The Rendering (11 page)

I stood beside the shuttle window, scared and shaking and imagining all the terrible things I wanted to happen to Roach. I won’t go into detail, but I was hitting him with some very nasty vibes.

I mean, pure
dripping
evil.

Then I felt another dizzy spell: the shuttle seemed to tilt crazily around me, and I dropped to my knees and felt something click in my head.

Hard to describe. Like when you’re looking at a jigsaw puzzle and the right piece suddenly clicks in your mind. Everything comes together in a sudden deciphering and you
know
the piece fits. That’s what I felt in that moment.

The cable holding the HostLink snapped.

The sheared end of the cable whipped through the air with
a shrill whistle, and the HostLink crashed to the parking lot, transforming instantly from $250 million of biodigital wizardry into $1.95 of scrap metal.

I did that. I snapped the cable.

I didn’t know how, but I snapped that cable.

Your inborn ability to cause mishaps with electronic devices was magnified and focused when the Holographic Hub compromised your brain waves
.

Yeah, we know that now, that falling into the Holographic Hub juiced my streetlight-flickering and kiln-zapping skills. And the first thing I’d snapped was that cable.

But at the time, I had no idea how I’d done that—or even if I really had.

I freaked.

Still dizzy, I barely managed to pull myself to my feet and started hammering on the shuttle door, trying to get out. I don’t even know where I wanted to go: back into the bomb zone?

Not smart, even for me.

But I’d lost it. So I pushed. I pulled. Nothing.

I slumped against the wall in defeat. Then:

Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
.

The sound of the shuttle door unsealing. I turned, and the edges of my vision darkened into a tunnel.

The door slid open. I saw that someone was out there. Some
thing
.

I looked for a long moment.

Then everything went black.

“That’s the boy?” a deep male voice said.

“Kind of scrawny,” a female voice answered.

“Cut him a little slack,” a different man said. “He took a bullet in the leg—oh, and saved the world.”

“The world?”

“If Roach had stolen that HostLink, not even
we
could’ve stopped him. At least now we have a chance. The kid bought us time.”

“He’s still scrawny,” the female said.

One of the things you learn when you’re fighting a supergenius like Roach is that there’s always a plan B. And a plan C. And D, E, and F.

And don’t get me started on plans G through R.

The guy
never
ran out of plans. Ever.

I didn’t know this at the time, but in Roach’s helicopter, he and Hund looked at the smoke curling from the wreckage of the HostLink.

“Someone’s gonna pay for that,” Hund spat. “With blood.”

“Most assuredly,” Roach said.

“What now? We’ve got nothing.”

Roach slipped the Protocol cube from his pocket. “Wrong, Commander. We have Plan B. Instead of a single, massive scan, we’ll progress in stages.”

“You mean digitize them a few at a time?”

“Precisely. We’ll scan in a dozen and use them to power our scans of the next hundred. Then those hundred will prepare my servers to scan the next thousand—and the ten thousand after that.”

“Won’t they notice?”

Roach chuckled drily. “The idiot meatpeople, trapped in meatspace? Until I show them the glory of cyberspace, they’ll always be sluggish and stupid and disconnected. They notice nothing at all.”

“When do we start?”

“Immediately. Look down. See that nice little town?”

Hund nodded. “Sure.”

“Tomorrow, that town will be pristine: a stream of pure ones and zeros. And after I scan them, my research will progress
by great leaps. Oh, the experiments I’ll perform! The freedom they’ll discover from those fleshy anchors—”

Yeah, a little of Roach’s ranting goes a long way.

The thing is, I guess I stopped him from scanning in thousands—tens of thousands, millions—of people at once. Which was good.

Go me.

But Roach seemed pretty content to take this one step at a time. To scan hundreds of people into his machine first. To run experiments on them. To make his digital realm stronger and stronger every time he digitized another brain, ended another life. To exploit the power of scanned minds as his own private data banks.

Starting with my hometown.

And I’m no hero. I know that. If you’ve read this whole blog, you know that, too. I’m just an ordinary kid … with one quirk. And some friends.

Of course, I hadn’t even met them yet. Right then, I was unconscious in the blue shuttle, a hundred feet underground, hurtling away from the nuclear blast at ninety-five miles per hour.

Good thing they used a “cone” nuke, one of Roach’s inventions, which funneled the blast into a small perimeter and minimized fallout. See, that way—

Douglas
.

Yeah?

You are done posting for today
.

What are you talking about? I can’t end with me unconscious. I mean, Roach
still
got 99 percent of everything he wanted, and planned to scan in my town the next day. All my teachers, all my friends … Jamie.

You haven’t yet started your science assignment, which is due tomorrow
.

Well, the due date is kinda flexible.

I am monitoring your teacher’s computer. The due date is tomorrow, with no extensions. And you are currently receiving a C in class
.

A C? Sheesh. I’m aiming for a B-minus.

Still, I’m not really done with this—

You lived, Douglas. You saved the Protocol and the skunks. You smashed the HostLink
.

I didn’t keep that Memory Cube from Hund. I didn’t save my aunt.

Without you, we’d have lost already. Take your victories as they come
.

After all these posts, my blog traffic is still pathetic. But I don’t care. I’m gonna keep writing.

Maybe one day more people will stumble across this. Maybe one day they’ll understand.

For those of you who aren’t only reading, but actually e-mailed … thanks. We’re investigating every report of cyber crime, every whisper of VIRUS activity. We’re doing everything we can to make sure your town doesn’t end up like mine.

Now, where was I?

Oh, right: in the shuttle, when everything went black. Time passed. A hum surrounded me, the shuttle rocked me, then a crack of thunder split the world in two.

I mumbled in my sleep and fell back into nothingness.

When I finally woke, the first thing I noticed was the smell. Before I even opened my eyes, I knew where I was.

Well, I’d caught the shuttle and somehow woken in the root canal, that dark, dingy basement I’d found when I was ten. I hadn’t been there in years, but I still remembered the smell.

Mud and mildew. And apparently, I’d slept on a slab of cardboard. I sat up, leaned against the dirty concrete wall, and moaned. I ached everywhere.

For a minute, I rubbed my temples and tried to convince myself that I’d had a bad dream. That everything that had happened the night before … hadn’t happened. The explosions, the gunshot, the look in Hund’s eyes when he drew his knife.

My aunt lying motionless on the floor.

A wonderful vacation from reality, but a lie. I knew all that had happened, all that and more.

I pressed my palms into my eyes, to rub away the cobwebs. And to keep from crying as the image of my aunt flashed inside my mind. I needed to focus. I didn’t even know how I’d gotten there. I stared into the dark corners of the cellar. At least I was alone.

First I needed to call the cops. My aunt was dead. If Roach’s scanning her brain into his machine hadn’t killed her, then the tactical nuke had.

No way around that. I needed to tell the cops.

Plus I’d seen Roach and Hund invade the Center with a mercenary force and steal millions of dollars in biodigital
tech. Oh, and I’d snapped a cable with my mind—though I didn’t
know
that then but only suspected.

Still, on second thought, if I told the cops
everything
, they’d send me to a psych ward. Maybe I’d just give them the abbreviated version.

So I stood and stretched and rubbed my bruises. Then I stepped toward the crumbling stairs—and froze.

A shadow fell across the stairs. Someone was coming into the root canal. Someone coming for
me
.

This is what I imagined was stalking down the steps into the root canal:

I backed into the darkness and groped around until I found a nice-sized rock. I breathed through my mouth, trying to stay completely silent.

And as the shadow loomed closer, I tensed. No way was one of Hund’s soldiers gonna corner me in here. I’d bust his head open first.

The shadow stepped into the room and I lunged forward, swinging the rock.

“Bug?” the shadow said.

Jamie!

I had too much momentum to stop the swing, so I heaved the rock past Jamie, barely missing her head, and lost my balance. I stumbled and knocked her to the ground, sending her laptop crashing down.

“Bug!” She cursed at me. “Right in the dirt!”

“Sorry.”

“Who were you expecting, an ax murderer?”

“Worse,” I said.

She grabbed her laptop, then eyed me. “You look terrible. What happened last night?”

“What
happened
? The whole place exploded—and the—the centipede saved me from that
thing
—and ohmigod, my aunt is—” I swallowed. “And Hund pulled a knife and the monkeybeast—”

“Bug!” Jamie said. “Take a deep breath.”

I breathed. “Okay. Okay, everything started with the first explosion—”

“What happened to your
pants
?”

“I got shot.”

She looked at my leg. “Holy crap. Are you okay?”

“Yeah. No. Kinda.”

“You’re starting to scare me.”

“My leg’s fine. Listen, these guys took over the Center and—” I stopped and stared at her. “How did you know I was here?”

“I got your e-mail,” she said, checking her laptop for damage from the fall. “With all the news about an accident at the Center, I—”

“You got my
what
?”

“E-mail. To meet you here with my laptop.”

My stomach twisted. “Oh, no.”

“What?”

“This is bad, this is very bad.…”

She tapped a few keys, then looked relieved when her laptop responded. “Don’t worry, it’s still working. Even logs on. That’s weird. You’d need a satellite to get wireless here.”

“Not
that
. We’re being set up, Jamie. We can’t stay here.”

“I’m not going anywhere until you tell me what’s happening.”

“Jamie,” I said. “Let’s go—
now.”

“First you send an e-mail saying meet you here, then—”

“I didn’t send an e-mail.”

“Someone spoofed your address?” She clicked her touch pad. “Who?”

“I don’t know, and I don’t want to find out. We have to go.” I started pushing her toward the exit. “Before they show up.”

“Who’d send a crazy message about blue shuttles and the root canal and—”

“The blue shuttle?” I stopped pushing. “The message mentioned the blue shuttle?”

Nobody knew about the blue shuttle except the Center’s AI. And I could trust the Center’s AI.

I hoped.

Then I remembered. I remembered what I’d seen outside the shuttle the night before—and I felt a little unsteady. Because what I’d seen was impossible. Some things are simply too strange to exist.

“Doug!” Jamie grabbed my arm. “Stop freaking, and tell me what’s happening.”

“Okay.” I nodded. “Okay, where do I start?”

“At the Center last night, in your aunt’s office. Something happened when you were sending me that dragonfly file for our project.”

“Yeah,” I said. “The building exploded. And I fell.”

“Into that room, the Holographic Hub.”

I nodded and looked away, afraid she’d see something different in my eyes:
brain waves compromised
. I didn’t really want to think about that.

“And then,” I said. “And then …”

A flat computer voice said, “I will provide the necessary background information.”

Jamie yelped and I spun and looked frantically around the cellar. Still alone. Then, slowly, we both turned toward her laptop.

“My apologies,” the laptop said. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

“Jamie,” I said. “That isn’t funny.”

“No joke,” she said, looking as scared as I felt.

“Douglas,” the computer said. “This is Aunt Margaret. I’m speaking to you through the laptop.”

“Auntie M!” I blurted, relief washing over me. “You’re alive!”