Doomed (36 page)

“Now what?” I ask, and though the timer is quickly winding down, it’s nice to be able to concentrate on the game for once instead of having to flee for our lives.

“I have no idea.” Theo does a loop-de-loop that has my avatar clutching on to Eli. As Theo straightens up, he flies higher than he had been, and lightning crackles across the sky.

“Is that a good thing or a bad thing?” Eli leans over to get a better look at the clouds we’re flying through.

“I have no idea,” Theo repeats as he does another spin and more lightning crackles, followed by the
boom
of thunder.

We soar over the scorched croplands outside of San Diego, and the higher we go, the more thunder and lightning there is. And then, as Theo executes a complicated sequence of twists and turns, it finally begins to rain.

As it does, the fields below us start to grow.

Instead of dusting the plants with chemicals, as the plane was originally intended, we’re bringing them water and the chance to flourish.

Huge expanses of field stretch before us, and the timer is quickly ticking away. 1:21. “Can we get them all done in time?” I demand, as Theo pushes the plane to go faster.

“We’d better,” Eli answers.

We soar over the last field just as the countdown ends. This time, a man with a full beard appears on the screen, dressed in a white robe and clutching a lightning bolt in one hand. Zeus, king of the gods and weather, has appeared as we level up.

We’re feeling good, at least until we move on to level four, and end up in the middle of what looks like a war zone. Streets messed up and houses in all states of disrepair.

Eli takes one look and puts down his iPad. “Glad that’s done. I’m starving.”

“Me, too,” Theo agrees, and I nod, as I can’t talk around the food I’ve already shoveled into my mouth. Jean is an amazing cook and she’s gone all out—fresh fruit salad, homemade cinnamon rolls, cheese-and-vegetable omelets, hash browns, coffee with cream. It’s a far cry from my regular morning bowl of Crunch Berries.

When we’re done and I’ve carried my plate to the sink, I wash my hands and then reach for the pictures my father sent me. I lay them out, until I’m looking at the next photos. Neither are in front of something recognizable, not like a solar array with Orinoco’s name on it or a “Welcome to” sign. But still, Theo has no trouble identifying what my father and I are standing in front of in picture five. I’m an infant, wrapped in a lavender blanket with rosebuds all over it, and he’s holding me up for the camera, a look of pride, excitement, and love in his eyes.

For a moment, I wonder who is taking the picture—Jean or my mom. Whoever it is, it’s obvious my dad is crazy about her.

“That’s Jackson Square,” Theo tells me, pointing to the huge church behind us. “That’s the St. Louis Cathedral, in New Orleans.”

“New Orleans?” I ask, surprised. I didn’t even know I’d been to the Big Easy. But it makes sense. In the game, that war zone we were in was probably just post-Katrina New Orleans.

“What are you guys talking about?” Jean asks, leaning in to see the pictures. From the way her eyes soften at the sight of the New Orleans photo, I suspect she is the one who held that camera long ago.

“I remember this day,” Jean tells us. “It was so cold the pipes had frozen at the hotel—one of those rare early winter days that New Orleans doesn’t quite know what to do with.”

“What were you doing with him?” I ask. It comes out more accusatorily than I would like, but Jean doesn’t take offense. Or at least, it doesn’t seem as if she does.

“We were in town for a convention, and your dad brought you and your mom along. He thought you’d have fun. But your mom worked most of the time, with conference calls or whatever, so he usually ended up carrying you around with him from meeting.”

Now that, I
can
believe. My mom’s been wrapped up in work for as long as I can remember. I just didn’t realize it had started back when I was only a baby. It’s strange, after all these years without him, to think of my dad as the primary caregiver when I was young. I’m not sure how I feel about that.

“You don’t happen to know where this picture was taken, do you, Jean?” Theo asks smoothly, sliding the picture of my
dad and six-year-old me across the table to her. We’re kneeling in front of a huge field of corn, wearing jeans and matching red T-shirts. My dad is facing the camera, and the front of his shirt reads, “Try a tankful.” I’m kneeling away from the camera, my long red hair divided into two pigtails, and the back of my shirt proclaiming, “You’ll be thankful.”

“Somewhere that makes ethanol,” she tells us. “That slogan is about a million years old and that’s what it refers to. ‘The Fuel of the Future.’ ”

So, that’s where we’ll be going next. Some state that grows a lot of corn and produces a lot of ethanol. I reach for my laptop again. Might as well play the game and find out where. It’s nice here at Willow Farms, but as I open up my computer, the counter reads, “Total annihilation in 6 days.” It’s not like I’ve got so much time to waste here.

We start to run down the torn-up streets, turning right and left and right again, looking for a way to get to Jackson Square, but we can’t do it. Everything narrows, hems us in, keeps us in this desolate stretch of New Orleans until we’re simply going in circles, spinning around ourselves.

“What is going
on
?” Eli demands, frustrated. “Why can’t we move?”

I slow my pace to little more than a crawl, look around the neighborhood we’ve been pacing for what feels like forever. And that’s when the truth hits me. “We have to do the task first.”

“What’s the task?” Theo asks, sounding as annoyed as Eli.

I point toward one of the dilapidated houses, where a huge pile of building supplies sits in the front yard, waiting to be used. “We need to build,” I say simply.

“What? Like Habitat for Humanity?” Eli runs over to check what we have to work with.

“That’s one of your father’s favorite charities,” Jean says. “He’s spent two weeks working with them every year for as long as I’ve known him.”

I turn to her. “Where is my father, Jean? If anyone knows, I figure it would be you.”

She shakes her head sadly. “I wish I did, Pandora. But he disappeared off the face of the earth two and a half years ago, and I haven’t heard from him since.”

“What happened two and a half years ago?”

She looks uncomfortable, like she’s got secrets to spill but doesn’t know if she should. I start to press her, but Theo looks up from where he’s knocking a hole in the wall of the existing house. “Your father walked away from a lucrative job at the number-one think tank in America.”

As Theo’s revelation sinks in, I stare at him for long seconds, mouth agape. In some dim corner of my mind, I realize Eli is doing the same.

“How do you know that?” I demand. “What game are you playing?”

He looks at me coolly. “The same one you are. But I’ve been thinking about this whole thing for days now, trying to put the pieces together. The Balboa Park fight helped me get my thoughts together a little more clearly, and then, being here, listening to Jean, made another big part of the puzzle slide into place.”

I glance between him and Jean. She smiles sadly at me, then gets up to refill our coffee cups.

“Will somebody
please
tell me what is going on? Because I don’t understand anything!”

“Yes, big brother, do tell.” Eli’s all smooth sarcasm, but I
can tell he’s as pissed as I am that Theo’s been hiding something this huge from us.

Theo doesn’t flinch under our scrutiny. “All along I’ve been wondering what the game has to do with this. From a programming perspective, it’s a million times more complicated to do what your father’s done than it is to just launch a simple worm. I mean, the worm is complex and all—so complex that it had to be uploaded in twelve pieces, something I’ve never even heard of before.

“But at the same time, why use the game? Why spend all that extra effort hacking into it, changing it to fit his and Pandora’s relationship, using it to actually upload the worm and destroy the world as we know it? From an efficiency standpoint, it just doesn’t make sense. You’re talking about months, probably years, of extra work that didn’t need to happen.”

“How else was I supposed to follow the clues? I mean, he wanted to send me on a scavenger hunt, so he used Pandora’s Box.” Bewildered, I look between Theo and Eli.

“Yeah, and there are a
million
easier ways to create a scavenger hunt than to mess with an existing game’s matrix. Unless—”

“Unless you already know that matrix intimately!” Eli crows. “You really are a genius, man.”

“He may be, but obviously I’m not, because I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about!”

Theo sighs, and I can tell he’s trying to bring his explanation down a level or five. “I’ve always been as interested in the makers of the games I play as I am in the games themselves. The makers of Pandora’s Box, Coronado Programs,
aren’t big game makers. They’re definitely the new kids on the block, so when they came up with this epic game that captured the attention of pretty much every gamer in the world, I wanted to know who they were. So I dug.”

“And?” I ask, still baffled. “What did you learn? What are they?”

“A San Diego–based think tank that specializes in solutions to major global environmental crises.”

“And they make video games?”

“They never have before. That’s the thing. But about three and a half years ago, if I remember correctly, they ran into a major cash-flow problem. The whole green movement exploded, and cash that used to be exclusively theirs started being earmarked for all kinds of different projects at different companies.”

“So they became video-game designers? That doesn’t make any sense.”

“No, what they became were backstabbing bastards.” Jean speaks up for the first time, her voice passion filled. “Your father … your father worked for them for years, warned them of what was coming if things didn’t change.”

“Coming? For what?”

“For the earth. For the environment.”

“Nobody listened?”

“Oh, they listened. But in the end, they sold him out. Not because he was wrong, but because he was right. In politics, being too right about a subject is almost as bad as not having a clue about it. At least that’s what we learned from Coronado Programs. That benign misinformation is actually the best bet in most cases.”

A feeling of dread comes over me, one that tells me I’m not going to like what I hear next. I want to run from the room, to cover my ears and sing at the top of my lungs like I did as a child when I didn’t want to hear something. But it’s too late for that. Too much is resting on us figuring this thing out.

“So what happened?”

Theo sits back, gestures for Jean to continue. She shakes her head, presses her lips together, but in the end she does as he asks. “Your father spent five years, at the behest—and expense—of ten major governments, working on a worst-case scenario for where we, as a planet, were heading. They wanted to know, from a scientific perspective, what Earth was going to look like in fifty, seventy-five, one hundred years. They wanted a ranked list of what the offenders were and how things could be changed to eliminate the worst of the problems.

“Your dad headed up the project, was involved in every aspect of it. But when he was finally finished, when he presented it to them, it frightened them so much—and pointed fingers at the biggest of the big campaign contributors—that they buried it. Buried
him
. He went from top dog at Coronado to working on projects that didn’t matter and no one else wanted.”

“And then they took that virtual worst-case scenario—the most brilliant of its kind—and turned it into Pandora’s Box,” Theo concludes. “The culmination of all your father’s work and research became an apocalyptic MMO that is one of the largest economies in the world and an incredible drain on the environment.

“I remember reading about it, about how he quit after staging a huge fit that succeeded only in putting the nails in his coffin,” Theo said. “For a man like him, it had to be a slap in the face, a nightmare of epic proportions.”

“It was. I’ve never seen Mitch like that. So angry, so hurt, so determined to make them pay for what they’d done—to him, to his team, to everyone in the world who would suffer because the people who could do something about his predictions were too blind and too afraid to try.”

“He was able to hack Pandora’s Box so easily because he designed it?” I ask.

“Pretty much.” Theo nods.

“And now he’s done what they tried to tell him couldn’t happen. He’s created his own worst-case scenario, using all of us—all of our lives—as research subjects.” The horror of it rips through me, claws at me until I can barely think. “We’re all just collateral damage to him.”

A few hours later, Jean sends us off in one of the Willow Farms trucks, on a back road in Colorado on the way to Hugoton, Kansas. The truck is filled up and loaded with enough extra gas to get us through the five-hour drive. We finally found the coordinates, N 37°10’31” and W 101°20’59”, but only after we built three houses (one for each of us) and battled with Oceanus, the Greek Titan in charge of the world’s water systems. He called forth the Mississippi and nearly drowned us—I’m still not certain how we survived, especially since he almost got me in his huge pincer claws more than once. There’s another task for us to complete, but
we won’t be able to do it until we get to an ethanol plant in Hugoton, Kansas, and find the code word.

“Hey, Pandora, can I have an apple?” Eli asks from the driver’s seat.

I roll my eyes, but he can’t see me as I’m stretched out in the back. Still, I hand him the fruit. Jean fed us again before we left, as well as filling up half the backseat with extra food. I’m so stuffed I can’t imagine eating again until tomorrow, but Eli and Theo don’t have that problem. Makes me wonder just how hungry they must have been in New Mexico, when even I was starving.

I close my eyes, overwhelmed once again by what they’ve sacrificed to help me on this terrible quest. I know Theo says he’s doing it for himself, but I saw through that argument even as he was making it. He rescued me, came with me, because he’s the kind of guy who does that. The kind of guy who stands up when no one else wants to.