The Skill Conspiracy Read online

  “That was my brother, Brandon,” I said.

  “Yeah? What did he have to say?”

  “He said somebody wants to buy my scuba skill.”

  “Scuba?” Annie asked with a bit of a laugh. “Isn’t that something you can learn in like a few weeks?”

  “I did it in two weekends.”

  “So how much are you getting for that?”

  “Four grand,” I said triumphantly.

  Annie laughed and said, “Wow, not bad for two weekends spent splashing around in a pool.”

  I’d gotten my dive certification just a month or so before I met Annie. My thirty-third birthday had been coming up, I was single, leaning a little bit toward the depressed side of things, and I thought an adventure would do me good. So, I got the dive cert and planned a little trip to the Bahamas, thinking the warm sun, warm water, and hopefully very single women running around in very tiny bikinis might cheer me up. Unfortunately, my mom had gotten very sick just a few days before my trip, and the night before I was supposed to leave, she passed.

  Annie was a psychologist working as a grief counselor at the hospital my mom had been checked into, and I have to say, she was a real Godsend. I don’t know how I would have made it through that time without her. Not only was she the most skilled communicator I’d ever met, but she was an amazing listener, and she actually seemed to genuinely care.

  “Wanna go spend some money I don’t have yet?” I asked her.

  “What do you have in mind?” she asked.

  “Well, Lucas is up front at Point 11 tonight. I bet ya he can get us a table, if I ask real nice.”

  Point 11 is one of the new swanky restaurants across the river in Manhattan. Annie and I live together over in Hoboken, New Jersey. Lucas is my old buddy from high school, who greets people at the door and walks them to their seats. I’m pretty sure the job title is just called “host” or “greeter,” but he prefers “Maitre D’.”

  Me? I’m a full-time Skill Donor. What skill, you ask, am I so clever and handy with that I can sell again and again and again? Why guitar, of course. My dad used to play jazz guitar full time, until he met my mom and she made him get a real job. My grandpa spent most of his time playing guitar in cover bands that played classic rock from like a million years ago. My dad had a plan for me early on. He was pretty sure that he’d be able to stick a guitar in my hands when I was like four and I’d probably be able to start strumming, but he’d heard of people with natural skills that intentionally delayed their development until after they turned twenty, so that they could sell them on the STU market. He was right.

  I made it through high school and even through college with a liberal arts education and then, right after my twentieth birthday, I finally got my first guitar, and within four months of regular practice, I was able to play pretty much any song I heard on the radio. At twenty years and five months of age, I listed myself on the STU database as an intermediate level guitar player. Just four days later I was at a STU facility in Midtown putting on one of those little “Hats” I’ve since become so familiar with, and in a matter of moments, I’d forgotten everything I knew about the guitar but was $35,000 richer. It sounds like a lot for four months’ work, but you do have to account for the additional ten percent tax the government takes on STU work. That part kinda sucks, but no matter how many times I sell my skill, I can still learn it again in four months or less. If I work hard, I can pull in over a hundred grand a year. If I take some time off, I can do about seventy. Better than my dad ever did in his little jazz band, or at his “real job” my mom made him get.

  Dinner at Point 11 that night was pretty awesome. Lucas got us a table right next to one of those giant windows. I transferred him a hundred bucks via my PCD, not because he would ever have asked for it, but because I was in a great mood and was looking to share the feeling. We ordered whatever we wanted off the menu, not even bothering to look at the prices. Drinks? Yeah. We had a lot of those. I couldn’t even tell you the total cost of the evening. When they brought the bill, I unlocked my PCD, held it over the bill, and thought-commanded it to add a twenty-percent tip to whatever the total was and charged it to my account.

  I’d look at the amount I had to pay at the end of the month, but whatever it was, the sex Annie and I had at the end of the night was totally worth it. The entire care-free attitude of the dinner carried over into the bedroom, so much so that we got the neighbor from below banging on his ceiling again. That always cracked us up. I could just imagine him down there, standing on top of his bed swatting at the ceiling with his tennis racket or broomstick or whatever he was using to try to get our attention. The last time I’d looked at the clock it was getting close to 3:00 AM.

  Before passing out, I saw that Brandon had set a reminder on my PCD’s calendar that the scuba skill transfer was going to happen at 9:00 AM that day. Chances were pretty good I wouldn’t still be drunk by then, but I found myself wondering how it would feel to undergo a STU transfer with a rip-roaring hangover.

  3

  The alarm went off at 8:00 AM, and I thought-commanded it to give me an extra fifteen minutes of sleep.

  “Your commute this morning is estimated to take forty-eight minutes. A fifteen-minute snooze is not recommended,” came the pleasant but still annoying voice from the little PCD unit on my nightstand.

  “Crap,” I said out loud.

  “What is it?” Annie asked, sleepily.

  “I gotta get up and go right now,” I said.

  “Okay. See you when you get back,” she replied, then immediately fell back asleep.

  I brushed my teeth but skipped the shower and jogged all the way to the train. The PCD had calculated forty-eight minutes for my commute, assuming I was going to be walking and not running, so I figured if I kept the pace up then I would have enough time to grab a bagel on the way into the STU offices. Sure enough, I was standing in the lobby at Midtown STU at 9:00 on the nose.

  “Mr. Heath?” the woman at the front desk asked.

  “Hi, Sandy,” I said to her. I’d been here like forty times, yet she never seemed to remember me.

  “They’re waiting for you in transfer room six,” she said. “Do you know where that is?”

  “Yup. I got it,” I said, shoving the last bit of sesame seed bagel into my mouth and making my way across the lobby and toward the door on the right.

  “Alden,” the tech said as I pushed through the plain white door into the plain white room.

  “Hey, Mark,” I replied.

  Mark had done at least a dozen of my transfers in the past. We had seen each other enough times and chatted often enough that we could be considered friendly, if not friends.

  “Look at this,” he said, as he glanced down at some paper on a clipboard with a big smile on his face. “Scuba! Who knew you had more than one skill?”

  “I know, right? Honestly, I didn’t even know a scuba certification counted as a skill.”

  “I’ve seen it with military divers before,” Mark said.

  “Yeah, well, I’m not sure if my four days in the pool out in Weehawken count as military-grade training, but if some rich, lazy dude wants to pay me for it, all the better for me.”

  “We should be ready to go in just a couple of minutes,” Mark told me. “The Recipient is just finishing up another transfer right now. He came in a little late.”

  This last part Mark said with a bit of a sneer. Anyone on the receiving end of a STU is pretty rich. Anyone who is pretty rich probably has a Mag Car. A Mag Car, of course, uses magnets in its frame that work opposite the magnets set in the roadways that allow its driver and passengers to hover over us peons still using plain old ground transportation, so there is no way they should ever be late to anything because of traffic. The only reason a Mag Car driver will leave you waiting around, is because their time is just more important than yours.

  “What’s he getting?” I asked.

  “You know I’m not supposed to tell you that.”

  �
�Yeah, but, what’s he getting?”

  Protocols were strict on information that could be exchanged between a Donor and a Recipient but, you know, not all that strict. Learning what skills someone might be receiving wouldn’t be like learning the identity of your Recipient or anything as forbidden as that.

  “Surfing, intermediate level,” Mark told me.

  “Ooooh,” I said with a mock bit of amazement. “Surfing and scuba diving. Mr. Money Bags is gonna have himself a big fun ocean adventure.”

  The intercom on the wall came to life and informed us that the Recipient was in place and ready for the transfer. Since the entire process consisted of me putting a plastic thing on my head that looked like a jacked-up visor hat, I was ready in just a few seconds.

  “You all set to go?” Mark asked.

  “Yup,” I replied.

  “You know the drill,” he said. “Just sit there and think scuba.”

  Thinking about the skill you were getting ready to donate helped activate the area of the brain that stored the information you’d learned to perform the skill. If you were thinking about the wrong thing at the moment of the transfer, nothing bad would happen. In fact, nothing would happen at all. It’s not like if I started thinking about the sex I’d had with Annie last night that the Donor would then acquire my skills in the bedroom. I mean, unless he was also thinking about having sex with Annie at that same instant, which I’m hoping is pretty unlikely.

  The moment I started thinking about scuba and the moment he did too, the transfer would begin. Sometimes they’d help out the Recipients by showing them visuals of people partaking in the skill they were going to be acquiring up on a screen. I’m sure Mr. Ocean Vacation was over there right now, watching a video of someone scuba diving a coral reef.

  When the transfer begins, the part of the Donor brain responsible for the skill transmits the “architecture” needed to acquire the skill to the Recipient brain. In turn, the architecture of the Recipient brain transmits back its blank slate to the Donor brain. A “blank slate” doesn’t mean a chunk of dead or useless brain. It just means that they’ve transmitted back an empty canvas, much like you had in that part of your brain before you started to learn the skill. That way, if you choose to try to learn the skill all over again like I do repeatedly with guitar, you’ve got the “real estate” within your brain ready and willing to start the process of learning it.

  Muscle memory didn’t come with the skills, of course. Even when I transferred my full skill of guitar playing to a Recipient, he’d still need to spend at least a few days getting his fingers used to holding the guitar. I’m told it’s the same for a lot of athletic skills as well. But hey, learning how to play guitar or how to ski like a champ in just a few hours sure beats months, or even years, of training. Languages were instantaneous. So long as the Donor had learned the language after the age of twenty, a Recipient would be speaking it in just minutes.

  “You’re all set,” Mark said to me.

  I had kind of spaced out and didn’t even notice the little tingle in my head that always occurs during a transfer. Now, though, I did notice the little panel that was lit up on the wall, which I’d learned over time indicated that everything had gone smoothly.

  “You think you’ll ever bother to learn how to scuba dive again?” Mark asked.

  “No,” I said. “Well, not unless some idiot wants to pay me four grand to do it again. The class only cost me a hundred and fifty bucks.”

  Mark laughed, and I was just about to remove my STU Hat to hand it to him, when a door in the room opened up.

  “—can’t go in there,” was all I heard as the door broke open the soundproof seal.

  “Randy!” the voice continued.

  “Dr. Kertzenheim?” Mark asked to the man now standing just inside the threshold to the Donor room.

  “Who’s this?” the newcomer asked.

  “Randy!” the voice from behind him called again.

  “You’re not who I was expecting,” the newcomer said.

  I had no idea what was going on. I was pretty sure that the door that had just opened was the one that led to the Recipient room, but I had never seen one of those doors opened before. Never. In fact, this was bad. Donors were not—NOT—supposed to see their Recipients. They entered through totally different areas of the building, and arrival times were randomly staggered to avoid crossover out on the street. Instinctively, I shut my eyes.

  “I didn’t see him. I didn’t see anything,” I said. Even though I had. I saw exactly who it was. Moreover, the guy in the Recipient room was yelling “Randy,” and Mark had called him “Dr. Kertzenheim.” It didn’t exactly take a genius IQ to figure out that this was the Dr. Randy Kertzenheim. He was third in the lineage of STU technology behind its original progenitor Dr. Martin and his protégé Dr. Melikin. Dr. Kertzenheim had done a lot of the original work for the PCDs, and after those came to market, he dedicated his considerable skill with brain-wave transfer technology toward bringing STU technology farther into the commercial realm, until out of nowhere, he’d just up and quit the scene. He didn’t go into hiding or anything. He just stopped working with STU technology altogether and never really gave a public reason as to why. He’s not what you’d call “famous.” At least, not to the general public. In STU circles, though, yeah, we knew him, and I had no idea why he was standing in my Donor room right now.

  “I didn’t see anything,” I said again, sitting there with my eyes closed and the STU Hat still on my head like an idiot. I never actually read the part in the contract about what would happen if you somehow figured out who one of your Recipients was, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t good and had something to do with never being allowed to work in STU ever again. That would be a problem. For fifteen years, my entire résumé read as follows:

  Learned to play the guitar, sold the skill, then learned again. Rinse and repeat.

  It was not what you’d call a very robust résumé.

  “Yes, you did. You saw me,” I heard Dr. Kertzenheim say.

  “Yeah, he did. He definitely did,” echoed the very disapproving-sounding voice from behind him in the Recipient room.

  “Oh, will you shut up,” Dr. Kertzenheim said. And it sounded like he was facing back into the Recipient room. Then, I heard his voice aimed in my direction. “Open your eyes,” he said.

  I shook my head no.

  “Someone tell him to open his eyes, and then someone go write him a check or something. How much do you want?”

  Everyone was quiet . . . and my eyes were still closed.

  “Tell him to open his eyes,” I heard Dr. Kertzenheim say yet again.

  “It’s okay, Alden. Open your eyes.” This time, the voice I heard was Mark.

  “You sure?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” he replied.

  I slowly opened my eyes but kept my focus locked on the floor.

  “Look at me,” I heard Dr. Kertzenheim say.

  I did, raising my head to meet his gaze ever so slowly.

  “How much do you want?” he asked me.

  “Want?”

  “How much can we pay you to keep this to yourself?”

  “I- I- I,” I stammered.

  “Just give me your PCD,” he said.

  Dumbly, I took the little hockey puck-shaped device out of my pants pocket and proffered it to the doctor.

  “Can you unlock it first, please,” he said with an impressive amount of patience.

  I put my thumb on the screen, then handed it back to him.

  “There,” he said, removing his own PCD from his pocket, unlocking it, then swiping it over my own device.

  “I just put half a million into your account. Now someone go get him some paperwork.”

  He tossed my PCD back to me, walked into the room from which he had originally come, and closed the door behind him.

  “Half a million?” I asked. “Dollars?”

  4

  Well, this was gonna suck. I suddenly had half a million dolla
rs in my account, and I had been forbidden to tell anyone that I even had it. I mean, I suppose I could stop talking to my dad and my brother, then dump Annie and start a whole new life with all new people who wouldn’t know that I had just recently come into all this money, but, well, I kinda like my family and my girlfriend. Well, I like my dad and my girlfriend. Brandon is kind of a dink, but he’s really good to our dad, so I guess I love him a little bit. So anyway, I’m not going to ditch them and start over. Instead, I’m currently considering pretending that I’ve won the lottery. I think that might be my best bet. Though, I never actually bought a lottery ticket before in my entire life, so it might seem kind of weird. Maybe I could spend a few weeks buying some of those scratchers, so that when I came home saying, “Hey, I won a half a mil” it wouldn’t be so completely out of the blue. Yeah, that was a good idea.

  A couple weeks had already passed since all the craziness at STU Midtown, and Annie noticed I wasn’t practicing my guitar like usual. I had been getting really close to being able to sell the skill again, and this was usually the time I’d start to refine things, but I’d barely even picked up my guitar in these last two weeks.

  “You gonna wrap up with your video soon?” she asked, right after we polished off our Chinese food and I was getting ready to go toss the mostly empty Styrofoam containers down the trash chute in the hallway of our apartment building.

  “Yeah, I’ll get to it,” I said, trying to convince not just her, but myself, that I’d get to it soon.

  Back when I was learning guitar for the very first time, my dad had suggested I put together a video record of the whole process for myself. At the end, about a week before I was going to go sell the skill for the first time, he helped me edit it all down into a really excellent tutorial that I could use to teach myself on what we hoped would be an accelerated curve. By the end of my first time learning, I’d written this really cool song and broken it down into ten different lessons. By week two, I was usually able to strum the really basic parts of the song. By the time I was moving on to part ten, I could play the whole piece at full speed, and it was kind of an awesome song. It started with a full bluesy riff in E, then moved to G and A, followed by a chorus with E, Bm7, and A. I guess you’d have to hear it, but it’s a really good song. It was always a little weird listening to it right after I sold my skill, knowing I had no clue how to play it anymore, but it was also good inspiration to start learning again.