The Game of Lives (21 page)

He didn't know how she planned to do it, but her intention had been made clear. She wanted to eliminate all the Tangents, including him when he was of no use anymore, severing the connection of the Mortality Doctrine. He'd be dead—the true death—and she could Lift back to the Wake and tell everyone that the VNS had saved the world and only they could prevent it from sinking into chaos again. As he flew, streaking up and down the curved, brightly lit walls of the Hive, he imagined the feigned look of pain on her face as she broke the news. Lives lost, but so many more saved.

He screamed in frustration, and the sound of his yell was swallowed by whatever substance surrounded him. Everything about the place was odd, different from what he was used to. It was programming on such a complex scale, it was beyond anything he'd ever dealt with before.

He flew in circles and found nothing.

Until.

There.

There.

A mere wink in his peripheral vision, like a fly buzzing by. A spark of darkness. Michael stopped his flight, turned toward whatever had captured his attention. It was far
away, on the other side of the Hive from where he hovered. He threw all of his will into being there, and this time it wasn't like flight. It was teleportation. In an instant he was there.

There to witness the beginning of the end.

A pod stood empty. Surrounded on four sides by glowing, living pods of orange light. In the entire structure of the Hive, he'd never seen anything similar. He'd never seen an empty pod. And he knew it had just happened—that had been the dark blur of movement in the corner of his eye. Although he still didn't understand how she was doing it, Agent Weber had just eliminated the first victim in her grand plan.

The true death.

Michael understood what it meant, and his chest ached. The human who'd been taken, and the Tangent who'd done the possessing—they were both dead now. Gone. Forever. Even without a full grasp of the coding or the Mortality Doctrine, he knew this was so.

As he stared at the vacant slot, thinking all of these troubling thoughts, the next pod over began to dissolve. Like black specks of disease or hungry insects, darkness spread across the surface of the orange light. In a matter of seconds, the entire thing was gone, replaced by emptiness. Though he might've imagined it, Michael thought he heard a faint scream, as if from far away, right before the last bit of orange light blinked out of existence.

He floated there, watching, trembling, as another one died, eaten by darkness. The swarm of blackness consumed
it like an army of ants. Not a second passed before it began on the very next one, eating away.

Never in his life had he felt so utterly helpless.

He screamed until his lungs hurt.

5

The clock kept ticking—there was nothing he could do about it. Every moment that passed without acting meant another Tangent dead, another human dead. The order of dissolved pods did have a pattern, at least. It was spreading in a straight line, from right to left. Michael made a quick timing judgment and flew to a pod about twenty slots down, trying not to think about those he'd just passed.

He reached the pod in question, drifted within a few inches. The same screen he'd seen when visiting the current resting place of Jackson Porter started to materialize with a name, but he dove into the code without looking—he didn't have a moment to spare. He dove into the code the way Kaine had shown him. The pods of the Hive blurred and shook, transforming into an array of tightly condensed symbols and letters, still glowing orange.

It was the code, dense and crowding him tightly into the small space, overwhelming him. The structure of the Hive itself had its own code, surrounding the individual pod data chunks, so that Michael was completely immersed in a blinding display of information. All of it moved at a blistering
pace, up and down and sideways, in and out of his vision. Different colors and sizes and shapes. His head swam with nausea trying to take it all in.

He looked to the right, in the direction of Weber's attacks on the pods. The darkness was thicker, more menacing in code view, like a black oil that had come to life. It reached out to devour huge swaths of code at once. Weber's program had already eaten through half of the pods between him and where he'd been floating before. There was no way he had enough time to create something to stop her. At least, not there.

But he could learn something. Bringing his attention back to the data in front of him, he studied the code, the organization, the characteristics of its programming. Darkness grew in his peripheral vision. It was making a sick squelching sound as it crept toward him, like a knife sticking into flesh. He tried to ignore it. He tried to focus on the code, find a link. There had to be something in there that Weber was specifically attacking. A link between the Hive and her program.

Like tar thrown from a bucket, a splash of a strange black substance sprayed the Hive in front of him. Upon contact, half of the pod's information sizzled and died, whisking into the endless darkness of Weber's program. Another thick ribbon of inky darkness came swirling in from above, snapping at the code, then whipping toward Michael's face. He cried out as it hit his skin, latching on, burning. The pain was like acid on a wound. He screamed and the sound died in the thick blackness that had covered
him. With a burst of panic he reached up and pulled at it until he ripped it off. It came back at him but launched back into visual mode and flew out to the center of the vast open chamber of the Hive.

Breathing heavily, he floated there, his skin burning as sweat trickled down his scorched face. He took in the Hive around him and saw the pod where Weber had begun her attack. At least thirty pods had now been destroyed, leaving nothing behind but empty space. And the destruction was spreading, its pace quickening.

Michael scanned the wall of consciousnesses, trying to gather his thoughts.
Focus
, he told himself.
Focus
. If ever he had to act without thinking, now was the time. Lives were dropping by the second.

A sudden, chilling thought almost froze his heart.

Jackson Porter
.

In the frenzy, Michael had almost forgotten that he himself was a Tangent, that he himself had taken over a human body, that he himself could die at any second. If Weber got to Jackson's pod…

Still he floated there, thinking all these things, when people were dying left and right. Indecision had him in its grasp. A sickness grew in his stomach. If he went straight for Jackson Porter, Weber would know. She'd throw everything at that pod.

Do it!
he almost shouted at himself. He had no choice. He could do nothing if he ceased to exist. Nothing else mattered. He had to protect himself, no matter what she brought down on him.

The Bubble.

It flashed across his mind, that membrane of protection that Kaine had programmed for him. Michael closed his eyes, tried to remember its feel, its look, its code. Complex, unusual, something he'd never done before. But it might be his only hope.

It was time to work on instinct.

As Weber's wave of dark decay swept across the Hive, Michael accessed his files, found Jackson's location, and went for it.

1

The pod was at least sixty or seventy rows up from the swath of destruction laid out by Weber's program. Michael zapped himself to it and dove into the code as if he were diving into the cold ocean. It was a sensory shock as it enveloped him, that beautiful, complex universe of information. He scanned the data, allowing his mind to open up and take it all in. He couldn't afford to think about it in individual pieces. He had to let it all flow past him, through him, grasping its meaning on a subconscious level.

At the same time, compartmentalizing his mind, he worked at the code for Kaine's creation, the Bubble. It had been a wonder of coding, but Michael was a wonder himself. He knew that, even if all the forces against him had made him doubt his abilities. An unexpected burst of laughter exploded from his virtual chest as he pieced his vision of Kaine's program together.

He was giddy.

He was delirious.

He was having the time of his life.

2

Near the end, things happened so fast he could barely track them all. The Bubble grew around him. He scanned the code of Jackson Porter's pod, searching for any clue that would help him rebound against Weber's program and stop it in its tracks. Then he could feel it coming—the darkness swooping. A shadow fell over him, and he turned and saw that Weber had abandoned her original course. She was now cutting across the Hive wall diagonally, heading straight for him.

Pod by pod went black as she passed.

Michael swam in the code of Jackson Porter's prison, even as he put the finishing touches on the Bubble of protection. He had no idea whether it would hold against Weber's program like it had against the KillSims. But surely it would, wouldn't it?

In his frenzied state, he remembered a line from an old flat-film.

Surely you can't be serious
.

I am serious. And don't call me Shirley
.

He laughed again, certain the pressure was finally starting to crack his mind wide open.

Yes, he was delirious. But he was sharper than ever.

Michael went back to the code, the Bubble around him giving him the time he needed. He hoped.

But what was he searching for? He had no idea—just had to trust that he'd know. He worked the information that pressed in from all directions, worked it like wet clay.

His entire world shook when the darkness of Weber's program hit the surface of his Bubble. Every piece of data around him shuddered and blurred for a moment, then righted itself. He looked over his shoulder and saw the visual manifestation of it all: black tendrils of some monstrous, amorphous beast attacking the invisible layer of protection between them.

From there, his instincts took over. He found things he hadn't dreamed of finding within the code. Access points to the Hive. A running history of the Mortality Doctrine program and how it did what it did to Michael's Tangent self. He even found a piece of himself in there, something he couldn't quite understand. It was almost as if he'd found his own DNA gene sequence.

He was a building block. He was beginning to see how he served as a foundation for the Doctrine and all that it had accomplished.

He took as much of the information as he could until he finally felt ready.

It was clear to Michael now that what would follow would be horrible, but it had to be done.

It was the only way.

Michael turned around and faced the Bubble. Weber's black destroyer program had now completely encased it.
With a few quick manipulations of the code, he dissolved the shield of protection and let the tarlike substance come at him and his pod.

It struck him all at once, and the stinging pain from before overwhelmed him. He resisted the urge to suck in a breath from shock, the world around him shifting between visuals and raw code, flickering like a bad WallScreen signal. Michael forced his mind to calm and made his surroundings solidify in the pool of code, the substance in which he needed to work. And work he did.

Michael floated a few feet from Jackson Porter's pod and let Weber's program devour him until it had nearly merged with his own code. He had to let it in to have access to what he wanted. The pain was excruciating, the intensity heightening. He ignored it, not caring how battered his body back in the real world might be—all he needed was to stay alive.

Darkness dimmed his vision, so he brightened the code. He dug into it like he'd done with Jackson's pod, but this time he was much more focused. He knew exactly what he was looking for: a pathway to Weber. That was the last piece of the puzzle.

Weber. He needed her.

The darkness ate at him, but it was confused by his programming because it was so different from the pods themselves. Michael knew it wouldn't take long for it to adapt, though. Like a pool of smart nanobots, it learned and changed as it worked. It was only a matter of time before it sucked the life from his Aura, leaving him as brain-dead as any KillSim would.

The true death.

Pain ignited his skin and sank into his muscles. His vision was blurry—almost black—and his own tears stung.

He pushed on.

Darkness closing in…Pain…

There.

Every program had a link to its owner, especially when it was being controlled. He'd found it. Weber was hidden somewhere, but it didn't matter. He had the link. The pain was so great he shook, barely able to reach forward and latch onto her, throw a million strings of code to lock her to him, pull her to him.

He felt her fear. Like stepping under a waterfall, it was a burst of coldness.

Through her own program, Michael had found her, and now she was his.

With his last ounce of strength, he launched an anti-program, countering every line of code encompassing the destructive darkness Weber had unleashed. In an instant it eviscerated her program, eliminating it from existence. Light poured back in, blinding and glorious, and the pain disappeared.

Michael held Weber in his grasp, the massive world of her code enclosed in his mental might. He leaped toward the wall of the Hive and found a pod that had already been half destroyed by Weber's program before he'd stopped it. Whoever it represented had no chance of survival. Gaping holes covered the orange oval so Michael could see inside to the dark purple world beyond.

It was enough. He hoped.

Michael launched himself at it, sank into its code, reached for the links to the Mortality Doctrine he'd discovered within Jackson Porter's pod, threw Weber's code into its vortex, and channeled her very being into the body connected to the pod at hand.

And Weber's essence vanished from the Sleep.

She entered a new body in the Wake, possessed its mind, linked to the pod before him. Her own link severed, the real body of Agent Weber was brain-dead.

Using his scant knowledge of the program she had created, Michael finished off the job on the half-destroyed pod that now represented everything that was left of Weber's essence. The pod disintegrated, vanished in a mist of darkness, killing anything linked to it back in the Wake. And then all was as silent and still as a windless day.

Michael had just killed Agent Weber.