The Skill Conspiracy Read online

  Annie and I sat down butt cheek to butt cheek on our saggy pleather couch and started looking for something decent to watch on TV. I had the remote control linked to my PCD, so I was thought-controlling the channel surfing, which always drove Annie kind of nuts.

  “Just pick one, will you?” she said with a smile. That’s what she said pretty much every night I was in control of the remote.

  I was making my way through the news channels and up to the sports channels, when all of a sudden, something caught my eye.

  “Wait,” I said out loud and thought-controlled the PCD to go back a couple of channels.

  “What?” Annie asked.

  “—was found dead in a trash dumpster in Lower Manhattan earlier today,” the news anchor was saying. The reason it caught my eye was because the picture on the screen was of Dr. Kertzenheim.

  “Oh crap,” I said.

  “Hey, isn’t that the guy who started STU?” Annie asked.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Well, kinda.” I wasn’t gonna explain the whole lineage of the corporation to her right now.

  “Details from local authorities are still forthcoming, but foul play is most certainly suspected,” the anchor continued to say.

  I must have looked just as shocked as I felt because Annie asked, “You okay? You don’t think this will affect your work with STU, do you?”

  “Oh,” I said, trying to shake off my seemingly disproportionate shock about the news. “No. It shouldn’t. He hasn’t been a part of the actual work at STU for years. I’m sure everything will keep running just fine. I just, you know, I guess I owe my career to the guy, and that kinda sucks to go out like that. You know, in a dumpster.”

  Annie nodded and looked back to the TV, expecting me to start flipping around again.

  “You have ten seconds to find something good,” she said. “Or else I’m taking over.”

  I shot right past the sports channels and into the nature stuff, which I knew she loved, settling just in the nick of time at the count of “nine” on a 3D tour of the area around Angel Falls in Venezuela. The 3D projection system in our TV was decent, but not great. Some of the fancier ones would have made it seem like we were actually right there next to the falls, but ours gave a pretty good approximation, so long as you didn’t look too far off to either side and notice our crappy apartment furniture encroaching on the lush digital recreation of the landscape. I was half absorbed in the show, but more focused on that news story and thinking about how weird it all was that I’d literally just met that guy. A minute or so later, a knock came at our door.

  “Who the heck’s that?” I asked.

  We weren’t exactly super friendly with any of our neighbors, so it was unlikely any of them would be stopping by for a visit. Anyone we did actually know would have had to have been buzzed in before they made it up to the fifth floor and our door.

  Annie shrugged her shoulders but was too absorbed in the show to venture any sort of guess as to who the visitor might be.

  “I’ll get it,” I said, stating the obvious, as there was no chance of her getting up and missing any part of the show.

  With a little effort, I climbed up out of the saggy couch and walked over to the door. I leveled my eye at the peephole, which was actually just a hole in the door, where one of those little fish-eye lens thingies were supposed to be, and looked out to see a neck and a necktie.

  “Mr. Heath?” a man’s voice from the other side of the door asked.

  “Yeah,” I said somewhat hesitantly.

  “We’re with the STU Corporation and were hoping to have a word with you about your settlement from a couple weeks back.”

  “Shhhhh,” I said, as I unlocked the door and pulled it open as quickly as I could. “My girlfriend is in here,” I said in a bit of an aggressive whisper to the two men who appeared on the other side of my threshold. “And I haven’t told her about that whole thing, obviously.”

  “Right,” the man closest to me said. “Then maybe you could come with us to discuss it more privately.”

  “Do we have to?” I asked. “I mean like, right now? It’s kinda late.”

  “Yes,” the man said, trying, and for the most part succeeding, at looking friendly. The guy next to him was a bit of a dud, but this guy seemed okay. Both of them were wearing slacks, button-down shirts, and ties. The one doing all the talking was slim and about my height at six feet. The dud was shorter and a bit dumpier. He had muscles, but you kind of had to look for them. I’d actually seen a lot of guys like him at the gym. Strong dudes with muscles buried under their fat.

  “I still get to keep the money, right?” I asked in a quiet whisper.

  “Yes, of course,” Man Number One, the taller one, replied.

  Just then, Annie apparently noticed I’d been gone for a little while. “Hey, Alden,” she called out from the couch. “Who is it?”

  I looked at the two men with an inquisitive look that was supposed to convey the message of, “What do I tell her?”

  Man Number One looked back at me and shook his head ever so slightly, as if to say, “She’s your girlfriend. You figure it out.”

  “It’s Mrs. Nelson,” I called back. “I apparently left my laundry in the wash again, and she wants me to come get it out so she can do her stuff.”

  “Okay,” came the reply from the couch.

  “You’re gonna need to come up with something that’ll last a little longer than flipping laundry,” Man Number One said. “We’ve gotta take you over to STU Midtown.”

  “Oh, come on, man,” I said, a little annoyed and also getting a bit worried about having to lie to Annie. “What’s this all about, anyway?”

  “The man you sold your scuba skill to,” Man Number Two said, speaking for the first time. “You saw he died?”

  “Yeah,” I replied.

  “Well, for the sake of expediency, he paid you that money out of his own personal account. We were remiss in letting him do that, so now, we just need you to dot some i’s and cross some t’s, to acknowledge that the money you received actually came from the STU Corporation and not Mr. Kertzenheim.”

  “I get to keep it all, though, right?” I asked.

  “Of course,” Man Number One replied.

  Annoyed, but satisfied, I closed the door, walked down the hall and into the elevator with the two men, and started thinking of some sort of white lie I could tell Annie that would explain me being out for however long this was going to take.

  “How long will this all take?” I asked.

  “Just a couple of minutes,” Man Number One replied.

  “In total?” I asked.

  “Oh, no,” he said. “The paperwork is just going to take a couple of minutes.”

  “But I mean, can I get a ride back here after we’re all done?” I asked. I needed to know how long my lie was supposed to cover. I hated this. I hated lying, and I was still going to have to tell the dumb lottery lie too. This whole thing was sucking big time.

  “Sure,” Man Number Two said. “We can give you a ride back.”

  “Cool,” I replied.

  I activated my PCD and sent a message to Annie, telling her that since I was up and out that I was just gonna go get some groceries. The reason we’d gotten the Chinese food in the first place tonight was because we had like zero other food in the house, and I had been planning on making a grocery run anyway.

  “Cool,” came the reply.

  Man Number One drove, Number Two sat up front, and I hopped in the back of a really cool black Mag Car. It didn’t look very sporty or anything. It was more like one of the luxury Mag Cars you see business guys using. The seats in the back were super supple leather, but the real stuff, not pleather like the couch from our apartment. Man Number Two told me I could help myself to one of the waters in the back, so I did.

  I had only ever made it into Midtown in less than thirty-five minutes once since we moved out here. Every time I even think about making the trek into Midtown, I still have fantasies about that
“Miracle Commute,” which is what I still call it to this day. Normally, the trip can take anywhere from forty-five minutes to well over an hour. These guys got us from my place to STU Midtown and into the building’s underground parking garage in just under fifteen minutes, and I’m betting we could have done it even faster if they had wanted to. Another one of the very cool things about Mag Cars is that so long as they are off the ground and up in mag fields, there is actually no speed limit. There’s also no risk of crashing into any other Mag traffic because as soon as a Mag Vehicle detects another one, the vehicle without priority will engage an electromagnetic boost that leapfrogs it over the other vehicle and right back down onto the mag track. This actually happened to us once on the way into the city, but unfortunately, we were the car that got jumped. I always thought it would be super fun to be in a Mag Car doing the actual leaping. I never really had the best stomach for amusement rides and stuff like that, so I wasn’t sure exactly how I’d react to something like that, but it did seem like it would be cool.

  Anyway, with the time we made getting here, so long as I didn’t have to spend too much time on all the paperwork, I was pretty sure the grocery lie was totally going to work out.

  The magnets embedded in the floor of the garage led right up to the elevator, which was rare. A lot of garages didn’t even have magnets in them at all. The Mag Cars would often be set down to street level while they were inside the garage and could only meet back up with a magnetic field when they left again.

  Right near the elevator bank, the magnetic field decreased, and our vehicle was set down gently onto the ground. It was literally just a few steps to the elevator, so we all got out, pressed the button for Up, and got in once it arrived.

  “Whoa, forty-two?” I asked as Man Number Two hit that numbered button in the elevator. “I thought you guys were just on the ground floor.”

  “No,” Man Number One said. “The STU Corporation owns the whole building.”

  “Oh,” I said out loud. I guess that made sense. They were, after all, pretty much one of the biggest companies in the world. I guess it would be kind of weird for them to be renting office space from some other company.

  I reached into my pocket, unlocked my PCD, and checked the time. I thought about sending Annie a text, asking if she wanted anything at the market, then, realizing it would be kind of tough to fulfill her request since I wasn’t actually at the market, I thought better of it.

  “Ah, crap,” I said out loud.

  “What’s wrong?” Man Number Two asked.

  “I just realized, it’s gonna look kind of weird when I come home without any groceries, since I told Annie I was going to the market.”

  “We’ll swing you by the market on the way home,” Man Number One said without so much as a milli-moment of hesitation.

  “Cool. Thanks,” I said gratefully.

  I followed the two men into a room with a desk in the middle of it, a chair on either side of it, and loads of computer equipment on the left wall. It also had a pretty sweet view out its floor-to-ceiling window that faced this part of Midtown Manhattan.

  “Just have a seat, and we’ll get the paperwork for ya,” Man Number One said.

  You know, I never did ask their names. I’m actually really bad at that. I always end up having to come up with random names for people in my head, since I always forget to ask what their real names are.

  The two men left the room, but instead of taking a seat, I walked up to the window and looked out at the scenery. Another tall building was right across the street, so there wasn’t really an expansive view or anything, but you could still see a ways down the avenue, and all the tiny ant-people were definitely out and about and scurrying around. After just a few minutes, I heard someone walking toward the room, and I turned to greet them.

  “Mark?” I said with surprise as my frequent STU tech walked into the room.

  “Oh, hey, Alden,” he said, looking a little more ragged than I was used to seeing him.

  “What are you doing here?” we said to each other at pretty much the same time. He answered first.

  “I’m just pulling some OT and doing a little maintenance on the hub units.”

  “Cool,” I said politely, though it actually sounded insanely boring and not cool at all. “I’m just here to sign some paperwork about that, uh, you know, incident a couple weeks back.”

  “Right,” Mark said with a knowing kind of nod.

  I knew I wasn’t supposed to be talking about that at all, so I just shut up and turned back to the view outside. After a moment, Mark took a couple steps over to the wall with all the computer stuff on it and asked me, “You ever wonder how all this stuff works?”

  “Nope,” I said. “Can’t say I’ve really thought much about it.”

  “It’s pretty cool stuff,” he replied. “Wanna see something?”

  “Sure,” I said. Nothing else to do but sit here and wait for Number One and Number Two to return with the paperwork, so I might as well see something cool in the meantime.

  “You know what this is, right?” Mark asked as he picked up a STU Hat and showed it to me.

  “Yup.”

  “The Donor and the Recipient actually wear the same exact Hat.”

  “Cool,” I said, noticing that there was another one of the Hats still sitting on a mini-shelf just in front of Mark.

  “In the control room,” he continued, “they assign one hat to send and another to receive, like this.”

  He tapped on a touch-screen in front of us and followed a little sequence of commands. “After that, and once you’ve got your Donor and Recipient both thinking about the same skill, all you need to do is initiate the two-way transfer and—”

  “What if you just made it go one way?” I asked.

  Mark looked surprised.

  “Like this,” I said, reaching up to tap on the touch-screen, backing us out of the transfer screen and going back to the root menu. From there, I isolated the skill center on the Donor headset frequency, alternating the transfer to go in one direction only, and then locking the parameters for non-rewrite. Of course, you couldn’t actually do anything beyond that until both units started to receive input from human brainwaves.

  There was a pause. It seemed kind of long. Mark had for some reason turned a ghastly shade of gray, then he looked at me and said, “Shit.”

  “What?” I asked.

  Next thing I know, the computer screen next to where Mark was standing was spattered in some sort of goop.

  What happened? I thought.

  I didn’t get it. My mind felt like it was starting to spin up to speed, but all systems were definitely not yet “go.”

  “That’s your fault,” Man Number Two was saying to me from the doorway of the room. He had a gun in his hand and was waving it toward the floor.

  “Mark?” I said. That’s Mark. Mark’s on the ground, and he seems to be missing a rather sizable piece of his head. Wait, had Man Number Two just shot Mark?

  “That’s a dangerous little secret to be sharing with people, Mr. Heath,” I heard a voice say.

  What is? Who said that? Oh, it’s Man Number One. Now he’s in the room too.

  I definitely didn’t feel like I was in my own body at the moment. This was all way too surreal. I did, however, realize that I had, at some point, taken my PCD out of my pocket, and it was currently vibrating in my hand. Numbly, I angled it toward my face and saw one word that was written on the screen, “Duck.”

  I didn’t, but I definitely should have.

  Before I could even begin to process what was happening, I felt like I was getting slammed from behind by one big object and a bunch of smaller ones. The noise was deafening. Suddenly, I was facedown on the ground and heard two sounds that reminded me a little bit of palm muting the high E string, only a lot louder. I looked up to see Man Number One and Man Number Two, both lying on the floor, halfway inside the room and halfway still out in the hall.

  “Come on!” a voice calle
d from behind me.

  “Huh?” I rolled onto my side and craned my neck back to find the source of the new voice. There, standing in front of what used to be the large window on the back side of the room, was a man dressed in all black, save two heavy-duty gray backpack straps over his shoulders and one across his chest.

  “Up,” he urged me, bending over and half helping, half forcing me to stand up and face away from him. Then, he put me in a weird and awkward bear hug, but before I could complain, he let go. Confused and still disoriented, it took me a moment to realize that he’d strapped something to my chest.

  “What the heck—” I started to ask, but then realized he didn’t just strap a thing to my chest, he’d actually strapped me to him.

  “Here we go,” he said, as I felt him pulling me back and away from the door to the room. Wait, isn’t that where the window was? Isn’t the window gone? OH, crap.

  5

  I had done the cliff jump at Rick’s Café in Jamaica a while back, but this? This was nothing like that. For one, it took me like a half an hour and a half dozen Red Stripes to build up the courage to jump off the little thirty-five-foot cliff in Jamaica. And two, there was water at the bottom of that jump. Nice, crystal-clear blue water with a whole bunch of happy vacationers who had just jumped off the cliff in front of me, splashing around and feeling just fine. Like I said, this was nothing like that.

  With a stomach-wrenching twist of gravity, we fell backwards out the forty-second-floor window and started plummeting through the darkness toward the hard concrete below. I think I must have been a bird in one of my past lives because rationally, I knew that flapping my arms wasn’t going to do me any good, but I started to do it anyway.