The Eye of Minds

^{CHAPTER 24} WORTHY

Michael didn’t respond. Couldn’t. His mind tried to spin all the threads of what he’d experienced along the Path into something that made sense, but it wasn’t coming together. His body hurt from being dragged through the forest, and the short nap had done nothing to relieve his exhaustion. All he could do was stare at the withered form of Kaine, wonder what he was talking about, and wait for him to explain it.

It took every ounce of his will, but Michael’s eyes stayed glued to the Tangent.

“You have no idea of the magnitude of what you’ve been involved in,” Kaine said. “Everything has been designed to lead those like you here. You were one of many chosen, but the first to make it. Every step of the way, you’ve been studied. Your intelligence, your cleverness, your bravery. Tested.”

Michael finally found his voice. “For what? So you can use me to break into more programs?”

“No.” Kaine laughed, a low chortle that seemed to loosen Michael’s spine. “I’ve tested far, far more than just your hacking skills. That will only take you so far in life. You won’t understand the magnitude of what I’ve set in motion until you experience it for yourself. It can’t possibly be explained with words alone.”

It was weird, but Michael felt as if Kaine was almost talking to him like an equal. He’d expected a madman—and the Path only seemed to ensure it—but this man seemed perfectly sane. Even respectful. “The VNS is here. It’s over.”

Kaine shook his head. “If only you had any idea, Michael.”

Michael opened his mouth to speak but was stopped with a word from the older man.

“Silence!” Kaine barked, and leaned forward in a flash. He was so close that his face seemed to fill Michael’s vision, his gaze fierce. It was a sudden reminder of what this man represented. Supposedly the most dangerous thing to ever hit the VirtNet.

Kaine sat back in his chair, calm once more. “There are things at play here that you don’t understand. Not yet.”

“What’s the point of all this?” Michael asked timidly. “Why were you testing me?”

“You’re about to find out,” Kaine said. “And then, with your… impressive bravery, intelligence, and skills at code-breaking, you’re going to help me crush the world in my fist.”

“Help you do what?” Michael asked. “You really think I’d help you?”

Kaine nodded matter-of-factly, as if the question was nonsense. “Absolutely. You’ve already done it by making it this far. You have no choice in the matter.”

“I came here to stop you!” Michael was shouting now. “Lead the VNS to you!”

Kaine looked amused, if anything, but didn’t respond. His silence was maddening—all Michael could hear was the crackle of the fire, and it made him even angrier.

“What is it?” Michael yelled, standing up. “Tell me what’s going on!”

The Tangent’s smile seemed carved into his face. “I told you—there’s no way you’ll understand until you experience it for yourself. Which is about to happen, very soon. There’s nothing you can do to stop it, Michael.”

“I should hack into your coding,” Michael answered. “I could do it. I could shut you down. Stop you forever.”

“You just continue to prove why I’ve deemed you worthy, boy. You are a perfect candidate indeed. Would you like to know something else?”

Michael was seething—he refused to answer.

Kaine shrugged his frail shoulders, then kept talking. “Your parents, Michael. They’re… gone. I’ve wiped them from existence. You’ll never see them again. I’ve done the same with your poor, poor Helga. Gone, Michael.”

Michael’s hands were shaking, his blood boiling, a rushing sound in his ears.

Kaine grinned so widely his teeth showed. “They’re all dead.”

Michael’s insides had felt as if they’d been strung with tight wire, cinched to the breaking point. At Kaine’s last words, they all snapped.

He ran forward and grabbed the Tangent’s shirt, jerked him out of his chair, and threw him to the floor. The chair flew back, hit the stone hearth, and tipped into the fire, sending sparks and ash everywhere. Kaine was on his back, staring at Michael, a huge smile still plastered on his face. Then Michael noticed the Tangent shaking. Kaine was laughing at him.

Michael’s hatred erupted.

He jumped onto Kaine’s chest and pinned the old man to the ground. But the Tangent wouldn’t stop laughing. Michael pulled back a fist, but it hung there—he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t punch someone who looked so old and frail, simulated or not.

Kaine stared back at him, smiling, revealing those ancient teeth. “I like your spirit,” he said. “I love how you keep proving me right.”

Whatever spirit he was talking about drained right out of Michael. He pushed himself off of the Tangent’s body and stood up, breathing heavily as he glared down at him. Kaine put his hands behind his head and crossed one ankle over the other, as if he was just lying on the ground, taking in the stars.

“This is pointless,” Michael said. “I’ll let the VNS take care of you. And if they don’t, I’ll figure out something else. I’m done.”

Michael turned and headed for the door.

“Just proving my point over and over,” the Tangent called from behind him. “Too smart, too grounded, to let your rage control you for longer than a moment. Go on, Michael. Go out there and fulfill your new role in the world. You’ll understand soon.”

Michael refused to look back. He walked through the door and slammed it behind him.

Michael’s first thought was that he needed to find a VNS agent, ask for help getting back to the Wake. Roaming the forest to look for a Portal—risking who knew what—sounded like a very bad idea. He needed to head for the castle and hope that the good guys had won.

The path away from the cottage was easy to follow even in the darkness. He could feel his way along it if nothing else. He headed down the trail, wondering if Kaine was going to follow him—try to hurt him somehow.

The VNS. They were Michael’s only choice.

He broke into a jog.

As Michael approached the edge of the forest, he started to hear the sounds of battle, and light from the fires ahead began to illuminate his path, but the closer he got, the darker his thoughts became. He’d hoped that the VNS would win swiftly—it had seemed to be going that way when he left. But the tide must have turned if things weren’t over by now.

Finally he could see where the trees ended, and he ducked behind an enormous oak to get a better look at the situation.

It was chaos. Pure, disastrous chaos.

The castle itself was almost in ruins. Entire sections had crumbled into piles of rubble. Fires burned everywhere—flames blazed and sent sparks dancing into the sky. Bodies littered the ground, along with broken stone—and there were just as many VNS agents as Tangents. Michael gaped as the bodies disappeared before his eyes.

Michael didn’t know what to do. How could he possibly expect to survive in such a mess?

Despite wanting to return to the woods, he ran forward, heading for the closest VNS agent, about twenty feet away. A woman, who seemed to have just finished off one of Kaine’s soldiers.

“Hey!” Michael shouted. “Hey! I need to talk to you!”

She spun to face him, raising her weapon. Michael immediately dropped to his knees and held up his hands.

“I work for you! My name is Michael, I’m the one you sent in here!”

The woman didn’t lower her laser gun, but she didn’t fire it, either. She walked over to him, everything about her stance defensive.

“What kind of trick is this?” she asked when she reached the spot in front of him. The sounds of battle still thumped the air all around them, screams and explosions.

“Trick? No trick.” Michael had to keep shouting, still didn’t know if she could hear him. His heart banged in his chest. “Agent Weber… sent me here. To break into the Hallowed Ravine. To stop the Mortality Doctrine program!”

The agent stared at him through her shield of protective glass. Michael hated not being able to see her eyes.

“You really don’t understand, do you?” she finally said. “Amazing.”

He couldn’t answer. She was right—he didn’t understand. But he had no idea what it was that he didn’t know.

A commotion pulled away his attention. Beyond the VNS agent in front of him, across the field of battle, Michael saw people running from the entrance of the castle, frantically trying to escape… something.

Then he saw what it was. They’d been hard to make out in the darkness.

KillSims. Dozens of them. Bounding out of the broken stone fortress and attacking anything that moved.

Michael jumped to his feet just as the agent turned around and realized what was happening. She dropped her weapon, then sprinted toward the forest.

A million thoughts flew through Michael’s mind, the biggest one being that there’d be no outrunning these creatures. Black and enormous, they pounced forward in impossible bursts of speed, covering the field and heading straight for him. So he stood there, waiting, wondering if there was some way out of this. He closed his eyes and scanned the code, but there was nothing.

Surely, if Michael was so special, Kaine wouldn’t sit and allow him to die now. His Core had been removed. This was it. But why? What was he supposed to do?

He opened his eyes. One of the creatures loped across the ground, then jumped a pile of debris and came directly at him, black jaws gaping to reveal that dark abyss that had almost sucked Michael’s mind out at the dance club. For a half second he remained still, wondering for that briefest of moments what might happen if he didn’t move, if he let fate take him. Could it be so bad? But the sight of that thing rushing in snapped him out of it. He bent down, grabbed the weapon the VNS agent had dropped, and saw the first KillSim just a few feet away out of the corner of his eye.

He felt for the trigger, pointed its muzzle at the creature. It leaped into the air, that familiar earth-shattering scream erupting from its throat. Michael fired the weapon, stumbling as a beam of pure energy shot out and slammed into the KillSim’s body, igniting the creature into heat and light before it completely disintegrated, nothing left but the glow of its afterimage.

Several others were right behind it. Dozens behind that. Michael planted his feet more firmly and fired, shooting the laser in one long burst as he swept the gun back and forth, obliterating any KillSim that crossed the beam’s path. Each one exploded in blinding light, then vanished, but more kept coming. An army of creatures, most of them screaming, converged on him, black shadows of movement that blurred into one mass of darkness. Sweat broke out on Michael’s forehead as he squeezed the trigger and tried to cut down the monsters one by one. But with every death, more came, and they were only getting closer.

He aimed his weapon and fired again, the beam cutting down the approaching monsters.

Then the weapon died.

An instant later three KillSims were on Michael, tackling him to the ground.

They knocked the breath from Michael’s lungs—he struggled to keep the snapping jaws of the creatures away from his face. Their huge paws pinned his arms and legs to the ground, and the weight of two of them pressed into his chest. They continued to scream their banshee wail, piercing his ears. He knew any effort to fight them off was pointless now. He stopped, stared up in horror as the closest KillSim opened its mouth wide—Michael could hear the creaking of its jaws, like a rusty door hinge. It slowly moved toward his face as countless of its brothers and sisters gathered around them, forming a circle of black shapes. They all melded into one, cutting off the light from the burning castle’s flames.

The yawning abyss of the creature’s mouth came closer.

Something sparked in Michael’s mind. A clear understanding that he was not in the real world, that everything around him was fake, part of a program created by humans. He knew all of that, but it suddenly penetrated his mind on a deeper level than ever before. Just like in any other game in the Sleep, there had to be a way out, a way to manipulate the code—maybe he’d given up too soon. The beasts attacking him were not real, even if they could destroy his own code. The sudden thought had to mean something.

The KillSim closed its jaws around Michael’s face, and total blackness overcame his vision. But instead of panic taking over, he felt calm. As if for the first time in his existence, he was totally in control. He was on the brink of something great, something still beyond his comprehension. He threw his thoughts into the programming that made up the world around him.

Michael sat up and detonated power from his mind, hacking through the code in a way he’d never tried before. Obliterating instead of manipulating.

A thunderous boom shook the air as a ring of energy circled out from him, light spilling in as every single one of the KillSims was blown away, their bodies flying in all directions. They windmilled through the air, howling as they tumbled. Michael stood, surveyed his surroundings. That ring of visible mind power—a manifestation of the code he consumed without trying—kept growing, expanding into a giant circle of force that destroyed every creature as it passed. The entire castle exploded into a dusty mist that whisked toward the sky in a tornado of wind. Michael could only stare in stunned awe.

Things started to change around him. Tremble in place even though he felt nothing. Bodies and grass and guns and swords shook as if the ground below them was vibrating like a plucked string. Then they began to break apart, dissolving before his eyes, torn away in layers by swirling air. It looked as if every object—the ground, even—had transformed into sand and was being swept away by the wind. Michael turned to see the same thing happening to the massive trees in the forest, their trunks already whittled down to half, disappearing by the second.

The world broke apart into tiny specks, all of it joining a cyclone of cloudy debris that swirled in great circles around Michael. He stood in place, looking back and forth. On some level he knew he was on the cusp of the great revelation that he’d sensed before. And he felt more curiosity than fear. Spinning, increasing in speed, the spiral of debris was all he saw now, filling his world, a color that was somehow dull and bright at the same time. There was a great rushing noise, like massive waves on the ocean, and the smell of burning plastic.

Pain exploded in Michael’s head.

It didn’t seem possible, but it was worse than ever before. He collapsed to his knees, pain tearing through him. He squeezed his eyes shut and screamed, pressing his hands to his temples, feeling the wound of where his Core had been cut from his head. The piercing ache throbbed, felt like someone had taken up a machete and was slamming it against his skull repeatedly. Nausea swept through him, and the pain intensified even more.

Tears poured from his eyes as he opened them, desperately searching for something or someone that could help him. But there was no sky or ground anymore—only the cyclone of debris, spinning faster now, a complete blur of color and sound. Michael floated at its center, still on his knees on an unseen ground.

A dissolved world spinning around him.

Pure agony splitting his brain.

Screams ripping his throat apart.

He was dying. He didn’t understand how, but he knew it was true.

Somehow, he whimpered out a few words, praying and pleading to the only person he thought might hear him.

“Kaine. Please. Make it end.”

A voice spoke, but he couldn’t make out what it said. And then he sank into the cyclone and the pain ended abruptly, just as it always had before.