Socket 1-3 - The Socket Greeny Saga (82 page)

But this didn’t slow Streeter down. It was
his diligent skills in information retrieval that revealed the
existence of Fetter. My mother gave him access to the dormant
Paladin databases that had been locked down during the fall of
Fetter. But Streeter found a way to open them up and he discovered
what few people knew.

Humans would have become the food of a
technological god.

Fetter.

Once he had the facts, and not until he had
a complete and exhaustive compendium, did he take it to Congress.
But he was rebuffed by the politicians and lobbyists for those in
favor of reviving virtualmode for the sake of law and order. And
profit. He got nowhere. Nothing could be believed and no one could
be trusted. But he had the facts and passed everything he had to
anyone that would listen. For the longest time, it was just another
conspiracy theory.

Streeter’s life ended before the truth was
accepted. He died at the age of 93. He lived in upstate South
Carolina with his wife, Janette. They had three kids. But before he
died, he developed a virtualmode composite of his personality, so
that if one day the world came to know the truth about virtualmode
and Socket Greeny, he could be there to see me once again.

“You’re a hero,” Streeter says.

I return to the kitchen, back in my sim and
out of his mind. “No,” I say. “I just lived my life.”

“But it was one no other person could
live.”

“I wasn’t a person.”

“You were more than that. You started as a
duplicate, but you transformed, somehow absorbed a portion of
Scott’s soul or humanity or something, I don’t know. But you
weren’t a duplicate in the end, Socket. You were a real life
Pinocchio!” He grabs my arms, firmly. “No machine and no person
could have saved the world. Only you.”

I pull away and lean on the sink to
contemplate this. None of it seems real. None of this
is
real because we’re in virtualmode. But outside the kitchen window,
cars drive down the street and children are playing in their yards,
squirting their father with squirtguns and bombing him with water
balloons. But this is virtualmode. Tightness squeezes my chest. I
don’t want to live in a false world, not again.

“I know this is hard to accept, that we’re
all gone and the world doesn’t look the same. But, please
understand, so many people loved you, they didn’t have a chance to
say goodbye. Couldn’t say thank you. Sorry that they had to live
their life without you.”

I’m squeezing the kitchen counter, the edge
driving into my palms.

“If there’s anywhere you could go,” Streeter
steps next to me, looks out the window, “anywhere in the world
right now, this second, where would it be?”

And the tightness melts. I know where I want
to go. Who I want to see. I let go of the counter.

He goes to the front door and waits. I
slowly follow. And when the door opens, it’s not the street with
cars or the neighbors in the grass. I step onto a stone slab that
is surrounded by a vibrant forest. White wood storks glide in front
of the rising sun. And directly ahead is a broad tree, an ancient
tree, with thick muscled branches. Large, glossy leaves shake in
the canopy among pink blossoms, their fragrance carried on a soft
breeze. There’s no roof on this Preserve, it’s open to the world,
not sequestered in its own environment.

The sunlight glitters on the grimmet tree. I
raise my hand to shade my eyes, to see what’s in front of the
massive trunk. But I don’t see the person there, I feel her. Then I
see her standing there, waiting. Her memories have waited thousands
of years for this moment.

“I brought you back for a lot of reasons,”
Streeter says. “But, mainly, I did it for her.”

Once again, my consciousness expands and I
merge with Chute. I see her life.

The time that followed my disappearance was
difficult. She spent several years in therapy working through the
trauma. She began meditating. Eventually, she pieced her life back
together and found a measure of peace, that she could live in a
world that didn’t make sense. That seemed so unfair.

Tagghet disappeared. Instead of a
professional athlete, she went to college to become a family
counselor. And although her interest was in marriage counseling,
she was still single in her early thirties. Many relationships had
come and gone, but she could not connect with them. None of them
felt right. She knew it was because she was hanging onto a memory
and that she needed to move on, but couldn’t force herself to do
it. She dreamed of me so often that it spoiled all her
relationships. She was confident that one day it would be resolved,
that she would forget about me, that she would accept the loss.

But that changed on her thirty-third
birthday.

She was downtown Charleston with friends,
sitting at an outdoor café that overlooked the market. They were
drinking coffee and planning the evening. One of her friends was
telling the story of a guy she’d met at work. Chute was listening
and laughing and, for the first time in a long time, was just being
herself.

But then she felt something. Something so
familiar, but so distant, like a scent from long ago reminding her
of childhood. On the sidewalk, down the steps and next to the
street, he stood among the tourists bustling along. He was quite
still, unmoved by the pedestrians finding their way around him. He
was staring at her.

She didn’t look away. She didn’t move, not
believing what she saw. She’d dreamed this dream a thousand times,
and if she moved he would disappear. He always disappeared. She’s
barely breathing, afraid she might wake up if she did. She just
wanted to sit there and look at him.

“Annie?” Her friends were staring at her.
“Are you all right?”

He was still there.

So she stood. Each step was slow and steady.
She took one step at a time, her hand sliding down the metal
railing. She stood at the bottom step. The man was near the curb.
Her heart pounded. She wasn’t breathing as she walked closer. Still
she did not wake. Still, he was there.

Her throat tightened. Lips quivered.

She touched his face with one hand. Then the
other. She was looking at the impossible, but there he was. He was
real. He wasn’t a dream.

“It’s me, Chute,” Scott said.

She didn’t answer. She was a rational
person, an educated woman that understood the mind and the tricks
it could play. But there I was, standing in the flesh. It was my
face. My eyes. Brown hair.

She slid her hand to his chest, felt his
heart beating. Somehow, she knew that she hadn’t gone crazy. She
didn’t know how, but she knew that it was me. She pressed her face
against his chest. He hugged her while she wept, tears soaking his
shirt while tourists tried not to look. Her friends were
speechless.

Scott was thirty years old when my memories
unlocked. He was fishing when the first one opened, a memory of
going to a carnival with parents that didn’t look like his. He
ignored it, figured it was a dream. But then another came the next
day. More the next. He remembered people he never met. Then,
walking around the town square, he saw kids skateboarding. He went
up to them and didn’t ask, just took one of their boards and pulled
a flawless heel flip. He had never skated in his life.

The memories burst forth, after that. He had
two lives inside of him and figured he’d gone insane. He sought
therapy and medication, talked with psychiatric professionals and
clergymen. Even went to a Buddhist temple. No one would explain his
condition, tried to convince him it was delusions and no one named
Socket Greeny ever came to visit. But he didn’t go nuts. He
remembered when he merged with me and while it still seemed crazy,
he made peace with it. It was years before he began to accept the
memories as his own, as if he was two people that lived
simultaneous lives, even though they didn’t make sense. He, like
Chute, found some measure of peace. But something was missing, like
there was someone out there that needed him. And that’s when he
decided to find Streeter.

Streeter walked him through the truth. It
didn’t take much convincing because Scott remembered growing up
with Streeter. He remembered that, somehow, Streeter was his best
friend. Streeter helped him accept who he was.
Scott Teck is
Socket. Socket is Scott Teck.

Streeter planned on introducing him to
Chute, but Scott couldn’t wait. Once things made sense, he went to
the market and found her. And when he saw her, he knew that he’d
found what was missing.

They married. Had two children and two dogs
and a horse. Their marriage wasn’t perfect, but it was genuine.
They brought peace to each other, their lives finally complete. And
every year they took a trip around the world with Streeter to a
remote manmade canyon buried in the mountains where barren trees
looked like a graveyard. They journeyed through a weed-choked
approach to an enormous stump where the grimmet tree once stood to
pay homage to a good friend. To a brother. And a love. Chute would
place a rose on the stump and would do so every year until they
were too old to make the journey.

The vision, fulfilled.

I return to my body. Chute’s standing in
front of me, leans her forehead against my chin.

“I told you I wouldn’t leave,” I
whisper.

Sadness intermingles with love. Tears run.
She died long ago, but she’s there with me. I close my eyes and
sink into the sensation, wishing it could be real. Grateful to at
least have this.

And while my eyes are closed and we’re
rocking each other in an embrace, I hear the ocean. It sounds like
waves are breaking just beyond the grimmet tree. I slowly walk up
the slab, listening to it get louder. As I approach the ledge, my
mother appears next to my father. And then Spindle. Pon is there
and the Commander, too. They greet me with handshakes, hugs and
more tears. But as I look past the tree, it’s not the Preserve I
see. Everything is replaced by an ocean of people. It’s like the
universe came to listen to a concert, pressed together and
extending out to the horizon. And when they see me, they roar.
Swinging their arms, all different sizes and colors, all
cheering.

“Who are they?” I ask.

“That’s the universe,” Streeter says. “Chute
and I may be digital reproductions, but those are real people out
there.”

I look at my entourage. Mother and Father
smile. The Commander nods. Pon looks on approvingly and Spindle’s
faceplate splashes with color. The tree squabbles and hundreds of
grimmets look down with golden, glowing eyes. Rudder drops onto my
shoulder, wraps his tail around my neck, purring against my cheek.
I can feel Pivot is somewhere. I can’t see him, but his presence is
unmistakable. It feels like home.

“You’re a legend,” Streeter says. “They’ve
been telling your story for thousands of years. They just want to
say thank you.”

I’m vibrating with the essence of millions
of souls, like I can feel each of their thoughts, their emotions,
and their presence. It streams through me like water. I thought I
had no soul, that I was a duplicate. But maybe Streeter’s right;
maybe I became something else. Maybe not human, but something real.
I understand the pain of suffering and the rise of happiness, too.
I know the human experience.

The crowd cheers for me like they’re the
lucky ones to see a legend. The sound is deafening and the ground
quakes. Chute hooks her finger around mine. Her pulse beats into my
palm.

I want to tell them they are wrong. They’re
not the lucky ones.

I am.

About the author

Tony Bertauski lives in Charleston, SC with
his charming wife, Heather, and two great kids, Ben and Maddi. He’s
a teacher at Trident Technical College and a columnist for the Post
and Courier. He’s published textbooks, novels and short
stories
.
You can always find out more at bertauski.com.