He might have repented, of course. He might have confessed his sins, and changed his ways, accepted his punishment on earth and hoped for forgiveness in the next life. He might have, but he wouldn’t. He felt there was no point in telling God he was sorry. He wasn’t sorry, not at all. He had enjoyed his work all these years. He had enjoyed wielding the power of life and death. He had enjoyed making people afraid. He had enjoyed making them suffer. He could pretend to repent, but it wouldn’t be real, and God would know. There was no point in repentance.
And anyway, he thought he had a better idea.
How much easier it would be, he thought, simply to live forever. No death—no judgment, right? Easy as that. It was with this clever plan in mind that Ermias had accepted the job of kidnapping Molly Jameson. He had brought her to her prison here in the forest. He had made the video to send to the Traveler. His work was finished. And now he was going to accept his reward—his eternal reward, so to speak—from Kurodar.
Kurodar, the god of MindWar, was going to make him a creature of MindWar, unchanging and eternal. In the Realm, Ermias would never die.
Up ahead now, through the trees, Ermias saw the barn. It seemed little more than an old lopsided structure. Its paint was gone and its wooden boards were bare and brown and splintery. Now that the swamps had reclaimed the land around it, no one was likely ever to find it sitting here in the middle of nowhere like this. If they did find it, no one would suspect what was inside it. If they did suspect, no one would be able to enter it before they were gunned down by the four men hiding in the trees all around, each holding a machine gun.
The four guards wore thick black snowsuits and balaclavas against the cold. The masks hid their faces but not their dark, brutal eyes. When they heard the branches crackling under Ermias’s feet, those eyes shifted toward him, and they brought their rifles up in front of them, ready to fire.
Then they recognized Ermias and lowered the guns to let him pass.
The Troll went by the guards silently. He reached the barn. He shifted a panel on one of its unpainted, splintery boards and revealed the pad underneath. He pressed in a ten-digit code, then pressed his thumb against the pad’s sensor. The heavy steel door hidden behind the barn’s wooden planks slowly slid open.
The Troll stepped inside.
At first he could see nothing in the interior shadows. But slowly his vision adjusted. With his abnormally big eyes, he had always been able to see well in the dark. He could make out the drones arrayed on the stone floor, row after row of them: a miniature air force ready to lift off on its mission of destruction. He moved among them until he reached the back wall.
This wall was not made of steel like the others. It was fashioned out of some unique and changeable polymer. Indestructible and black as night, it was a key element of Kurodar’s latest invention: the Breach.
The Breach was something entirely new: a living link between the MindWar Realm and RL. It was through the Breach that Kurodar had taken control of the drones; through the Breach that he had hidden them from the American defense systems to move the stolen mini-planes invisibly through the sky. The Breach opened the border between Kurodar’s mind and reality. It gave him the power to change the world with but a thought.
He truly was like a god, thought the Troll.
Ermias stood before the Breach, breathing deeply, waiting. This was where it was going to happen. This was where he was going to beat death and escape judgment.
“My job is done, Kurodar,” he said aloud. “I’ve come for payment.”
For a moment, nothing happened. Then, first, the wall began to vibrate. Next, it became transparent. Ermias could see right through it, could see the forest outside the barn. And now, amazingly, the wall seemed to dissolve completely. Ermias could feel the winter chill wash over him as if he were standing outdoors again.
He stared at the forest. And what happened next defied belief. The entire wood, all the winter trees and stretches of swamp, began to flicker and grow dim. It was as if the light of the world were failing . . . fading . . . fading . . .
Then—flash!—there was nothing! The forest was gone. The swamp gone. The world—RL itself—was completely gone. A night of absolute blackness had fallen over everything like a great stone. Stretching out in front of Ermias was an immensity of nothingness. Space. And yet more than space. This emptiness somehow lived. It lived and breathed and . . . pulled at him, called to him. It was drawing him into itself.
Yes! thought Ermias. And for the first time in months, his fear of God’s judgment lifted off him.
He spread his short but powerful arms and let the power of the darkness sweep over his small misshapen body. The darkness took hold of him and suddenly he knew what it was. It was Kurodar. Kurodar himself. It was Kurodar’s mind, the force and power of Kurodar’s imagination. It was in the dark, it was taking control of him, taking control of his flesh, his cells, the very fabric of what he was.
It was like a new creation. Ermias felt his body begin to transform. He was becoming larger, much larger. His already oversized head was expanding and becoming the center of his body. His arms were extending into snapping, rubbery tentacles, stretching out across a vast distance. His chest felt as if it were about to burst—and then it did burst as even more tentacles grew out of the core of him. At the same time, he could feel himself being lifted up, up, out of the living world. He was being drawn into the center of that utter blackness of unending space, drawn into that utter blackness of Kurodar’s imagination.
With a thrill of excitement, Ermias felt his dying body replaced—replaced with something monstrous, yes, but with a monstrous shape that was impervious to disease and decay, a monstrous shape that would overcome human weakness, overcome time, overcome death itself.
I’m becoming immortal! he thought in raging triumph.
The next moment his enormous octopus form was sucked into the farthest reaches of nothingness and the man who once was Ermias became the Great Octo-Guardian of Kurodar’s massive WarCraft.
8. WARPATH
RICK DIAL WAS still thinking about Molly as he stepped into the Portal Room. His mind and heart were in utter confusion.
He knew he had to do this thing, to return to the MindWar. Kurodar was planning an act of terrorism that could wipe out a whole city’s worth of people, maybe more. Rick had to go into the Realm to stop him. What else could he do?
But what if Kurodar saw him or sensed him there, what then? Would he order his thugs to kill Molly on the instant? Would Victor One be able to find her and rescue her before they did?
He felt guilty about putting Molly at risk like this. And he felt guilty about something else as well. He felt guilty because he was eager: he was eager to enter the Realm again. Partly because he wanted to stop Kurodar from killing people, sure. But partly, he knew, it was because he wanted to see Mariel. To find Mariel. To bring her back to RL . . .
Was he doing the right thing? Was he doing it for the right reasons? Was he going to cause the death of a woman he cared about, one of the best friends he’d ever had, maybe the best?
A lot of questions. Zero answers. Not one. He just didn’t know.
The Portal Room was the heart of the MindWar complex. It was large but crowded close with machinery and people. On every wall, on every countertop, there were screens and flashing graphs, keyboards and e-charts and microphones—and there were operators stationed in their chairs to work them, so many operators they were practically sitting shoulder to shoulder.
Then, at the far end of the room, embedded in the center of the wall, there was a transparent box. It was the size and shape of a coffin. Its bottom was lined with a sheet of some kind of flexible metal. This was the portal, the doorway that would send Rick into the MindWar Realm.
The tech operators in the room looked up as Rick moved past them. He approached the portal slowly. He had worked so hard to get the strength back in his legs that he walked with only a slight limp now, but there was always enough pain there
to keep him from any overly quick or sudden movements.
Miss Ferris stood beside the portal, waiting for him. Juliet Seven stood beside her. Juliet Seven was Miss Ferris’s personal security man. Despite his name, he was a towering blocky monster of a fellow who seemed to Rick like a comic-book figure drawn by someone who only knew how to make rectangles and squares. He stood with his enormous arms crossed over his enormous chest. He was smiling to himself as he watched Rick come forward. There was something about Rick and Rick’s grim intensity that always seemed to amuse the big man.
Rick’s pulse sped up as he approached them. He was eager to get on with the immersion, but he was also nervous. That is, he was scared.
“You have ninety minutes,” Miss Ferris told him. No words of encouragement, of course. She didn’t even say hello. “The timer will be visible in your right palm as always. Pay attention to it. After ninety minutes in the Realm, your consciousness will start to disintegrate. Stay in there too long, and you’ll spend the rest of your life without a working brain.”
Rick gave a quick nod, eyeing the portal in the wall above him. “Thanks for the pep talk,” he said. He wondered what she would say if she knew about his headaches and his nightmares. She probably would’ve called off the whole mission, sent in one of the other gamers they had tested for the job. Well, it didn’t matter what she would’ve done if she knew. She would never know. He would never tell her.
“We’ve installed a fresh energy pod in your left hand—that is, it will be programmed into your avatar’s left hand,” she continued in her robotic voice. “If you should find your friends, feel free to give the energy to them. But always remember, that’s not the mission. The mission is to find Kurodar’s new outpost and stop him before he launches a drone attack.” When Rick didn’t say anything, she added, “Am I making myself clear?”
“I know why you’re sending me in there,” said Rick, annoyed at the way she always badgered him. “I’ll get it done or die. One or the other.”
“Remember, we only have . . .”
“Three days. I know.”
“We can’t afford to have you waste your time . . .”
Saving Mariel, Rick finished her sentence in his mind. But out loud, he only repeated more forcefully, “I know!”
Miss Ferris pressed her lips together. He could tell she wasn’t satisfied with his answers. He didn’t care. He was risking Molly’s life just by going in there, but he didn’t have much choice about that. It had to be done. But no matter what happened, he wasn’t going to leave Mariel to die as well. Or Favian. One way or another, he would find them both; get some fresh energy to them; keep them alive until he could bring them out of the Realm for good.
“All right,” Miss Ferris said finally. “You should emerge at the last portal point you found, right where the fortress was. Remember: without a portal point you can’t get home, so don’t stray too far from one without locating a new one. Ninety minutes is all you’ve got.”
Rick drew a deep breath. “Are we gonna do this or just chat all day?” he asked her.
Miss Ferris’s only response was a glance at Juliet Seven, a slight lifting of her chin. In response, the big man held out an arm like a girder to help Rick up the three stairs to the portal. But Rick ignored the arm. He didn’t need the help anymore. He climbed the stairs on his own, climbed into the box, and lay down.
The next moment Miss Ferris was there above him. She touched the lid of the portal and it slowly lowered over him, closing him inside.
This was the part of the immersion process Rick liked least of all. He was a little claustrophobic; not too much, but being shut up in this coffin-like thing made him sweat. Even worse, he now felt the box’s metal lining come to life beneath him. It began to rise and wrap itself around him like a cocoon. It closed tighter and tighter around the sides of his face and over the top of his head. Soon he felt the familiar sting of it, as if a thousand tiny needles were injecting something through his skin.
RL—Real Life—began to fade into darkness. And at the center of that darkness was a corridor of light. Rick knew he had only to will it, and his spirit would fly through that corridor like liquid through a straw. The next thing he knew, he would appear inside the mad world of Kurodar’s digitalized imagination, like a living character injected into a video game.
He hesitated only a moment. He thought of Molly. He thought of Victor One. He thought of Mariel. He thought of Kurodar and his stolen drones. He didn’t know if he was doing the right thing. He didn’t even know what the right thing was.
But he had to do something. He had to try.
The words came into his mind, it seemed, on their own.
God help us, he thought. God help all of us.
Then he entered the MindWar.
LEVEL TWO:
THE ENERGY WRAITHS
9. SWORD 2
THE FIRST TIME he had ever entered the Realm of MindWar, it had been . . . well, incredible. The bizarre colors—the scarlet grass, the blue trees, the bright yellow sky—and the sudden strength that flowed through his then-shattered legs . . . He remembered he had whooped like a madman, running here and there just from the sheer energy and excitement of his first arrival.
It was nothing like that this time. He stepped into a world of death and ruin. The only thing that seemed to have any color at all was the purple diamond of light that pulsed and glowed beside him: the portal through which he had come. Everything else was black and brown and gray, fallen and dead.
This was where Kurodar’s fortress had stood, a grandiose castle full of immense statues and stained-glass windows and topped, in its central room, with an enormous dome that mapped the heavens. It was from here that Kurodar had commandeered several aircraft, had threatened to crash them into a city in order to blackmail the Traveler to turn over his work. Before Kurodar could succeed, Rick had managed to blow the place up. It had crumbled into rubble and flame. Rick himself had barely escaped with his life.
Now, where that fortress had been, there stood only jagged walls of stone, hollow archways leading not into grand halls, but to open fields covered with broken rocks. There were corridors going nowhere and roofless rooms. And over all of it there was silence—silence, except for a weird electrical whisper that was very much like the rising and falling whisper of the wind.
What was once the bright red grass around the fortress had been scorched by fire to sere gray ash. And while the sky above was still yellow, all the vibrancy had somehow drained out of it. The color seemed swampy, sickly, like the color of jaundiced skin.
Worst of all—most disappointing to Rick—the moat was empty. Before, it had been filled high with flowing mercurial water, silver and bright. That—that water—was the element through which Mariel moved and in which she lived. This was the place where he had seen her last, her hand reaching up out of the silver flow to take back the sword she had given him. Now the moat was just a long trench, its walls and floor thick and brown and fluid like mud. There was nothing living in it.
Rick lifted his eyes from the moat and looked off into the distance. Far away, he could see the misty skyline of the Golden City. That, Mariel had told him, was the heart and battery of this place, the core from which Kurodar’s imagination spread out, dreaming new portions of the Realm into existence. Somewhere between here and there, according to Miss Ferris’s map, stood Kurodar’s new outpost. But strangely, though there wasn’t anything to block his view, Rick could see nothing like an outpost anywhere. From this ruin to that golden skyline, there was only a level plain that started gray and then steadily grew brighter and redder as it spread away from the center of destruction.
What should he do, then? Where should he begin? Should he just start walking in the direction of the city? He tested his legs—walking, then jogging, along the edge of the moat. Once again, he couldn’t help but feel a surge of joy at the strength in them, the absence of pain. It was a little taste of the old days, when he was a high school football hero, when hi
s biggest worry was how to win the next game.
After a few steps, though, he stopped. As his breathing slowed, he heard that strange wind-like silence again—and he heard now that it was more than silence, really. There almost seemed to be voices in it, an eerie high-pitched singing. Rick thought it had been there all along, but it was louder now. Closer.
He glanced at his right palm where the timer was embedded. The seconds were rapidly counting down: 88:47 . . . 88:46 . . . He raised his eyes to the ruin again and saw that he was standing by a collapsed gateway, two brown walls of stone that had tilted into each other, the low point in the middle where the gate itself had been. This, he remembered, was the spot where he had emerged from the fortress as it fell. This was where he had seen Mariel for the last time and promised to return for her. This was where he had hurled the sword to her, and her hand had reached up out of the moat to catch it.
He missed her. He missed her presence, her voice, her face. He feared he had already lost her, that he would never see her again. The thought made him melancholy. He turned his gaze to the empty moat again as he remembered that final moment . . .
And he saw something! There, at the bottom of the moat. Something buried in the mud.
He moved to the very edge of the pit. He squinted as he stared down into it. What was it? Something small, only about the size of his hand. It was green with flashes of silver in it.
Rick caught his breath. The sword! Though the moat was deep, and the thing on the bottom was half covered with mud, he thought he could just make out the image of the woman that was carved into the hilt of his old sword. The carved woman looked like Mariel herself. He remembered how, when he had wrapped his hand around the hilt to wield the sword, he had felt her strength and her wisdom flowing into him, giving him extra power and guidance. He had even heard her voice in his mind.
As he stood there, looking down at it, the wind—or the sound of the wind—or whatever that weird sound was—rose higher for a moment. It really did seem like some sort of wordless singing now. A high-pitched musical cry that almost seemed . . . hungry, was the word that went through Rick’s mind.
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