The Skill Conspiracy Read online

  “Go,” Frank croaked, shoving his gun into my hand.

  “I don’t know how to use this thing,” I said.

  He shook his head and rolled his eyes at me.

  The banging on the door had stopped, and I knew Frank had been right. They would be coming around the side of the building to enter through this new gigantic hole at any moment now. I jumped to my feet, stepped over to the table, and placed the STU Hats back into their carrying case. Holding the case and the gun with my left hand, I ran back over to Frank, bent down, and grabbed him under the armpit with my right hand.

  “Help me,” I said to Annie, quickly realizing that I wouldn’t be able to lift him all by myself.

  Frank screamed in pain as we dragged him past the Mag Truck and out onto the street. Ground traffic was stopped, but only due to the gawk factor. There was actually nothing blocking the first car I saw on the street as we stepped from the building. I left Annie holding Frank as best she could and ran in front of that nearest vehicle, screaming, “Help! Help!”

  Oddly, the woman behind the wheel put her hands up in front of her.

  What was that all about?

  “We need to get out of here! Help!” I yelled again.

  I watched in confusion as she opened her door and took off at a full sprint in the other direction. It actually took me a moment to realize that I was holding the gun Frank had just handed me, and I’d been waving it around like a lunatic while yelling for help.

  Whoops, I thought, then ran back over to Annie and helped her half-carry, half-drag Frank over to the car. I opened the back door, pushed him in, and got in next to him.

  “You drive!” I shouted to Annie.

  “Me?”

  A chorus of screaming voices was coming around the side of the building.

  “Drive!” I yelled at her.

  She jumped in the front seat, and fortunately, the woman who had just abandoned the car had apparently left her PCD in it because we were able to start driving down the road immediately.

  Your PCD gave you access to everything you owned, from the locks on your house to the doors at your work, and of course, your car.

  “Is he gonna make it?” I asked Annie regarding the bloody man next to me.

  “No,” came the reply from Frank. “And neither are you, unless I give you something.”

  “What?” I asked.

  He nodded toward the portable STU unit I was holding.

  I sighed, then opened the briefcase and took out the two Hats. I put one on my head and another on his. The computer was already booted, and I searched for a way to access the root menu.

  “Crap,” I said.

  “What?” Frank asked in a whisper.

  The interface wasn’t responding to the commands that I somehow knew it should be. I tried the sequence three times, none of them working, until something on the briefcase itself finally caught my eye. A hole. It looked like a bullet hole.

  “Crap,” I said again.

  “What?” Frank reiterated with annoyance.

  I tried another set of commands, which did work, but I still had to break some bad news to Frank.

  “The unit’s damaged. I won’t be able to perform a nondestructive skill transfer. As it is, this thing can only go one way.”

  Frank laughed, coughing up a little more blood in the process. “Pretty sure I’m not gonna be needing anything up here very soon,” he said, tapping his head with one bloody finger. “I won’t need this either.” He took his bloody hand, reached into his pocket, wiped his thumb clean on the cloth seat of the car, and logged onto his PCD. A moment later my own PCD made a noise, and I looked to see that Frank had just made a five-million-dollar transfer to my account.

  “Holy crap,” I said.

  He smiled.

  “Thanks, Frank,” I said. Then, double-checking our connection through the STU, I said, “Think about shooting guns.”

  “Oh, I’ll give you a lot more than just that, Mr. Heath. You’ll need it to take down these assholes.”

  The unit synchronized, and a transfer began, which lasted for about thirty seconds, until the screen on the unit indicated that the connection had been lost. I was confused for a moment until I looked up and saw that Frank was dead.

  10

  “We gotta get out of here,” I said to Annie.

  “You think?” she replied sarcastically.

  “I don’t mean just here, here. I mean we’ve gotta get out of the city, the state, maybe even the country. You heard what New Guy said.”

  “Who’s New Guy?” she asked, annoyed but aware of my tendency to suck with names.

  “The dude who was just trying to scramble our brains. He said the government knows about this whole thing, and even they wanna keep it quiet.”

  “So you think everyone in the government knows?” she asked, once again leaning heavily on the sarcasm. “The Mayor of New York, Paul the postal worker, that guy who did your audit down at the IRS?”

  “No, I don’t think everyone knows,” I said, a little annoyed with her sarcasm. “But somebody does, and the thing is, we have no idea who.”

  She was quiet for a moment, then I saw her nod to herself. She knew I was right.

  “Give me a minute,” I said. “I need to think.”

  The portable STU I was holding wasn’t gonna cut it. If it couldn’t do the one thing I really needed it to do, it was pretty useless. Examining the briefcase, I found that the bullet hole looked to have entered right where the CPU fan would have been. That explained why the unit seemed to be running so hot. It also explained why the root menu wasn’t working. The CPU fan was right on top of the primary motherboard, which contained a proprietary STU chipset. I could tell you exactly how to program the thing to do pretty much anything I wanted, but the skill set Dr. K had passed along didn’t seem to contain anything about fixing a broken chipset, or making a new one. I’d need to get a replacement.

  I logged onto my PCD again and did a quick Web search for privately owned portable STUs. A bunch of articles came up about that billionaire guy who had been taken to court over the way he acquired that poor girl’s ice-carving skill. Next, I saw a couple more articles with names of billionaires I’d never heard of, and just as I was about to exit out of the ad that popped up, I saw that it was a commercial for the STU Spacewalk Experience on the SS Olympus.

  I smiled to myself. Annie and I had just watched a whole special on the Space Station Olympus the other night. It was actually still in my “watch list,” so I thought-commanded it to open and scrolled to just after the second commercial break.

  “It’s the only privately owned STU in the universe that is offered to use for the general public,” the narrator was saying.

  “What the hell?” Annie asked in annoyance as she heard the program playing off of my PCD. “Why are you watching TV?”

  I shushed her.

  “This STU offers the transfer of one skill and one skill only,” the narrator continued to say. “The skill required to take a space walk outside the SS Olympus. And, some good news for space travelers made wary by the unfortunate micro-meteor that damaged the STU unit this time last year, the SS Olympus now sports a backup unit to guarantee the adventure of a lifetime to anyone aboard who has the funds required to take this most scenic of walks.”

  “Wanna go on vacation?” I asked Annie.

  Every STU on the planet was either smack dab in the middle of a STU-owned and operated building or in the care of some jag-off billionaire who probably had more security around him than the President of the United States. This one, though, the one on the space station, it was just sitting there on display like a table hockey game in a cheap hotel. Well, like a three-hundred-million-dollar table hockey game in a six-billion-dollar hotel, but you get the idea. The point was that since the unit was up in space and there was only a very limited amount of ways to either get there or leave, security was quite a bit more lax than it would be if the Unit were here on Earth.

  A plan was f
ormulating in my head, which was actually kind of amazing. I’d always been pretty horrible at planning. My whole adult life had consisted of learning guitar, selling the skill, paying some bills, and trying to save up enough in between to try to take a little vacation if I could. Right now, though, I had a plan in my head with a backup plan behind it, and even an exit strategy just in case things went wrong.

  Exit strategy? I don’t think I’d ever said or even thought those two words before in my entire life. Thanks, Frank. I was pretty sure infiltration and exit strategy had to have been part of his extensive military training. Of course, having these skills in my head and knowing how to use them were two different things. It was kind of like knowing how to hit a baseball, but not understanding any of the rules of the game. Well, I guess I’d just have to figure it out as I went along.

  I grabbed my PCD again and began spoofing a different identity onto the unit.

  “What?” I said out loud as my mind flew through the procedure.

  I didn’t think this was even possible. Wasn’t this like the exact reason these things were created? Dr. K apparently knew an awful lot about how to manipulate the so-called safeguards for privacy. Sure enough, in under twenty seconds, my PCD was coming up as registered to Mr. Jake Kline of 318 Whipping Way in Idaho Falls. Fortunately, since Mr. Kline was also me, he was rather wealthy, having access to just over five and a half million dollars. Cool.

  Checking on my PCD, I saw that travel to the SS Olympus happened via the Space Elevator located just south of Bogota, Colombia. Annie and I had heard some info about that in the special too. It was apparently this thirty-person capacity elevator that ran on a carbon nanotube cable that stretched from just south of Bogota all the way up to the SS Olympus in Earth’s orbit. I didn’t remember anything else about it, other than it costing $250,000 per person to use it. Fortunately, for the first time in my life, money wasn’t going to be an issue.

  So, I tapped my way over to a search page and started looking for “empty leg” flights out of LaGuardia-Kane airport and found one that would be going direct to Bogota in just under two hours. Empty Leg Flights were something I’d read about online a while ago. Apparently, private jets get chartered all the time to go just one way, and their owners will often offer them up for the return leg of the flight at a generously reduced rate. If the plane is going that way anyway, might as well get someone on board willing to pay for the fuel and any bit of profit you can get out of it.

  “Give me one of your earrings,” I said to Annie.

  She did so without question.

  I cleaned the blood off of the PCD Frank had been using, then used the post of the earring to reset the unit to factory defaults.

  “Here,” I said, handing the PCD up to Annie. “It’s a blank. Just pair it to your thumb and brainwaves.”

  She did so at the next stoplight, then handed it back to me.

  Following the same set of commands I’d just used on my own PCD, I was quickly able to change the PCD from coming up as registered to Annie Crown, to being registered to Sophia Bowers.

  A thought came unbidden into my mind that I should probably take a minute to switch the identities on our PCDs again. It was Jake Kline and Sophia Bowers

  “Here,” I said, handing it back up to her again.

  I’d explain everything I’d done later. For now, I logged back into my own PCD and booked the empty leg flight I’d found for the not-so-reasonable rate of $120,000.

  I suppose that with all the money Frank had just given me I could have just chartered my own flight, but a little part of my brain was telling me that chartering a flight out of the country five minutes after being involved in a shoot-out would be kind of obvious. That in mind, I booked four additional empty leg flights, to Sweden, Miami, Minneapolis, and London, along with seven pairs of seats on various commercial airlines to random domestic and international destinations.

  Now, though, it was time to ditch back into the subway. Annie and I were both wearing our generic-looking Shadez, so none of the facial recognition software running in the city would be able to pick us up, but if we stayed in this same car on the same street for much longer, we’d get tracked down in no time. I asked Annie to pull over and said adios to a man I barely even knew, but who had given his life to protect me, and whose skills would hopefully keep on protecting me for at least a little while longer. I wiped the gun clean, left it in Frank’s hand, brought the case, and got ready to go travel in style on our rented private jet.

  11

  While we were down in the very crowded subway I kept bumping into people with the portable STU case I was carrying. It was thicker than any normal briefcase, not to mention it was ridiculously conspicuous. The bulging metallic silver case was banded with solar panels and, just like the PCD, could operate all day when exposed to just a few minutes of sunlight. True, not everyone in New York City knew exactly what a portable STU unit looked like, but the guy carrying around a big, silver metal briefcase with a bullet hole in it is bound to draw the attention of least a couple of people. Realizing this, I told Annie that we’d have to temporarily ditch the thing.

  “But don’t we kind of need it to show people what it can really do?” she asked.

  “Yeah, but it’s broken right now anyway. The only thing it can do for us at the moment is make us stick out and get us caught. When we get the new chipset, we’re just gonna have to come back for it.”

  “Why not just take the computer out and put it in a different case?” she asked.

  “The case and the solar panels built onto the outside of it are part of the whole unit. Trying to rip the guts out of the case would just mean that we’d need to find or steal more parts somewhere else.”

  Annie was most definitely not used to me talking about anything computer-related with any degree of confidence, so she gave me a bit of a weird look, but then nodded in acceptance of my explanation. Now, I just needed to figure out where to hide this beast of a briefcase.

  The first idea that popped into my mind was the same thing I’d seen done hundreds of times in a bunch of different TV shows and in the movies. So, just like a thousand fictional characters had done before, Annie and I made a stop at Grand Central Station, rented a locker for eight bucks a day, and left the three-hundred-million-dollar portable STU unit amongst everyone else’s travel toothbrushes, business suits, and whatever else wasn’t worth toting around the big city after a train ride.

  With the case hidden away as safely as I could think to hide it, we popped back down into the subway for a little while longer, then came up in search of one of the few roaming cabs still operating in New York City. I normally would have used a Ride Share Service, but those people tended to be a lot more friendly and a good deal more chatty, whereas cabbies basically just tended to bury their noses in their PCDs and do the bare minimum required to get you from point A to point B. Normally, I enjoy meeting new and fun people in Ride Shares, but today, right now, we needed as little human contact as possible.

  While standing on the Avenue of the Americas waiting for one of the yellow vehicles to come by, something on a nearby giant 3D screen caught my eye. It was me, standing in the middle of the street, holding the big silver STU case in one hand and waving a gun around with the other, while screaming in panic at a woman in a car in front of me.

  “Oh man,” I said.

  Annie started to ask what was wrong, but she followed my gaze to the big screen that was set between two scrolling digital stock tickers I was looking at.

  “That looks horrible,” I said.

  Annie grimaced in agreement.

  “We need to separate,” I said to Annie.

  “What?” she asked with a rather petrified look on her face. “I don’t know, I mean, where would I—”

  I cut her off. “I mean, we just need to separate for a few minutes.”

  The video they were showing on the news had been shot by someone with a PCD that was apparently right there on the street behind the STU Donor Un
ion building as it was all going down. You could see the garbage truck wedged halfway into the building, me accidentally pointing the gun at the woman, Frank getting helped into the back seat, and Annie getting into the driver’s seat. If anybody was paying any attention to the news, which, on the streets of New York City was, luckily for us, not a strong possibility, the two of us standing here wearing the same exact clothes that we had on in the video, were going to be pretty easy to spot.

  “We just need to split up to get some different clothing. Just for a couple of minutes,” I said.

  Since I was wearing jeans, which was pretty much standard wear for every guy in the surrounding area, I told her that all I needed was a new shirt. Her pale yellow yoga pants, on the other hand, were a little more conspicuous, so she would need some new pants and a new shirt. I’m not sure why, but I thought it would be a good idea for us to shop for each other’s clothes instead of our own. I gave her a quick hug and jogged off down the street, telling her we should meet back here as soon as we could.

  At the end of the block I found one of those tourist trap stores with little mini Statues of Liberty, postcards, posters, and all sorts of souvenir clothing. I grabbed pretty much the first two things I found, which were a black pair of sweatpants with a little “NYC” on the right hip and a gray zip-up hoodie with “I heart NYC” in big block letters on the back. I charged them to my PCD and jog-walked back to where Annie and I were supposed to meet.

  She wasn’t there. I waited a minute, then two, and then three, and then I started to get nervous. Just as I was reaching for my PCD to send her a message, I finally saw her coming down the sidewalk toward me.

  “Hey,” she said, noticing that I was a little flustered. “It took me a minute to find you this one in your size.”

  As she reached into a bag to take something out, I saw that the word “Trace” was written on the side of the bag. Great, I thought. Trace was one of those fancy-pants stores that Annie shopped at for me twice a year, once on my birthday and once on Christmas.