The Rule of Thoughts Read online

  Michael kept working, feverishly. He had to get a few more things done before he could sign off. Wrap up the new identity so he could access him later, tie off any loose ends so Kaine wouldn’t be able to find him when he did so. He had to finalize the accounts, secure the money, make sure he could access it from somewhere else, respond to the Porters so they’d know their son was safe.

  But there was one thing even more important than that.

  Finding Bryson and Sarah. At least one of them. At least the general area where they lived. With Jackson’s account compromised, it might be a while before Michael dared access the Net again.

  A line of bright light slashed across his NetScreen again, wider this time, and it remained longer. Random numbers and letters flashed, then vanished. Kaine—it had to be Kaine—was now throwing his full force, trying to sabotage instead of hack. Michael knew the signs from his own work over the years. He pushed back with a flurry of codes, not sure if he could do it again.

  Instinct took over. He searched and searched, digging through the archives of Lifeblood, the game that had once meant so much to him. Data on players, high scores, dates, event logs. The image of the girl, Tanya, jumping to her death off the Golden Gate Bridge flashed in his mind. Michael had only been a Tangent, Lifting up from what had actually been Lifeblood Deep to play the game. But Bryson and Sarah were real—Agent Weber had said so, anyway—and there had to be one snippet of real-world information he could dig up from all the Lifeblood data before Kaine destroyed the digital existence of poor Jackson Porter.

  Three slashes of searing white light burned across the NetScreen, wiping out the path Michael had been digging through the code. Once again, numbers and letters flashed, one after the other, blurring the screen in a rush of movement that drowned out the background. Michael swept it away with a last-gasp code that was absolutely illegal. The screen cleared once more and he jumped full-bore back into the Lifeblood data archives, his eyes stinging with tears from concentrating so hard.

  Sweat beaded his forehead, ran down his temples, slicked his skin as he worked. Lifeblood’s code was complicated and heavily protected. But Michael was good—he’d been part of the code itself. He dug and searched, looking for any background files he could find on his friends. Personal information was sacred in the virtual world. Sacred.

  He could sense Kaine’s efforts to crash his system. It was almost like a tangible pressure, pushing down on him. Ignoring it as best he could, Michael swam in a sea of data, searching, searching.

  There. A gamer’s file with all of its experience points laid out like folded laundry on a bed. Everything looked familiar, matched the criteria Michael had entered. He recognized so much of what he saw before him, spelled out in code—he’d been by that gamer’s side.

  It was Sarah.

  The pressure intensified. The characters on the screen jumped and twitched, pulsed like a drumbeat—something he’d never seen before. The upper-right-hand corner of the screen glowed, a bulge of light forming like a giant blister. Michael found the location-file, seared it into his memory. Sarah. He’d found Sarah. She was real. Relief and something close to happiness swelled within his chest.

  And then everything came crashing down.

  Slashes of bright light flashed across the screen. Acting on instinct, Michael reached up and squeezed his EarCuff, but he knew it would do no good. The NetScreen stayed where it was, though it had lost its crisp shape, its edges blurry. Numbers and letters swirled, barely identifiable behind the barrage of blinking lights. There was a loud buzzing sound. Michael tried to lean back, tried to escape the pulsing screen, but he hit his head on the wall behind him. This was a massive, all-out cyberattack.

  Something popped, followed by one last explosion of blinding light. Michael closed his eyes and turned away, saw spots swimming in the darkness. Sweat drenched every inch of his body. Then the buzzing stopped, replaced by the distant honking of horns, the skittering of debris as wind pushed it across the alley.

  Michael opened his eyes. Of course turning his head had done no good—the NetScreen hovered before him, seeming to lean against the wall of the building. The screen was black, with white-lettered words filling the space:

  YOU SHOULD’VE FOLLOWED MY ORDERS, MICHAEL. WE NEED EACH OTHER.

  He was reading the message for a third time when the words dissipated into the dark background; then the entire screen winked out. Michael didn’t have to squeeze his EarCuff to know that it would never work again.

  Michael’s brain was tired.

  Even though his stomach ached with hunger, the sheer exhaustion of mental effort overwhelmed everything else. He didn’t even care that the pavement on which he sat was rough and dirty. He slumped over and rested his head on his arms, curled his legs up, and closed his eyes.

  Right there, in the corner of the alley, not caring who saw him, somehow soothed by the hypnotizing sounds of the city, he slept.

  When he woke up, it was dark.

  He hadn’t changed position the entire time he’d slept, and he opened his eyes to see the pavement an inch from his face. He slowly turned his head and stretched, his muscles groaning, joints popping, as he straightened out. Slowly, he got to his feet. He felt like an eighty-year-old man. He stretched out his limbs again and the memory of Kaine’s cyberattack hit him, making his stomach turn. Then came the hunger—cramps that felt like claws raking his innards.

  He needed food. The man at the coffee shop around the corner was a little shocked when Michael ordered three different sandwiches and two bags of chips, but everything in the place looked good. He found a booth and wolfed down the food, staring blankly out the window at the city lights, thinking of the data he’d found on Sarah. She wasn’t close at all. She was hundreds of miles away, and for some reason, it saddened Michael to think of leaving for such a long journey, which made no sense, considering he had no actual ties to the home of Jackson Porter.

  He had no ties at all. To anywhere. It didn’t matter where he went.

  The second sandwich did him in. As his dad—his fake dad—used to say, his eyes had been bigger than his stomach. Still achy from the long sleep on the concrete bed, he got up and headed out of the restaurant, handing the spare sandwich and a bag of chips to a homeless woman he’d seen nearby. For some reason, he envied her. At least she had a world. His had been destroyed.

  There was a lot to do before he could leave town. He’d just started making a mental list of tasks when he heard someone shout behind him.

  “Jax!”

  It was a girl’s voice, and Michael only turned around out of curiosity, at first making no connection to himself. But it clicked when he saw dark eyes focused on him, a pretty teenage girl running down the sidewalk. It was her. Gabriela. Even from a blurry pic sent with a short note, he could tell.

  Michael grimaced and swore under his breath. He spun around and started walking, briskly, his mind suddenly empty of all solutions.

  She caught up and grabbed him by the shirt, forcing him to turn and face her once again. He stopped and stared, sure that he’d gone totally pale.

  “What’s wrong with you?” the girl asked, her expression somewhere between confusion and anger. “Jax. You look like a … like a zombie. Tell me what’s going on right now. I haven’t heard from you in two days!”

  Michael’s mouth moved, twitching more than anything. No words came out.

  Gabriela let go of his shirt and stepped back. Now she only looked hurt. “What happened to us hanging out while your parents were gone? Time of our lives! And now you can’t even reply to my messages? Can’t call me? What’s …” Her words faded out and she furrowed her brow. “Jax. Seriously. What’s wrong? Did something happen?”

  “Um,” Michael managed to say. “Uh, look, um, Gabriela …” With every syllable that came out, she looked more perplexed. If he’d doubted at all before, he now knew—there was no way he could fake being Jackson Porter. “Look, things have changed. I couldn’t explain it in a million years.
I’m sorry. Really. Bye.”

  Michael turned and started pushing past people, dodging shoppers, then broke into a run. He ran and ran and ran through the city, and he didn’t look back, not once, scared she’d be on his tail, not until he found another alley far away, sure that he’d left her behind. She’d never even called after him. She might not even have tried, too baffled to speak.

  But he was alone.

  Gasping for every breath, he sank to the ground and huddled in a hidden corner, aching for what he’d done to that poor girl, a girl he didn’t even know.

  But Sarah … Sarah he did know.

  He had to find her.

  Twenty hours later, Michael was on a train, a real train—one of the sleek BulletStreams that traveled almost two hundred miles an hour. He’d never ridden on such a thing in his virtual life as a Tangent, which made him think of something he couldn’t believe he’d never realized before: he’d never gone anywhere with his family during all those years. Not any significant distance, anyway. And it had never seemed strange to him. It was just life. You worked or went to school, you longed for the next time you could slip into your Coffin and leave the world behind. That had seemed normal to Michael, and he suspected it wasn’t true at all. At least, not for everyone.

  In some ways, even though he had no justification, he was offended by how manipulated his life had been. But wasn’t that the very definition of being a program? He didn’t know why; it just ticked him off. All of it. And now he was flesh and blood. He wasn’t sure when it had started or when it would end, but he knew that, slowly but surely, he was transforming, taking ownership of his … “self.” The insecurity of being artificial had started to fall away, and he didn’t know how he felt about that. It came with an arrogance he didn’t like. Or understand.

  And part of the problem was that he couldn’t stop thinking about Gabriela. He felt something for her that he shouldn’t, as if feelings really did reside in the heart. Which, in Michael’s case, still belonged to Jackson Porter.

  Maybe he just felt guilty about hurting the girl’s feelings so terribly. Sighing, he leaned his head against the window next to his seat and stared out at the landscape as it flashed by. He was moving so fast it was almost impossible to discern one place from the next. He’d passed a blur of city buildings, a blur of farmland, a blur of forest. Now it was an endless sea of houses and apartment complexes, streaming by in streaks of color.

  It had been a busy day. He’d rested far better than he’d expected the night before, sleeping in the same dark alley where he’d ended up after fleeing from Gabriela. But he woke up feeling fresh and nervously excited about getting on with his new life, especially by finding Sarah. And then the day had unfolded in a flurry of errands to prepare for his trip.

  He’d written a short note to Jackson Porter’s family and dropped it off at their apartment, unable to think of a better way to do it than the old-school method of pen and paper. He had to hope his handwriting hadn’t changed when he took over Jackson’s body and that Kaine didn’t have more people watching the house. The message was brief to lessen the risk of saying something that didn’t sound like their boy, simply telling them that he had things he wanted to see in the world, things he wanted to do. That he was sorry for taking so much money but he wanted them to know he’d be okay. That maybe he’d come back someday.

  Blah, blah, blah.

  It was, of course, ridiculous. They’d call the police and come looking for him, no matter what he wrote. But at least they’d know he was alive. After seeing the broken door, their minds would no doubt go wild with awful possibilities of where he might be.

  He signed the letter, saying he loved them. Which almost made him choke up, because it felt as if he were saying it to the parents he’d known in Lifeblood Deep. The ones who still felt like his parents. Whom he’d never see again.

  After showering and eating, he’d packed a suitcase he found in Jackson’s closet, then stood for a moment in the hallway outside the apartment. The apartment that should’ve felt like home but didn’t. As for the broken door, he didn’t know what to do, so he propped it up against the wall. Who knew what they’d think. Feeling a sadness that just confused him even more, he walked away.

  The first thing he’d done after that was go to a bank station. He needed to make sure that what he’d done on Jackson’s NetScreen had worked. He breathed a great sigh of relief when the account of one Michael Peterson appeared, filled with plenty of money. From there Michael went to a Net store and bought one of the finest EarCuffs on the market, then had the old one destroyed and the new one installed. He arranged his travel and booked a hotel in a town near Sarah’s, and now here he was, on a train, heading toward the girl who’d become one of his two best friends. The last time he’d seen her, she’d been melting in a pool of lava. Hopefully she’d fared better in real life.

  The dizzying view rushing by outside the window was starting to make him queasy. He shifted and scanned the other passengers sitting around him. The seats of the train alternated direction so that groups of people could face each other and chat during the trip. His gaze fell on a woman about five rows away, whose eyes met his for the briefest of moments. She quickly—too quickly—looked down and studied something intently on her NetScreen.

  She was older, maybe sixty, dark hair streaked with gray. She was slightly plump, wearing a blouse and skirt, her legs crossed primly at the ankles.

  And Michael had no doubt that she’d been staring at him for as long as he’d been looking out the window. Watching him.

  He felt a chill.

  His gaze flickered back to the woman every few seconds, waiting to catch her staring again. But she didn’t return the look, not once, removing any doubt he might have had that the woman had been casually watching him. No person would naturally resist at least a cursory glance when being stared at. There could be other reasons why a creepy woman had been observing a kid, but only one seemed likely to Michael in this case.

  Kaine.

  Did the Tangent already have spies trailing him, watching him? Could Kaine really be that all-knowing? Michael had been good at deception in his old life, and he thought he’d covered his bases pretty well in escaping and creating a new identity.

  But this was Kaine. Kaine was better at everything. He’d figured out how to put an artificial intelligence into a real human body, for crying out loud. Which made Michael wonder once again if the Tangent had triggered the Mortality Doctrine for himself.

  Kaine might very well be a human now, running around in some stranger’s body. Michael had to stop himself. If he was the guinea pig in this whole experiment, surely Kaine had a while to go before he risked the transformation himself. Then again, would Kaine even want that for himself? As a Tangent, theoretically, you could be immortal, living forever in code. As a human, you’d risk death every day. What was Kaine’s ultimate goal?

  Michael’s vision had blurred as his thoughts raced. He shook his head and focused on the woman again. This time she was staring right back at him and didn’t bother to lower her gaze.

  Michael flinched, but he didn’t break eye contact. Nor did she. Teenage boy and grandma: staring contest. Her heavily made-up face was unsettling, her expression blank—no hint of a smile, but no anger or animosity, either. She looked at him, and he looked back.

  Finally, the woman lowered her eyes and squeezed her EarCuff, cutting off the NetScreen projection in front of her. She gathered a couple of things from under her seat, then calmly stood up and turned to walk down the aisle in the opposite direction from Michael. He watched as, without so much as a glance back, she moved farther away. A surge of panic struck him—he had to know who this lady was, and his chance to find out was about to disappear into the next car of the train.

  He got up and followed her down the aisle.

  He had to pause a couple of times, turning his body and leaning against the seats to allow other passengers to get by. He saw the woman step through the door onto the next
train car, still not looking back, not even a glimpse out of the corner of her eye. He quickened his pace, almost knocking over an old man who grumbled something about “kids with bad parents.”

  He caught the glaring eye of more than one passenger who’d noticed his rudeness. He didn’t care. With every passing moment his sense of urgency increased, his heart pumping rapidly. He had to know who that stranger was.

  He made it to the door just as it opened again. Three women passed, gossiping about the latest NetVoyeur show. They were all bright lipstick and big hair, and he had to resist the urge to push them out of his way. He shuffled past them, onto the next train car, caught a glimpse of the older woman, almost at the opposite end now. There weren’t many people standing, so he picked up his pace again, moving through the aisle as if he were being chased. An attendant halfheartedly yelled at him to slow down, but Michael ignored him.

  He made it to the next door, opened it, hurried through. The woman had sped up, too, but she was only halfway across the train car. Michael moved, figuring he’d catch up to her just as she reached the next door. And then he’d grab her arm and ask her nicely but firmly to tell him what was going on. Why she’d been watching him.

  Before he could get to her, though, she stopped in front of the door and spun around to face him, her expression completely blank. It was unnerving, how calm she appeared after how fast she’d been moving. Michael stopped in his tracks. The woman raised a pale arm and held up three fingers.

  She thrust her arm out in several short, quick jerks, emphasizing the number three to him, keeping an impossibly vapid expression the entire time.

  Then, abruptly, she turned and walked through the door into the next train car.

  Three.

  Three what?

  Michael went after her.