Nova Project #1 (25 page)

Nick grips one of the slats on the vent and pulls. It shifts ever so slightly. “Help,” he says. Leah and Miguel move to either side of him, and together the three tug on the vent, the screws at each corner grinding against crumbling brick. It wrenches free at one last hard yank, rubble crashing around their toes. Nick throws the metal grate on the ground behind them, and they all stare into the hole.

The vent is exactly like the one Miguel had to crawl through in the game, and he wants to do it exactly as much. There's room for a single body length before it veers off to the right, into the invisible depths of the building.

At least, if he goes first, he'll get out first.

“Stay close,” he tells the others, and slowly climbs in, crawling forward on his elbows. The turn is tight, as tight as the walls closing in around him. He takes a deep breath and pulls himself the next few inches, and the next. Pitch darkness comes for what feels like several feet, then the faintest glimmer of light ahead, getting incrementally brighter as he drags his body toward it.

Through the slats of another grate, he sees an empty room. Not just empty of people but completely so: no furniture or computers or even a window. Just walls in Chimera's favorite shade of gray and a single spotlight on the ceiling. This grate is on simple hooks, easy to move aside, and slowly, carefully Miguel climbs out of the tunnel.

“That was easier than I expected,” said Leah, following him.

“Don't speak too soon. We still need to find where they keep their tech.”

“You think there are cameras or motion sensors or anything?”

Miguel turns to Nick. “Could be, but what are they going to do if they catch us? Have us arrested? I don't think Blake wants me to tell the world he fixed the game.”

A shadow passes over Leah's eyes. “They could do something to that again,” she says, pointing at his chest.

He swallows. She's right. Right here, right now, he has to make a choice. He closes his eyes and opens them again.

He'd rather die knowing whatever truth Blake and his partner are hiding than live wondering why Blake cared so much about winning that he was willing to kill to do it. Why they came up with a beta test for a game they never intended to launch.

“Come on,” he says, heading for the door.

The corridor feels familiar, like one he's been in a thousand times, as if someone sat in a room in this building and coded a gamescape based on what they saw. That's probably what happened.

“Which way?” Nick asks.

Miguel shrugs. He can't post an update asking for tips on this. “Listen out for people?” he whispers to Leah. She nods.

He heads left, testing door handles along the way. All locked. They might need to come back and break in if they can't find anything else, but for now it seems safe to explore. The light gets brighter as he walks, and suddenly explodes into brilliance as he steps into a large glass atrium, facing the tall windows and front door they saw from the other side. The desk is still empty.

“Hear anything?” he asks Leah.

She shakes her head. “Nothing. You know when a place just feels completely abandoned?”

He trusts her, but he won't count on her being right just yet. Overhead, four more floors rise, and the edges of a tile mar the marble underfoot.

“Up, I guess,” says Miguel, moving to the middle of the tile as Leah and Nick join him. “We'll try them one at a time.”

The second floor is only more gray hallways, more locked doors. Maybe Blake and Lucius cleared everything out, sealed it up, and there's nothing to find here. Maybe that's why it was so easy—comparatively—to get inside.

They step back onto the tile. The third floor begins the way the second did, but the corridor is much shorter this time, and an open door at the end reveals a massive room, filled with banks of computers. Bingo.

This is where Chimera lives. What Miguel wouldn't have given to be in this room only a few months ago, crack open the game and discover its secrets so he could progress even faster.

Now he's looking for a different secret. He takes a chair at the nearest desk, wakes the screen in front of him. Nick and Leah hover over his shoulders for the first few minutes, before both finding seats themselves.

There's much less security on the network in here; firewalls hadn't been built to keep out anyone who was already inside the building. Miguel calls up the same files he found in his bedroom, finds the places that kept shutting him out. Now they let him in. His hands move faster than his brain. He goes
too far, doesn't realize what he's seen until he's three screens ahead. He flips back. Stares. No. That makes no sense. None.

And then it makes total sense. Bile rises in his throat. He looks for the nearest thing to vomit into, but he's frozen in his chair. Swallow. Burn. He coughs.

“Mig?” Nick jumps up. “Mig? What's wrong?”

Everything. His hand is on his chest. He wants to claw through the muscle and bone and tear out the heart inside. He doesn't believe this stuff. He doesn't know anyone who believes this stuff. All that died out with technology, with science.

Which just made it so much easier for Blake and the other one, Lucius, to hide in plain sight. To take over the world with their fucking game, negotiate with men and women who believe they rule the world and . . . don't.

He coughs again. “Have you ever heard the phrase
Gods play games with the lives of men
?”

I
t's almost like being a parent. Lucius steps back, surveying his work with no small measure of pride. And because he's Lucius, he silently gives Blake credit for his contributions.

Neither one of them would have managed it alone. It's sad to think that their partnership is nearly over, but such is the way of the world. Chimera will shut down in a month, enough time for the horsemen to go out into the world and do the jobs he and Blake have so carefully given them.

Their forms, their purposes exist in many mythologies, but never like this.

Technology is a beautiful thing.

“Are we ready?” Blake asks, setting down his coffee cup. “We need to leave. The boy and his friends will arrive soon.”

“Remind me again why you want him to come here? And why you think he will?”

“Because we want the truth to come out, but we don't want
to be the ones to say it. History has shown the boy will not be believed, not at first at any rate. People saying the things he will say have been dismissed as madmen since the dawn of time. He'll come because he's curious. I've left him clues. So, are we ready?”

“I think so. Ask them.”

Blake does.

“Yes,” they say one by one. Their voices are mechanical, false, but the thoughts they speak are their own. Lucius is particularly pleased with the brains. He'd dreaded having to follow each one around, making sure they were acting according to plan. Especially when Blake would have had to do the same, under instructions from
his
superiors, with completely different objectives. What a mess that would have been.

It's still going to be a mess, but the planned one. Both sides are just waiting to clean up.

“Well.” Lucius turns to his friend, his enemy, the only one on earth who understands. “It's been a pleasure.”

“It's been an absolute chore,” Blake retorts, shaking his hand.

“I'm sure I'll see you around, but I'll be busy.”

“Me too. Good luck.”

“And you.”

“Go,” says Lucius. He and Blake follow the four horsemen
as they walk out the door of Chimera headquarters and into the world, gleaming creations of the foundations of humanity, war, famine, pestilence, and death, imbued with all the supernatural abilities heaven and hell can provide.

I
t is so beautifully simple, but even water can make you choke. Kill you. Simple things have power.

Simple choices do. Miguel looks from his screen to all the others, text scrolling across them at a rapid, almost illegible rate. Names. Statistics.

Alignments.

“Look!” he says, pointing. “Every one of those is a person, someone making choices. Good ones. Bad ones.” His fists clench.

“That's not possible.” Leah's voice quivers.

“They've been data mining our
souls.”

“No. No-no-no. It's some kind of joke.”

But it isn't. “Think about it,” Miguel says. “We all basically live either online or in Chimera, which is partly the same thing. Status updates and photo collections. Diaries. Game progress. Grades, statistics, choices. Everything.” He points
at the computer, the face of what he means. “It's all in there. And when we die, it stays there forever. People have been talking about that for basically forever. You. Me. Immortal in the system. Everything you've ever liked or loved or hated. Everything you've searched for, bought, said. Everything we
are.
What is that, if not a soul?”

“You sound like you believe it.”

He doesn't. But he has to. None of this would be here if it wasn't true. And just think of Chimera.

“They've been laughing at us,” he says. “They threw gods and demons at us in the game, thinking we'd never figure it out. They designed every level to show us the world they're about to destroy.”

“And they've been watching our every move,” Leah whispers. “Every decision. Not just ours. Millions of people. Cheer at someone's failure, complain at someone's success . . . Some people were
happy
Josh died.”

This game will teach you who you are.

“Now you sound like
you
believe it,” Nick says to Leah.

“I don't want to.”

Synapses fire, connections made. That's why the balance of the teams had been so important. The spectrum of good to evil. Team leaders the ones in the middle, the hardest to judge, the ones who could go either way had to be tested the most.

Oh, they had tested Miguel.

And he'd failed.

“This— No,” says Nick, finally finding his voice. “You were blackmailed into playing like that, into killing Josh. You didn't have a choice, you can't be judged by that. Even if you had a choice, Josh had one, too.”

“I did have a choice.” A few hours ago he'd been so sure he'd never tell anyone this, but the time for secrets is over. “And Blake knew I'd almost made it once. The night the leaders were announced I left you and Anna in the park and went to—to— I stood on the roof of the tallest building I could get to,” he says, hoping that's enough.

It is. Nick's pain is so palpable Miguel has to turn away from it.

“I always had a choice,” he whispers, not looking at either of them. “I made the wrong one. For me, for you guys.”

“We didn't do anything!” says Leah. “It was your choice. I'm not saying I wouldn't have made the same one, in your shoes, but we didn't know.”

Yeah. He doesn't think that matters. He was the leader, there to overrule them, to choose for them even though they had the ability to choose for themselves. They hadn't spoken up, they'd watched him do it.

The truth is too large for this room, though it's held here. It's too large for the enormous world. It surrounds them, a
bubble that won't burst no matter how much they poke it with logic and reason.

“We need to tell someone. We need to do something.”

Who? What? There is no higher authority than the ones who have been mocking them, that's the point. Leah's shaking fingers fly across the projected keys, and he moves to stop her, thinking she's posting a status update. Too late he realizes what she's actually doing.

She finds her name among billions in a spreadsheet. Tears drip down her face. “I was good,” she whispers.
“Was.”

“Leah—”

Years of Chimera have heightened her speed and reflexes. His fingers close around air as she runs, leaping onto the tile at the end of the corridor.

Nick stands, too, leaves, and Miguel is alone.

Stunted trees rise from a dying earth soon to be put out of its misery. There is a wind coming off the water, and Miguel pushes his hair from his eyes for the hundredth time. He barely remembers coming here, it's just where he goes when he needs to be alone or to think.

It's his fault. He made the decision. They followed and are now as guilty.

It's not fair, but life isn't. He's seen that firsthand, even before now.

The sky darkens. The late-summer night is cold, and he didn't bring a coat. Such tiny considerations are just that—tiny. Unimportant in the grand scheme of things, the grand plan. He missed an entire summer, the last summer, holed up inside a ChimeraCube. He would've even if they hadn't run the competition, but now he feels the loss.

He definitely doesn't feel like a champion.

There's been no more word from the Gamerunners. It might not come at all. After Leah and Nick left, he'd watched his status feed on one screen, the Chimera files on all the others. Human after human, being sorted according to whether they care or not, Miguel's one decision touching millions. Maybe that was all they wanted.

Footsteps. He turns.

“I messaged Anna,” she says. “She told me you come here.”

Anna would know. It's right that now Leah does, too, for as long as they have left.

“I want to be so angry at you.” She sits next to him on the ground. “But that makes it worse somehow. If you hadn't done what you did, we wouldn't know at all. I'd rather know.”

Miguel laughs without humor. “I wouldn't.”

“Really?”

“I thought I wanted to know. I really did. There was a moment when we were in that first room, the empty one, where I knew we could turn back. I thought I wanted the
truth.” Painless isn't the same as not knowing, but not knowing is painless. There's nothing he can do about it either way. All his life he's been fighting, and it was pointless, he was never going to live much longer than he has already. Blake knew that. He knew it the whole time, but he gave Miguel hope just to see what he'd do with it. And when that didn't work, he threatened Miguel to see what he'd do with
that.

Games. A toy. That's what he feels like.

“What did you think their secret was?”

Does it matter now? Miguel shrugs. “I'm not sure. Human experiments? Something to do with the biomech. There've been rumors about a singularity, a collective digital consciousness. Maybe that. I guess I wasn't entirely wrong, but there's nothing we can do either way.”

“I think I agree with you,” Leah says. “When I ran off, I went to do some reading. Guess what, nobody raving about gods and demons has ever been believed.”

“We could show them the proof?”

“Look at the history of the world. Someone will come up with a ridiculous story, which by the way won't be anywhere near as ridiculous as the truth. People are weird. They have their own lives to worry about.”

“For now.”

“Yeah.”

He stands, slowly, legs aching after so many hours on
the cold ground. Whether he wants to know or not, he does. Regret is far behind him. He has to make the right choices now, and the right choice is to let one more person in on the secret. He's told Nick to go to hell so often, laughing the whole time. It's just what people say.

Vision is a fluid, contextual thing. What you see depends on what you know.

He knows too much, and so he sees too much.

Miguel tears off his lenses. This can't be coincidence. Not believing in coincidences is one of the many things Chimera has taught him. Everything found, everything learned is needed, relevant later.

His eyes ache from reading, books on one side, status feed on the other. They'd started to blur, converge.

Miguel reads Leah's message on his monitor. “Did you read the news?”

Yes. A small war in a peaceful country, rapidly becoming a large war in a violent country. Citizens are taking refuge in their local Cubes, where there is food, clean water, shelter. More of the limitless resources to which Blake and Lucius have access, but at least Miguel has an explanation for that now. Life must be so much easier when you don't have to obey the laws of physics.

Also when that life is eternal.

Miguel's stomach turns. He ate that stuff. Maybe it was real food, it had tasted real. It's just that he doesn't know the difference between real and not real for anything anymore.

The world is going to end. That's real.

His hand in front of him. That's real.

Mom knocking on his bedroom door. That's real.

“Dinner,” she says.

“Yeah, I'm not really hungry.”

“And I don't really care,” she retorts, smiling. “We've hardly seen you all summer. Come sit with us, I won't force-feed you.”

How can she smile? Oh, yeah. Because he hasn't told them. He turns the arguments for and against over in his mind like he has been for the past week and a half, and pushes his chair away from his desk. His mother puts a plate in front of him at the table, and he stares at it. Is this real food? It was synthesized in a lab, does that make it better or worse than what Blake and Lucius might be serving in the Cubes?

There's no answer to that. Focusing on small questions temporarily saves him from having to look at the bigger ones.

In this case, the biggest one, the question that has consumed humanity since the dawn of time. Preoccupation with it has faded in recent centuries, but that's only made it easier for Blake and Lucius to pull off their plan.

“What do you think happens to us when we die?” Miguel
asks. He wasn't going to ask. He'd opened his mouth to put his fork in it, but the words had other ideas. His parents look up in surprise.

“You're not going to die, sweetheart.” The unspoken
anymore
hangs over the table like the lamp illuminating their faces.

“I know.” Miguel's unspoken
Yes, I am, we all
are lurks in the darkened corners of the kitchen. “I'm just asking.”

“Nothing,” says his father firmly. “Your life ends, so does your consciousness. There's nothing after that.”

“That's what I think, too,” says his mother. “All the more reason to enjoy life while we have it.”

“Right.”

“Your new girlfriend seems nice.” His mother winks slyly. “Is that still a thing? She hasn't been back since that first time. Did we embarrass you too much?”

The feeling of watching himself, all of them, from overhead is sudden, consuming. Small lives, small worries, small pleasures and sins. This is what Blake and Lucius are concerned with, this is what they are collecting. A grain of sand plus a grain of sand plus a grain of sand eventually add up to a beach.

For one of them, it will eventually add up to victory.

“She's fine. It's still a thing.”

He hasn't eaten a bite. He watches his parents instead.
They're still young, relatively, and look younger than he can remember their having done so for a long time, their biggest worry erased by a surgeon's laser. He won't put those lines of concern back on their faces, smoothed now but lingering just under the surface.

His father stands abruptly, blinking furiously behind his lenses. “Excuse me,” he says, almost to himself, heading for the living room and shutting the door. Miguel and his mother shrug, silent and waiting until his father returns.

Pale, furiously grabbing his coat from the hook by the door. “I have to go,” he says, still blinking. “Accident . . . lab . . . something really wrong.”

The door slams.

“This worries me,” Leah says.

“Oh, really?”

She slaps Nick's shoulder. “No, seriously. Like this is all part of the plan. War starts breaking out, that makes a twisted kind of sense. A computer error causes a meltdown at Mr. Anderson's lab, and others, too. Their systems are linked. That means food shortages, and that makes sense, too. So now people are hiding inside the Cubes, where there's food and doctors and shit, right? Except in all of human history, when have diseases run rampant? When people are living in close quarters. That's the third one. Gather everyone together, it's
going to be easier to infect them with some virus or something, isn't it?”

“Won't people leave once they start getting sick? Go home?”

“If they're allowed to,” says Leah grimly. “Right now the war is halfway across the world, but it'll come here, and everything else will follow. I know it will.”

War. Check.

Famine. Check.

Pestilence. Check.

There's only one more, and it comes with all the others. They should have studied this more in school. The monsters of myth and legend, the demons that hide in fire.

A face dances in the flames. Miguel shifts away from the pit he, Nick, and Leah have built in the park, burning preapproved, environmentally friendly fuels. He almost laughs, but the face winks at him. The others can't or don't see it.

Leah was right. He keeps his mouth shut, afraid of sounding like a lunatic even to those who already know what he knows. They don't know what to do about it, but the knowledge unites them.

Which explains one thing. For days Miguel's been trying to wrap his head around the idea that Blake and Lucius could work together when surely their aim divides them more completely than anything has ever been divided. Now, though,
he gets it. How much lonelier would he feel if Nick and Leah weren't here?

He has counted every one of the twenty-two times he's tried to tell his parents, opening his mouth and shoving food into it instead.

They might believe him. They might think that they just got their son back, healthier than ever, only for him to lose his mind.