Daniel X: Game Over (11 page)

Even as the Opus 24/24 discharged—a plasma pulse of pure pain erupting from its wicked, sawtooth muzzle—I dove through the space-time continuum and put the entire situation on standby.

It’s pretty intense, really, to have everything in the world suddenly stop and hang in the air like you’re walking around in a museum diorama. Intense, but also a little lonely, and
quiet
like you wouldn’t believe.

“Very good, Daniel,” my father said stepping back from the still-frozen Opus 24/24. “But what do you do if your
opponent
is also able to manipulate time?” He walked around the floating weapon, as if to emphasize his point.

“Look, Dad. It’s one thing to give me fighting tips and keep me on my guard and all that, but I need some rest right now. I’ll have you over after I’ve taken a nap, okay?”

“You’re not answering my question, Daniel. Do you know for certain that Number 7 or Number 8 can’t stop time?”

“No. I mean, we know almost nothing about them, but I don’t think—”

“Oh, you
don’t think?
” he said mockingly, waving his arms and somehow casting us both backward in time, slowly at first, and then faster, faster, faster.

In a blink, we were watching my arrival at the hotel, and then the guest before me, a businessman of some sort, and then back to the one before that, and the one before that and then—
bam!
—there were soldiers around. American soldiers. And there was some military dude I recognized in khakis smoking a corncob pipe. General Douglas MacArthur? The man who’d been entrusted with Japan’s recovery after World War II and had helped start the nation on one of the world’s most remarkable comebacks of all time.

I could have yelled hello, but then—
bam!
—the hotel was being built, and we were hovering in the air over the horses and carts of the nineteenth-century construction crew, and then—
bam!
—we were hovering over the previous building on the site, maybe a hotel too but shorter? and then—
bam!
—we were back back to when the site was occupied by a small, curved-roof house and there was a big stone castle not far away. Just then the earth started to shake. I looked off in the distance and saw a huge black cloud exploding out of Mount Fuji—it must be the famous eruption of 1707!

Before I could scramble for cover—
bam!
—we were at a camp of ancient Japanese soldiers armed with wooden spears and polished stone axes, and then—
bam!
—back to pristine forest. And then—
bam!
—back to some sort of ice age and we were on a glacier, and then the glacier was gone and there was a grassland, and then a forest with really weird trees, and then—

“This should do,” said my father, looking around at the primitive jungle. “So, Daniel, it’s time you got caught up on your homework. What do you know for a fact about Number 7 and Number 8?”

“They run a video-game company, live in Tokyo, have a son, a really nice apartment, and they like to hunt and eat endangered aliens?”

“So what puts them in the List’s top ten?”

“They’re plotting to decimate the human race by brainwashing kids to become killing machines like the ones in their video games.”

“You mean to go after them, and
this
is all you know? What’s the rest of their plan? How will they initiate it? How do you know it hasn’t already begun?”

“Well—” I started to say, but I knew he was right. Had I ever been this badly underprepared for anything?

“And how about Number 1?” he asked me. “We’ve heard he’s been in town recently. What have you learned about him after all these years on the same planet with him?”

“You mean other than that he can give a person bad nightmares?”

“What do you know about him in terms of his abilities or physical appearances—”

“Well, he has dreadlocks, red bug eyes, looks like a big giant praying mantis—”

“Always?”

“Well, the List computer says he’s a shape-shifter—”

“So, he could, in theory, look like
this?
” asked my father, morphing into a twenty-foot-tall carnivorous dinosaur with red bug eyes and dreadlocks.

“Run, Daniel.
Run,
” he roared.

I didn’t ask. I just did.

I GUESS YOU’VE got to trust your parents know what’s best for you. Even when they’re in the form of the largest land-based predator the Earth’s ever known and are testing your ability to survive by attempting to
kill
you.

“Daniel,” boomed my tyrannosaur father, knocking down a huge fern tree as he charged after me. “Here are the rules to this little training exercise—” He cut himself short to lunge at me with his wicked six-inch teeth. I barely managed to leap over a moss-covered boulder and out of reach.

“Each time you survive one of my attempts on your life, you earn a catechism question.”

“What kind of reward is
that?!
” I panted.

My dad was big into what he called his “catechism”—a way of verbally instructing me with hard-core questions on all manner of philosophical and ethical topics.

“And each correctly answered question—” he roared, stubbing one of his big clawed toes on a spiky cycad plant, “will earn you the next level. Complete all the levels, and today’s training will be complete.”

“And if I don’t complete all the levels?”

“You ever wonder what it would be like to get bitten in half?” he said, stopping and snapping his enormous jaws down at me.

I leaped out of the way and took off in a new direction.

“Okay,” he bellowed. “First catechism question: Give me a Japanese proverb on the subject of the difference between wisdom and memory.”

I
knew
this one: “Knowledge without wisdom is a load of books on the back of an, um, donkey.” Call me crazy, but even if my dad was conjured up by my own mind, I wasn’t fond of using what my mother would call “coarse” language around him.

“I trust you can see how the saying applies to your current situation.”

I didn’t have a chance to think it through right then.
Bam!
Dad was now back as his usual self, and we were standing in the future—
way
in the future by the looks of it. We were in some sort of high-tech, robot-operated assembly plant with silver Honda logos all over the place. Laser saws, titanium rivet guns, and ceramic shears were slicing, dicing, puncturing, folding, and hammering large shapes out of metal, carbon fiber, glass, and plastic all around us.

This was clearly a place for machines, not people. The
air was stifling hot and smelled of sulfur, but worse than the air was the noise.
Deafening
is too weak a word. It felt like hammers landing on the sides of my head. It was too loud to do anything, much less think, and I almost didn’t notice Dad leveling the Opus 24/24 at me again.

I leaped backward, landing on a high-speed conveyor belt as the blast ricocheted off a junction box and hit an assembly robot. The poor thing actually seemed to scream as it burst into a thousand pieces.

I smiled triumphantly back at my father.

I couldn’t hear him, but it was easy enough to read his lips: “You only earn a question when you
survive!
” was what he said.

I rolled over just in time to notice I was being whisked into an enormous laser cutter.

I thought quickly. I knew from my studies that lasers are made of light and therefore will pass harmlessly through anything that’s perfectly clear. I rearranged my molecules to be transparent to visible radiation, and, sure enough, I passed through the machine and emerged on the other side entirely intact—well, except for my book bag, which I’d kind of forgotten to make invisible with the rest of me.

I swiftly hopped off the conveyor belt and flung the flaming thing to the ground before it burned my back. At least my teachers wouldn’t have to hear that the dog ate my homework.

Suddenly, the machines stopped and quiet returned, except for the ringing in my ears. Dad had paused time once again.

“Congratulations,” he said. “You’ve earned yourself another question. Ready?”

I nodded wearily.

“Who said, ‘Success is 99 percent failure’?”

My mind was blank. I was thinking it was somebody Japanese, but—

“Answer the question, Daniel, or if you’d rather, we can play this level again.”

I racked my brains and did a quick search through the virtual Wikipedia I’d installed in my head. “Um,” I said, playing it cool, so Dad didn’t discover I had kind of, sort of, cheated. “Soichiro Honda, the guy who started the manufacturing company.”

“And I trust you see why that, too, is applicable to your current situation.”

“You mean I should assume Number 1’s going to have some serious failures coming soon because he’s had 99 percent successes so far?”

“I’m saying you can profit from your mistakes.”

“Ah,” I said, not following him, but once again not exactly having enough time to speculate. Because now I was standing on what looked to be a near present-day Tokyo street. Judging by the big white-and-orange concrete barriers lining it, it looked like it was closed off for a Grand Prix street-race course.

“Next question,” Dad continued. “What two words did General MacArthur, supreme commander of Japan in the years after World War II, say summed up the history of failure in war?”

This one I knew all too well.

“Too late,”
I said.

Dad nodded and was gone.

My ears were still ringing from the car factory, but I detected a sort of roaring, thunder-like sound in the distance. And it was getting louder by the second.

IT WAS NOT a mystery that took long to figure out. In a moment, I saw the source of the noise—
motorcycles—
1400cc Hondas, in all poetic probability.

Dear Old Dad had transported me right into the middle of a MotoGP exhibition street course in downtown Tokyo. A pack of overpowered, smooth-tired street racers was now rounding the corner about a half mile away and coming straight at me. They’d have plenty of time to stop or steer around me, assuming they took pity on me.

But it was soon obvious, mainly from how they were laughing and pointing, that they had no interest in avoiding me. The fact that the racers were barb-tailed, cloven-hoofed, red-horned
demons—
or, at least, a species of alien that very much looked that way—was also something of a warning sign.

Fortunately, the course was less than one hundred and fifty feet wide, so I didn’t need to sprint much faster than Usein Bolt to get to safety. When I glanced back at them from the side of the road, it looked like they didn’t care I was escaping. They were still speeding forward and laughing their pointy heads off.

I turned to see what they were looking at and spotted their
real
target: a little girl clutching a big Hello Kitty doll and frozen in pure horror at the sight of the approaching demon bikers.

“RUN!” I screamed, skidding to a stop at the barrier. This would be close—the demons were about to go by me, and the girl wasn’t much farther. If I was going to save her, there weren’t even seconds—

Time-out! If I could stop time, but I knew immediately I couldn’t dive below the surface right then. It’s one of those things you either can or can’t feel, and I definitely didn’t have the feeling.