Death Dream (55 page)

"Why? For what purpose? Who for?" Dan croaked. He felt stifled inside the helmet, choking.

"Don't try to take the helmet off, Dan," Jace said softly. "I've got to make you understand who's in charge around here."

All around Dan galaxies glowed warmly in space, majestically sailing outward in an expanding universe, generating swarms of bright blue stars as they revolved smoothly in the void. But his chest was constricting, his breath gasping. Christ, not an asthma attack. Not now!

The helmet was smothering him. He had to get it off.

But he could not move his arms.

"I can make amputees have their arms back," Jace said. "I can also make your arms useless."

Dan sank to his knees. His chest was aflame. He could not catch his breath.

"The helmet you're wearing now," Jace said, his voice flat and deadly calm, "it's rigged just like Ralphie boy's. I don't have your brain patterns mapped out, but I can do a job on you, Danno, just like I did on Adair."

The universe swam around Dan. He could not get air into his lungs. He was suffocating, his lungs rasping as if a red-hot sanding machine was blasting away inside him. A thousand-ton weight pressed on his chest as he tried to crawl, gasping, all his strength seeping away while he desperately, painfully tried to draw a single breath. "All these years we've worked together," Jace said. "You thought they were just simulations, didn't you? You thought they were just electronic games. I don't play games, Danno. I play God."

Dan collapsed on the floor of the VR chamber, visions of star-filled galaxies swimming in his blurring sight.

CHAPTER 42

Angela sat unhappily at her desk, staring at the book in her hands. Six of the students were in the VR booths. The rest of the kids were waiting their turns at the games that Mrs. O'Connell let them play at the end of the day.

But not me, Angela knew. She won't let me play a game because my parents told her not to. I hate them! I hate them both and I hate Mrs. O'Connell too!

But she knew she did not hate her parents or her teacher. She did not understand why they were keeping her away from the games, though. Or maybe she did know! She suddenly realized that her parents wanted to keep her away from the handsome young prince who somehow worked his way into almost every game she played. I shouldn't have told Mommy about him. She doesn't want me to be with him. She's jealous.

Why? she asked herself. It's only a game. He can't do anything to me. And even if he did, he wouldn't want to hurt me, in the first place. And I love him!

That's why Mommy doesn't want me to be with him. She thinks I'm too young to be in love. But I'm not. I'm not.

"How's the book?"

Angela was startled by Mrs. O'Connell's question. She saw that her teacher was standing beside her, bending over slightly with a kind little smile on her face.

"Okay, I guess," said Angela.

"How much of it have you read, Angie?"

"Not much," Angela said, glancing around the classroom. All the other kids were busy with their own work or huddled together in one of the workshop corners, talking to one another about their study projects. Thank goodness nobody was paying any notice of her, stuck with this dumb book.

"You know," Mrs. O'Connell said, "books are like virtual reality games. You only have to use your imagination a little, and a book can take you anywhere you want to go."

But Angela shook her head. "It's not the same."

"I know. You have to do some of the work—inside your head."

"In a VR game everything's right there," said Angela. "You see it and hear it and everything."

"Try reading the book, dear. You'll see the scenes and hear the people talking and you don't need anything except your own mind to do it."

Angela knew that her teacher was wrong. How could a bunch of words on paper compare with being in a VR game? But she dutifully stared at the open page, desperately hoping Mrs. O'Connell would go away before any of the kids noticed. Angela felt like a retard, unable to do what the others could, getting special attention from Mrs. O'Connell because she was different from all the rest. Several kids laughed and Angela's face flamed. But then she saw that they were laughing at a paper airplane that sailed across the room, right over the teacher's head, and landed smack on her desk.

Mrs. O'Connell turned away from Angela and headed for the boys in the far corner of the room who were supposed to working on a map of the original thirteen American colonies.

Angela held the book up and tried hard to get interested in it.
Heidi
, by someone with the weird name of Johanna Heusser Spyri.
Yuck!

The minutes crawled by. Every time Angela peeked up at the clock above the chalkboard at the front of the room the hands seemed to be exactly where they had been the last time. If the second hand had not been sweeping along—slowly—she would have thought the clock was stopped.

But by the time the belt rang to signal the end of the day. she was getting engrossed in the story of the Swiss girl. It wasn't tike a VR game, for sure, but she could see Heidi in her mind and the rugged snow-covered Alps and the green meadows with spring flowers beneath the clear blue sky and the sheep with their bells tinkling in the crisp mountain air.

The school bell jarred her out of the story. Angela looked up, surprised that the clock actually showed three-thirty. While all the other kids trooped to the door and lined up, Angela went to Mrs. O'Connell's desk to return the book.

"Would you like to take it home with you?" the teacher asked.

"Could I?"

"If you promise to take good care of it and bring it back tomorrow."

Angela nodded eagerly. "I will."

Mrs. O'Connell smiled. "All right, then. I'm glad you're enjoying it. I read
Heidi
when I was about your age. I loved it."

Angela got into the line, the book tucked under her arm.

"Is she making you read that whole book?" Gary Rusic asked her.

"Uh-huh," Angela replied. "It's really good."

"Not as good as the VRs," said Kristy Kelly. She had thick red hair and perfect teeth.

"Yes it is," Angela countered.

"Quiet now." Mrs. O'Connell opened the classroom door and led her students down the wide hallway to the double front doors of the school building.

"Why won't she let you into the VRs?" Marta Randolph whispered. "Afraid you're going to faint again?"

"She likes reading books," Kristy said with a laugh.

"Angela's real old-fashioned."

"I am not!"

"Quietly, please," called Mrs. O'Connell from the front of the line.

I am not old-fashioned
, Angela repeated to herself.
But my parents are.

She heard Marta snickering, "Her father builds the VRs and she can't even go in them."

Angela fought to keep the tears back.

"Well," said Kristy, "maybe when they take the braces off her teeth they'll let her back into the VRs."

Several of the girls laughed and Angela felt her insides burning.

They went out in a fairly orderly line, joining the other lines of students trooping to the yellow minivans that served as school buses. Angela went along glumly, the book under her arm now a badge of shame. Then she heard a car horn toot.

"Hey, Angela! You want a ride home?"

It was Uncle Kyle. Mr. Muncrief, Angela remembered. Her mother did not want her to call him Uncle Kyle any more. He was sitting in his totally awesome green Jaguar with the top down, smiling and waving at her.

Mrs. O'Connell looked at Angela.

"May I go home with Mr. Muncrief?" she asked.

Eleanor O'Connell walked slowly down the line toward Angela. She recognized Muncrief, of course; she knew him as the founder and president of ParaReality, the man who had made the Pine Lake School the unique educational establishment that it was. Still. . . .

"Do you parents allow you to ride with him?" she asked.

"Oh sure! He drives me to school all the time."

"Wait here while I phone your mother," Mrs. O'Connell said.

"But he drives me to school," Angela repeated"

"Yes, I understand that, but I still must call your mother. Those are the rules, Angela. wait right here; I'll be back in a few moments."

Angela watched Mrs. O'Connell walk back to the school's front door while all the other kids were climbing into the school buses. She looked over at Uncle Kyle in his convertible. He waved to her.

She decided not to wait for Mrs. O'Connell.

Angela wanted to run, but instead she paced slowly toward Uncle Kyle and his convertible, enjoying the envious stares of Marta and Kristy and all the rest of the nasty bitches filing into the school buses. She knew her mother did not want her to call him Uncle Kyle, but she didn't care. He was rescuing her from ridicule and she loved him for it.

The first hazy thought that drifted through Dan's mind as he struggled back to consciousness was that hardly anybody ever died of asthma. You just wish you could die, gasping and wheezing, your lungs on fire while you fought to get air through your constricted bronchial passages. It was like drowning, only dry and painful.

A black nurse was standing over him. He saw that he was in a little cubicle with lime green walls. Hospital emergency room, he guessed.

He pulled in a breath of air, gently, cautiously. His chest ached, but the asthma seemed to be gone. His butt was sore too, and he realized he was in a drafty white hospital gown.

"How long have I been here?" he asked.

The nurse eyed him suspiciously. "You're supposed to ask "Where am I?"

"I can see where I am." Dan started to push himself up on his elbows.

The nurse pushed him back down flat. "You just rest for a while more. Doctor will be in shortly."

"How long—"

"Nearly two hours. Worst asthma attack I ever saw. We had to put a quart of adrenaline into you, just about." She smiled to show she was exaggerating.

"With square needles, huh?" Dan understood why his backside hurt.

"You just rest now and you'll be all right by suppertime." The nurse left and Dan lifted his arm to see his wristwatch. Almost four-thirty. He remembered being in the VR chamber and Jace acting crazy.
Jace caused this asthma attack?
He realized he was chewing on his lower lip and opened his mouth as if yawning.
If Jace didn't cause the attack outright he sure made it worse than it would have been.

What he had thought to be walls were actually curtains.

He was lying on a gurney or a makeshift bunk of some sort, partitioned off from the other cubicles by thin pale green curtains. He could hear someone moaning softly: woman or man, he could not tell. Swell background music, Dan thought. Where the hell's that doctor? I've got to get out of—

The curtain was pushed aside and Jace Lowrey stepped in. Dan blinked at him
. Are we still in the simulation?
He wondered.

"How are you?" Jace whispered.

"Not dead yet."

Jace fidgeted a little, raised his hands and let them fall to his sides again. "Hey, I didn't mean to make it so bad. I was just—well, kinda showin' off, I guess. I'm sorry."

"Some show."

"I got carried away."

"You're going to get carried right into jail, you know."

Jace shook his head.

"You tried to kill me," Dan accused.

"No, I didn't. Honest, I didn't mean to make it so bad. I got carried away."

Dan said nothing. In the back of his mind he still wondered if this was a simulation or the real world. Must be the real world, he told himself. Jace would never be apologetic in one of his own creations.

"I just wanted to show you. You know. I wanted you to see what I can do."

"Okay, you didn't try to kill me. You just tried to scare me into keeping my mouth shut."

"About what?" He looked genuinely puzzled.

"Aw hell, Jace. You admitted that you killed Ralph and that other pilot."

Jace looked over his shoulder, as if afraid they would be overheard. "I didn't mean to kill him," he whispered. "I didn't mean for them to die. It was just supposed to—y'know, to show him."

"Just to show who?"

"Ralph. Who else?"

"Show him what?"

"Show him what I can do. Make him admit that I'm as good as he is. Better, even. Thing is, once I start workin' on a sim I can't just go half way. I gotta push it as far as I can, see what I can do."

"See if you can give somebody an asthma attack?" Dan growled.

Jake's eyes narrowed into a truculent stare. "I said I was sorry, didn't I?"

"See if you can kill people?"

The frown deepened for a moment. Then Jace grinned slyly, making his long, lean face look almost wolfish.

"Try to prove it," he said, leaning over Dan's bed. "I'll deny I ever said a word."

"Two men have died."

"So what? I was a thousand miles away."

"I'll dig out the subprogram you put into the sim. The biofeedback loop."

"Loops. Plural. And they're all erased. By phone, pal. I set it all up so I could destroy the evidence whenever I needed to. That's what modems are for."

"You can't just pick up the phone and get access . . ." But Dan's voice trailed off before he finished the sentence.

Jace grinned at him. "Hell, Danno, teenage hackers can break into secured systems. Don't you think I set up everything in the computer before I left Wright-Patt?"

"You did it all deliberately. Cold-blooded premeditated murder."

"Sure I did. I can see you telling that to the cops. They wouldn't believe a word of it, not in a million years. Not without proof."

"So it'll be my word against yours."

"Doesn't have to be anything," Jace said. He backed away from the bed, scratched at his stubbly jaw. "You don't have to say a word. Not to anybody."

"The hell I don't."

Spreading his long arms, "Hey, it's over and done with. Ralph's dead. You're not gonna bring him back."

"You killed him."

"He killed himself, the big heroic motherfucker."

"He was killed by your simulation."

"It was your sim as much as mine," Jace said. "You had it to yourself for a whole year, just about."