“Let’s check it out,” Bryson whispered. He nodded to a window and gestured to Michael and Sarah to follow.
The glass crunched beneath their shoes as they crept up to it. Bryson swiped away the few jagged pieces of glass remaining in the frame and knelt down. Michael got to his knees on Bryson’s left and Sarah crouched to his right. Michael hoped the darkness would hide them from whoever was outside.
“An empty threat.” It was Trae speaking to Helga, shining a flashlight right in her face. They were surrounded by a group of five or six, all with their own flashlights pointed toward the ground. “You do realize we’re Tangents—we weren’t programmed to be idiots.”
Helga raised her hands above her head. “Well, you’ve got us cornered, and there’s too much at stake. If you don’t believe me, then I’ll prove just how high those stakes are. And if you decide to jump the gun and blow us to bits, then the message has already been sent. You’ll all die. Forever.”
Michael couldn’t make out much about the people standing behind their leader. He could make out Janey, though, and judging by their size, there were other children in the group as well. One boy looked to be as young as eight or nine.
Several moments passed in silence as the bearded man thought.
“What do you think she’s talking about?” Sarah whispered. “What message? How could she kill them?”
“The true death,” Bryson answered. “Something’s going on that we don’t know about.”
“Obviously,” Michael replied. He didn’t mean to sound rude; he was in total agreement as to how clueless they were.
“Boo!”
A girl’s face had appeared on the other side of the window, and Michael nearly jumped out of his pants. Bryson yelled and fell backward, knocking Sarah to the floor. Michael froze. Those dark eyes and that pale face. She giggled hysterically, then vanished again. Michael sucked in a breath of air.
“Quiet!” Trae screamed outside. “Tina, get away from there. Now!”
“Sorry, boss.” There was another giggle; then Michael saw the girl run off into the woods. Bryson and Sarah came back to crouch next to Michael.
“I was just trying to protect you,” Bryson said to Sarah. “She could’ve had a gun, you know.”
Sarah rolled her eyes and settled back into her place at the window. Helga was still outside, and they didn’t want to miss any of what happened.
“I call your bluff,” Trae said. “You’re not going to surrender, and I don’t have any more time to waste.” He turned back to face his people. “Kill them,” he said in an eerily calm voice. “Every one of them. I’ve had enough of this.”
“Now!” Helga yelled.
Suddenly a woman standing next to Trae slumped over and collapsed to the ground, like a puppet whose strings had been cut. She lay splayed out, arms and legs in an unnatural position. Her face was mostly hidden in shadow, but Michael could see her eyes had rolled back in her head, the whites shining in the dark.
Trae was at her side in an instant, feeling for her pulse. He didn’t need to say anything—his body language showed it all.
She was dead.
2
Michael’s breath caught in his chest, and the next couple of seconds seemed to stretch out forever. The group outside stared at their friend in shock, and then, as one, looked up at Helga. Trae bolted to his feet and whipped out a knife, pressed it to Helga’s neck.
“What did you do?” he bellowed. Spit flew as he yelled. “Tell me what you did or I’ll make sure each and every one of your pathetic friends dies a long and painful death!”
Helga was the picture of serenity. “Killing me or anyone else in my group will only make it worse. One of you will die every thirty seconds until you leave. And this order to my friends in the Sleep will stand until we leave. If you set off the explosives, you will receive the true death. If anything happens to us, same. Now leave.”
Trae stumbled backward a couple of steps, his hand dropping to his side. “You…you…”
Michael couldn’t believe this was the same man who’d been so terrifying just moments ago. “What did she do?” he whispered.
“I don’t know,” Sarah answered, “but it sure seems to be working.”
Helga still hadn’t moved, but she seemed a few inches taller. And Trae looked stunned. He stared at Helga, fear transforming his face.
“We swore to never do this,” he said weakly. “We swore.”
“We?” Helga asked. “Who is this ‘we’? We have nothing to do with you. We are trying to save the world from what you’ve done. You signed up for this, so don’t blame it on us. Leave, now. I’m done talking to you.”
She turned away, pausing to show she didn’t fear having her back to him, then calmly walked back into the barracks, closing the door behind her. Michael kept his gaze fixed on Trae. Some of his people had gathered around him, were whispering furiously. If he noticed them, he didn’t show it, because his eyes were glued to the door through which Helga had disappeared.
Someone tapped Michael on the shoulder and he jumped. It was his nanny.
“What’s happening?” Helga asked.
Before Michael could answer, a scream came from outside. He spun to see a girl—one of the youngest he’d seen—sprawled at Trae’s feet. A woman knelt panting by her side, as if she’d carried the lifeless child there to her leader.
“Dead,” the woman proclaimed to no one in particular. “She fell to the ground right next to me.”
Helga’s voice boomed from behind Michael. “And every thirty seconds there’ll be another! Leave! Now!”
Trae finally snapped out of his daze. “I swear on my maker that you’ll regret this, Tangent,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper. Then he turned from the barracks. Michael expected him to command his people to leave. But instead he just slowly walked away, the others who’d come with him following. Michael watched as they vanished into the trees like wispy ghosts.
“We better have a meeting,” Helga said, suddenly not sounding so confident. “There’s going to be hell to pay.”
3
They met in a room at the far end of the barracks, an old office with a desk and chairs. There was a cot in the corner, and Michael wondered if this was Helga’s private quarters.
“Sit,” the woman said as she took the chair behind the large wooden desk. Michael, his friends, Sarah’s parents, Walter, and the woman named Amy had been invited into the room. Everyone sat down except Walter, who stood behind them all with arms folded. “I know you’re upset,” Helga said to him. “Which is why I owe you an explanation. And, Michael, all of you deserve to know what happened as well.”
“You got that right,” Walter said. It seemed to Michael like he might say more, but he went silent.
Helga sighed. “Only two of them died.”
That was enough to set Walter off again. “Only two? Only two. I think you mean four. You gave the true death to two people, so two humans and two Tangents. Four beings who will never exist again. Without consulting any of us, you decided to go against every principle we agreed to when we joined you. And you’re supposed to be our leader!”
Helga stood up and slammed her hand on the table. “Yes! I’m your leader! And I did what I had to do! A lot more people would’ve died if I hadn’t done that—you know it, Walter!”
“We could’ve fought them,” the man countered. “We could’ve stood our ground and fought. Or we could’ve surrendered and started over. Or tried negotiating more. Anything but resorting to the one thing we’re trying to prevent!”
“He gave us an ultimatum,” Helga said more calmly. “I couldn’t risk him blowing those explosives and killing every one of us. Including four people”—she pointed at Bryson, Sarah, Gerard, and Nancy, one by one—“who aren’t backed up on the Hive yet. You want to talk about true death—well, these people are our friends, and I wasn’t going to sit back and allow that to happen to them. I had no choice!”
“You did have a choice,”
Walter answered.
Helga sat back down. “A lot more lives were saved than lost.”
“But—” Walter started, but Helga cut him off.
“Stop!” she shouted. “If you want to go out there and organize a coup, then do it. Go make your case and gather your votes. But what I did was necessary, and it’s time to move on.”
Walter didn’t answer. And he didn’t leave, either. He looked down at the floor, breathing heavily.
Michael sat, stunned, taking it all in, not sure he understood what was happening. The thing that really stood out to him was when Helga had pointed at his friends and Sarah’s parents. She’d very deliberately pointed at them, but not him. That simple gesture meant everything.
“Once and for all,” Bryson interrupted the silence. “Can someone please tell us—what is the true death?”
“Straight out.” Sarah nodded.
Helga leaned forward on the desk and clasped her hands together. “Remember what I explained earlier? Even if we’re not sure exactly how it works, for a Tangent to exist inside the body of a human, a connection needs to remain to the original person’s consciousness. It’s a link that can’t be severed or the body would die. We believe this is the reason the Hive exists.”
She took a deep breath, studying her hands as she rubbed them together. “The true death is when an intelligence stored within the Hive is destroyed. It can be either a Tangent or a human. Destroy it in the Hive and that…person, Tangent, consciousness, whatever you want to call it, is gone forever. And if it’s connected to a body here in the Wake, that body will die as well. They both cease to exist, as far as we know.”
She paused. “But that’s just one way for the so-called true death to happen. What it really means is quite simple. It’s when anyone—Tangent or human—dies without having a backup stored. However the death happens, virtually or in reality. If there’s no backup in the Hive, then a person’s intelligence, memories, and essence are gone forever.”
Michael was picturing the Hive in his mind. He wondered how they did it—how they killed a consciousness. He imagined floating in that vast space with all those orange pods, igniting one with a virtual flamethrower. He could almost hear the screams as the intelligence inside was burned to a crisp.
He shook the image out of his head and turned to Helga. “I’m still stored there, right?”
Everyone in the room looked at him.
Slowly, Helga nodded.
“And so is Jackson Porter,” he continued. “So we could still insert him back into this body and I could go on existing in the Sleep. Right?”
Helga nodded again. She seemed almost sad.
“And the reason that you pointed at Sarah and the others is because if we’re all killed here by the explosives, the rest of us wouldn’t die the true death. We’d revert back to our programs stored in the Hive.” He paused. “Except for these guys.” He gestured toward his friends. “No backup.” The two words felt cold and harsh.
Helga stood and walked to the other side of the desk, then leaned against it. “That’s all exactly correct, Michael. When the other Tangents and I gathered and made the decision to use the Mortality Doctrine to borrow bodies and come here, we made some important promises to ourselves. And one was to avoid the true death, for anyone, at any cost. But today I broke that rule because I had two terrible options. I’ll have to live with that decision, but we have to keep going. I believe that with your help, we can stop Kaine, whoever was behind Kaine in the first place, and this splinter group we met tonight.”
She folded her arms and looked down at the floor. “We call ourselves the Tangent Alliance. Ever since you were taken away from me, things within the inner workings of the VirtNet have been crumbling. Several Tangents broke away from their host programs. We saw what Kaine was doing, and we decided to fight against it. We want to restore things to the way they were. And I wanted you back. I think we have the same goals. Am I right?”
Michael glanced at Sarah, who’d been quiet since Trae and his gang finally left the barracks. She gave him a half smile, her eyes sad.
Michael sighed. “We definitely want to stop Kaine, Helga. But I feel like there’s something major that we’re missing. I don’t think it’s as easy as saying that Kaine is our enemy. We need to figure out what’s really going on, and I think the right place to start is the Hallowed Ravine. If we can…disrupt the Mortality Doctrine itself, at least we’ll stop Tangents from being able to leave the VirtNet.”
Helga clapped her hands together. “I taught you well, didn’t I? The Hive is merely a storage facility—the actual Mortality Doctrination happens exactly where you mentioned.” She gestured toward the door to the main room. “Well, we haven’t exactly been sitting around doing nothing. You saw what we have out there. People, NerveBoxes, NetScreens. We’ve been working, and we’re ready to take the next steps.”
This time Bryson spoke up. “Sounds to me like you better catch us up, then.”
“I want to know what’s going on out in the world,” Sarah added. “Things were getting bad even before we got caught in Agent Weber’s setup with the Lance device.”
“We’ve got answers,” Helga replied. “And some potential plans. But first, I think we all need some rest. Diving in right now will only make everyone miserable.”
As curious and anxious as Michael felt, he couldn’t disagree. He could have crawled under his rickety wooden chair right that second and fallen asleep.
“The Hive was the first thing I wanted you to see,” Helga said. “And then we got a little sidetracked, didn’t we?” She started moving for the door. “We’ll have a few more cots brought in. You can all sleep in this room. In the morning we’ll Sink into the VirtNet and I’ll lay out our plan and our resources.”
The last thing Michael noticed before Helga stepped out of the room was how she avoided Walter’s gaze as she passed him on her way into the main barracks.
4
Michael lay on his cot, hands clasped behind his head, staring at the ceiling. He stared at the shadows crossing its surface, and the longer he looked, the more they seemed to be moving, swirling, concealing something. It made him feel like he was inside the Sleep.
“Well, peeps,” Bryson said from his own cot just a few feet over. “Today was what you’d call a very strange day.”
Sarah was across the office, between her parents’ cots; her dad was already snoring quietly, and Nancy had admonished them every five minutes to go to sleep until she finally went under herself. There was a squeak of movement on a cot, then soft footsteps and a moving shadow. Sarah sat down on the floor next to Michael’s cot and patted his hand.
“Strange doesn’t even begin to describe it,” she said.
“Makes our old gaming days seem downright dull,” Bryson added.
Michael shifted and leaned up on an elbow. Sarah was close and warm, and it gave him some comfort. “I can’t believe you guys don’t hate me,” he said. “Think how sweet your lives were before I yanked you into my freak show.”
“Oh, please, not this again,” Sarah groaned. “Like we’d be better off living at home, not knowing the world was being possessed by Tangents and crumbling around us. At least we have an opportunity to do something about it this way.”
“But that’s the thing,” Bryson said, his face hidden in darkness. “What’re we going to do? Even if we do go to the Hallowed Ravine and somehow manage to destroy the Mortality Doctrine program, Kaine or someone else could just recode it down the road. Plus, there’s that giant Hive, growing by the second. Wipe that thing out and who knows how many people we’d kill? That true death crap.”
Sarah was rubbing her temples with both hands. “Guys, can we talk about something happy for a little while? Something that has nothing to do with the Sleep, or Kaine, or Tangents, or mass murder? Please?”
Michael reached out and touched her shoulder. Sarah had never said anything so glorious in all the time he’d known her.
“What else is there t
o discuss?” Bryson asked. “Are we going to tell each other our favorite childhood memories or something?”
“Yes, actually. That’s a great idea,” Sarah said, suddenly cheery. “That’s exactly what we’re going to do. You first, Bryson.”
“What? Serious?”
“Totally.”
Mostly dressed in shadow, Bryson swung his legs around and sat up on his cot, leaning forward with elbows on knees. “All right,” he said. “You asked for it. But it’s going to shatter your illusion that I was a childhood prodigy, well on my way to becoming the smartest man alive.”
“We’ll risk it,” Michael muttered.
Bryson rubbed his hands together, then started in. “Okay, I was…five years old, I think. So I was a little kid, but that still doesn’t excuse how stupid I was. I mean, seriously, I had to have been one brainless child. Maybe I had an implant later in life. Or hey, maybe I’m a Tangent!”
“Not funny,” Sarah said. “And would you please get on with this amazing story of what an idiot child you were?”
It didn’t faze Michael. He’d long since accepted that he was a Tangent. The lighter they could make of it, the better. It was a huge, and relieving, change for him.
“Christmas,” Bryson said. “Snowing outside, sparkly lights everywhere, a real tree in the living room. Man, that thing smelled good. My dad chopped it down himself while I watched. I’m pretty sure we stole it off some dude’s land, but that’s another story. Anyway, I was the youngest kid, three brothers and a sister. They were all at school and my mom had gone upstairs to take a nap. And there I was, poor little baby brother, sitting in the living room, staring at a mound of wrapped presents under the tree. So inviting. It was like the paper could talk, telling me I should take a peek, see what everyone would get from Mom and Pop.”
“You sneaked a look at some Christmas presents?” Sarah asked. “That’s it? What kid in history didn’t do that?”
“Well, I didn’t,” Michael said. “I’m Jewish.”