Game Over (5 page)

A flash of anger went through Rick. He was never very good at controlling his temper, especially around pompous authority figures like Mars. He jumped to his feet, ignoring the dull ache that still went through his legs sometimes, especially when he moved too quickly. “What's that supposed to mean?” he said.

“We're still trying to assess the damage that's been done to your brain . . .”

“There is no damage,” Rick said—though he was nowhere near sure of that. “You have to send me back in.”

“I don't have to do anything,” said Mars. “If your mind was somehow altered by going through the Breach, sending you back could cause more damage than it prevents.”

“I need to get back into the Realm,” said Rick. His heart felt like a clenched fist in his chest. “I won't leave Favian and Mariel to die in there. I can't. I've got to find a way to get them out.”

Mars gave a rough snort. “More friends.”

“That's right. And I promised Mariel—”

“Ah, Mariel!” Mars cut him off dismissively. His permanent frown seemed to turn upward in a chiseled sneer. “Don't you understand? There is no Mariel. There never was.”

With that, Mars turned on his heel and stormed out of the auditorium.

5. GLASS TOWER

THERE WAS A
little grove of trees planted outside the Dials' house, a small cluster of oaks and elms and maples that had been set there to enhance the view from inside. When the Dials were in the house, they could look out, and the trees' branches partially blocked the sight of the barbed wire and the guard towers that surrounded them. It was a nice effect. It made the family feel less like prisoners of the MindWar Project.

Now Rick was standing under the trees with his hands in his pockets and his shoulders hunched against the cold. The temperature was dropping steadily as the sun was dropping toward the western horizon. Rick shivered a little, his breath misting in front of him. Lost in thought, he watched the guard tower through the branches, his eyes on the glassed-in booth at the top. Inside the booth, Rick could see the guard pacing back and forth. He would come to the glass wall nearest Rick and look out over the compound, then he would move off to the other side of the booth, out of Rick's line of sight. A few moments would pass. After presumably scanning the forest outside the
barbed wire, the guard would come pacing back into view again.

“Mars is right, isn't he?” the Traveler said. “Your symptoms—your headaches—they've gotten worse since you went through the Breach, haven't they?”

Rick barely nodded in answer.

“And the nightmares—do they still seem real?”

Slowly, Rick turned to him. His father was hunkered inside a blue overcoat. He had a black woolen watch cap pulled down over his bald head. The little puffs of frost that came out of his mouth as he breathed rose up and fogged his glasses.

Without answering him, Rick opened his own overcoat and pulled his arm out of the sleeve. He rolled up his sweatshirt sleeve and held out his bared wrist so his father could see the scratches there.

The Traveler let out a long breath. Gently, he took hold of his son's hand. He frowned as he turned Rick's arm back and forth, examining the marks. “Tell me what you dreamed,” he said.

Rick turned to look up at the guard tower booth again. The soldier inside looked out through the glass wall, then turned and paced away out of sight.

“I dreamed about the Golden City,” said Rick.

“The Realm's battery,” his father murmured, studying his arm. “The place where Kurodar's imagination enters the Realm and powers it.”

“Right. In my dream, it was littered with dead security
bots. Creatures Kurodar had imagined into being. He had withdrawn his energy from them, and their corpses were rotting. But when Kurodar sensed my presence, he brought them back to life and sent them after me. One of them—a dead Boar warrior—grabbed my arm. When I pulled away, his claws scratched my wrist.”

Rick still didn't turn back as his father examined the marks. He kept watching the booth. The soldier paced back into view through the glass.

He could hear the concern in his father's voice. “You dreamed that? And when you woke up . . .? These marks . . .?”

Rick nodded, still without turning. “Yeah. When I woke up, the scratches were there.”

The soldier in the booth looked out the glass for a moment, then turned and paced away out of sight.

Rick glanced over at his father now. His dad's cheeks expanded as he blew out another long, whistling breath.

“What's happening to me?” Rick asked him. He could hear his own voice trembling. It wasn't just from the cold. It was fear too. He sounded like a little boy afraid of the dark.

His father examined the wounds some more. He didn't answer.

“What did Mars mean about Mariel?” Rick asked. “That there is no Mariel. That's true, isn't it? Otherwise, why was her coffin empty except for that black box? What was that thing? Who is Mariel, Dad?”

He had asked his father these questions before—after
he had seen the empty coffin. But his father had put off answering them. He wasn't sure, he said. He needed to get more information, he said. Rick had waited to hear what his dad had found out. But he couldn't wait anymore. Everything was too confused. He was beginning to be unsure of what was real and what was not. In his life, in his mind, in his heart—everywhere.

His father sighed and let go of Rick's hand. As Rick slipped his arm back inside his overcoat, his dad said, “I'm still not sure. Mars is not exactly quick with a straight answer. He won't tell me much, but I got some of it out of him and I think I can guess the rest.” Rick's dad, quiet as he was, absentminded as he was, was also one of the strongest, most self-assured people Rick had ever met. It was his faith, Rick knew. His faith seemed to fill him up, from inside somehow, to keep him strong and tranquil no matter what was happening around him. Now his confidence gave Rick confidence too.

Bundled up inside his overcoat again, Rick shoved his hands into his pockets and lifted his eyes to the guard tower, watching the soldier up there pace as he listened to his father speaking.

“When I first stumbled upon Kurodar's Realm,” the Traveler said, “I handed over much of my work to Leila Kent, and she passed it on to Mars. Included in that work were our BCI experiments, our attempts at full brain-computer interface. There were experimental files Professor Jameson and I had created in which we'd tried to download
the minds of several hundred volunteers and translate them into a form that could be read by a computer.
Connectomes
, they're called.”

“Yeah, I remember. I was one of the volunteers. Most of my friends did it too. You made those things of all of us.”

“That's right. Just about everyone we knew helped out by hooking their brains up to our computers, and we made connectomes of them, or tried to. There were also plenty of strangers we just recruited for the experiment.”

“Okay,” said Rick. “What happened then?”

In the booth above the winter branches of the trees, the soldier paced out of sight again.

“Mars acted too quickly,” the Traveler went on—and even without looking at him, Rick could hear the irritation in his voice. “He felt the security situation was urgent and he had to act. Even before I could fully complete programming a system that would safely immerse our MindWarriors into the Realm, Mars jumped the gun and sent three subjects in without my knowledge.”

“Subjects . . . You mean people. MindWarriors like me. Mariel, Favian, and the other guy, the one I saw in the Spider-Snake tunnel.”

“The man you call Favian was a young man named Fabian Child, an Army clerk who happened to have tremendous gaming skills. Mars thought he might be able to help even though he wasn't really a warrior. He wasn't even very courageous . . .”

“No, I know,” said Rick with a little smile, thinking
of Favian's perpetually worried look. “But he's courageous enough, it turns out. More than he thinks, anyway.” He kept gazing up at the glass booth at the top of the tower. And the soldier kept pacing back and forth within.

“The other man was a United States Marine sergeant named James Posner. A decorated combat veteran, plenty tough and plenty brave, but not much of a gamer.”

“What about Mariel?” said Rick. “Tell me about Mariel.” He actually held his breath, waiting for his father's reply.

“Mariel,” his father said slowly, “was not a person at all. She was a program. I'm not sure whether Mars used one of our connectomes or whether he combined two or several of them together. He won't tell me. But the mission was so dangerous, Mars wanted to experiment with sending in a connectome rather than a real person. If he could stop Kurodar with programs instead of people, he thought he could reduce the risk of casualties. You can't blame him for that. He was looking to save lives.”

“No, you can't blame him,” Rick tried to say, but the words wouldn't come out. He could barely speak. He could barely take in the information. His head felt like it was filled with mist. Mariel. A program. A “connectome.” Not a real woman. Not an actual person at all. Which meant that all those feelings he had for her . . .

“The mission was a disaster,” his father went on. “The MindWarriors were immersed without full security. They'd barely traveled ten yards from the portal when one of Kurodar's security bots spotted them and attacked.”

“The Spider-Snake,” Rick whispered hoarsely. He—who had twice the gaming skills of Fabian Child combined with at least some of the courage of Marine sergeant James Posner—had only just barely outrun the thing and defeated it . . . and even then, he had needed Mariel's and Favian's help.

“Sergeant Posner was killed trying to defend the others from the Spider-Snake,” his father said. “And Mariel and Favian were wounded so badly, their minds were cut off from their portals. Mars lost connection with them and there's been no way to extract them.”

Rick nodded dumbly. He had seen Posner in the tunnel . . . or what was left of him. And as for Favian and Mariel . . . “They're getting weaker every day,” he said. “They don't even remember who they are . . .” The words brought a new thought into his mind. A new thought with new pain. “Mariel doesn't know,” he whispered. He stared up through the branches at the soldier pacing in the guard tower booth. “She doesn't know she's not real, does she? She doesn't know she's just a computer download.” The idea was a special agony to him. The image of Mariel rose in his mind: her warmth, her grace, her strength, her beauty. “She thinks she's a human being,” he said. “She thinks I'm going to save her and reconnect her to her body and . . .”

Standing beside him, his father shook his head sadly. “I don't know. Probably. That's probably what she thinks.”

Rick had to pause a few moments to subdue the waves of sorrow that were washing over him. Ever since Mariel and Favian had been injured, their energy had been slowly bleeding out of them, their Realm selves aging quickly toward a horrible living death. But Mariel had hope. Her hope was Rick. She believed he was a hero who had come to save her. She believed he had been sent to rescue her from her dying Realm life. She didn't realize that her Realm life was the only life she had ever had, the only life she was ever going to have. Bring her out of the Realm, and Mariel would be nothing, some electronic impulses, some numbers flashing in a box. Nothing.

Rick went on gazing up at the guard tower. He didn't want to face his father. He didn't want his father to see the pain and misery in his eyes. He gazed up at the guard tower, and slowly, something occurred to him . . .

The soldier. The pacing soldier. He had come to the glass window again a few moments ago. He had looked out and paced away again out of sight . . . and he had stayed out of sight. He had been gone a long time now. Too long. Rick kept looking up there, waiting for him to pace back into view, and he didn't. Seconds went by and more seconds, and he didn't reappear. Rick murmured, “Where is he?”

He heard his father say, “What?”

“That soldier,” Rick said, his voice still low. He was thinking—thinking fast—trying to figure it out. Maybe it was a change of shift or something. Or maybe the guy had paused to get a drink of water or a snack. But something deep down inside him told him it wasn't that. It was something else. Something wrong . . .

“What's the matter?” his father asked him, following his gaze to look up at the tower.

Rick shook his head a little. “Nothing, I . . .”

Before he could finish, he saw a movement in the high booth. A reflection on the glass. The soldier was moving back into position.

There he is!
Rick thought with relief.

The soldier came into full view, looking out through the glass of the booth. And all of Rick's relief vanished.

Because it was not the soldier anymore. It was not even a human being!

It was a giant humanoid Boar! It was one of the soldier Boars from the Realm, a great hairy, tusked pig standing tall on two legs. And dead. He was dead, like the Boars in Rick's dream. A dead soldier Boar from the Golden City, his pig face half rotted away to reveal the skull beneath.

Rick stared up at the tower booth, thunderstruck. The dead Boar peered out at the compound through the glass, grinning its skull grin. Then it lowered its eyes. It looked down. It looked directly at Rick. Its grin grew even wider.

Then it vanished. Melted into air. Gone.

“Did you see that . . .?” Rick's father began to say.

But Rick was already running past the trees toward the tower.

His mind was racing as he ran. His sneakers smacked the frozen earth as he broke out of the low branches and headed for the tower base. Images from his nightmare rose up before him. The Golden City. The Boar Soldiers coming
to life. The skeleton Cobra Guards rising up to bare their fangs. The rotting Harpies swooping down on him from above . . .