Ready Player Two

As the panic subsided, Aech, Shoto, and Faisal began feverishly tapping at the icons on their HUD menus, sending texts or making panicked phone calls to their loved ones.

Aside from Og, all of my loved ones were already in the room with me. So I didn’t text or call anyone. I was too busy hyperventilating, thinking, This is all my fault, over and over again. After each repetition, I clenched both fists and pounded them against my forehead. I couldn’t make myself stop. This sort of thing had happened to me a few times as a teenager, but I hadn’t had a meltdown like this in years. And I’d never experienced one while logged in to the OASIS. I’d also never behaved like this in front of Aech or Shoto or Art3mis either—a realization that only compounded my shame even further, and made me attempt to pound myself in the skull even harder. Luckily, it wasn’t my real skull I was punching, or my real fists I was using to punch it. It was all a simulation, and the ONI’s pain inhibitors and anti-masochism protocols prevented me from feeling anything but mild discomfort each time I hit myself. But I still couldn’t seem to pull out of my shame spiral—not until I felt a pair of small, strong hands take hold of my wrists, restraining them.

“Wade?” I heard Art3mis whisper. “Please stop.”

The tenderness in her tone, which had once been so familiar to me, now felt completely foreign. Hearing it again was like a knife in my heart.

I turned to see Art3mis standing there, restraining my arms in her viselike grip.

“Calm down, OK?” she said. “It’s gonna be all right.”

She let go of my wrists and took hold of my hands instead, forcing open my clenched fists so that she could interlace her fingers with mine.

“I need you to breathe, Wade,” she said. She gave me a comforting smile and squeezed both of my hands. “I’m here with you. Be here with me.”

That finally snapped my brain out of its toxic thought loop. I relaxed my hands and she let go of them. Then she rested her own hands on my shoulders and gave them a brief squeeze.

“There he is,” she said. “All good in the neighborhood, Z?”

“Yeah, thank you,” I said, turning away sharply in embarrassment. “It was just—I think I may have had a panic attack. But I’m better now.”

“Good,” she said. “Because I need you to get your head in the game. Everyone does. OK?”

I nodded and took a deep breath. Then I took a few more. Once I had calmed myself down a bit, I pulled up my HUD to check my vital signs. They all looked normal. Then I decided to check the operational status of my OASIS immersion vault, and discovered that my situation was even more fucked than I thought….

I no longer had the ability to unlock or open my MoTIV’s armored canopy. Both of those functions had been disabled. But I could still see myself and my surroundings, via the MoTIV’s interior and external camera feeds. And, thankfully, the MoTIV’s mobility, defense, and weapons systems were still functioning normally, and still under my control. So I could still defend myself if I needed to. The only thing I couldn’t do was get out.

Each MoTIV unit had an Emergency Release Protocol, but you had to power down your ONI headset before it could be activated. And to power down your headset, you first needed to log out of the OASIS. And thanks to Anorak’s “infirmware,” I couldn’t do that.

In the calmest voice I could muster, I told the others about my discovery. Aech, Shoto, and Faisal immediately checked their own OIV control menus and discovered they had the exact same problem I did. We each owned different immersion-vault models, but they all had the same fail-safes built in to them.

“Guys,” Shoto said. “What the hell are we going to do?”

Faisal was listening intently to several different phone calls. He shouted, “One at a time!” to whoever it was he had on the line. Then he regained his composure.

“I’ve got one of our chief engineers on the phone right now,” he announced. “And he can’t figure out a way to unlock his vault either. According to him, the firmware on our OIVs has not been altered in any way—it just isn’t functioning properly now, due to the changes in Anorak’s infirmware.” Faisal threw up his hands in a helpless gesture. “We won’t be able to attempt a lobo logout. Even as a last resort.”

A “lobo logout” was the slang term for what happened when someone’s ONI headset malfunctioned or lost power before their OASIS logout sequence could be completed and their brain was properly awakened from its dreamlike state. Nine times out of ten, a lobo logout left the wearer in a permanent coma. But a few hardy souls managed to wake up and recover their faculties, the way some people were able to bounce back after a major stroke. Several of these survivors described being trapped in an endless loop of the final second of the simulation they were experiencing before they lost their connection. A loop that seemed to stretch on for months or years. (GSS never allowed the public to find out about that last bit, though.)

Lobo logouts were an extremely rare occurrence, because each ONI headset had three redundant onboard computer systems and three fail-safe batteries. These batteries were small, but with a full charge, each one could keep the headset in operation long enough for it to complete its wearer’s logout and wakeup sequence, which was triggered automatically when the headset switched to battery power.

When the redundancies failed, it was almost always a result of sabotage, either by a user who was looking to end it all, or a user’s family member who was looking to get rid of them and/or cash in on their life-insurance policy. As a result, GSS wasn’t held legally accountable for any of these incidents—although thanks to the licensing agreement our users clicked past before each login, if our ONI headsets suddenly started making people’s heads explode like watermelons at a Gallagher concert when they put them on, we probably wouldn’t be liable for that either. It was real comforting.

Up until now, I think Aech, Shoto, and I had all been thinking the same thing. If Anorak failed to release us before we hit our ONI usage limits, a lobo logout with a 10 percent chance of survival was better than no chance at all. But Anorak had robbed us of that option too. Even cutting off the power wouldn’t help; with the logout disabled, the redundancies designed to save users would instead power the headsets long enough to push each of us past our daily ONI usage limits. Each of those backup batteries held more than enough juice to cook our frontal lobes.

The armored shell of my tactical immersion vault was designed to be indestructible and impregnable. Even if I disabled all of its defenses and ordered a security team with plasma torches to come down into my bunker and start cutting open my vault right now, they wouldn’t be able to get my body out of it for at least a day or two. I would be long dead from Synaptic Overload Syndrome by then. And Aech, Shoto, and Faisal were all in the same boat. And so was every other ONI user with an OASIS immersion vault.

Anorak had thought of everything. Every precaution we’d taken to protect our bodies and our brains was now being used against us.

People often jokingly referred to OIVs as “coffins.” Now that felt terrifyingly prophetic.

“Z?” Aech said. “I see those wheels of yours turning over there. What’s your assessment of our situation?”

“That we’re totally screwed, pal,” I said. “At least for the time being…”

Aech let out a roar and punched the wall in frustration.

“This shit is unbelievable!” she said. “Faisal, how the hell did our admins let this happen? We’re always saying we have the smartest people on the planet working for us, right? And the ‘best cybersecurity infrastructure ever to exist in human history’? Some shit like that?”

“We do,” Faisal said. “But we never anticipated an attack by an AI copy of our deceased CEO! How the hell were we supposed to prevent that? It’s impossible.” He grabbed a fistful of his own hair in each hand, as if preparing to yank all of it out. “He had unrestricted admin access to our entire internal network. All of our safeguards were to prevent someone on the outside from hacking in to our network. Anorak already had the key to the front door!”

“It doesn’t matter now,” I said. “Just tell the engineers to keep working on a solution, OK?”

“They are, sir,” he said, giving me a grim smile. “Like their own lives depend on it.”

“Good,” I replied. “In the meantime, we’ll try to give the Dixie Flatline what he wants, and hope he makes good on his promise to release us.”

I glanced back over at Aech and Shoto. They both nodded mutely in agreement. We all looked at Art3mis, but she appeared to be lost in thought. She also appeared to be the only one who had fully regained her composure—maybe because she was the only person present whose brain wasn’t currently being held hostage.

She walked back over to the conference table and turned to address all of us. I winced, bracing myself for the worst. This was her moment to shout, I fucking TOLD YOU SO, morons! at the top of her lungs. Because she had told us. Many, many times. And now she might pay for our hubris with her own life, along with half a billion other innocent people. It was all our fault, and she would’ve had every right to say so.

But I should’ve already known…that wasn’t her style.

“We can handle this,” she said, making eye contact with each of us in turn. “Anorak isn’t some supergenius. He said so himself. He’s only as smart as James Halliday was when he was alive.” She made a show of rolling her eyes. “Halliday may have been a genius with computers, but we all know he was a total idiot when it came to understanding other people. He never understood human behavior. Which means Anorak will understand it even less—especially since Halliday erased a bunch of his memories. We can use that to our advantage.”

“But this isn’t Halliday we’re dealing with here,” Aech said. “It’s Anorak. He’s read the entire Internet! Now he knows everything about everything!”

“Yeah,” Shoto said. “Because there isn’t any false information on the Internet. At all.”

“Hey!” Art3mis said, snapping her fingers at us like an annoyed schoolteacher. “I don’t want to hear one more word of negativity, guys! You got that? We’re the High Five! We beat Anorak once before, remember? And if we work together, we can do it again. Right?”

Aech and Shoto both nodded silently in agreement. But their faces seemed to give a different answer.

“Parzival?” Art3mis said, locking eyes with me. “Back me up, here….”

I met her gaze.

“You tried to warn us,” I said. “I’m sorry I didn’t listen.”

“Being sorry isn’t going to save anyone,” she replied. “Even I couldn’t have predicted something this fucked-up would happen. But now that it has, it’s up to us to try and fix it. Right, Z?”

I took a deep breath.

“Right,” I said. “I’m sorry I lost my cool before. I’ve got my game face on now.”

“Good,” Art3mis said. “Because we need to figure out what we’re going to do, and do it A-S-A-F-P.” She tapped an invisible watch on her wrist. “Like Raistlin said, ‘Tick-tock.’ ”

“Agreed,” I said. “But before we start discussing our game plan, we need to make sure Anorak isn’t still here in this room, eavesdropping on everything we say.” I turned to address everyone. “He has the Robes of Anorak now. If they give him all of the same abilities they gave me—when I wore them, they gave me unrestricted superuser access to the OASIS. They also made my avatar invulnerable and invincible in combat. And they allowed me to go anywhere I wanted to in the simulation. Anywhere. And they let me remain invisible and undetected to other avatars, even in null-tech and null-magic zones. I could also eavesdrop on private phone calls. And access private chatrooms too. Just like Og did, when he eavesdropped on us in Aech’s Basement.”

Art3mis, Shoto, and Aech all appeared to be processing this new information. But not Faisal.

“We may have a solution here,” he replied. “We’ve been aware of the robes’ powers for a long time now. Halliday used to use them occasionally, when he wanted to travel around the OASIS undetected. Just like you, Mr. Watts.” He gave me a knowing smile. “But we managed to isolate the unique item-identification code that Halliday assigned to the Robes of Anorak when he created them. We still can’t pinpoint their location in the OASIS, but we can detect the item’s presence within a defined volume.”

He opened a browser window in front of his avatar and spun it around to face us. It displayed a three-dimensional wireframe diagram of our conference room, with the position of each of our avatars indicated by a glowing blue outline.

“When Anorak revealed himself, our OASIS admins immediately conducted a server-side scan of this room,” Faisal explained. “This shows us everyone and everything located inside it, regardless of whether or not it’s visible to the room’s other occupants.”

He tapped a few buttons and the wireframe diagram of the room began to rewind like a video recording, showing our avatars moving and walking around the conference table in reverse. Faisal paused the recording a few seconds before Anorak disappeared. The system classified him as an NPC, so his avatar appeared with a red outline around it. Faisal hit Play on the recording, and when Anorak teleported away, the outline of his avatar vanished from the room too.

“As you can see, he really did teleport away,” Faisal said. “And he didn’t leave behind any monitoring or recording devices, or we would be able to detect those too.” He turned to me. “So there’s no way Anorak could be listening to us right now. Unless those robes give you the ability to remotely eavesdrop on other users, no matter where they are?”

I shook my head. “No,” I said. “The wearer has to be in the same OASIS location or logged in to the same chatroom to listen in on them.”

“Jesus,” Aech said, shaking her head. “So much for our famous user privacy policy.”

“Are you sure there’s no other way Anorak could be spying on us?” Shoto asked Faisal. “Perhaps via some other modification he made to his ‘infirmware’?”

Faisal waited to get an answer from his engineers, then he smiled and shook his head.

“The admins tell me that’s impossible,” Faisal told us. “There’s no way to tap a person’s ONI connection to the OASIS and filter out just the audio or visual data—all of the sensory input and output is streamed simultaneously. They say it can’t be done.”

“Maybe not by them,” Shoto said. “But if Anorak is a copy of Halliday, he probably understands the OASIS even better than our engineers.”

“Why am I thinking of that scene in Heat?” Art3mis asked us. “The one where Pacino is starting to close in on De Niro and he tells his crew, ‘Assume they got our phones, assume they got our houses, assume they got us—right here, right now as we sit, everything. Assume it all.’ ”

She looked at me, Aech, and Shoto. “I think it might be wise for us to observe the same policy, from here on out. Just to be safe.”

I nodded. “If we need to say something to each other that we don’t want Anorak to hear, we should do it in this room.”

“Do we have any way of finding out where Anorak is right now?” Shoto asked.

Faisal closed his browser window and shook his head. “When Halliday created Anorak and released him inside the simulation as an autonomous NPC, he gave him the ability to move around the OASIS freely, uninhibited and undetected by our admins—just as Halliday and Morrow’s own avatars had always been able to.”

I found myself wondering if Fyndoro’s Tablet of Finding would be able to help us locate Anorak. Then I remembered—that artifact only gave you the ability to locate other avatars. It didn’t work on NPCs. And the admins said the system classified Anorak as an NPC. And there were no artifacts that gave you the ability to locate an NPC, because it would break every single OASIS quest that involved tracking one down. Probably at least half of them.

“Thankfully, we have come up with a way for you to detect Anorak if he comes into your immediate vicinity,” Faisal said.

He opened his inventory and removed four plain-looking silver chains. Then he gave one to each of us.

“These are Bracelets of Detection, linked to the Robes of Anorak,” Faisal continued. “They will begin to glow bright red if the robes come within a hundred-meter radius of your current location. That should prevent Anorak from sneaking up on you.”

“Nice,” I said, slipping my bracelet on. “Please thank the engineers for us.”

Art3mis put her bracelet on, too, then she turned to face me.

“OK,” she said. “Spill it, Watts. What’s this ‘Big Red Button’ that Anorak mentioned? And what does it do, exactly?”

I’d been dreading this question. But under the circumstances, I had no choice but to answer it truthfully.

“The Big Red Button is a self-destruct mechanism for the OASIS,” I said. “It’s located inside Castle Anorak, in the study—a room that only the wearer of the Robes of Anorak can enter. If you press it, it will shut down the entire OASIS and launch a tapeworm that will erase all our backup servers, destroying the simulation forever.”

Everyone’s eyes widened in surprise. For a second, Faisal looked as if he might faint.

“Holy shit, Z,” Aech said. “Why didn’t you ever tell any of us about this?”

“Halliday showed me the Big Red Button in secret, so I decided to keep it a secret.” I shook my head. “And I honestly couldn’t foresee a single reason why I would ever need to press it.”

That made Art3mis laugh out loud.

“Well, can you ‘foresee’ one now, Nostradamus?” she asked.

I gave her a sober nod.

“Yes, ma’am,” I replied. “Now I can think of several.”

“Why would Mr. Halliday be reckless enough to build a self-destruct mechanism into the OASIS?” Faisal asked, still shaking his head in disbelief. “He knew there would be disastrous consequences if the OASIS ever went offline and stayed that way. We conducted several studies, involving dozens of simulated scenarios.” He turned to me. “Mr. Watts, if you—or anyone else—ever presses that button, it would disrupt global communications, law enforcement, transportation, and commerce….The world would be thrown into complete chaos.”

Shoto nodded. “The entire drone protection force would go offline and remain offline,” he added. “There would be shipping delays, food and medicine shortages. Rioting. Markets would crash. States would fail.” He shook his head. “Jesus, the whole of human civilization might even collapse.”

“Then why would Halliday take such an insane risk?” Faisal asked.

“It’s better to have a self-destruct and not need it than to need one and not have it,” Art3mis said.

I nodded. “Exactly.”

“So that’s why Anorak went through all that trouble to steal the robes back?” Shoto asked. “To keep Z from pressing that button?”

“If I erased the OASIS, Anorak would be erased along with it,” I said. “Now he doesn’t have to worry about that anymore.”

Everyone fell silent for a moment. Art3mis began to pace back and forth while chewing absentmindedly on one of her thumbnails. Samantha was probably doing the exact same thing in the cabin of her autojet, and her movements were being mirrored onto her avatar.

“Faisal,” she said, turning to face him. “What would happen to all of Anorak’s ONI hostages if we shut the OASIS down manually? By taking all the servers offline, one by one?”

Shoto chimed in. “Or even take the whole Internet down, just for a few seconds. What would happen? Would all the ONI hostages wake up?”

Faisal held his index finger to his right ear to indicate that he was listening to the team of OASIS engineers he had on the phone. When they finished talking, Faisal shook his head.

“No, I’m afraid not,” he said. “Normally, when an ONI user loses their connection to the Internet or to the OASIS, the headset’s firmware triggers an automatic logout. But Anorak has disabled that feature. So even if the OASIS went completely offline, it still wouldn’t wake any of the hostages up. The techs think it would probably just leave all of us in a permanent ONI-induced coma. Unless…”

“Unless what, Faisal?” Shoto asked.

“Unless he also programmed his infirmware to lobotomize anyone who tries to escape by cutting off their OASIS or Internet connections.”

“Son of a bitch,” Art3mis said. “If he did that, he would be able to kill all of his ONI hostages at once, just by pressing the Big Red Button. Right?”

“Hold on a second,” I said. “Even if Anorak did want to press the Big Red Button, I doubt he could. I bet Halliday designed the button so that it could only be pressed by a real person, and not an NPC like Anorak. Considering the other restrictions Halliday placed on him, that seems like a pretty safe bet.”

“Maybe that’s the reason Anorak broke Sorrento out of prison,” Art3mis said. “So that he could give his robes to Sorrento and order him to press the Big Red Button.”

“Yeah,” Shoto said. “But if Anorak did that, he’d be killing himself too. Wouldn’t he?”

“Unless he has a backup,” Faisal said. “A standalone simulation we don’t know about.”

“Like that one TNG episode with Professor Moriarty,” Shoto said.

“ ‘Ship in a Bottle,’ ” Aech and Art3mis said in unison.

“Can our guys analyze Anorak’s firmware?” I asked. “To find out what he changed?”

Faisal shook his head. “Our software engineers are trying to do that right now,” he said. “But Anorak has completely rewritten the firmware in some sort of programming language they’ve never seen before. They don’t even know how to disassemble or decompile the code, and even if they could, they don’t think they would be able to understand it.”

“What about rolling it back to the previous build?” Shoto asked.

Faisal shook his head again. “We already have,” he said. “But to reinstall it, we would need to log out of the OASIS first. The headset can’t be active.”

“Great,” I said. “Wonderful. Just perfect!”

“OK,” Aech said. “Then we give him what he wants. Like, right fucking now. Whatever the Siren’s Soul is, it can’t be worth risking half a billion lives….”

“Og apparently thought it was,” Art3mis said. “Otherwise, he would have given it to Anorak. But he refused….” She locked eyes with me. “We’re missing something here.”

Aech shook her head.

“None of this matters right now, y’all!” she shouted. “We have to find the rest of those shards by sundown. We can figure out what the Siren’s Soul is and what it does along the way. Now, let’s fucking moooove!”

Aech made a herding motion with her arms, as if to spur all of us toward the exit. But Shoto stepped in front of the doors, blocking them.

“Hold on,” he said. “Aren’t we going to release some sort of statement to all the ONI users who are being held hostage? To inform them of their situation?”

Faisal shook his head.

“I believe that would be an extraordinarily bad idea, sir,” he said. “We don’t want to create a global panic—or admit any liability for this situation—until we have no other choice.”

The room fell silent for a moment.

“For now, we can say the problem is due to a minor glitch,” Faisal added. “Tell the users their temporary inability to log out is due to a harmless bug in our new firmware, and that they aren’t in any danger, because the system will still log them out automatically when they hit their twelve-hour ONI usage limit.” He spread his hands. “If we can pull that off, our customers will never know their lives were in danger, and that would save GSS billions in lawsuits.”

Art3mis sighed. “Forget the lawsuits,” she said. “But I agree with Faisal—the longer we can keep this quiet, the safer our users will be.”

“Great,” Aech said, clapping her hands together. “Motion carried.”

We told the ONI users the logout issue was due to a minor firmware bug, apologized profusely for the temporary inconvenience, and announced that all teleportation fares would be waived until the problem was fixed. We also offered to deposit a thousand credits in each ONI user’s OASIS account, to help them “make the most of this unfortunate situation”—in return for digitally signing an agreement stating they wouldn’t sue us over this incident. Faisal told us this was just an extra precaution, because each time our users logged on they were already clicking Agree to an end-user license that classified our headsets as experimental technology and absolved GSS of any liability for injuries.

We sent the message out to every single ONI user who was currently logged in. Faisal also posted it to the official GSS media feeds, looking visibly relieved as soon as he had done so.

“OK,” Shoto said. “Now we can get to work.”

“Agreed,” Arty said as she stood up and moved to the corner of the conference room. “But you’re gonna have to start looking for the Second Shard without me.”

We exchanged confused looks.

“Where the hell are you going?” Aech asked.

“My jet just reduced its airspeed to link up with a midair refueling tanker,” Art3mis said. “So it’s time to rock and roll.”

She tapped a series of icons on her HUD, then placed her hands on her hips—a pose that made her look like Wonder Woman for a brief moment.

“I’m not gonna let some two-bit Gandalf wannabe take me hostage,” she said. “And I’m not going to sit on my ass and do nothing while Og is being held prisoner.” She raised her right hand and saluted all of us. “I’ll call you back!”

Then she did what none of the rest of us could—she logged out of the OASIS, and her avatar disappeared.

But then, a few seconds later, Faisal received two incoming vidfeeds from Samantha—one from her mobile phone, and another from her jet’s onboard phone line, which was tied to the plane’s internal and external cameras.

Displayed side by side on the conference-room viewscreen, we saw shaky footage of the cabin of Samantha’s private jet from two different angles. Samantha fumbled with her phone for a few seconds as she clipped it to the front of her jacket, leaving us with a POV shot from her perspective.

We all watched in shock as Samantha slipped both of her arms into the harness of an emergency parachute applicator mounted on the bulkhead and buckled its safety belt around her waist. The parachute’s straps tightened automatically and a computerized voice spoke from a strap-mounted speaker, announcing that both main and reserve chutes were ready to deploy.

By this point we had all started shouting at her to reconsider, as if she could hear us. Samantha stepped away from the applicator, now wearing the parachute on her back. She pulled on a pair of goggles. Then she went to the emergency exit and pulled down on the manual-release handle with all of her weight, briefly hanging from it before it finally gave. The door detached itself from the fuselage and flew off, depressurizing the cabin and sucking everything outside through the opening.

Including Samantha.

Her vidfeed became a spinning whorl of blue, then stabilized as she went into a back-first free fall. We caught a glimpse of the jet above her, and could just make out that it was still connected to the much larger refueling drone by its automated umbilical.

Faisal cycled through the cameras on board the jet itself, pulling up a downward-facing external camera mounted on its underside. It gave us a perfectly centered shot of Samantha, just in time to see her pull the ripcord. Her parachute unfurled and opened, revealing the Art3mis Foundation logo printed on top of it—the one where the adjacent letter t and number 3 in her name resembled an armored woman in profile, drawing back on a futuristic hunting bow.

“Holy shit, Arty!” Aech said, amid a fit of anxious laughter. “I can’t believe she just did that. Girl got a death wish!”

Faisal and Shoto burst into applause. I joined in, trying to ignore my fear. Was outsmarting Anorak really going to be so easy?

That was when the view from the autojet’s video feed veered off to the side. The plane was changing course. Its camera was now showing only empty sky. On the feed from Samantha’s phone, still clipped to her chest, we had a POV shot of her feet, which she appeared to be kicking up like a girl on an amusement park ride, as her parachute floated downward.

Her hands rose in front of her chest and she raised both middle fingers in the direction of the jet. Even through the wind, we could just make it out when she shouted, “Now you can hold that empty plane hostage, Anorak!”

She dropped her hands fast, though. Probably because like us, she had just noticed that her jet was still banking around and down into a dive—one that put it on a collision course with her falling parachute.

“Oh shit!” I shouted. “He’s going to ram her!”

We watched helplessly as the jet rapidly closed the distance between them. As the jet’s nose filled her POV, we saw a jolt on Samantha’s feed—she had cut her primary chute loose and was in free fall, just in time for the jet to soar by harmlessly above her. She continued to dive for several more seconds, even though the warning lights on her altimeter were already flashing red.

Finally, she pulled her reserve chute and slowed her rapid descent. She came in, still falling far too fast, landing in a small, heavily wooded park just a few miles east of downtown, and we watched as the chute dragged through the tree branches on its way to the ground.

Then she touched down with a jolt that made every bone in my body ache—and her phone’s vidfeed cut to black.

“Is she all right?” I asked Faisal with a shaky voice. “Did she make it to the ground safely?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m trying to call her back, but she isn’t answering.”

My eyes shifted back to the viewscreen, which still displayed the live vidfeed from Samantha’s commandeered jet. It hadn’t pulled out of its dive. Instead it had increased its angle of descent, so that now it was hurtling straight toward the ground like a missile.

“Oh my God,” Faisal said. “He’s gonna crash into her landing site!”

By the time he’d finished saying it out loud, it was already happening.

But as the jet was about to crash, it pulled up sharply, so instead of hitting her landing site dead-on it made impact a few hundred feet away, in the middle of a deserted picnic area.

As it hit, our remaining vidfeed cut to black.

We stared at the blank viewscreen in silence for a moment. Then Faisal had the presence of mind to check the local Columbus newsfeeds, and in less than a minute we were watching high-definition drone footage of the crash site. The just-refueled jet had detonated like a fuel-air bomb. The immediate area surrounding its crash site had been razed to nothing by the awesome force of the initial explosion. If Samantha or anyone else had been within that radius, they would have been incinerated.

The real problem now was the fuel, which had been flung far beyond the initial blast zone, like a botched napalm strike. A dozen different fires now raged across the entire park and several of the office buildings adjacent to it. It looked like a war zone down there.

With the flames still raging, it was impossible to see how many people had been engulfed by the sudden inferno. Anyone who had would be a charred corpse by now.

And I knew that any one of those burned bodies might belong to Samantha.