The Skill Conspiracy Page 4

  “Baw!” I heard the man attached to my back yelling.

  “What!” I yelled back.

  “Stah!”

  Then he momentarily pinned my arms to my sides.

  Oh . . . I suddenly realized he was saying, “Stop.”

  He released my arms, and about two seconds later I felt the Chinese food I’d had for dinner make an attempt to bypass a good amount of the digestion process and just come flying right out of my ass. I groaned, then looked around wildly to see that a black parachute was attached to the man who was attached to me via this chest strap thing that I had unconsciously started to fumble with. Common sense kicked in to tell me it’d be best if I maybe stopped messing with this thing, though.

  “You’re Alden?” the man asked as I hung there like a dopey marionette. “Right?”

  “Yeah,” I called back over my shoulder to him.

  I didn’t really have a heck of a lot else to say at the moment, so I just looked down toward the ground and watched it make its way up to us at an only slightly alarming speed.

  “Get ready,” the man said, as we were about twenty feet above the street.

  “What do I—”

  We hit the ground before I could ask. My feet connected with the concrete, but I wasn’t ready for it at all. I tripped, stumbled, and fell pretty much face-first into the middle of the street, an action made way worse by the fact that the man strapped to my back also fell, and landed right on top of me.

  “Ah! Get off,” I pleaded as I lay there facedown on the dirty road.

  I felt myself getting rolled slightly to my right side, then an arm came around my left, and before I could ask why he was trying to spoon me, he unclipped the strap that was around my chest. Finally, the two of us separated from our previous Siamese-twin-like connection.

  “Oh,” I said out loud, just now understanding that he wasn’t just trying to cuddle.

  “Get up,” he said.

  I did, but not because he told me to. I did it because I didn’t feel like lying in the middle of the grimy street, and it wasn’t important enough just to say, “I’m not gonna do what you tell me to do, Mr. Parachute Man.”

  “Who are you? What the hell’s going on?” I asked, after rising to my feet and realizing that I had a pretty decent case of road rash on both of my palms and elbows.

  “You were in danger. Dr. Kertzenheim told me I needed to protect you,” came the reply.

  “Who?”

  “Dr. Kertzenheim.”

  My mind was a little blank at the moment, so the name wasn’t really ringing a bell.

  “Oh, wait,” I said. I got it now. “But he’s dead.”

  “Right,” came the reply from Mr. Parachute Man, as if that was all the explanation I needed.

  “Wait!” I said abruptly. “Did you shoot Man Number One and Man Number Two?”

  “What?”

  “Those two guys up there,” I said, looking up in the direction of the building we’d just come plummeting down from.

  “I don’t have time to explain right now,” was his reply. “They killed Dr. K, and since you apparently know what he knows, it looks like you were next.”

  “Me?” I asked. “Why would they wanna kill me?”

  “I’ll explain later. Let’s go.”

  He literally took me by the hand and started walking me down the street like I was a little kid. I wasn’t really a big fan of that, and I also wasn’t sure if I should be going anywhere with this guy. Then again, I suppose if he had wanted to hurt me, he could have just unbuckled that chest strap thing before we hit the ground. That would have done the trick nicely. Still, I jerked my hand back and asked, “Where are we going?”

  “Away from all of . . . this,” he said, waving his hand at the area immediately around us, which I was just now realizing happened to be filled with a pretty large number of people, all pointing their PCDs in our direction. Right, we had just parachuted out of the sky. Crazier stuff happens in the streets of New York City pretty much every day, but, yeah, I suppose this was worth posting a video of online.

  I heard sirens in the distance, and Mr. Parachute Man grabbed my hand again and started pulling me toward the nearest underground subway entrance.

  “I think I’ll just head home on my own, man,” I said.

  “You hear those sirens?” he asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, they’re coming this way.”

  “So?”

  “You feel like spending the night in the police station, explaining why you jumped out of a building?”

  “You jumped,” I said defensively. “I mean, you jumped and took me with you.”

  Mr. Parachute Man sighed, and I took his point. If the police did manage to pick me up, this would not be a really fun story to try to explain to them. And that’s not even taking into account that the building I had just jumped out of had three dead guys lying on the floor of the room I’d jumped from. I mean, that could possibly be an issue. So, I went with him.

  We were hoofing it down the stairs into the subway when it occurred to me that I was never going to be able to make it home in time for Annie to buy my whole story about the grocery store. I reached into my pocket, unlocked my PCD, and thought-commanded a message to her.

  Hey.

  Hey, came her reply back after just a few seconds.

  I’m running late.

  What are you doing?

  I looked up just in time to avoid walking right into a guy who was coming up the stairs in front of me.

  “Hey! Watch it, man,” he said as we just barely brushed shoulders.

  You could thought-command your messages into your PCD, but you still had to actually look at the screen to see what people were writing back. That guy needed to relax, though. I mean, we barely even touched.

  “What are you doing?” Mr. Parachute Man asked as he turned to see the reason for the little commotion I’d caused.

  “I was just telling my girlfriend I’m running late.”

  He stopped dead on the stairs, and I barely managed to not run right into him. I stopped just in time, and he gave me the most incredulous look.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Do you like this girlfriend of yours?” he asked me.

  “What?” I asked, confused at this rather out-of-the-blue question.

  “Do you like your girlfriend?” he said again with a little space between each word, as if I’d had trouble understanding him the first time.

  “Yeah,” I said emphatically.

  “Well, good job,” he said, while shaking his head. “Because now she’s in danger too.”

  “What?” I asked. Man, I was asking “what” an awful lot lately.

  “Do you two have a place that you meet up at?” he asked me.

  “What?” I said . . . again.

  “Like, hey, meet me at the shop we always go to, or meet me at your favorite clothing store. Some thing you can say in a message that she’ll understand but without actually having to say the location outright.”

  “Why?” I replied. Hey, at least it wasn’t “what?”

  “Because I’m quite certain that they are monitoring your messages, and you need to get her somewhere safe, but you don’t want them to know where that is.”

  “Who?”

  “God, you ask a lot of questions,” Mr. Parachute Man said, becoming obviously exasperated with me. “You are in danger,” he began to say, using that slow speech again, like I was a toddler who needed things broken down into simple words in order to comprehend what he was telling me. “People are going to be coming after you. If they can’t find you, they will go after the people you care about.”

  Okay. Now he’d gotten my full attention. So, I did like he said and thought-commanded another message to Annie on my PCD. Actually, I kinda need your help.

  You okay? came her reply.

  You remember where we got our best Christmas tree ever?

  Yeah.

  I need you to meet me there as soon as
you can.

  Now?

  Yeah. It’s important.

  There was a pause, then eventually, Okay.

  I looked up to Mr. Parachute Man and nodded. He took the PCD out of my hand, then chucked it on the tracks right in front of an oncoming train.

  “Hey!” I called.

  What a jerk.

  6

  “You got a Christmas tree from Rockefeller Center?” Mr. Parachute Man asked as we stood on the edge of the park. Turns out his name was Frank, by the way. I actually did remember to ask once we’d gotten on the subway. Didn’t catch his last name, though.

  “Well,” I began to say by way of explanation, “remember how insanely expensive Christmas trees were last year?”

  He didn’t respond, but I continued anyway.

  “Well, they were, but one weekend, a couple weeks before Christmas, Annie and I came down here to look at the big tree they light up every year. I took a picture of it on my PCD, and as kind of a joke, I went and had it printed out as a poster over at Turner’s Print . I put it up on the wall behind where we’d been planning to put a real Douglas Fir, and it actually served as our Christmas tree that year. We joked it was the best tree ever.”

  Frank did not seem amused. He actually seemed annoyed.

  “You asked,” I said defensively.

  It had been more than an hour since I’d told Annie to meet us. I would have known exactly how long if Frank hadn’t trashed my PCD, but I felt like it was about an hour or so. We’d spent most of the time crisscrossing beneath the streets of Manhattan on a few different trains. Eventually, we’d popped up in Lower Manhattan, and Frank had walked us to a car he had parked on the ground floor of a parking garage. From there, he’d driven us up here to Rockefeller Center.

  “There she is!” I said, having just spotted Annie walking down the sidewalk a little way off from us.

  “Where?” Frank asked.

  “There,” I said. “With the light blue baseball cap.”

  “Okay,” he said. “You stay here.”

  I had told him on the way over here that there was no way in hell Annie would just up and walk off with some stranger who said he knew me, but he kept telling me how dangerous it was for me to be seen in public right now. So, he had insisted I keep hanging out by a bush, while he made his way over to Annie. I actually thought he’d be lucky if she didn’t kick him in the nuts. She’d done it to creepers before. If I were being honest, after hanging out with the guy for a while, I kinda wanted to see it.

  As I stood there watching Frank walk toward Annie, a different man caught my eye because he also seemed to be walking across the park and straight toward Annie. The three of them were about to converge when, all of a sudden, Frank took two super-quick steps off to his right, intercepted the man, then grabbed him by his arm and threw him to the ground.

  Another man I hadn’t even spotted until now came from the opposite direction, and as Annie started to run away from the sudden commotion, Frank confronted the second man and dropped him as well.

  “Annie!” I shouted from fifty yards away. Screw this. There was no way I was just gonna hang out in the bushes while my girlfriend was in danger. “Annie!”

  She saw me.

  “Alden!”

  The first man was back up on his feet and speed-walking after Annie.

  “Annie!” I yelled to her again. “Run!”

  She looked understandably confused but picked up her pace quite a bit. Far behind her, Frank had turned and was running our way. The second man he had attacked was motionless on the ground. Annie was maybe only ten yards away from me, but the man chasing her was just a few feet behind her, and Frank was a good twenty yards behind him. As the man closed the distance between himself and Annie, he reached for her arm, but just as he was about to grab her, he fell face-first to the ground. I looked up to see that Frank had closed the distance quickly and was just now dropping something from his right hand.

  “Taser,” he said, as he caught up to me and Annie. “Let’s go.”

  “Alden?” Annie asked, completely confused.

  “It’s okay,” I replied, though I had no way of knowing if that was true anymore. “This guy is helping me,” I said, gesturing toward Frank.

  She didn’t look convinced, but I took her by the hand and got in step behind Frank as he jogged in the direction of the car he’d parked less than half a block away. I jumped in the back seat with Annie as Frank hopped into the front.

  “Can I have your PCD, please,” Frank said to Annie, as he turned around in his seat to look at the two of us behind him.

  Annie gave me a what-the-hell kind of look, to which I nodded in reply.

  She took her PCD out of her jacket pocket and handed it up to Frank. He, of course, popped the battery out, chucked it out of the window, and drove off.

  Annie was pissed.

  7

  It had been two months earlier that Patricia Kertzenheim, wife of Dr. Randy Kertzenheim, had died. Modern science had come up with treatments for almost every form of cancer. Almost, but not all. Dr. Kertzenheim’s wife had been diagnosed with an extremely rare case of brain cancer that formed a mass within the pituitary gland, and within just two weeks of the diagnosis, Patty passed quietly and comfortably in the night, alongside her husband of forty-seven years.

  The night before she passed, despite telling herself again and again that she wouldn’t, Patty had sat in bed and spoken to her husband about his life’s work.

  “If only you’d done things differently.”

  Six little words was all she’d said, but they meant so much, and they cut him so deeply. Being the wife of the father of modern commercialized STU technology, Patty Kertzenheim was one of the few people on Earth who knew the truth about the Skills Transfer Unit and how it could truly operate. She really hadn’t wanted to leave her husband, Randy, a widow and feeling guilty for not having done something that may or may not have helped to save her life, but a terminal prognosis does tend to make a person a little introspective, so she said what she had said.

  “If only.”

  If Dr. Kertzenheim had only let the truth be known about STU technology. If only he’d let the world benefit from non-destructive skill transfers. The advancement of the human race had, since its very beginning, been limited by the vast amount of time it took to acquire its baseline skill sets. It took years to learn math, science, how to write computer code, how to recognize and diagnose disease, and so much more. It took years of training built on years of acquiring different skills to even begin the process of advancing technology and understanding. True that acquiring a skill via STU transfer wasn’t the same as learning the good old-fashioned way. People who purchased STU skills lacked the experience to use them in the way of skills that were naturally learned, but just imagine what kind of a head start mankind would have if every generation could simply acquire the baseline skills of their forefathers in an instant with a STU transfer.

  True that even as the system worked now, people could sell their scientific skills and pass them on to the next generation, but the system Dr. Randy Kertzenheim had helped to develop made this both unlikely and improbable. For one, people weren’t interested in purchasing medical or mathematical skills. They wanted adventure skills, action skills, and skills that went over well at dinner parties. The second problem was the economy of the whole system. Would a man in need of a job want to instantly acquire the skills needed to operate complicated computers and machinery at a power plant? Of course he would. But who would sell him that job? Certainly not a person who currently held the skill set, because then, thanks to the decisions of Dr. Kertzenheim and the other forefathers of STU technology, the original Skill Donor would lose his skill and thus lose his job. If the Skill Recipient could pay enough money to the Skill Donor to make his early retirement worthwhile, that might be a different matter altogether, but the Recipient, of course, was in need of a job, and thus probably didn’t have the kind of money needed to pay another person a ret
irement-worthy sum of money to acquire the needed skill or skills. In other words, when it came to any practical use of STU technology for anyone outside of the uber-wealthy, the whole thing was one big useless catch-22.

  So in the end, only the very rich were buying only the most frivolous of skills at prices just high enough to keep regular people selling them but so far within their own exorbitant budgets that it would barely put a dent in their finances. There was even the Supreme Court case of Jade vs Hanson, which, when you boiled it down, basically just ended up being a case of the rich versus the poor, or at least, a Have versus a Have Not. Juliette Hanson was by trade an ice sculptor. She had been hired to work at a black tie fundraiser attended by tech billionaire Arthur Jade. Arthur was known in some circles for having won four gold and two silver medals in archery during the two previous Olympic Games in Sweden and Germany. More people knew him, however, as the founder and CEO of a company by the name of Ribbon that created the technology that made fully immersive 3D televisions possible.

  Arthur Jade was one of literally just a handful of people in the world rich and influential enough to have purchased himself a fully portable STU. His portable Skills Transfer Unit consisted of two STU Hats, one for the Donor and one for the Recipient. It contained a simplified version of the computer interface used in actual STU facilities, and also contained a little printer that would spit out legal and binding STU contracts that could be modified to fit the occasion.

  At this particular black tie affair that was taking place in San Francisco a little over eighteen months ago, a somewhat inebriated Arthur Jade became infatuated with watching young Juliette Hanson carve different fanciful beasts like unicorns, griffins, and dragons from large blocks of ice. He watched her for more than an hour, then made his first attempt to buy her skill at ice carving. His first offer, most ungenerous, had been a mere 10,000 dollars. Ms. Hanson declined. The rate increased, and as the evening wore on, Ms. Hanson was also plied with numerous expensive and exotic beverages provided by Mr. Jade. Before the night was over, Ms. Hanson was wearing the STU Donor Hat attached to Mr. Jade’s portable STU and received a money transfer via her PCD in the amount of $275,000 before the device was activated and her skill was transferred into the brain of Arthur Jade.