Socket 1-3 - The Socket Greeny Saga (70 page)

[I require your assistance.]

I sucked the hot air through my nostrils,
looked thoughtfully into the barren desert. “You wanted a machine
to be human, Pivot. So I’ll act human. Flawed and
self-centered.”

[You are the only hope.]

“Then you failed.”

I took the first step off the ship, landing
softly in the sand. Into the desert I walked. Pivot remained in the
ship, still and silent. He had said all that needed to be said. And
I had listened.

What else could he do?

Nothing
.

L E G E N D

Child of fETTER

It was such a relief when I stepped out of
the ship. My telekinetic presence pushed outward like a star. I
connected with all the Mojave Desert. The ecosystem and organisms
in it remained separate, their own existence, but I felt their
movement, their compulsion, hunger and pain and pleasure.

I stopped at the top of the nearest dune.
Desolation was as far as I could see, but the desert teamed with
life at the cellular level. My presence continued to expand,
crawling across the desert, its reach going farther and farther,
knowing and becoming the physical world for several miles. Fetter
had changed me, stretched my senses beyond the limitations of human
existence. I was now like the universe, expanding outward. Becoming
everything.

The sun was still overhead, but I didn’t
feel it. I was utilizing and storing the sunlight, converting its
heat into energy. The universe had the potential for endless
giving. I was channeling that energy into my being.

I sliced time, speeding my metabolism at the
cellular level. The sun stuck above me and the slight breeze died
in the stillness of earth’s frozen moment. The world would not
resume their lives while I walked the desert. I needed it to be
still for a while. It would be a long walk.

I willed the sand to whirl in front of me,
blowing out of the way and forming a flat path. There was a time I
pondered the purpose of life. I didn’t like pain. I didn’t like
emptiness, couldn’t understand why anyone would exist to suffer, it
wasn’t rational. Why try? Could I just get my life over with? We
all had to end, so what’s the point of suffering until then? When I
discovered my Paladin powers, I understood the inseparable oneness
of us all, the immortal existence of the present moment, how each
life was precious and that I could help others understand that
truth for themselves. That with understanding, all people could
find peace, experience the pure joy of their existence.

But I’m nothing like them. I’m just a
signpost, an image, a reflection of their potential. Just a
program.

I willed the dunes to flatten out before me.
I uprooted scrub and rolled away boulders with a flicker of
thought, walking straight across the endless desert. I walked for
miles, and in all that time the sun did not move. My body did not
exhaust in the timeslice. Not only was I drawing on the sun’s
energy, I was taking it from the life around me – the insects and
snakes and rodents – as they became part of my existence,
connecting telekinetically with my body. I took from their
mitochondria. I took from the atoms that constructed their being,
from the magnetic balance of protons and electrons, took from the
neutrinos, up quarks and down quarks. I took essence.

I am a child of Fetter. The black
planet.

So be it.

And with the endless supply of essence, the
secrets of the universe unfolded in my mind. I saw the fabric of
space-time, how time was simply a direction of space. How the
interconnection of all life was dimensional fabric that could be
traversed in any direction like the flatness of the desert
plain.

I saw my life spread out in this fabric,
sensing each moment, each memory like a byte of data, all connected
like a string that made up Socket Greeny, dangling behind me. And
the future was a vaporized bit of existence coming together as I
chose my path. Where would it lead? Was it already predetermined?
Did Pivot draw my life in the fabric of space-time like a stick in
sand and set me loose like a mechanical mouse, trained to go where
it was supposed to go? And while the desert crunched under me, I
saw the very beginning of my life, when it first started. The
moment of birth.

Pressure on my head. Pushing from behind and
then viscous sliding.

My chest inflates.

Images blur in front of me. A single face.
The details are blurry, but Pivot’s presence is unmistakable. I
feel it in my core, know its love.

I am born.

Suddenly, there is a tremendous sensation of
separation. I am missing something, pulled away from a presence
that I have always known. Something I have always been.

And now it is gone.

Born? Could that be my clone, my original
self’s memory? Could that be what I have always felt was missing,
the presence of my original self? Even at birth, I knew my
essential self was somewhere else. I didn’t feel real. Because I’m
not. I was just an imitation.

There is much discomfort as I grow. Hunger,
ear infections, exhaustion. I learn to cope. And, often, I find
comfort in the faces of my mother and father, looking down on me in
the crib, in the car seat, sometimes stern, sometimes joyous, but
always supportive. Always loving.

I am always with them.

I’m sitting on my father’s lap as Fourth of
July fireworks light up the sky. Mother is laughing somewhere.
Later, I put on his boots that rattle on my tiny feet. I am looking
down a flight of steps and the world tumbles. The bottom step hits
hard on the back of my head. I feel Pivot’s presence as I draw in
the first long breath to bellow the alarming cry. He does not help,
but he is there as my mother and father arrive, carry me back
inside the house. I can feel him.

I couldn’t see Pivot, but he has always been
there. He has always managed to avoid being seen, to be anywhere he
wanted. To follow and watch. Did he shove me down the steps, just
so I could experience life’s pain?

I am five, watching television. Mother is
letting me watch television when I should be in bed, but she’s in
her bedroom crying. I knock on the door, to ask if she’s all right,
but she’s talking to someone. I don’t hear anyone answer, and she’s
barely able to make sense, her words are garbled in sobs. I don’t
know who’s with her, but I sense it’s someone familiar, but it’s
not my father.

My babysitter stays with me the next day.
And then Mother tells me about Father. She tells me he’s not coming
home anymore. I’m confused. Why won’t he come home?

Because God took him, she says.

Why would he do that?

From then on, the emotional hole was bigger
than ever. I was born with something missing, and now it was as
deep as the ocean. The joy of life was gone. Mother didn’t smile.
Father’s boots weren’t around. And the emptiness consumed me, until
I didn’t smile, either.

“
I don’t think about them, much,”
Streeter says. “But I wish they were here.”

We’re seven, climbing into his treehouse to
look at magazines.

“
At least you got your gramma and
grampa,” I say.

“
Yeah, but their Christmas presents
suck.”

“
That’s why you want your parents back?
Better presents?”

He laughs, but his attempt to avoid the
emptiness in his being fails. He nervously lifts the magazine, then
shows me a cool skateboard ramp for the backyard. His emptiness
resonates in my stomach.

Streeter never spoke about his parents
again, at least not until we were older. He didn’t know how to deal
with it, except ignore it.

Chute was different.

“
You like that?” I say.

Chute is in the gift shop. We’re in sixth
grade, on a field trip. She’s looking at a plastic recorder
instrument, something we had to play in grade school to learn
music. We hated it and swore we’d never play it, again. But there
she was, stroking the holes.

“
I was just remembering that my mom liked
it,” she says. “She used to dance with my sister when I
played.”

“
She danced to Hot Cross Buns?”

“
It didn’t matter what I played.”

When she’s not looking, I buy it and give it
to her on the bus. She doesn’t say much. Later, she plays a song
and Streeter and I dance.

Chute’s emptiness was open and hurtful, but
unlike Streeter, she let it be there. She let it be part of her. It
felt like falling in a hole that had no bottom, but Chute let that
happen because she didn’t want to forget her mother, no matter how
much it hurt. I didn’t understand that, not then.

I’d known death and loss forever. Was that
why we were so close?

We wait at the bus stop. It’s the first day
of school. Streeter’s gramma comes out with a camera and takes the
picture that Chute still has on her wall. And there, lurking in the
back, the familiar presence. The presence I had known all my life.
Something inseparable from my life, something I didn’t even notice.
Someone was always there.

Watching.

Pivot. He was the blur in the picture.
Watching, guiding, following. Building his plan, making sure I felt
human. I remembered how it felt to be human. I remembered pain, I
knew death and joy and love.

Always there.

“GODDAMN YOU!” My rage burst in a seismic
wave, uprooting every plant within miles, tossing boulders in the
air and flipping cacti headfirst into the sand. I couldn’t feel
Pivot, he was no longer in the desert. I stretched my presence for
miles, felt all the way back to the shipwreck. The ship was gone. I
extended my influence farther, but he was gone.

Was any of it real? Did he manipulate
everything so that I would be friends with the right people, have
the despondent mother and the brainy friend and the girlfriend I
would fall in love with so that I experienced sadness and joy and
loss and fullness, so that his creation would appear human enough
to trap Fetter? Is that what my life was, a fucking game?

Pain defines us. Reminds us we’re human.

Pike told me that. He knew about papa Pivot.
He knew this day was coming. How could he? And what else did he
know?

I stopped walking. Without my footsteps, the
desert was dead silent. Destruction lay all around. The plants
would soon dry out. Insects would be buried. I put things back in
order, moving everything within my connected presence. The desert
reassembled itself before me. It would live again, just as it had
before I froze time. No one would even notice I walked through the
desert. I would be invisible; the only proof would be the string of
my existence on the fabric of time.

Space and time are inseparable.

And if I can manipulate time, I can
manipulate space.

I closed my eyes, spreading out to the far
reaches of the desert, to the foot of the mountains many miles
away. Every molecule, each atom, resonated with my being. I was a
body, but was inseparable from the essence of life. And if I
wished, if I willed it to be so, I could transfer my body through
the atoms of space to the outer reaches of my influence,
transferring my physical existence like a sound wave passes through
air, like a wave rolls across the ocean.

My body seemed less solid, the barrier of my
skin becoming gray and fuzzy as it dissolved into the atoms.
Thinner I became until my awareness blew in the atmosphere like a
dust cloud. I floated with the cloud of my body, all the way to the
foot of the mountain range where the dust cloud of my atoms
reassembled and condensed. My organs solidified and my skin
tightened.

I opened my eyes.

The shadow of the mountain fell over me. I’d
traversed several miles within seconds.

I expanded outward, again, pushing through
the solid mountains, connecting with the inner core of sand and
miniscule algae and delicate lichens, past the reaches of the
desert into the town on the other side where I merged with houses
and cars and people, absorbing their memories and desires and
worries.

I can go anywhere. Be anything.

Pike was calling me, I could feel it.

I closed my eyes, felt the dissolution of my
body. Somehow I knew I would find him in South Carolina.

IX

Your entire life may prepare you for one
moment,

a single second in time that means
everything.

When that moment arrives, will you be
there?

Pivot

Let go over a cliff, die completely, and
then come back to life.

After that you cannot be deceived.

Buddhist proverb

I have seen the beginning and end of the
universe.

Do you want the answer?

Pick up a cup and drink from it.

Do so purely, without thought.

That is the face of God.

Socket

L E G E N D

Hearts that Hum

South Carolina was a thousand miles
away.

I crossed the land, one enormous leap at a
time. Cars that were once speeding along were frozen to the
concrete like a wax museum. The passengers appeared to be singing
or facially numb with boredom.

I crossed through Kentucky and Tennessee,
stopping often to admire the countryside and the horses in their
gated land, lips to the turf. I floated over the top of the Smokey
Mountains, walking along the curving Interstate, towing the dashed
line between massive trucks and tiny cars. I stepped off the Blue
Ridge Mountains and dissolved before hitting the trees, merging
with the green foliage and crumbled bedrock.

I walked through Columbia. My heart was
barely thumping anymore. By the time I reached Charleston, it
started to hum.