Hacker: The Outlaw Chronicles (17 page)

The command prompts appeared on screen:
Initiate Hack Protocol?

I palmed the mouse. Clicked the confirmation key.

Command:
Configure Session Time . . .

Time . . . time . . . how much time did I need?

I had to go deep into the hack—through the second doorway, the one that had taken me to India—and find the girl who’d healed me. She could help us, I was sure of it. But I had to find her. The Kick dosage had to give me enough time to do that.

00h:00m:60s [ENTER]

One minute—one hour of hack time. Was that enough? I knew where I was going this time and where to find the girl. At least I thought so. I didn’t want to consider the idea that she’d be somewhere else. I pushed away another flash of concern: What if she didn’t
want
to help us? How could she
not
help us?

There was no time to strip out of my clothes, no time to do any of the system checks we normally ran through, so I launched the auto-hack application, and ran for the tank, kicking off my shoes.

Under my breath I prayed that all of it would work. If it didn’t, everything would be lost.

E
VERYTHING WAS profoundly
silent as if the universe was holding its breath. Austin drifted in a vast sea of darkness, carried along by a current of peace that moved in deep ebbs and swells around him . . . through him. The flash of pain that had burned through his body like lightning and set every nerve ablaze had disappeared completely.

Now, he felt nothing at all: no pain, no worry, no fear. And yet everything. A vast emptiness that somehow also had substance to it.

He was in the hack—that much he knew, though he’d never felt the sensations that were coursing through him in that moment. Every hack he’d experienced had felt surreal. But this . . . this felt more real than anything he’d encountered. He didn’t simply
feel
its reality, he
knew
it at the deepest part of himself, as if the core of his being was entangled with the world around him.

Austin relaxed and let his arms and legs drift free. Was this the ocean Nyah had experienced the first time she’d hacked?

Then a thought arose in his mind as if it had bubbled up from the depths far below him. It was an idea that he felt, saw, and heard all at the same time. He
knew
it. It had come to him unlike any thought had before, from everywhere at once. It was a simple thought.

Breathe.

But he couldn’t simply breathe the water, if that’s what it was. Could he?

It came again, this time stronger, but gentle.
Breathe.

He parted his lips slightly and sipped at the darkness, letting it slip over his tongue. It was cold—far colder than ice—and stung as it filled his mouth and washed down his throat. It was tasteless, but it crackled in his mouth and made a sound like the spark of electricity that resonated in his ears and soon vibrated through his entire body with irresistible force.

Again the overwhelming word came:
Breathe.

He opened his mouth wider and pulled the liquid into his lungs with a long draw. He exhaled it, feeling the current it made as it rushed from his mouth and nose. He drew it in again, and this time he laughed, surprised. The muffled sound of his own voice disappeared into the liquid surrounding him. It was absurd, breathing underwater. Wasn’t it? And yet, here he was.

Curious . . .

The thought faded when a deep rumbling, like a storm might sound from inside a thunderhead, resonated through the water so loudly he thought it might crush his bones. Distant light flashed, like lightning stabbing through the sea. It shot deep into the ocean and branched in all directions, piercing the wet darkness with white-hot fingers.

Lightning in the ocean?

Something pulled at his body—a force strong and strange. It felt
personal
in an unexplainable way, as if someone had snatched him and was dragging him up from the depths.

Immediately he was rushing toward the surface, drawn upward toward a pinprick of light high above him. He rushed toward it, accelerating until he broke through the dark surface. Light exploded all around him.

The world snapped into sharp focus. He turned, slowly looking at his surroundings, which shimmered with clarity, though he already knew where he was.

“Not like this,” he heard a familiar voice say. “Please . . . not like this.”

He twisted back and saw.

Nyah.

He was watching her from above the tank. A body was floating in the tank. His body. He’d seen himself during hacks before, but this time felt . . . different. Final. The body in the tank struck him as nothing more than an empty shell or a vehicle that he’d discarded because he no longer had use for it. It wasn’t him any more than the clothes he’d put on that morning were him.

Drifting higher, he could see not only the body, but his entire apartment, including a woman in a wheelchair. Nyah’s mother.

His attention was drawn back to Nyah who was breathing into the body’s mouth, frantic. She was trembling with fear. He could feel it as if her emotions pulsated from her like shock waves radiating out in all directions. He watched her curiously as she struggled. What she was doing was obvious, of course—she was trying to revive his body, wake him from the hack.

She was trying to keep him alive. He should’ve felt fear, but he didn’t. There was only a detached curiosity. Why was she so distraught? Didn’t she know that there was nothing to fear? There was no problem. He was right there, beside her even if she couldn’t see him.

Austin heard the computer’s voice warning of danger. The fail-safe had triggered, which meant that his heart had stopped.

His returned his gaze to his body. So he was, what,
dead
? No, that was impossible, wasn’t it? If he were dead then his brain would’ve ceased all function. He wouldn’t be able to witness this very moment. Instead, there would be nothingness, oblivion, because his conscious mind was all that made him alive. It was all that made anyone alive.

But he
was
aware of where he was, who he was, and that meant his brain was still functioning down in the tank, in his body.

He felt no fear. Compassion welled in him for his friend and the fear she felt. He watched as Nyah stood inside the tank then stepped out of it. She hurried through his apartment, desperately looking for something. He wanted to tell her that there was nothing to worry about, that he was fine inside the hack. All he had to do was go deeper while she waited for him to come back.

Just wait for me to come back.

He was going to find the doorway. She didn’t know that, of course. It was all going to be fine, he wanted to tell her. He just had to find Outlaw.

His focus drifted back to the body,
his
body. As he stared at it, fascinated, the world around him began to shimmer and shift.

Everything in view suddenly dissolved with a sizzling sound, replaced by a darkness—utter and complete—that swallowed the world. It was cold and thick and bottomless and fluid. No up or down existed and the darkness seemed infinitely vast. There was no edge to be found nor surface to break through. The darkness was everything there was. It was absolute. It wasn’t like the water he’d breathed before. This was something altogether different. Something to be escaped, though he knew he couldn’t.

The world surrounding him seemed like a secret he’d forgotten—but now remembered, triggered instantly by seeing it again. That puzzled him: he’d never been here before. Had he?

Fear welled in him for the first time. He felt it first like a rivulet of water trickling through a hairline crack in a rock. He frantically searched the darkness. Where was the door? He needed to find it and progress to the next level. Only then could he begin looking for Outlaw. Where was it? It had never taken this long before to find it. Something was wrong.

Where am I?

He could feel the darkness as much as see it. It resolved into a murky swirl of brackish grey and black. A tangled network of black tendrils—like coiling ink. Shapes began to emerge, slithering and writhing around him. A mechanical sound filled his ears—a tortuous grind and clank of gears larger than the world. He couldn’t tell from which direction it came.

Panicked now, Austin twisted, searching for a way out. Something was very wrong!

A bright pinprick suddenly snapped into view, high above him. Light! Now rushing toward him.

The darkness peeled away from it, driven by a shock wave that pushed ahead of the light. The shock wave reached him before the light did and it roared through him, sweeping away fear as if it were a fog blown by a warm wind.

The light source drifted to a stop just above him. A tunnel? Bluish-white, radiating an inexhaustible power, brighter than any sun or star.

The light stirred and extended toward him.

He could do nothing but watch. The light had come to him, and he knew it was the only way to ever be near it. Bathed in its warmth, he sensed peace and love that he’d long forgotten.

A warm current stirred when the light touched him, driving away whatever frigid emptiness remained in his awareness. He focused on the brilliant light and a voice reached into the deepest part of him, speaking words in a language he couldn’t understand. The words came as a song, though not sung in any way that he’d ever known. It was beyond singing, beyond knowing. It was a song that could only be known by
being
it.

An intoxicating song of exquisite pleasure and love. A knot formed in his throat; tears misted his sight. An intense desire to be joined with that song swallowed him.

He felt something deep inside of him release, something that had once wrapped him tightly. And the moment it did, he heard himself say, “Yes.” Then again, “Yes.” And with that one word, everything changed.

In an instant he was rushing upward again, pulled by the light, and now he began to tremble, overwhelmed.

Beyond the white light he saw a swirling cluster of blue and white and purple that appeared infinitely far away. It swept through the darkness, trailing vast fingers of light like a spiraling galaxy filling the whole universe. Within the span of a breath he’d reached it and was plunging headlong through the shimmering cosmic vortex.

The light closed below him, blotting out the darkness. He felt a hand grip his own and he surrendered himself completely.

This is it, he thought. This is really it.

I
RAN
. The second hand on my wristwatch ticked at a glacial pace. But fifteen seconds of clock time had already passed since I was plunged into the hack. I’d moved quickly, retracing my steps through the two white rifts that had been my doorways in previous hacks.

The black door that Austin had seen still eluded me, but it didn’t matter. I was on the inside. More importantly, I was in India. Moving through the levels had been much easier this time, but I still needed every second of clock time—every minute of hack time—and wished I had programmed the system for more.

Only forty-five seconds of clock time remained.

I moved in a kind of panicky stumbling run down the same dank alleyway of Calcutta I’d been before, rushing toward the swell of people in the streets just ahead. Unlike the first time I was here, the world now pulsed and surged with motion, vibrant and very much alive. No one was frozen in place.

Reaching the sidewalk, I slid to a stop and scanned the thick crowd.
Where was she?
The scene was a swarm of diesel fumes, shouting vendors, and gridlocked taxis, livestock, and motorcycles. People, too, crowded the streets, seeming to fill every space not occupied by a vehicle or animal. They moved sluggishly in the heat—all headed, it seemed, nowhere in particular.

Before, the girl had been to the right of the alley, sitting beside the street. I pushed forward, shoving and weaving my way through the surge of people. Within seconds I reached the spot where I’d knelt in front of her, but she was nowhere in sight.

I spun, searching the crowd for her. My heart pounded as I nervously scanned the faces rushing by me, none of them hers. I glanced through the narrow gaps between bodies as they shuffled past.

What if I couldn’t find her? What would I do then? She was Austin’s last chance, and Mom’s too. If the girl could affect physical reality then maybe she could save him even if he wasn’t there with me. It was a stretch, but no more than anything else I’d already witnessed.

Hope bled from my veins as I moved forward into the street, wishing desperately for a glimpse of the girl. In this chaos she could be anywhere, or nowhere. Maybe I was too late. Was it possible that the girl didn’t exist at all, that she never did? No, she was real. She had to be.

Halfway across the dusty street my eyes locked on a figure no more than twenty feet ahead, watching me with a gentle smile. A shock of familiarity spiked through me, and the sight brought me to a dead halt.

The world around me slowed to a grinding pace. Everything fell away at the periphery, leaving only the two of us. That’s the way it seemed.

I stepped forward. It wasn’t possible.

Another step. I expected her to fade away like a mirage, but she didn’t.

“Mom?” I said. She sat in a wheelchair on the other side of the road. Among the chaos she seemed entirely out of place, sitting there so peacefully. Her eyes were bright, the eyes of someone fully aware and engaged with the world and not trapped helplessly in their own head.

What kind of trick was this?

I stopped in front of her. She was the girl I’d seen last time, only now my mother as I knew her.

She looked me up and down, and said, “Nyah.”

They say you can see people—the real them—if you look deep into their eyes because eyes are the windows to the soul, the essence of who we are. Standing there, gazing deeply into her loving face, I knew that this wasn’t a trick of the eye or the mind. My mom was as real as anything else in the universe at that moment.

“Mom?” I was terrified to even blink, certain that, if I did, she would disappear, and it would all turn out to be nothing more than a dream.

“I’m here,” she said. Her voice was tender, but strong. There was no hesitation in her words, no slur in her voice like there had been over the months as her condition had deteriorated.

She wasn’t just alive, but fully aware. Alive-ness, if you want to call it that, radiated from her, but how was it even possible? She was in Austin’s apartment, not in the hack with me . . . yet, here she was. How?

The woman in the chair wasn’t the same one whose life I’d watched fade away—one day, one memory at a time—over the past two years. She was my mom, the woman I’d known before our life had been violently shattered. I knew it and so did she.

She was talking to me! And she remembered my name.

“I don’t understand,” I said. “Why are you here?”

She smiled, and tears glistened in her eyes. “For you.”

“You’re in a wheelchair in Austin’s apartment right now.”

“My body, yes, but not
me
.” She held out her arms.

My heart had been locked away long ago, but her words kicked down the door. It wasn’t a dream, and even if it was, I didn’t care anymore. I stepped forward and wrapped my arms around her, burying my head into her shoulder, and began to sob. My body shook as she held me close, cradling me as best she could.

“It’s okay, sweetheart,” she whispered. “Everything’s going to be okay.”

I held onto her as if my life depended on it.

She held me and kissed the top of my head. I felt her lips press against my bare scalp and her warm tears too, as they landed on me.

“I’ve missed you so much,” I said. “I’m so glad you’re here.”

For several moments, she held me tight, then drew back and took my face in her hands. She looked deep into my eyes with a love I hadn’t felt in so long.

“Look at you. So beautiful. So strong.”

“Thank you,” I said, a hitch in my voice and a smile on my face.

“Your head,” she said and traced her finger along my temple with a look of wonder.

“I shaved it.”

“I see that,” she said. She lay her open hand on my scalp and ran her palm over it. “I remember. There was a scar here once.”

I shrugged. “Something happened.”

“Yes,” she said with a knowing smile. “I know.”

How could she know?

She held me at arm’s length. “Let me look at you.”

There was bottomless compassion in her eyes that reached deep into me and began to draw the tattered pieces of my heart together. In spite of all the wreckage the years had left behind, and all the scars life had cut into me, there was no resisting the love I felt in that moment.

“You’ve been through so much,” she said and wiped a tear across my cheek with her thumb. “You’ve learned much too. Haven’t you?”

I bit my lip. I couldn’t speak. All of the pain and hurt that had bound my life like razor wire, holding it together while at the same time killing me slowly, was being clipped away by her words. I could feel it physically.

“Some things are ending,” she said, “but only so new things can take their place.”

Ending? Fear flashed through me. “What do you mean?”

“I’m returning home,” she said. “You can’t come with me yet.”

“Home?” Then in an instant I knew what she meant. She was dying. “No, stay. You have to stay.”

“Listen to me,” she said. “I know you feel alone, but you’re not.”

“Don’t leave me.” My voice cracked, barely a whisper. “Please.”

“I’m always with you. And so are Dad and Tommy. You’re loved—cherished more than you can ever imagine. I know that what’s happened to you, to us, seems random and pointless and cruel, but it’s not. I’ve seen it. I see it now. Everything had to happen as it did. It was the only way.”

“No,” I said. “It wasn’t the only way. It didn’t have to happen. It
shouldn’t
have happened.”

“But it did.” She answered with a gentle smile.

“It destroyed our lives,” I said. “How is that beautiful? How is that fair or right or good?”

“Sweetheart, there’s a truth that’s so large and beautiful and perfect that it holds everything together. It’s hard to see it now, but it’s true.”

The entire world seemed to stall around me. “How? How does it hold it together and make it better?”

“It’s a mystery too big to know, but it exists and it’s truer than anything else that ever was because it’s more real than what we think of as real. I know it. I’ve seen it . . .” She was quiet for a moment. “I want to tell you something, and I want you to hear me.”

I grew still.

“After the accident, the world changed for me. Physically, I mean. It
looked
different. It was transformed as if I had a new set of eyes or a pair of glasses that allowed me to see what others can’t—a reality that is part ours and part . . . something else, something just out of sight. Both together, entangling one another. I began to see patterns in everything, intricate shapes and connections that flowed from one thing to another—events and people and circumstances—weaving them together in beautiful ways that only I could see.”

“Your artwork—all of those designs and shapes. That’s what you were drawing and painting.”

She nodded slightly. “Yes. I was catching glimpses of the life that’s just beyond what we can see. You know what I’m talking about.”

“I’ve seen things. Visions.”

“No, sweetheart, visions are dreams. These weren’t dreams. They’re more real than you or me. More real than can be described with frail things like words. Art was the closest language I had to express what I saw, but even then it fell so short, like trying to write a symphony with only a few notes or pen a novel with a handful of words.”

I knew she was telling the truth. I was experiencing it right then, in the hack. There was something else to the world—something
other
that our brains filtered out
,
that existed around us if only we knew how to hack into it.

In my mind’s eye, it became clear. Austin had tried to explain it, but at the time I didn’t have the ears to hear. The hacks that Austin and I were doing relied on shutting down the brain, not enhancing it. Only when we did that, when we silenced the brain’s incessant processing, could we access reality in a new way. It was our thinking that got in the way.

Austin had said it himself, the brain was like a computer running software programmed to handle one layer of reality, but not all the other layers of reality. There was a firewall that blocked the way, but our hacks had shut down the firewall so that we could see.

Mom’s brain damage must have done the same thing for her, only naturally. She could see the world differently, more clearly, because her firewall, her mind, had been stripped away, leaving the Reality behind reality exposed. Her firewalls had not only cracked, they’d crumbled to dust.

She continued. “With time the patterns and images became clearer to me. I saw other beings—lights and shadows—moving through the patterns. I began to understand that things we would see as terrible or tragic, while they brought unbearable pain, were transformed into something new. They
had
to be transformed because that was the plan all along. It’s how God works. I realized that life was beautiful, perfectly ordered, and death and suffering can be as well, in its own way.”

“Suffering’s not beautiful,” I said.

“Necessary. Without it, growth would be impossible. There would be no opportunity for our hearts to unfold, to blossom, like they were meant to. The only thing that truly crushes our hearts is our unwillingness to let go. Let go of our need to control. Let go of our need to know the answers to our questions. No amount of suffering is truly heavy enough to crush us completely unless we let it. It only has the power that we give it.”

Let go.

My head tingled.

“Unless a seed falls to the ground and dies it remains a lone seed,” she said. “All things that live eventually become the soil in which new things can take root. Things that would otherwise not exist.”

She paused and her smile softened. “Sweetheart, everything that’s happened to our family has left so many unanswered questions. Yet, life will eventually blossom into something beyond imagination—if we can let go and allow it to happen. Do you believe it?”

Let go. It’s what the girl had told me on this very street. She’d been right. For a moment, however brief, the girl had helped me let go. I had let go of my need for a scar—my belief that it was the least I deserved after what happened to the rest of my family. I’d let go of those things, and I’d been healed.

“I can’t,” I said. “I can’t let go of you.”

She ran her finger over where my scar once had been. “Yes, you can. You’ve done it before.”

“That was . . . different.”

“No, it wasn’t.” As her finger grazed my skin, a jolt of energy shot through my head and into my body. I gasped and took a step back. The sensation converged in my chest and my heart began to ram hard. My legs were unsteady.

“You’ve sat in darkness too long,” Mom said. “It’s time to leave it behind. You have to let go of everything.” She paused. “You have to let me go.”

Her words were like a stone landing on my heart. “No,” I said. “No, you can’t die.”

“When God calls his children home, there’s no death, no sting. There’s only new life. Resurrection. That’s the life that I want, dear, not the rumor or shadow of it I’ve been trapped in for the past year.”

“The girl said I have to save you.” I heard the desperation in my own voice. I could barely choke out the words.

“You already have. By bringing me to Austin’s you saved me.” She took my hand and held it gently in hers. “You saved me. When you wake up you’ll see that I’ve already passed. I died and I wanted to die. By taking me from the hospital you gave me what I most wanted, the ability to pass in peace. It’s what I want.”

Tears flowed from my eyes, but it wasn’t simply from sadness or loss, but release. I could feel myself letting her go, and in that was the first glimmer of hope.

“Don’t give up on life,” she said. “You’ll find joy again . . . and peace. And love. I’ve seen it. I promise you, it’ll be okay. There’s nothing to fear. Open your eyes. See . . .”

She touched my head and the energy that radiated in my skull felt like two hot coals behind my eyes.

“Every moment of your life, every choice and every circumstance, has carved a path to this very moment,” Mom said. “You’re always exactly where you’re meant to be at precisely the perfect time. You can trust that always. When it’s dark and when it’s light. In those times when you scream at the sky or when you turn your face up to catch the warmth of the sun—you can trust that.”