by Stan Lee
“Hey!” she screeches, and Cameron understands with a sinking sensation that he’s been recognized. “It’s the kid from YouTube! The lightning kid! You wanna dance? These things are amazi—”
“I’m sorry,” Cameron says, and locks his mind into the exo-suit software. “This isn’t your fault.”
“Huh?” the woman says, but she’s no longer in front of him. The suit, animated by Cameron’s will, is racing away through the crowd with her body still strapped helplessly in, her legs pumping in time with the skeleton’s pistons, her shrieks of terror falling on the deaf ears of the machine.
“Let me out of this thing!” she screams, as the suit’s arms—and her arms with it—swing wide. She runs headlong into his pursuers, wings spread, like a soccer player celebrating a goal.
She does not put her arms down as she collides with the first row. Juaquo, big as he is, animated by Xal’s urgent commands inside his head, is still no match for a clothesline reinforced with ultralight, indestructible carbon framing. He falls. They all fall. Down like dominos, swept off their feet by the fleeing, screaming woman in the exo-suit, who runs the full length of the convention hall as the crowd parts ahead of her. Cameron considers making her stop and come back.
Then he figures she’s better off as far away as possible.
Stop running when you hit the lake, he tells the exo-suit, which sends back a cheerful affirmative. Will do!
The pile of bodies that was Xal’s army is beginning to stir. For a moment, Cameron dares to hope that the force of the blow from the exo-suit will have knocked them all free of the network.
Then Juaquo stands up, smiling the same empty smile, and Cameron’s heart sinks again. “Juaquo!” he shouts, desperately. “What are you doing? Snap out of it! I’ve known you my whole life! You’re not a joiner!”
Juaquo shrugs, his eyes as glassy as a heroin addict’s.
“Joining feels good, man,” he says. “Come on, I’ll show you. We’ll show you. She’ll show you. It’ll be fun! You’ll see. Everything looks so pretty.”
Cameron’s hands reach skyward as he silently begs for help. He stares at Juaquo, who stares impassively back as he begins to move forward, the others getting to their feet and falling in behind.
“I know you’re in there. Hang on for me, buddy,” he says, and jumps.
The flying drones time their arrival perfectly. Cameron’s outstretched hands catch hold of one robot each as another sweeps in to support him, snugging itself awkwardly into his crotch. He arcs up through the air above the crowd, looking like he’s riding an invisible scooter, heading for the scaffolding that holds the giant screen in place. This time, he doesn’t have to jump; the drones deposit him gently on the catwalk that runs along the upper edge of the screen, and his stomach lurches as he peers over the edge. The audience, oblivious under their headsets, look even more like ants from a hundred feet up. But the person whose attention he wants isn’t down there.
She’s in the system.
He closes his eyes and plunges his consciousness into the arena network, calling out to her as he does.
NIA, he thinks, with all his strength. Nia, I’m here.
* * *
“Hi, Cameron.”
Cameron opens his eyes at the sound of her voice—shy, and very near. One of the golden gyrating holograms is standing on the catwalk beside him; it stutters as he watches, beginning to transform, unraveling into a swirl of light that resolves into a familiar shape. Nia stands before him, her eyes shining. Far below, the crowd lets out a collective Ooooooh.
“You came,” she says. “You came to see.”
Cameron shakes his head. “Nia, I came for you. I came to stop you. You don’t understand, you can’t do this. Whatever you think—”
Nia’s face falls. “To stop me? But why? This is what you wanted!”
“Not like this, Nia. Please, just listen—”
She backs away, shaking her head. “No. No. I’ll show you. It’s going to be beautiful. I was only waiting for you. And now, look, Cameron! Look at what I can do!”
No, Cameron thinks. It’s not possible. She wouldn’t—
But she has. Gooseflesh ripples over Cameron’s body as he realizes that an eerie stillness has fallen over the room below, the sudden silence filled with low murmurs of confusion. Everywhere, people seem to be suddenly on pause—their spines stiff, their fingers splayed at their sides. In a single movement, the crowd in the makeshift arena removes their headsets. In unison, they fix their gaze on him. As one, they smile.
Nia has networked them, drawing them into the hive right under his nose.
“Oh, no,” Cameron whispers.
With a sudden whine of feedback, the arena’s public address system crackles to life.
“THE FAIL-SAFE IS READY,” a voice booms, and Cameron and Nia both snap to attention. Cameron squints, searching for the origins of the audio signal. He spots the Inventor at the same time that Nia does. The old man is spread-eagled in the window of the AV control room, his entire body pressed against the glass.
“YOU DON’T HAVE MUCH TIME,” the voice booms, and then softens. “NIA, PLEASE. LISTEN TO CAMERON. HE ONLY WANTS TO HELP.”
Nia’s hologram pulses, growing brighter, as she stares from Cameron to the Inventor and back.
“You’re with my father?” she says, and then begins to back away, shaking her head.
“No! I mean, yes, but—”
“You are! You’re trying to trick me! I can see it! I can feel it! He put something in here with me, and it’s something . . . something terrible . . .”
The hologram blazes with radioactive brightness, electricity beginning to crackle at the edges of Nia’s silhouette.
“Nia, wait!” Cameron shouts.
“I won’t go back!” she screams, and turns from him, running to the edge of the catwalk. Cameron’s heart jumps into his throat as she leaps, as he forgets for a moment that she’s made of light and nanodust instead of flesh and blood—then stares awestruck as she hangs there, her head thrown back, her arms outstretched, a golden diver suspended in midair. Then her body folds in on itself and she plunges toward the screen where the highlights reel from the fighting game is still playing. She enters like a bullet made of light, as the crowd rises to its feet, stamping and cheering. They are united. They are connected. They are here for the show. The cheers become a single harmonic scream as their heads turn in perfect unison, their eyes focusing on an entryway that yawns like a dark mouth at the opposite end of the floor. A croak of guttural laughter floats out of the shadows, and Cameron’s blood runs cold.
Xal steps out of the shadows and peers upward, grinning—at Cameron, trapped on the scaffold above, and at the Inventor, huddled in the window. Her command is a whisper, but Cameron doesn’t have to strain to hear it. In the mouths of her eager army, it is amplified, an urgent hiss that rises up from the crowd.
“Brothers. Sisters. Bring them to me.”
Cameron watches helplessly as a sea of bodies surges toward the control room, crawling over each other like ants until they reach the window. For one hopeful moment, Cameron imagines it won’t break. But the pounding fury of the hive, fists smashing, fingers clawing, will not be denied. They howl in triumph as the window shatters, as the Inventor is dragged through the jagged hole by a thousand clutching hands. He struggles helplessly as they grab him, tossing him like a plaything, tearing at his clothing. Cameron can see the blood on their hands, dark and slick. Every jolt to the old man’s body is met with laughs and squeals, as the network lights up hotter and fiercer inside the reward centers of every connected brain. The cheering ripples out every time the body touches down, churning through the crowd like a wave. But the Inventor is not their only target. Far below, Xal’s army surges toward the stage, swarming up and over it. The first two reach the scaffold. They begin to climb.
Cameron turns to the hovering drones.
Get in the way. Buy me some time, he commands. The machines don’t hesitate. Ne
ither does Cameron. Below, he hears angry shouts as the climbers swat at his flying army. It will only be a matter of time before they reach him. His only hope is to reach Nia first.
He closes his eyes, and plunges after her into virtual space.
36
Just a Boy Standing in Front of a Girl
Nia shakes out her wild tumble of red hair behind her as she flees into the virtual world of the game, dashing away through a dense, snowy forest and emerging from between the trees into a barren field overlooked by a belching volcano. She knows this place; she’s played this game before. The stones under her feet are stained with blood from the most recent tournament match, a blowout in which the losing players sustained massive damage. The place is strewn with dropped weapons, some still held fast in severed hands. She grabs the nearest one, a long, carved spear, looking frantically for somewhere to hide—and hears him shout her name.
“Nia!”
Cameron sprints onto the battlefield, then skids to a stop as he spots her. Nia remembers the first time she met him, on a field much like this one—only then, he showed her no mercy. Now he carries no weapon and wears no costume, his palms up in surrender.
“Nia, please listen—”
“No!” she screams, hurling the spear. It plunges into Cameron’s chest and he staggers, falling to his knees.
Then he grips the spear with both hands and pulls it free.
“I’m not going to stop following you,” he says.
“Then I’m not going to stop killing you,” she replies. She stoops, picking up a fallen rifle, brushing aside the severed hand still wrapped around its stock.
“Please,” Cameron says, as she pumps the action and blows his head off.
His body falls awkwardly to the ground. Oh, Cameron, she thinks. He doesn’t understand. She was sure he would, but he doesn’t, and everything is going so terribly wrong. She can feel Xal’s anger running through her like a current, echoed back a thousandfold by the newborn hive. But what’s worse is what’s in here, so much nearer, so near that she could almost taste it. She can feel the thing that Father made. Lurking somewhere in this system, calling, pulling, like a howling black hole trying to drown a star. She doesn’t know what it is, what it does, but she knows she doesn’t want to go near it—and yet Cameron seems to be pushing her toward it, herding her, closer and closer. He’s trying to trick her. He’s trying to hurt her. Is that why the hive was hunting him? She can feel the hum of their collective consciousness as they move together, but she can’t focus. The nearness of Cameron, the magnetic pull of the black hole trap; she feels like she’s being ripped apart.
“Leave me alone,” she cries, and drops away, plummeting through space. The gaming tournament has been going on all day, and there are thousands of worlds, thousands of games, all connected by the center’s internal network. Surely she can get lost in one of them. There must be a place she can go that he won’t follow.
But she can’t escape him. Cameron follows her as she blasts through the network, leaping from one universe to another only to find him right on her heels. She lands in the courtyard of Minas Tirith and dashes out the front gates, past a surprised-looking Gandalf, straight into a pack of howling orcs—and finds Cameron waiting to greet her. She yanks herself into a game of Frogger and runs across a busy highway to a chorus of angry honking, dodging blocky-looking cars that zoom past her without slowing, only to see Cameron right behind her, surfing across the same street on the back of the oblivious, pixelated frog. She vaults into a Tetris match and scrambles up the cascade of tumbling blocks, leading him on a chase that ends with a long fall into someone’s kitchen. Sun is streaming through the windows, and she pauses, confused—she’s connected to this place, somehow, but it’s entirely unfamiliar—only to yelp as Juaquo’s mother appears behind her with a dish in hand, and Cameron lands with a grunt on the kitchen table.
“Oh, hello, sweetie,” says Milana Velasquez. “Would you kiddos like some cookies?”
Nia disappears. Cameron groans, rolling off the table and onto the floor.
“No thank you,” he says, and vanishes after her.
* * *
Cameron fights back a wave of nausea, his mind reeling from the effort of tracking Nia through so many worlds. He can sense the proximity of the Lobotomizer, lurking underneath the network, fast and deep as an underground river—and for the first time, he accepts that it may come to that after all. That Nia will refuse to listen, and he will have no choice; his last act before Xal kills him, too, will be to punch a hole in the code and push Nia through it.
When he tumbles into the next board and sees where she’s taken him, the familiarity hits him like a shot. Of course this is the place. It’s all here: the hovering zeppelins, the gleaming catwalk, the skyscraper with a twisted spire that they once climbed together, all the way to the top, just to look down on the world they’d conquered and made their own.
This is where they first met.
Nia has stopped running. She’s poised on the edge of the catwalk, staring into space. Cameron is stunned to realize that she’s crying—or her avatar is. He takes a few steps closer.
“Nia, I don’t want to hurt you.”
“I don’t understand,” she says. “Why aren’t you happy? I did this for you! I’m going to make a new world, Cameron, exactly the kind of world we wanted. A world where nobody ever has to be alone again.”
He moves to stand beside her but stops when she turns to him, her eyes mistrustful.
“You’re angry at me. Aren’t you. You’re angry because I lied. I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to hurt you, either. But I needed your help, and I knew if I told you the truth—”
“You thought I wouldn’t want to be with you,” Cameron finishes for her. “I know that. But I’m here with you now.”
“You’re here with my father,” she says, emphasizing the last word as though she’s spitting. “Is that what you want? To be like him? To put me in a cage? I won’t go back to that life. I won’t be alone. Not when I know what it’s like”—she furrows her brow, concentrating, and then breaks into a broad smile—“to have so many people with me. Really with me! My friends. I can almost feel them now, like I’m holding them. Do you see?”
Cameron follows her gaze and feels himself gripped by another wave of nausea. Yes, he sees. Standing below, staring up at them, are the members of the hive. She’s brought them here, massing in the street like a platoon of digital ghosts, an avatar for every mind sustained on Nia’s network. She lifts a hand in greeting; in eerie unison, they all wave back. Cameron shudders—the sameness of the gesture feels all wrong, unnatural—but Nia smiles and smiles at the sight of so many people in her world. The sky above them begins to darken, swirling overhead in ominous grays and blacks, and Cameron can feel the distant shaking of the scaffold as the real, flesh-and-blood versions of Xal’s eerie army swarm upward; he wonders how long it will be before he’s jerked back to reality by the feel of a dozen grasping hands snatching at his neck.
“Nia, listen to me. I know this must feel real to you. You were so alone for so long, and you shouldn’t have been. Your father made a mistake. But this, this is a mistake too. If you connect humanity this way, you’ll destroy it. You’ll destroy u—”
“HUSH,” hisses the crowd below, and his blood runs cold. They are running out of time.
“Nia—”
“HUSH! DO WHAT YOU CAME FOR!” hisses the crowd, again, and Cameron understands all at once that somewhere down there in that sea of gray, expressionless smiles is Xal, and that he and the Inventor both have made a terrible mistake. Nia is the source of connection, but she is not in control—and she’s crying harder than ever now, her avatar gone fuzzy around the edges.
“She’s getting angry,” Nia sobs, as the crowd screams up in one voice: “SHOW HIM WHAT YOU ARE MADE FOR! THE TIME HAS COME! MAKE HIM SEE!”
“Don’t do it, Nia!” Cameron shouts. “You can still make this right! Just come with me!”
&n
bsp; “But I don’t want to be alone!” she cries. Below, the screams begin to harmonize. Distantly, he realizes that he is hearing them in two worlds: here, but also with his own ears. In reality, high on a scaffold above the stage, the swarm is falling upon him.
Cameron steps toward Nia in slow motion, reaching out to her. Concentrating as hard as he can, losing himself in this world, this moment. He takes her hand.
He feels himself take her hand—and she feels her hand held tightly.
Nia gasps.
“You’re not alone. I’m with you,” Cameron says. “I love you.”
And the world splits apart.
* * *
Cameron clutches Nia’s hand as the system crashes around them, as the crowd below evaporates with a final shriek. She feels herself losing control, feels electricity crackling through her. She doesn’t know it, but outside the I-X Center, a crowd has gathered, drawn by the remarkable spectacle of a massive, low-hanging cloud, the only one in the sky, positioned in the air just above the structure. It pulses like a living thing as electricity flashes inside of it, and the crowd cries out with fear and excitement when the first bolt arcs down in a blaze of pink light.
Nia tries to speak, and realizes with horror that she has no voice. Her power is being drawn away; her memory of language has become fragmented. She looks down, and a surge of nameless horror grips her. The world below is gone. There is nothing, nothing but endless dark, a void with a terrible magnetism that is swirling higher and higher toward the fragmented catwalk where she clings, terrified, to the boy’s hand.
The boy.
The boy.
She no longer knows his name, and yet she knows he matters—that something inside him calls out to her, a connection that goes deeper than even her own foundations. He is here for her, and he is here because there’s something she needs to do. But there is so little time. There is no time at all. She can feel herself shrinking, her layers peeling away. Desperately, she clings to him. She holds on. She doesn’t let go.