Chapter 4
“You seen anyone that doesn’t look like you?”
“No sir, I have not,” Tommy Spade—that was his stage name—said to the man who was blatantly ignoring the ‘No Smoking’ sign at his establishment. His real name was Seth Johnson, but he hadn’t gone by that for a long time. Tommy Spade was his gambling name and his stripper name, not that it mattered much anymore. He was older, pudgier, and DeKalb had about five chicks tops who’d want his junk tick tocking over their nose like a clock’s pendulum. Nope, those days were done.
He was the proprietor of the Paperback Grotto, an old style porno shop that had been in his family for seventy years. People laughed, but porn was his family’s business. Tommy never understood why it was viewed as a dirty trade. He thought it was a necessity, just like food and water. Sex was a part of who we were, why be so damn uptight about it?
The Grotto had everything a customer needed for an old school spank or to liven up the bedroom with the better half.
Business had been shit, of course. No one was around anymore. The only clients he had were farmers who, in general, didn’t use the Mindlink. As that technology had proliferated, the farmers had retreated from it almost out of principle. They were like the Amish now.
But it didn’t matter. The Grotto was paid for and Tommy figured a few more years and that’d be it. The last porno shop on the planet. Tommy pictured himself like an old gunslinger, except he had dildos in his holster and tubes of lube on his bandolier. Maybe a disc of Horny Housewives 300 as a throwing star.
That’s a ninja.
Whatever.
The young man waited patiently. He had pulled up in a car, which meant he was either police or military.
“And you know everyone in town?” the man asked.
“There isn’t anyone to know anymore.” Tommy had already given the names of the twenty or so farmers.
“No one dark complected, different accent, that kind of thing?” Glass asked. He was thinking Middle Eastern.
“Well, we got migrant workers that help with the harvest, of course,” Tommy said. “They come in a bit, like the traditional stuff, the arcades . . . ”
“Arcades?” Glass raised an eyebrow: he was too young to get the reference.
Tommy hitched a finger toward the back of the store. “The wank boxes. Put in some money, watch a movie.”
The young man nodded.
“How long have the migrant workers been here?” Glass asked.
“A few weeks now. They move from farm to farm across the country.”
“Who uses them?”
“Everyone. We have no young population anymore and they’re cheap and reliable. A lot of them have been coming here for twenty years.”
Glass pulled on his cigarette. His eyes bugged Tommy, they were a dark green, but they conveyed nothing, like they had been whittled into his head with a pocketknife.
Glass took the list off the table.
“I appreciate you giving me the lay of the land.”
“Are you an officer?”
The man gave a nod goodbye and left. Tommy Spade immediately regretted the names he gave this man. Those eyes showed no quarter. What was the military doing out here?
= = =
At the same time, Raimey and his team were dressed plain clothes in the alleys surrounding a dilapidated high-rise on the south side of Chicago. Cynthia’s Sleepers had cracked the program that originated the hack. The tail of the programmer who built the software led here.
“It doesn’t look terroristy,” Janis said. The high rise was old and unkempt except for a garden that some elderly men and women were tending. Old people shuffled in and out. “It looks like an old folks home.”
“Check on 176 Elk Street,” Raimey said into his comm. “We’re seeing a lot of . . . uh . . .”
An ancient woman eked out of the door using a walker.
“Geezers knocking on death’s door,” Janis finished.
“. . . old people.”
“It is a retirement home,” the operator confirmed. She sent the data to their comm. The home was called Adventurous Gardens. Two elderly people held each other closely on the front page. The guy was hugging the woman from behind.
“Dude, are you reading this?” Janis’s eye scrolled up and down as he went through the site.
“No.”
“It’s a retirement home for elderly singles! Married couples aren’t allowed. Gross! The elderly are riddled with disease, you know. You read about that how gonorrhea gets passed around faster than their meds. So much loose skin . . .”
“You have a weird thing with old people.”
“They smell like graveyards.”
Raimey to the comm, “Should we just go in? I don’t think this is what we think it is.”
“It’s your call,” the operator said.
Raimey ushered Janis out of the alley. A centenarian smiled at Eric showing one brown tooth and a lot of gum.
“Seriously, man. Get me back to Iran,” Janis whispered.
They went to the front desk. A kind looking women dressed in whites was there. Raimey showed her his ID. “We’re looking for Jared Stachowitz.”
Eric scanned a nearby TV room and spotted a punchbowl of condoms that looked worked. “Ahmygod. I’m going to puke.”
“It’s perfectly natural,” Raimey teased.
“This way,” the nurse directed. She took them up to the second floor. It was filled with state-of-the-art Mindlink terminals.
“Wow, I didn’t expect this,” Raimey said. “Are you seeing this?”
“Yep,” the operator said.
“Most of the seniors prefer to be online,” the nurse said. “It’s given them a much fuller life, especially for our residents who are ill or weak.”
She pointed out a skinny bald man in a worn out robe two chairs down. An oxygen tank was by his side. His chest rose and fell in bursts. He was linked in.
“That’s Mr. Stachowitz.”
“We don’t want to kill the guy, waking him,” Janis said. The nurse gave him an ugly look. “Seriously.”
She went up to the man and shook him gently awake. His eyes opened blearily and he blinked into awareness. He looked over and saw Raimey and Janis.
“I thought you’d come,” he said in a weak voice.
= = =
Mike Glass enjoyed this assignment. The open land and sparse population reminded him of the backwoods of Kentucky where he was raised. He never knew his mother and Thomas Glass never explained what had happened. Mike had asked twice, got hit twice, and that had knocked the curiosity out of him. Thomas was a Marine ex-sniper, an avid hunter and a consummate drunk. Since he could walk, Mike and his father carpeted the hills and gullies hunting and trapping. Twice a year they would go in town to re-stock the cabin.
Glass could read, but not especially well. He learned in bits and pieces until he was fourteen when Ms. Kragley, a retired teacher, cornered Thomas when they had come into town for their bi-annual supply trip.
“Thomas, don’t you walk away. Your son has never been to school. What are you doing?” she said. Thomas had that southern characteristic where, even though he was hillbilly white trash, he was as polite as a politician to women. If a man had said that to him he would have curb stomped his face, but because it was Ms. Kragley—who at one point had taught him—his eyes were cast down like a kittens.
“I’m teachin’ him at home,” Thomas replied.
“You are!” Ms. Kragley said. The book section was near them. She pulled out a children’s book, flipped it open, and put it in Mike’s face.
“Read this,” she said. Thomas stared at his boots.
Mike knew some of the words, but not many. He didn’t utter a word. She snapped the book shut and put it on the shelf.
“What’s your name?” she asked.
“Mike.”
“Would you like to go to school?”
“He ain’t going to school, I need him around the farm,” Thomas said
. The politeness had started to melt away.
She studied Thomas. “I’m retired. Tutored then. Will that work for you?”
Thomas grunted, “okay.”
“You’re still up off 80?”
Another grunt.
“I’ll be there at nine a.m. tomorrow morning.”
On the way home Thomas didn’t say anything about their encounter with Ms. Kragley. When they pulled up and Thomas threw the truck into park, he cracked the door open, paused, then said, “learning’s good. It’s a good thing for you.” And then he went to the back shed where he distilled bourbon. Mike didn’t see him for the rest of the day.
Mike never had an imagination. He didn’t dream. He wasn’t inherently curious and he didn’t think about people’s emotions or motives. He was either all process: “to get to here, do A, B, and C,” or he was instinctually reactive like a venus flytrap clamping down on a bug.
When he turned eighteen, Ms. Kragley—not his father—suggested he enlist. In Mike’s mind, the recommendation brought up two paths: ‘Yes’ and that would involve enrolling and going off to boot camp. ‘No’ and he would continue his study and his normal life.
He chose ‘Yes’ because he had never been out of Kentucky and he knew he could only go so far where he was. He wasn’t educated and if his dad was any indication, nothing justified not enrolling.
He excelled and he was recruited into Seal training. He was a gifted athlete and his calm under duress—not yet diagnosed as sociopathic—gave him a 100% success record in training. During his psych profile they administered a Rorschach test. He described the ink pattern. The psychologist corrected him.
“You’re supposed to tell us what you see in the ink.”
“All I see is ink, doctor.”
The instructors had never seen someone so calm under live fire, interrogation technique, and combat training. As a curiosity, they put a heart monitor on him before a live exercise. The average heart rate of the other elite soldiers, the best of the best, rose well into the hundreds, even at rest. Mike’s hovered around fifty. One time sprinting for cover it rose to ninety-five. He was completely unaffected by the stresses of the real world.
And now he was in DeKalb, Illinois on a cool day that hinted at autumn. He liked his job, he supposed. The migrant worker angle was interesting. Off the grid, nomadic, and most likely undocumented. If terrorists were using these channels, it was an innovative way to go about it.
The owner of the porno shop said that two, Fernando and Margarito, had been in earlier, using the arcades. The owner had made a joke about Glass taking a DNA sample, but at that point the man’s voice had already been pushed into the background. He would start with them. There wasn’t a lot of ground to cover. Twenty farms and some dilapidated neighborhoods, most of which would not have any active data connection so they could be ruled out quickly. But you had to start somewhere and these two leads were as good as any.
Mike saw the tall, rusty trellis the porno shop owner described. “McWilliams” was at the top in a calligraphy style font. He turned underneath it to a mile long driveway. On each side, tall crops bent and swayed in the wind. The sound of the breeze slipped through the corn like a million whispers.
The house could have come from a painting. It was a white two-story set in a small yard bordered with a white fence. Smoke puffed out of the chimney. A barn was set back to the right and a small pack of dogs ran figure eights around the two buildings, playing.
He saw a man watching him from the window as he pulled up. He got out and walked to the house. The man opened the door before he had a chance to knock.
“A car, huh?” the man said. He had a smile on his face. Nothing to hide.
“Yes, sir. My name is Mike Glass, I’m with the President’s office.” Glass showed him his ID. The man glanced at it.
“Are you lost?”
“No sir, I don’t believe so. Is this the McWilliams’s farm?”
“I’m Frank McWilliams.”
He reached out and Glass shook his hand.
“What’s this about?” Frank asked. It was clear he still wasn’t concerned.
“I’m looking for Fernando and Margarito. Are they here?”
Frank looked surprised. He stepped out to the porch and spoke quietly.
“They’re at the dinner table. Is there a problem?”
“You’ve worked with them a long time?” Glass asked.
“Since I was a kid. They worked for my father.”
“Then I doubt it. But I would like to speak with them.”
Frank stepped aside.
“After you,” Glass said. He never gave his back.
When Glass walked into the dining room, Fernando and Margarito were at the table with a woman—Glass assumed Frank McWilliams’s wife—and a young boy. Margarito was using his hands to reenact a story. The woman was laughing. The boy had a thin smile on his face. He seemed off.
“. . . and THEN I took the drug lord’s head in my hands and,” Margarito made a quick motion with his hands. “SNAP! Dead!”
“That’s a horrible story, Margarito,” Fernando said, but he was laughing too.
Margarito took a slow slip from a glass of wine.
“Well . . . most of it was true except the last part. I was in the Mexican army.”
“You were a nurse,” Fernando said. This got the woman laughing again.
“A medic,” Margarito corrected.
They noticed the young man with Frank and quieted down.
“Fernando, Margarito, this is Mike Glass, he would like to ask you a few questions.”
Fernando and Margarito looked at each other confused. Fernando spoke up. “You are police?”
“Military. I’m on special assignment with the President’s office,” Glass said. He turned to everyone else in the room. “This should be quick, just a couple of questions.”
He asked if they had traveled with anyone. If they had seen or heard of any migrant workers that weren’t the norm. They answered both in the negative.
“What happened?” the boy asked.
“Justin, shh,” the woman said.
“No, it’s alright. You heard about the Terror War?”
The boy seemed to retreat.
“First hand, unfortunately,” Frank said. He ruffled Justin’s hair. “We were stuck at MindCorp during the attack. The world’s turning to shit.” Charlene gave him a look. “Sorry, but it is.”
“Well, it looks like they are trying to go online now,” Glass said.
“Is that why the Internet went down yesterday?” Justin asked.
Glass smiled. “Top secret.”
“I told you it was peligroso,” Margarito said to Justin. “That two way stuff can’t be good for you.”
Frank turned to Glass.
“Justin just got on the Mindlink and then ka-put,” Frank made a face. “The damn thing broke.”
“I was in a flight simul—” Justin started. Glass’s heartbeat rose to its max of ninety-five. No one knew. “-ator.”
“I heard those are fun,” Glass said.
“I didn’t need the plane,” Justin said.
“Really?”
“I program fast too,” the boy said proudly. He didn’t know what he was implying. “My friend Jared said I was the fastest he’d ever seen.”
“Maybe someday you’ll work for MindCorp,” Glass said. Justin beamed at the thought. Glass couldn’t believe it. Was it possible? He had to speak to Evan. “Well, it should be up soon. We’re working directly with MindCorp to get things back on track.”
Glass turned to Frank. “We’re done.” Back to the table. “Thanks everyone. Justin, keep it up.”
The boy gave a weird, quick wave and the others nodded. Glass thanked Frank at the door and asked if there were any other workers currently on-premise he should speak with.
“Nope, it’s just us,” Frank said. They shook hands and parted ways.
Glass got in the car and headed down the dirt driveway. When he
was out of sight, Glass pulled over, turned off his headlights and called Evan. This was not in the contingency plan. Evan told him what another unit had learned at an elderly rest home.
Fernando and Margarito slept in a lofted room in the barn. A long time ago the barn had been used to store hay, but the farm only handled crops now, so the barn had become a garage and living quarters for the workers that came to help.
Both men were buzzing from the wine. Not drunk, but another glass would have sent them into that territory. They shambled toward the barn after saying goodnight.
“I need some agua,” Fernando said and slapped his buddy on the back. “My head is already starting to hurt.”
“Wine does that to me, too. We just had two glasses or so, no?” Margarito said. “Tequila doesn’t.”
“That’s because you wake up two days later, Margo,” Fernando said. They laughed.
The barn was one hundred yards away from the house, nestled up against a cornfield. One large spotlight hung over the double door entrance. The loft had two large beds, a bathroom and a kitchenette. On the ground floor were alcohol fueled ATV’s they used to go to the main barn a half-mile away which housed the combines and large equipment used for the farm. On the walls were various antiquated farm tools: sickles and scythes, shovels and spades, heirlooms of the McWilliams’s past.
“Tomorrow’s going to be an early one, hermano,” Fernando said. Margo grunted acknowledgement.
They slid one side of the door open and the rattling of the gate masked the already muted sound of a bullet leaving Glass’s silenced Heckler and Koch Mark 23. Glass was crouched inside the barn, kneeling against an ATV. The .45 caliber round hit beneath Margarito’s nose and lodged into the back of his brain. He slumped down to the ground.
Fernando saw the muzzle flash, saw his friend collapse, but didn’t make the connection before another round hit him in the left temple and exited out the right side of his head, leaving a crater the size of a bloody orange. Glass moved like a cat and pulled them into the barn. He shut the door and went to the farmhouse.
He approached the back, indistinct from the shadows. He glanced across the kitchen window and saw the top of the wife’s head. She was washing dishes. He moved against the house to the porch.
The door was unlocked. Out here, no one locked them. He quietly slid the door open, just enough to squeeze through. Glass was low, knees bent, hunched over with the slide of the gun near his head like he used it for prayer.
He moved through the dining room. He saw the top of the woman’s head over the countertop he crouched behind. She was perpendicular to him. She stopped washing a pan and put it down. She looked out the window, thinking about something. Glass shot her in the head and swept around the countertop into the kitchen and broke her fall. He put her into the cupboard and listened for footsteps. Muted conversations. Nothing. He continued through the living room into the main hall. He paused to listen. He heard . . . water. Water pipes. Someone was in the shower. He moved up the creaky stairs and they made no noise.
To the right was the master bedroom. Glass could see the entrance to the bathroom and he heard the shower. To his left was the boy’s room. There were posters tacked all over the door.
Glass drifted into the master bedroom. The man—Frank—was in the shower, washing away a tough day’s labor. Glass leaned in and saw his outline through the shower curtain. Glass raised his pistol and shot the silhouette in the head. The shadow of a man washing his armpit collapsed into a heap beneath the bathtub.
No need to clean up now. All adults accounted for. He moved toward the boy.
He entered the room. The boy was on his Mindlink, seemingly unaware of his surroundings. Glass pulled a syringe filled with Sodium Pentothal out of his jacket. The boy turned, done with his session. Before the boy could react, Glass grabbed him by his shirt and threw him on the bed.
“Dad!” Justin cried. Glass didn’t bother to cover his screams, there was no one for miles.
Glass popped the syringe into the boy’s shoulder and pressed the plunger. The boy’s struggle stopped. He stared glassy-eyed at the ceiling, unconscious.
Glass took two long zip ties and bound the boy’s hands and feet. He carried Justin like a bride through the doorway. He hopped down the steps and exited the house.
He put the boy down in the front yard and went to the barn. He found large alcohol-based fuel canisters near the ATVs. He coated the base of the barn with one canister and lit it up. The fire bit into the fuel and the dry barn erupted into flames.
Glass trotted over to the farmhouse. He went inside and doused the lower level with the fuel and dropped a match. He came out through the front door and picked up Justin. The inside of the house was already engulfed—and through the windows—deep flickering orange danced on the lawn.
Outside the dogs howled and hissed at Glass. But they kept their distance. He was the predator, not they.
Ten minutes later, while he dreamt of a vacation he took fifteen years earlier with a stripper he had known (and adored), Tommy Spade’s dreams ended forever when Glass cut his throat.
The Grotto went up into flames too.
= = =
It was night when Glass got to the Derik Building. Glass brought the boy to Evan’s office and Evan directed him to a pair of Mindlink chairs next to each other. Glass put Justin down in one. Evan checked the boy’s vitals.
“Was it difficult?” Lindo asked. Glass shrugged. Lindo checked the boy’s pulse. He opened his eyes and shined a light into them.
“I sedated him with Sodium Pentothal. It should wear off soon,” Glass said. Lindo nodded.
“You did well Mike,” Lindo said. Glass showed no reaction.
Evan put a rubber tube around Justin’s right arm as if he were drawing blood. He rolled a stand next to the chair that held a bag of IV fluid. With precision, he inserted an IV needle into Justin’s vein and attached it to the bag. He taped the needle down on the arm.
“What’s that for?” Glass asked.
“I don’t want him to wake,” Evan replied. He tapped the IV and watched the fluid drip from the bag. “You can go.”
Without another word, Mike left.
He makes no noise when he moves, Evan noticed. Not even his boots.
Evan walked over to a server as tall as the room. It was new, backwards engineered from the self-contained Mindlink blueprint that Cynthia had given him for the Tank Major program. Two Mindlinks were attached to it with fiber. He turned it on and a hum filled the air.
He looked at the boy and marveled at what was in front of him. Lindo’s eyes teared up. He rubbed them away. No reason to celebrate. Not yet.
Cynthia had thought they would find some kind of supercomputer designed to disrupt cyberspace by flooding a targeted section with data. A classic hack on a massive scale. “That would explain the chaos,” she had said when she had briefed him just a few days ago on what they had learned so far. “During the anomaly, no program or portal functioned differently, like they were being manipulated—that would indicate intent—they just weren’t functioning, as if they had been short circuited. All signs point to a software program designed to overload our systems.”
Evan had listened intently and didn’t object to her hypothesis. But he knew she was wrong. She was too close, too shaken by what had happened to see her grade school error.
A mindscape is a human attribute. They would find a man. Evan didn’t think it would be in DeKalb, he thought they would end up in China, or somewhere else after they unwound some kind of routing algorithm. He didn’t expect a boy. But Evan knew at the end of the rainbow, they would find a human because that’s the only thing it could be.
What seemed so complicated because of the preposterous nature of its scale, was actually simple. The boy didn’t mean to cause the chaos. He just did it. He willed his reality into existence. The portals and programs that went dark were just caught in the wash of his jet stream.
The implications were enormous. The bo
y could manipulate and control cyberspace—at least theoretically—on a level that a thousand Sleepers could not. And it should have taken at least sixty terabytes per second to cause that kind of disruption, and the boy had done it on a three hundred megabyte line.
It had been theorized for decades that the human memory compressed data. It had to be true, because humans only used ten percent or so of their brain, yet they never ran out of space. An eighty-year-old woman could vividly remember her first kiss like it was yesterday. Using all the senses, the brain took memories and broke them down like Legos, only to rebuild again. That was why a perfume could trigger the memory of an old flame, or the morning sun on a calm lake would transport a person to a vacation they took when they were three. The raw data was parceled and shared to build different things. But that compression and decompression was all in our head, in one space.
As preposterous (once again, Evan thought) as it sounded, the boy’s brain was compressing data and decompressing it in cyberspace. He was capable of transferring this ability outside of himself. No person or system has ever done this without a codec on the other side to decompress the data stream.
So . . . how?
Lindo put a Mindlink connected to the giant server onto the boy. Lindo took the other and put it on himself. He lay down in a reclined chair and felt his consciousness get pulled outside his body.
Lindo hovered. Not above the boy, but inside the Mindlink the boy wore. He was analyzing the boy’s brain by using the micro frequencies that made a Mindlink function as sonar. The boy’s brain worked differently with a device that worked in the same predictable manner for ninety-nine percent of the population. Lindo thought he knew why.
After Albert Einstein’s death, his brain was removed and preserved for research. Great minds of the twentieth century wanted to find out how the greatest mind of the twentieth century worked. Would they find that Einstein’s brain was no different than their own?
No. They found it was quite different. Einstein was missing the parietal operculum (used for speech and language) on both hemispheres of his brain, but the inferior parietal lobe—which was responsible for mathematical thought, visual cognition, and imagery—was fifteen percent larger than a normal brain.
He thought differently and saw things differently not because of education, but because of evolution.
Evan gasped.
Justin’s inferior parietal lobe was thirty percent larger than normal. And like Einstein, parts of his brain were completely different than anything Evan could have imagined.
Had Lindo seen this boy’s brain without knowing its capabilities, he would have said either the person was dead at birth or a genius.
= = =
Justin woke up floating in a white space. There were no visual cues to call it a room. It could have been the size of a closet or as vast as the universe. There were no shadows or bends, no hint of distance. He sensed someone in the room with him.
“You’re up,” the man said.
Justin rotated to his right and sat up on the bed of air. The man wore all white. Justin did too. Suddenly Justin remembered.
“My parents!” Justin yelled.
“What do you mean?” the man asked calmly. He walked over to Justin.
“A man took me. He may have hurt them!” Justin said. He shook from the thought.
“Shh. They know you’re here. Everything’s alright,” the man said. He was short and stubby and wore glasses. “My name is Dr. Evan Lindo. They asked that I help you.”
“Help me? No. The man. He threw me down. He had long hair. He—” Justin started. He was confused. He didn’t trust this, it felt wrong.
“This man?” Lindo asked. In the nothingness a picture appeared of Mike Glass.
“Yes! That man!” Justin said.
“He’s not real, Justin. We’ve seen the dream you had of this man coming to your home. He came at dinner and asked questions and then left. Then he came back and took you. You’ve had a serious accident, Justin. You’re in a coma. We’re at a hospital right now.”
“I don’t believe you,” Justin said. The room vibrated. Evan felt it, but Justin seemed unaware.
“You fell off your four wheeler while following Margarito and Fernando back from the utility barn. You hit your head and broke your neck.”
“How am I here?” Justin asked.
“This is how we test coma patient’s true brain activity. Your father Frank said you had just been on a Mindlink, which was a blessing. If you hadn’t, it would have been much harder to connect to you, to even get here.” Lindo looked around at the white space they were standing in.
“Can I see Dad?” Justin asked.
“Yes, very soon. Your father is going to help you recover,” Lindo said. “Because you’re here, we can now develop a proper rehab program to pull you out.”
“What about my neck?” Justin asked. He was scared.
“Your hands and feet are reacting to us poking and prodding. Not perfectly, but that’s fine. You’ll recover once we beat this,” Lindo said. “I need to go now, but have faith and know that your parents are right next to you. In fact, your mother is holding your hand.”
“I feel nothing,” Justin said.
“You will. In time. We’ll begin the rehab very soon. In this space, it will feel like a couple of hours. Your father will tell you what to do and I’ll be connected too, but only in voice. I know this is strange, and difficult to comprehend, but you’re doing great. What would you like this room to be?”
“What can it be?” Justin replied. He was so confused.
“Anything. A beach with an ocean and jet skis. A house. A toy store. Whatever makes you the most comfortable.”
“I want my Dad,” Justin cried. He curled up into a ball.
“I know, son. And they want to be with you too. Soon,” Lindo replied.
Justin didn’t respond. He was curled in like an armadillo. The room shook again.
“I’m trapped here,” Justin said. The voice came from all around. Evan could feel Justin’s pain as if it were his own. The boy vanished from view.
“Why am I trapped here?”
“It’s for your safety, Justin.” Evan had to stay calm. However powerful, Justin was still a boy. “Don’t disappear. Come back. We can’t get you well if you aren’t here.”
Evan could feel Justin poking and prodding at his avatar. Suddenly he could feel Justin’s mind encroach on his own.
“Justin! This isn’t a game!” Evan yelled.
The boy re-appeared in front of him. “I want to go home!”
Evan got down on one knee. He saw that Justin’s eyes were onyx black and the interior of his mouth glowed neon purple. “Then listen to me, Justin. If you follow my instructions and work really hard, you will see your home. You will see your mom and dad, okay?”
The black eyes and glowing mouth disappeared. Now a small, scared boy stood in front of him.
“I’ll make this a beach,” Evan offered.
“I like books.”
“With books,” Evan said. “Be brave.”
Evan disappeared and a cabana on a Caribbean shore appeared around Justin.
Evan pulled off the Mindlink. Sweat drenched his body. The kid didn’t realize it but for a moment he had hijacked the program, he had even crept into the interior of Evan’s mind. If Evan had had any doubts about his actions to this point, he didn’t now. The boy was extremely dangerous.
The false construct was necessary. You couldn’t reason with a child. You couldn’t kill their parents and then expect them to give you their mind. The boy wouldn’t wake the entire time he was being used. Instead he would think he was doing exercises to improve his mind at the encouragement of his father. But the whole time, he would be dismantling infrastructure, hacking into secret files, influencing, and yes—even killing—foreign leaders.
Evan marveled at his own genius.