Socket 3 - The Legend of Socket Greeny (18 page)

“They came after you with sticks.”

“Yeah, and you stood up to all of them.”

“They would’ve beat me senseless if the coach
didn’t stop them.”

“But you took the blame.”

“I have a higher pain tolerance.”

He tapped the window, punctuating a set of
memories as if to validate this moment, to anchor his beliefs about
who he was. Who I am. Then he stepped away, scratching his chin. I
leaned back against the window, let my head bump against the
glass.

Then he said, decisively, “I know who you
are, goddamnit.”

“I showed you the truth.”

“That’s not what I mean. I don’t care
what
you are. I’ve known you all my life. You’re Socket.” He
stopped pacing. “Socket Greeny.”

He resumed looking out the window. The
moments stretched out, silently. The librarians were talking
louder, now, mostly about Tommy Fletcher and how he needed to get
counseling for his severe attention deficit disorder.

Streeter turned his head. “So what now?”

I shrugged.

“You going to the Garrison?”

“No, it’ll just be madness if I go back. I
mean, if your alarm system recognized me, I’m not going to make it
within a hundred yards before a dozen crawler guards gang-tackle
me.”

“You can come to my house.”

“I… no. Not a good idea.”

“Why not? No one will know you’re there.
Besides, you got to eat.”

No, I don’t.
“It’s not that. I’m…
evolving into something, I think. I don’t think it would be a good
idea if you were around me until I figure it out.”

“What? You mean, you’re becoming one of
them?”
He meant duplicate.
“You planning on taking over the
human race?”

No, it was the temptation that bothered me.
The taste of his essence lingered around me like an addiction. Like
a shark smelling blood. I could resist, but for how long?

I faced him. “You feel that in your
belly?”

He rubbed his stomach, sensed the fear of
falling, the removal of his essence as I let myself for just a
moment to reconnect with him, automatically absorbing his essence,
leaving him with the twisted missing sensation of a void.

“I think I’m stealing from you,” I said.
“Kind of like charging my battery with your… life.”

He tensed. “Dude, that’s cold.”

“Sorry.”

“Can you stop?”

“Yeah, but… I don’t know for how long. I just
need to go somewhere with no one around, just for a while,
anyway.”

The sun hung lower in the sky. Streeter
didn’t run, but he didn’t take his hand away from his stomach,
either. His mind was working. After a long minute, he said, “I know
where you need to go.”

“The North Pole?”

“You need to find your clone.”

Now I laughed. Streeter was mentally tough;
he assimilated more than I gave him credit for. “I have no idea
where he’s at.”

“I know exactly where he’s at.” He pulled the
locator from his pocket and, fearlessly, took both my hands and
placed it in my palms. “Do it again, like you did at the tagghet
ceremony. Locate yourself in time and space.”

I turned it over, saw my distorted reflection
in the black convex surface. It invited me to connect with it,
almost like it was thinking to me.
Like we speak the same
language
.

“Go on.” Streeter nudged me. “Do it.”

He had rewritten the code; it was tighter and
more efficient, merging with my consciousness as I opened to it. A
holographic planet projected from the surface, rotating between
us.

“He’s there.” He stuck his finger on the spot
of light in the middle of Illinois. “When you used this at the
ceremony, in front of all those people, it knew you were just a
copy, it found the original.”

A copy.
I cringed.

“It worked,” he said. “The whole time, it was
working.”

My chest fluttered. He was right, the locator
simply considered me a mirror projected from the original identity.
Streeter had done it.

“You should go.”

I looked up. “Why?”

“Why? He’s you. You’re him. You’ve been
separated from who you are all your life. You’ve got to go see if
something will happen.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know! What else are you going to do,
sit in the desert and meditate the rest of your life? Just go and
find out.”

Suddenly, I didn’t feel in control of
anything. And that was my answer. I wasn’t in control; I was swept
into the current of the unknown, flowing with the mystery of life.
I handed the locator back to Streeter. “You’re right.”

“Hell yeah, I’m right. You can use my car, if
you want. I’ll tell my gramma you needed it for a couple days. She
won’t care.”

“I won’t need it.”

“Are you kidding me? Illinois is like 800
miles away unless you’ve got a ship or something out there in the
trees.” He looked out the window. “Do you?”

I looked at him. He’d really like to
know.

“I’m right, aren’t I? Or do you have some
kind of teleportation thing.” His eyes were wide. “You’ve got
teleportation?”

Maybe I shouldn’t do it, I didn’t want to
overload him again. But he’d want to see it. I held up my hand and
let it dissolve. My fingers were the first to fall away, dissolving
into the air, followed by my hand, wrist and arm. I gathered the
molecules at my waist and my arm reappeared.

“That is badass.” He stared at my arm,
blinking heavily. The overload was dulling his consciousness
again.

“I got to go, Streeter.” I washed the
thoughts from his immediate awareness, let him keep the memory for
later digestion.

“Am I going to see you again?”

“I don’t know.”

We shook hands, fingers up, then I jerked him
close and we hugged, patting each other’s backs with the free hand.
“You should probably get back to Janette.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I should, you know.” He
took a long look, not convinced it wouldn’t be the last time he
ever saw me, then started away. I’d wait until he was long gone
before I leaped. He stopped at the book shelf and turned.

“Thanks, Socket.”

“For what?”

“Just, you know. Glad you were here. That’s
all.”

He left before I could say anything.
Glad
to be here, Streeter.

A librarian had come back to make sure no
other students were around, but I had dissolved before she turned
the corner. I gathered far past Interstate 26, near Monck’s Corner
and highway 52 and sliced time to a standstill.

I walked the country roads and sometimes went
straight through the wetlands. Whenever I felt people within my
influence, I turned away. I didn’t want to be tempted to draw on
their life. I trusted myself less and less, having visions I would
leave a wasteland of bodies in my wake
.
Even the slightest
attempt to expand my awareness out like a shrimp net to locate Pike
put people into my influence and an immediate download of their
essence. Perhaps vampires did exist. We didn’t drink blood. Just
essence.

Pike was out there, I could sense him, just
couldn’t locate him. Unlike my original, my
brother;
I had
locked onto his location from 800 miles away. He was in
Tannerville, Illinois. Population, 12,132. I didn’t know his name,
but excluding some terrible accident, I assumed he looked like
me.

For much of the trip, I saw nothing and heard
only the path beneath my feet. I worked my way to the heartland of
the Midwest, up through southern Illinois to the central part,
where the hills turned flat and the grass was replaced by rows of
corn and soybeans. Enormous combine tractors were in the fields in
the midst of harvesting another season, a cloud of dust suspended
over the long mechanical teeth that would be chopping and stripping
the kernels from the cobs once I emerged from the timeslice.

The sun slowly moved higher in the sky, not
because time was moving. I walked westerly, from the Eastern Time
Zone to Central. A trip in regular time would’ve taken months, but
I arrived on the outskirts of Tannerville at the exact moment I
left Charleston. Some twenty miles south of Springfield, I stood on
route 29, looking at a sign:
AAAA Girls Basketball State
Champions
. I walked near a car travelling sixty miles an hour
back in ordinary time; now it was standing still. The license plate
read Land of Lincoln.

Abraham Lincoln, the president that freed the
slaves.

I grew up in the South where President
Lincoln was viewed as a war criminal, by some. Others refused to
call it the Civil War.
There was nothing civil about it.
It
was the War of Northern Aggression. Even had a history teacher that
refused to use the textbook because it was written by Yankees. And
here I was, in the Land of Lincoln. My original self, raised in the
North. North versus South, the Civil War; a conflict fought long
ago, but the scars still remained.

I returned to ordinary time.

I was greeted with the sounds of blackbirds
and the distant roar of tractors. Hundreds of feet below, I sensed
the coal mine and the men in hardhats and smudged faces, putting in
hard hours to pull black rock from the ground. And as they mined
the coal, I felt their essence slowly pull towards me, like metal
shavings to a magnet. I focused on being centered, but I could only
slow the draw. Eventually, I wouldn’t even be able to do that.

I couldn’t avoid people, now. I walked past
small gas stations and Wal-Mart, McDonalds and car dealers, and
onto the town square with a clock tower rising from the courthouse.
Teenagers hung out by their cars and small business owners hustled
inside the clothing stores and jewelry shops. The asphalt road
turned to bricks, a town as old as farming.

A couple miles from that, the street ended at
a two story white house. It felt like a blank in my consciousness,
like it was somehow blocked. Still, I knew he was there.

I stopped at the curb near the mailbox that
read
Teck Family.
My stomach fluttered. An old concrete
sidewalk led straight to the wide front steps, and at the foot of
those steps a girl was doodling with sidewalk chalk. She was
singing a song, making up the words as she went. It was a story
about a monster that fell in love with a little girl. The monster
lived under the bed and he was angry she didn’t love him back.

“I don’t talk to strangers,” she said and
went back to drawing with a yellow piece of chalk.

“That’s a good idea.”

She was humming. I walked gently up the
sidewalk and squatted next to her. Her mind was so open and
innocent, but I wasn’t compelled to draw from her essence, as if
the compulsion halted inside a bubble around this house. A warm
peacefulness settled in my stomach, relieved I didn’t have to focus
on restraining myself from taking, that I could just be in this
moment.

“What are you drawing?” I asked.

“That’s Saucy.” She pointed at the girl with
big ears and pigtails. “And that’s Greg. He’s got big teeth.” She
drew even bigger, sharper teeth on Greg the monster next to Saucy,
his mouth open and slobbery.

“He looks mean,” I said.

“He can be.”

She colored Greg’s teeth yellow with big
drops of purple stuff dripping off them, humming as she did. She
didn’t look up, but asked, “Where’re you from?”

“Me? I’m from faaaaaar away.”

“I’m not four.” She frowned at me. “I’m seven
years old, you don’t have talk to me like a baby.”

“Sorry.”

She stared at me curiously, then I quickly
realized I might look exactly like my original, so I quickly warped
my features in her vision, as if she saw my face in a carnival
mirror.

“Are you an alien?” she asked.

“What if I am?”

“Then you look pretty normal. For an
alien.”

“What if I said I wasn’t human?”

She shrugged. “Saucy’s not human, even though
she looks like it. She’s my best friend.”

Now she was coloring her imaginary friend’s
hair green. She clapped the dust off her hands and grabbed the
thick blue sidewalk chalk and colored Saucy’s shoes and started
humming again.

“Want to know a secret?” she asked.

“Always.”

“Scott got in a fight today.”

“Who’s Scott?”

“My brother, silly.” Her rapid giggle was
contagious. “You’re here to see him.”

“I am?”

“You kind of look like him, you know.” She
squinted at me with her tongue stuck between her lips. “Well, you
do if I do this.”

She was giggling again and I couldn’t help
laughing a little. The essence of joy bubbled between us and it
made her laugh harder.

The front door jiggled. “Maddi,” her mother
called through the screen door. “Time to eat, go wash up.”

Maddi smacked her hands again and ran up the
wooden steps, past her mother holding the door open. The letter T
was in the middle of the screen door. It rattled in the frame as
she let it close. “Can I help you?” the mother asked.

“Yes, ma’am. I, uh, was just… uh.” I grabbed
the railing for support, suddenly dizzy. A powerful force surged
from her, gushing inside me. It wasn’t her essence. I don’t know
what it was. And I couldn’t read her. I knew nothing about her, not
even her name. She could sense the power exchange, and she could
sense that I was sensing her sensing me, a loop of self-generating
energy, a fusion that was disorienting us both.

“He’s here to see Scott, Mama,” Maddi
said.

Her mother rubbed Maddi’s head and whispered
for her to go clean up. “Have we met?” the mother asked.

“Um, no—no, ma’am.” I stepped lightly up the
steps. “I’m kind of new in town, I’m in Scott’s class and I, uh, he
said I could stop by if I needed help with a project.”

Her hair was short, like my mother’s, but her
hips were wide and her skin sun-baked. She stared intensely and I
quickly gathered my focus to distort the perception of my features
or she’d be staring at an exact copy of her son. Still, there was
nothing I could do about my personal energy she experienced. I felt
familiar. Like family.