot and humid. His eyes were light
blue with streaks of darker blue radiating from the pupils. His
sweaty forehead touched mine. Eye to eye.

He wanted to
know
the essence he
craved like a hungry ghost. He wanted to grab it, to make it his
own. So he raised his hand. He wanted more than to just see it. He
wanted more than to just feel it. Have it.

He touched my forehead to take it from
me.

A light burst behind my eyes.

Com’s fingers burned, his mind spreading
like a fungus inside me, chasing the experience to make it his. He
tried to take what was ungraspable and the more it alluded him, the
deeper he plunged. His mind penetrated through me until we were
impossibly tangled.

Shapes took form in the white light. I
wasn’t seeing with my eyes, though; I was seeing like a minder.

Com was convulsing.

The messenger tried to the pull him away but
his fingers were welded to my forehead. He shook like an
electrocution was taking place. I felt my lifeforce pulled through
his fingers. He didn’t mean to kill me, but he couldn’t stop.

The density of my physical body lightened.
My heartbeat faded and blood pooled quietly in the chambers. My
arties and veins relaxed. I didn’t know where I was, but it wasn’t
my body. I could see it, though, like I was sitting in the tree. I
saw Com still convulsing. My body was limp.

All was silent.

There was a graceful solitude to the event
below, moving in an odd, slow cinematic way. Nothing was out of
place. Everything as it should be.

The grimmets stirred on the branches. I felt
their movements. They shuffled again. Rudder clung to my neck and
the rest watched from the tree, blinking their golden eyes. I could
feel each of them as individual lifeforces, their essence a
fountain of youth that flowed through my body.

Com fell away. The grimmets watched him. He
shook his head. He looked at my body like he was coming back from a
dream. Then he looked at the grimmets.

“Destroy him.” He reached for the evolver on
his belt but fumbled it.

“Com?” The messenger stepped forward. “But,
sir…”

He had glimpsed what was about to
happen.

Grimmets began to leave the branches,
circling above, emitting vibrations, a call not heard by ears, but
felt by all. More grimmets lifted off and the call gathered
momentum.

The Com stripped the evolver from the
messenger’s belt. It began to unfold but fell from his quaking
hands. Com crawled after the unwieldy weapon. He clamped his hands
over his ears.

The grimmets called to the duplicates.

“Kill him!” the Com cried.

They were calling them…

“KILL SOCKET GREENY!”

…
to deactivate.

The crawlers cocked their legs. Stopped.

The crawler holding my body gently laid it
beneath the tree and heeled like a dog, answering the grimmets’
call.

My vision illuminated in my mind’s eye in
full detail. I sensed my lifeless body, calmly resting beneath the
storm of grimmets circling above. The call pulsed through my flesh,
through the tree, stone and earth. It was a sound beyond the plane
of thought and emotion. It was much more fundamental, much simpler.
It was the call of existence, spanning the globe as if there were
no separation. As if they were one with the universe.

The grimmets were pure presence.

And I was their conduit.

They swarmed down upon my body, crawling
beneath it. Rudder gently cradled my head. The beating of their
wings stirred dust and debris, fanning lifeforce and heating my
flesh. They held me up for the world to see.

The One that Sees Clearly.

The assassins laid their weapons at the tree
and bowed. Com and the messenger joined them, placing their
foreheads on the stone. They sought to possess the majestic beauty
of presence, but the grimmets’ call gave them clarity.

They realized they would never have the
being of presence. Humans had the ability to understand their
psychological programs; they could realize their true nature.
Humans had the potential to transform. The duplicates understood,
in that very moment, that they would always be a program. They
understood that when they gave up their humanity, they lost the
ability to truly transform. They would stagnate in their
programming for eternity.

The wisdom of the grimmets’ call released
them from their obsessive chase of something they could never have,
to abandon the futile efforts. Regardless of how perfect their
programming seemed, no matter what it promised, their search was
pointless. They could never be human again. They could never
Be
. And for that wisdom, they bowed.

My vision expanded and I began to rise. I
saw the grimmet tree from high above. I saw Garrison Mountain and
the endless miles of uninhabitable land around it. I saw the ocean.
I continued to rise until I saw the continents. I rose above the
planet and saw Earth suspended in black space. I felt life pulse
within it and heard the duplicates answer. One by one, millions
laid down their weapons across the planet and bowed. They rose
above their programming. They understood. They changed at a
fundamental level and heeded the call. Perhaps, in the end, they
were as close to human as possible.

My vision continued to recede further into
outer space. The moon orbited nearby. And as I sped away from
Earth, my vision expanding outward, the moon passed in front of
me.

And, for the first time, I saw the dark
side.

T R A I N I N G

Railroad tracks

Where do we go when we die?

I know people have lots of ideas, but they
don’t really
know
. Even if you die and come back, that’s not
the same as being put in a box and buried. Do we go to heaven?
Hell? Nirvana? Are there virgins waiting for us?

I didn’t get any answers. I know my body was
lifeless. And I know I could see it from above like the grimmets
carried my awareness and I shared their vision, but where did I go
after that? Wherever it was, no one greeted me. No old man with a
white beard or dead dad. No virgins.

There was dark and light. No shapes, just
the sensation of dark and light intermingled and dancing some
eternal dance. And I was in the middle of it. Dark and light.

Dark and light.

But then there was more light than dark. It
shrank down and took shape. Sometimes it became a square, and then
it would fade and reappear sometime later.

But then the square of light returned and
never left. I felt the confines of my body. And the wheel of time,
once again, began to turn.

I opened my eyes.

A square light was on the ceiling with
cobwebs blowing in an air-conditioner vent. I was lying in a bed
with the unmistakable presence of my boyhood around me. The essence
of my past saturated the sheets and the carpet, the posters on the
walls.

I was in South Carolina. While the Garrison
was capable of replicating it perfectly (even the cobwebs), I knew
reality. There was no way to explain how I knew, other than a lack
of separation between me and my surroundings. I just
knew.

But how long I’d been there, and how I got
there, I didn’t know. My nojakk didn’t respond when I asked for the
date and neither did the imbed. Both were dead.

Sunlight streaked between the blinds. I put
my feet on the floor. A red ball was snoring next to me. I held
Rudder by his long tail like a possum, his tongue rolling in and
out. I laid him on my pillow.

My body ached like I’d run a hundred
marathons. I stretched and twisted to loosen the stiffness in my
neck and back and just doing that much made me tired.

I sensed a lot of people in the house. They
could sense me waking and stretching. I couldn’t tell who was out
there. Probably Paladins. Whoever they were, there were a lot of
them in the next room. Mother was there, too. Her scent lingered in
my bedroom. She’d been in to check on me.

I scratched and stretched, and then did my
morning business in the bathroom. I stopped at the mirror. I’d lost
so much weight and my hair was a few inches longer.

I leaned closer and scratched whiskers on my
chin. My skin had aged like a sun-baked cowboy. I was an old
looking seventeen year old. My eyes had changed, too. It wasn’t so
much the appearance, they were still blue, but now there was
something in them that reminded me of what I saw in Pon’s eyes.
There were no distractions inside.

I’d put up and taken down enough posters in
my bedroom to wallpaper the entire house. Where there wasn’t a
poster there was grimy tape where one had been. My ancient iPod
with the cracked screen was on my desk. A skateboard stuck out from
under the bed, a Toy Machine sticker scratched on the bottom.

There was a photo above my desk of train
tracks, long and straight, disappearing on the horizon. I was
thirteen years old when I put that up. I’d ripped it out of a
National Geographic at the library. At the time, I wasn’t sure what
was so compelling about it, I just wanted it. It represented
somewhere else to me. One day I would follow those tracks and get
away from the conflict in my head, the anger and sadness that
twisted inside me. Those tracks were my yellow brick road to
someplace else, something better.