Socket 1-3 - The Socket Greeny Saga (81 page)

And then it is only the light. No thoughts.
Nothing but awareness.

Pivot is still present, his essence
intermingles with mine, but even that becomes indistinguishable
from the light. I recall, in the final moments, I’m artificial. I’m
not real.

But in the final moments, I don’t know what
I am. I only know the light.

L E G E N D

Awakening

“Socket.”

There’s rough fabric against my cheek.
Something rustles next to my ear, but my body is too heavy to move,
my eyelids sealed shut. The roughness fades.

“Time to wake up, Socket.”

A hand grips my arm and shakes me. My breath
is hot. Sensations return to my body, still too heavy to move, but
I’m lying on a soft cushion. My eyelids crack open just enough to
see the green fabric of the couch only inches from my nose. My eyes
close, once again, but the hand shakes me and feeling begins
rushing through my body with pins and needles.

I roll onto my back, see a ceiling above. My
lips are sticky, my throat swollen and tight. I take a deep breath
and loosen the stiffness in my chest. I’m stretched out on a couch
and across from me, over a coffee table littered with empty pizza
boxes, is an identical couch with a short boy sitting on it. He has
one leg crossed over the other with his hands folded on his
lap.

“Take your time,” he says.

The room is familiar. A television is above
a fireplace, a news reporter discussing a protest that’s going on
behind her. There are two doors behind the boy. The one on the left
is my mother’s bedroom. The other is mine.

“Can you sit up?” he asks.

My skin is tingling, but I’m able to move my
feet. My right foot thuds on the floor and I’m able to push up on
my elbow. My head is like a sandbag. I let my left leg drop and use
the momentum to sit up. My balance sloshes between my ears.

“That’s good,” the boy says. “You’re doing
good. Now, when you’re ready, stand up and look around.”

I move my lips but the words won’t come out.
Who are you?

“Don’t force it, it’ll come. Give it some
time. For now, just look around and let things come back. And when
you’re ready, tell me your name.”

My name?
I… I don’t know my name.

The house feels empty. I’m staring at the
bedroom doors. My mother’s door is closed, but mine is partially
open. I ease my weight forward, slowly, letting the balance shift
and settle. My long hair falls over my face.
White hair. I’ve
got white hair.
My legs are still slightly numb, and my bones
made of lead. I squeeze the armrest and stand up like I’m a hundred
years old. Blood seems to crash into the bottom of my feet and I’m
standing on nails. I close my eyes and remain still until more
feeling comes back, enough that I stand upright.

The kitchen is behind me with dirty plates
piled in the sink and books and papers and cups with dried orange
juice covering the kitchen table. I look back at my bedroom door
and slide my foot across the carpet. The next step is a little
bigger, a little higher, and I let go of the couch. I go around the
clothes scattered on the floor and grab the doorframe and peek
inside. It’s more of the same, with dirty clothes and magazines.
The walls are covered with rock bands. A skateboard is upside-down,
half under my bed.

I haven’t skated in forever.

“Soc…” The first syllable scratches my
throat. The boy turns on the couch, his frog-face peeking over the
back. “Socket?”

He smiles. “That’s right. Your name is
Socket.”

I’m not convinced, but it sounds right. And
my mother, if I open her door, she won’t be in there. She’s rarely
there. Always at work.
Where did she work?
I remember a
mountain, that’s all.

The house feels empty, the walls saturated
with loneliness. And even though light fills the room through
several windows, it feels dark. I’ve been here before, but now it
all feels new. And if my mother’s at work, where’s my father?

I grab the door and take a deep breath.
Another memory is coming, that of a funeral. He’s dead. He’s been
dead a long time.

“What’s going on?” I ask.

“Let the answers come back.” He stands,
gesturing to the fireplace. “Walk around, explore. See what you
remember.”

The mantel is filled with pictures, all in
different frames, big and small. I take my time walking around the
couch, sliding my hand along the wall until I touch the ledge of
the mantel. They are family photos. It seems I’ve seen family
photos on a wall, once, but it wasn’t this home. It was another
house I once lived in, like another life. These photos have a
little kid with short white hair.
And that would be me.
But
the other people, a woman with short brown hair and a gruff looking
man, both smiling.

“Mom and Dad,” I whisper.

I go down the line, pausing at each of them,
but it’s the one at the end that I pick up. We’re at a carnival and
I got this giant pink cloud of cotton candy and I’m holding my
father’s hand and my mother’s laying her head on his shoulder. I
can feel the humid night air, remember the lurch in my stomach when
we go on rides, and seeing my parents hold hands like teenagers. It
wasn’t long after that…

“Do you remember how he died?” the boy
asks.

I shake my head. I’m not sure I want to
remember because that’s when the happiness died. When life became
work. When my mother stopped smiling.

“You remember?” the boy asks.

The boy’s face is clearer, now. I’ve seen
him before, like a thousand times before. I remember when he was
smaller than that, a little kid. I remember him…

“Let it come,” he says. “This is a memory
boot, like a computer. It just takes a few minutes to reload, but
you need to stay open.”

Computer?

Something jars loose a tangle of thoughts,
releasing a wave of sadness. Something I can’t quite comprehend,
but the answer is in the room. The answer is the short kid, now
standing next to the couch, staring at me expectantly. My head
shakes and a chill starts somewhere in my chest, shockwaves
reverberating outward. I grab the mantel, pictures crash on the
floor. I hold on with both hands as the room begins to turn.

Images flood through my mind, of mountains
and jungles, weapons and sterile white rooms. My mother is there.
Kay. Kay Greeny.
She has a name, she is there, with me. I’m
stretching open, about to burst. The mantel creaks in my grip.

“Stay open,” the boy says.

The room is spinning like a carnival ride
and I don’t know if I’m still standing or pressed against the wall.
There are faceless mechs and men with white eyeballs and colorful
little dragons and flying discs…

“Hold on, Socket.”

Outer space. A black planet. The Paladin
Nation.

I was one of them. Am one of them. But
something else. What am I?

WHAT AM I?

I’m not real.

I barely hear his voice this time, it’s so
distant. I’m fading away, my body becomes heavy again. The world
crumbles. The television trails off. I’m going somewhere else,
again. And the images of my past follow me, asking me to return to
my body, next to the mantel. It’s Streeter, that’s who that boy is.
My best friend. And then I remember everyone else. Mom and Dad,
Spindle, Pon, the Commander… I remember. But I’m leaving my
body.

“Stay open,” Streeter shouts from a million
miles away.

The tunnel is closing on me, and I remember,
like I’ve done this a thousand times, that I’m going back to sleep,
going back to the light. Until one voice and a single word stops
me.

“
Socket,”
Chute says.

My eyes flutter open. I’m staring up from
the floor; Streeter’s face is over me, his hands on my cheeks. A
hopeful expression relaxes on his face. He waits.

“You did it.” He backs away, gives me space.
“You’re back.”

The heaviness has left me, and my senses
have returned. I smell the stale pizza crusts on the coffee table
and hear the flies buzzing around the room, feel the ache of an
empty home. I get up, feel the fabric of my clothes, the itch of my
skin. The room is in perfect detail, but something is wrong.
Something about the solidity.

Streeter latches onto me, throwing his arms
around my mid-section and picking me up in a bear hug. “YOU DID
IT!”

He knocks the wind from my lungs. I hold my
breath until he lets go and walks off, wiping his eyes so that I
don’t see his face. Memories continue to trickle back, the remnants
find their way in slow fashion, rounding out the details of my
life. My best friend is composing himself next to my bedroom
door.

I go to the kitchen, touch the table and
feel the memory of eating dinner with my mother, watching her sip
coffee with a plate full of untouched food. My mind expands to the
filthy sink, remembering the mess I made to get her back for
ignoring me. She hated me because my father died, like it was my
fault. I realized, at the end of my life, she rejected me for other
reasons. More than that, I realize what feels so wrong about the
house. These are not walls around me. This isn’t my skin.

“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.