The Rule of Thoughts (31 page)

Michael pointed at his mouth, trying to show them they had to do this. It was now or never. His lungs burned, begging him to take a breath. If they didn’t psych out their bodies soon, they might very well die of asphyxiation.

Sarah nodded, and so did Bryson.

It had been Michael’s idea, so he felt like he had to do it first. Every molecule of his body screamed at him to shoot back to the surface, breathe in that rich air that filled the world above the ocean. But he fought back. With one last, desperate look at his friends, he opened his mouth and let the water rush in, then sucked it down his throat and into his lungs.

There were a few seconds of sheer panic, his chest filled with agony and a wrenching need for air. Spasms riddled his body, and his heart suddenly felt empty and lifeless, slowing down, forgetting how to beat. He twisted left, then right, instinctively sucking again and again at the sea around him,
as though if he tried hard enough he could pull in the oxygen from the water like a fish. He saw his friends beginning the process, bubbles of air streaming from their mouths, their eyes wide with fear. Just when Michael thought he might choke, he felt a sudden and sweeping rush of calmness spread through his muscles as his lungs filled with air. His heart was whole again, thumping and thumping, if a little fast.

The transition was instant, nothing like that of a newly surfaced man who’d been close to drowning, and he knew what had happened: his body and mind—safe and sound back in the VNS Coffin—had switched from the state of illusion within the Sleep to normal function. From edge-of-death fantasy to all-systems-okay. As a result, he was no longer submerged in anything like water. The cold, the wet, the ocean pressing down on him, the muted sounds—all gone, replaced by open air. Michael still felt buoyant, as if he were floating, and was still surrounded by lines of code, but he could breathe. And each lungful of air felt like heaven.

Sarah was just a few feet away, and he could see by her ease that she’d completed the transition herself. Bryson came along a few seconds after her, though he was farther away. Together they floated in a surreal world of purple lights and code, in desperate need of someone to splice it all back together.

“That
was
the worst few seconds of my entire life,” Sarah said. Her voice was a little … 
off
. Almost robotic, like it had been charged with static. “Remind me to never go swimming again.”

Bryson flapped his arms, looking like a deranged oversized
bird, but somehow it worked to move him closer to the other two. “I’m gonna have to say that was about a nine on the old sucky scale. I’d rather get eaten by the
Lizards of Laos
than go through that again.”

“But it worked, right?” Michael asked. He didn’t mean it in an I-told-you-so way. He was just filled with a ridiculous amount of relief that they hadn’t drowned. Of the countless times he’d been virtually killed throughout the years, for some reason this one had felt most real.

“Uh, I guess,” Bryson murmured, gesturing with his hands at the bizarre world around them. “If you call this working. I was kinda hoping for a library or something. At least a chair.”

Sarah spoke in that manner that showed she was doing some seriously deep thinking. “It’s weird, you know? Because of all the programs Weber drenched us in to make sure Kaine couldn’t find us, it was like we were cut off. At least from what we were used to. But then here we are. Code all over the place. It’s almost like normal, when we close our eyes in the Sleep and access whatever program we’re in.”

“
Almost
being the key word,” Michael replied. “I hope we can do something with all this. Otherwise Weber will bring us back and all we’ll have to say for ourselves is that we got to go swimming and feel what it’s like to drown. We’ve got nothing on Kaine.”

“How much time has passed, anyway?” Bryson asked.

Sarah pulled up her NetScreen, its glow odd-looking in the world of flying code. She scanned through a few things, then shut it back down.

“We have tons of time before she pulls us back out,” she said. “Like thirteen hours. So what do you guys want to do?”

Michael had no doubts. “There’s only one choice. We need to put some of this code together. If it’s all stuff that was destroyed by Kaine, like that town we were in, then it’ll have traces of him. Or whoever works for him. Or whoever did it for him. Anyway, I think we can work backwards. Maybe even find out where he’s hiding, if we’re lucky.”

Bryson snorted. “You make it sound like we’re going to make sandwiches or something. This is going to be harder than
Devils of Destruction
, my friend.”

“Yep,” Michael replied. It would be.

“It won’t be that bad,” Sarah said. “We only need our brains for this, guys. Time to put on your big-boy pants and get to work.”

Bryson looked at Michael. “Are we sure
she
wasn’t the Tangent? One of those pain-in-the-butt sidekick programs in the
Ancient Digs of Runeville
game? I’m pretty sure she was one of those.”

Michael responded by waving his arms enough to turn himself around, putting his back to his friends. Purple lights shone in front of him, and mysterious figures lurked in the distance, obscured and fuzzy. Lines of code buzzed about him like a million marching caterpillars, ready for him to dissect and put back together. It was programming in a way he’d never done it before, and he was more than a little excited.

Squinting with concentration, he reached forward and literally dug in.

It took a while to get used to this new method of manipulating code. It brought Michael back to his childhood days—his fake, fabricated, programmed childhood days—when, while living his life within the virtual world of
Lifeblood Deep
, he’d played with toys. Actual, tangible toys. SealBlocks and ViviCars and SimLasers and the countless figurines of those games the “big kids” played in the Sleep. Kids weren’t allowed to immerse themselves in the VirtNet until they were eight years old. Everyone was worried about proper brain development and acquiring social skills, so they’d made a law, though the age changed every few years.

Back then he’d played with his hands, developing the imagination that would end up taking him so many places virtually.

It was like that now. Playing. Physically playing. Touching the building blocks of programming, feeling them, squeezing them, trying to reach into their essence and read their origins, understand the bigger picture of what they used to be a part of.

He’d been a part of
Lifeblood Deep
. Literally. No one was more qualified to do this than Michael.

Piece by piece, he examined. He deduced. He built. He manipulated.

He played.

Time sped by, Michael oblivious to it. He was lost in the fun of the programming. He might’ve worked forever, his body back in the Coffin weakening until even that device couldn’t keep him going.

A tap on the shoulder snapped him out of it.

“Got anything?” Sarah asked.

He waved himself around to face his friend. She seemed weary but satisfied. Bryson had drifted off in the distance, his enthusiasm for manipulating the code making him completely unaware of his surroundings. An indecipherable shadow loomed behind the purple lights beyond his body, as if a giant whale were making its way in their direction.

“I got a lot,” Michael answered, returning his attention to Sarah.

“Me too. I think it’s time we linked up.” She paused and looked around. “Well, guess we can’t do that here. Put our heads together, then.”

“Sounds good.”

They flapped their way toward Bryson, the insane-bird dance bringing smiles to their faces.

By the time they were finished, Michael’s entire body ached and his stomach was growling. It had taken both mental
and
physical effort to piece all their programming together, and
he was starving. Such was the nature of the Sleep. Yes, the Coffin would feed him the nutrients he needed, keep him alive and fairly healthy. But that didn’t mean his mentally infused virtual body didn’t get to the point where he’d kill a roomful of people for a hot dog.

An entire world of logical code extended farther than Michael could see. It was a beautiful, beautiful thing, and the three of them had worked furiously in the last hour or so, copying the details of what they’d learned onto their own NetScreens so they wouldn’t forget. And so they could share it all with the VNS once they returned to the Wake.

Michael clicked off his NetScreen. As fun as the process had been, he was done. Officially done. There wasn’t a molecule in his body that didn’t ache for food, only before settling down for a long nap.

“I can’t believe this guy,” he said, almost used to the tinny echo of his own voice. “I guess I can understand why Kaine wants to be human. But wanting to wipe out half of the VirtNet doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me.”

“You know what I still don’t get?” Sarah asked. “Why he
wants
to be human. I mean, even if he downloads into someone our age, he’s gonna be dead in a hundred years. In the Sleep, he’s immortal, right? He could live forever.”

“Well,” Bryson said, “there’s the Decay that’ll hit him.” Sarah shrugged. “If he can download a Tangent’s brain into a human, I bet he can figure out how to avoid that.”

Bryson laughed. “That’ll be hilarious if he does all this, wakes up in some dude’s body, then gets hit by a bus the next day. I’d even go to his funeral.”

Michael shook his head slowly—something Bryson said had struck him. “No way,” he murmured as his thoughts started coming together. “No way it’s that easy—that Kaine just wants to try out a human body. Something else is going on. Something a lot bigger. Remember what he said about the Mortality Doctrine being a plan for
im
mortality? I mean, he could be planning to switch his intelligence to a new, younger human every twenty years and keep a backup on the VirtNet in case he
does
get hit by a bus.”

“Well, at least we’ve got a line on him,” Sarah said. “We know where he’s been, what he’s done, and where he’s hiding when he … does whatever he does after a hard day’s work.”

“Do you think that guy even sleeps?” Bryson asked. “You did, Michael, but your programmers wanted you to think you were human.”

Michael shrugged, looking absently into the distance, where all those odd shadows grew and shrank and coalesced behind the spray of purple lights. Despite his fatigue, he was excited at the wealth of information they’d gathered from the broken code.
The VNS should bow down and worship the Trifecta to Dissect-ya,
he thought.

“How much time do we have left?” Bryson asked.

Sarah looked at her NetScreen, which was still illuminated. “About forty-five minutes. Let’s just hope we’re still connected to her. I don’t see a whole lot of Portals around these parts.”

“We’re connected,” Michael said, so confidently that they didn’t even respond. Sometimes he just knew.

Sarah started to say something, but her mouth snapped shut when the lights around them dimmed. It didn’t take long for Michael to understand, and an uneasy feeling crept into his belly.