Game Over (23 page)

The sight of the cemetery chilled him, but it was what he saw beyond the graves that made him quail.

It was off in the middle distance, not that far. It was like nothing he'd ever seen before, nothing in Real Life, anyway. Beyond the graveyard, the sky seemed to just . . . go out. Like a candle flame when you blow on it. Like a lightbulb when you throw the switch. The whole world beyond the graveyard seemed to just . . . go out. And in its place, there was a wall of burgeoning, shifting, solid cloud boiling and churning like some great wizard's potion. Now and then, light flashed from inside the heart of the miasma: lightning. And in the moment after came that low grumble of thunder.

“What . . . what's that?” said Favian. His voice trembled.

“Guess that's the fog cloud Mariel was talking about,” said Rick—and he could hear that his own voice wasn't all that steady either.

“You have to pass through the cloud to reach the interface,” said Mariel. With every word she spoke, more of her strength and energy seemed to drain away.

Rick and Favian stood staring across the misty graveyard at that boiling wall of solid atmosphere. As the thunder subsided, another sound replaced it. A low, rhythmic boom.
Boom. Boom. Boom.
Very soft. Very far away. But all the same, Rick could feel the pavement quake underneath his feet every time the sound reached him. He felt himself shrink inside his armor, fear pulling him into himself.

It was the sound of footsteps. Something pacing back and forth. Something huge.

Rick's confidence left him all at once. It was like water dropping out of a bucket when the bottom gives way. Suddenly, he knew with absolute certainty: He was going to die in there. He was going to walk into that cloud and meet whatever was pacing inside it, waiting for him, and he was never going to come back. The best he could hope for was that God would let him destroy the interface before the monster overcame him. That he could stop the attack on his country—on RL—before he lost his life.

Taking a long and shuddering breath, he turned away from the spectacle of the lightning-laced wall of cloud. He
turned back to the canal. He realized he had no choice anymore. He had to tell Mariel the truth. He couldn't walk into that cloud—he couldn't die—and leave her to believe that he would somehow save her. The truth might break her heart. It might make her hate him. But he had to tell her. He couldn't die with the lie on his head.

He moved close to the balustrade and looked over the stone rail into the silver water. He felt Favian at his shoulder, hovering nearby, curious.

“Mariel,” he said.

And her voice surrounded him—and the warmth and strength of her presence was as close to him as the armor was close to his skin. “What is it, Rick?”

“There's something I have to tell you.”

“What?” said Molly. “What is it?”

The Traveler and her father—and now Chuck the tech guy, too—were gathered around Professor Jameson's computer, staring at the code rolling down the screen. They were all staring openmouthed as if they were looking at . . . well, who knew what? Molly had no clue what they were seeing. It made her want to scream with frustration.

“What is it?” she said again. “Is it Rick? Is he all right? Is something wrong?”

In answer—if you could call it an answer—Rick's father and her father turned to look at each other silently.
Chuck the tech guy turned to look at her. But none of them spoke.

“Daddy!” Molly cried out finally. “Tell me what's happening!”

Professor Jameson cleared his throat as if he were about to give a lecture.

“We're trying to isolate the code variation that keeps damaged avatars stuck inside the Realm,” he told her.

“Yeah, yeah, I get that,” Molly said impatiently, though she had only the vaguest idea what it meant.

“To do that . . .,” her father continued slowly, glancing at her only every other word as if he found it difficult to meet her eyes. “To do that, we were going to compare the code for Mariel's connectome with the code for Fabian Child's avatar. That way we could find the similarities in damage. Do you understand?”

“Yes. No. Sort of. I don't know. Why?” said Molly. “What's it mean? Why is everyone so excited?”

“As I was studying Mariel's connectome, the patterns began to seem familiar to me,” her father continued.

“Familiar? Those numbers? What—”

Professor Jameson cut his daughter off. “You remember how you and Rick helped us out by coming in and letting us borrow your brain waves for our experiments in brain-computer interfaces?”

“Uh, yeah, sure, you hooked up some wires to our heads and—” Molly stopped talking abruptly as some inkling of
what her father might be telling her began to filter into her mind. “You mean . . .?”

It was the Traveler who started speaking now. “When Mars acted on his own and sent these first MindWarriors into the Realm without my knowledge, he used our research to build the avatars for Fabian and for Sergeant Posner. To try and limit the risk, he sent in one warrior who wasn't human, who was just a connectome, a collection of downloaded code. He used our research materials to accomplish that. And he chose the most complete connectome we made, the one that was nearly human because we were so familiar with the subject we were downloading that we could fill in the gaps ourselves.”

Molly turned from the Traveler's mild gaze and stared back at her father. The large, shambling Professor Jameson finally looked directly at her.

“He chose your connectome, Molly,” he said. “He used the download of your mind to build a MindWarrior.”

“My . . .,” was all Molly could say. Her mouth had turned as dry as ashes.

“He used the download of your mind to create Mariel,” Professor Jameson told his daughter.

“You mean . . . You mean I'm Mariel?” she asked softly.

“No, no, no, of course not. You're not Mariel,” her father said. “But to all intents and purposes, Mariel is you.”

Half a world away, Kurodar felt his power nearing its very peak. The Battle Station was completely under his control and was steadily charging, almost ready to fire. He could feel the efforts of the people in the American government trying to hack their way into it, to wrest it away from him, but he flicked their efforts off like so many flies with the merest effort of his mind. They could not touch him.

Meanwhile, in the Realm, what was left of the Realm, the Golden City, he sensed his nemesis, Rick Dial, moving toward the interface. This made him glad. The boy had defeated him twice, but Kurodar was certain it would not, and could not, happen again. The King of the Dead, the last defender of his territory, was virtually indestructible. It was a thing from the very core of his own mind, automatically drawing on the power of his imagination so that any damage Dial managed to inflict on it would be almost immediately repaired. What's more, it could do more than attack. It could create on its own, so that as often as Dial launched himself against it, he would find himself facing a full complement of reinforcements, a legion of destruction.

Kurodar was going to unleash an attack of unimaginable scope on the United States and, at the same time, he was going to kill the Traveler's son.

He was, at this moment, everything he had always wanted to be.

He had been dreaming of this day forever. When he was a little boy, he remembered looking at his father in his sharp, crisp KGB uniform. He remembered thinking his
dad was almost like a god, inspiring fear in everyone who saw him, wielding the power of life and death. There could be no one, he had thought, more powerful than his father was. And he had wanted to become like that himself. Even as his father laughed at him for his ugliness, or made fun of him for being a weak, puny intellectual, or struck him in his drunken rages, dealing out humiliating beatings in front of his mother and in front of strangers . . . Even then, Kurodar worshipped the man and wanted to inherit his god-like strength.

Now he had. The King of the Dead was the very image of that father he admired—but with this twist: he had the son's mind, the son's genius. In MindWar, Kurodar had become the man he always wanted to be. He had become his father. He had become that god.

It was the point and purpose of all his work. And now nothing and no one could stop him.

As Rick peered down into the silver water of the canal, Mariel's face and form appeared to him faintly. He wasn't sure whether she was really visible beneath the glinting current or if he simply imagined her there as she would be. But he could feel it was she—her spirit, her essence. He could feel it in the response of the armor she had given him, the metallic second skin that rippled and shone over his entire body.

He drew a breath and when he let it out, it carried the words he had been holding inside him all this time.

“Mariel,” he said down into the water, “I can't take you with me.”

Mariel's voice rose up to him and surrounded him, filling the mist that hung everywhere. “I know that, Rick. I'm not strong enough anymore to break through the cloud. You'll have to go and face this last security bot alone. You'll have to—”

“No,” he said, “that isn't what I meant. I meant I can't take you out of here. I can't take you out of the Realm.”

Mariel didn't answer. It was Favian, hovering just behind Rick, who said sharply, “What? What do you mean? That's crazy. You said you could. Why not?”

Rick swallowed. He could feel the seconds ticking away, the Battle Station in RL charging, time running out. But he had to say this. He had to. “Mariel, you've done everything for me. I would never have survived this long without you. My sword, my armor, the fact that I can use my spirit to control the fabric of the Realm—you gave me all that and I'd've been dead a thousand times over if I didn't have it.”

“That's right!” said Favian. “You'd've been killed if it weren't for her. We both would've been killed.”

But Mariel remained silent.

“But see,” Rick stumbled on, “Favian here, he's an avatar, like me. He's made out of the link between a living human being and a computer. I have to bring him back to
free that human being from his interface with the Realm. So he can live, see. So he can go back to his life.”

“But what about Mariel? What about her life?” Favian said. “She's got to live too.”

Still Mariel said nothing.

“You, Mariel, you're not what Favian is,” Rick said. “You're what's called a connectome. A computer-generated code that imitates a human mind.” It was hard, but Rick finally forced it out. “Look, I'm not a science guy. I'm just a football player. But the bottom line is this: You're not a person, Mariel. You're a program. There's no you in RL. There never was. There's just a machine, generating code.”

“That's crazy!” Favian cried out. “That's ridiculous! That's—”

Now Mariel finally spoke, cutting him off. “Rick, are you sure?” she said. And the sound of her voice made Favian stop talking. The sound of her voice made Rick stand straight, gripping the stone of the balustrade. He had never heard her sound this way before. He had never heard this tone of doubt and fear from her. But he heard them now. “I can't . . .,” she began. “I mean . . . it doesn't seem . . . I remember things . . . the laughter . . . the blue of the sky . . . I remember . . . that kiss . . . How is it possible if I'm just . . .?”