Squinting, he studied the endless sea stretching in every direction, its choppy surface full of whitecaps, like frosting on a purple cake. There was no ship, no birds or sea life or land to speak of. Two other rocky spits were the only things that broke the monotony. They stood equidistant a few hundred feet away, forming a triangle with his own perch. He didn’t catch it at first, but as he gazed out at the other rocks, he realized that a person sat on each one. And he was pretty sure who those people were.
Bryson and Sarah.
Michael climbed out and kneeled down at the edge of the hole. He waved his arms, shouting his friends’ names as loud as he could, but the roar of the wind and the ocean swept his voice away. Eventually both of his friends noticed him waving and motioned back to him. Michael couldn’t imagine where they’d been sent—or why—but he didn’t really care at that moment. He was just relieved to be reunited with Bryson and Sarah.
He looked back down at the hole he’d climbed out of and watched as it disappeared, only to be replaced by rock congruous with the rest of the little island. The area looked as if nothing had ever been there.
What is this place? Michael wondered.
He scanned the choppy waters below, wishing he had the courage to swim across, and realized there was something strange about the ocean, besides the fact that it was purple. There was a static look about it, sparkles and flashes and fuzzy lines, all moving in the water like sea creatures. And when he really thought about the color itself, it reminded him of times he’d been immersed in areas of naked programming material within the VirtNet—undeveloped places waiting to be molded by code.
Swimming seemed like a bad idea. He was thinking about the possibility of coding a bridge when Sarah beat him to it: a green beam of light suddenly stretched from her rocky perch into the air. It was simple, a flat plane about three feet wide, and it was crossing the distance between them as if someone were drawing it with a giant marker. Michael smiled, still feeling the rush of the cold water that had splashed over his body. He knew exactly where she’d gotten the code for this beauty. It was from a game called, simply, Bridges. It was about as exciting as it sounded, and they’d only played it a couple of times before moving on to bigger and better things.
Even before it reached Michael, another bridge started connecting Sara’s rock to Bryson’s, where he sat like a sunbather, leaning back with his face open to the gray sky even though clouds hid the sun. It made Michael think Bryson spent way too much time inside.
Michael stood up, bracing himself against the wind, just as another wave crashed into his island and sprayed him good. Laughing, he wiped his face again. For a moment he forgot about everything that had happened and just smiled, feeling like the king of the world.
As soon as Sarah’s bridge of light reached Michael, he jumped onto it and sprinted toward her. The surface was rubbery, just like he remembered from the game. Goose bumps covered his skin as the wind ripped at his wet clothes, and the feeling gave him even more energy. He picked up his pace.
He was about twenty feet away—almost there—when the bridge vanished, leaving nothing below him but air. He yelped as his heart leaped into his throat and he plummeted into the angry purple water.
The ice-cold water swallowed him, igniting his nerves and making his heart pound from the shock of it. He kicked and pulled himself upward, breaking the surface in a sparkle of purple light. Treading water, he looked up at Sarah’s rock, only a few feet away now, to see his friend staring down at him, Bryson standing beside her.
“Sorry!” she yelled. “I forgot those things had unpredictable timers on them in the game!” She laughed, tried to cover it up, then laughed again. Bryson didn’t even bother trying to hide his glee. Michael would have laughed, too, if he didn’t feel like his nether regions were about to freeze solid.
“I didn’t know you were that slow!” Bryson shouted down to him.
Michael wiped his face and spit out some of the strange purple water, then swam toward his friends. Suddenly he saw something out of the corner of his eye. Something slithering—and there were more than one. In a flit of panic, he burst forward, swimming frantically until he reached a slab of low black stone angling into the ocean and climbed onto it. He scrambled away from the edge of the water until he backed into a wall of jagged rock.
He ducked as a huge wave slammed him against the stone. When it receded, he quickly climbed even higher, finding plenty of places in the rocks for hand- and footholds. About halfway up, he found a flat outcropping and stopped. He got onto his stomach so he could lean out and look down at the water, madly curious about what lurked in this bizarre ocean.
Another cold wave crashed below, its crest splashing over him as he ducked his head. When it receded, he wiped his face and spit, slicked his hair back. And then he stared.
It wasn’t eels or fish slithering around in the water. They were spliced lines of code—actual, literal lines of numbers and letters—squirming and bouncing around like electrocuted worms.
He called out to his friends, the words ripping through his throat. “Get down here!”
By the time Bryson and Sarah clambered down to him, Michael had gotten to his feet. He crouched over, hands on knees, studying the water below. There was just enough room for the other two to squeeze in beside him, both of them taking a seat on the ground, legs dangling over the edge of the rock. A wave crashed, spraying them all. Sarah shrieked and then laughed.
“Whoa!” Bryson shouted, pointing at several different spots. “What was that? What are those …” Michael knew Bryson had seen the same thing he had. And Sarah, too, because her face had grown as immobile as the wet stone on which they sat.
“It’s code,” Michael said, even though he knew they’d figured it out. There was no denying what they saw. It was just too familiar, far too familiar—something they’d seen thousands of times, those combinations of letters and numbers. This purple ocean was full of swimming, wiggling, slithering lines of code. And they behaved as though they were all desperate to create a program. “Infected or destroyed somehow, which is probably why we can see it. But it’s code.”
“Okay,” Sarah said, holding her hands out as if steadying herself. “Let’s put our heads together. What exactly are we looking at here?”
“And how did we get here?” Bryson added. “What happened to that town we were in? Where are we? And while we’re at it, where can I get a burger?”
Michael felt like he was in a trance—he barely heard his friends. He stared at the frothy purple water below them, waves crashing into each other, spray filling the air. Everywhere he looked, those lines of code bounced off each other. There were so many of them, he thought the water itself might be made out of the things.
Bryson gently shoved him with an elbow. “Hey, wake up, maestro.”
Michael shook his head a bit—he had to recalibrate his vision after concentrating to focus on such small things for so long. “Sorry. It’s just so weird.”
“Yeah” was all Bryson said. But then a few seconds later he added, “Guess I’m not getting that burger any time soon.”
“Guess not.”
“The water’s just an illusion,” Sarah said, seemingly out of nowhere. Michael knew she’d been thinking fiercely since they’d arrived in the strange world, and she had a theory already. He wanted to hug her, wet clothes and all, because his mind was worthless mush at the moment.
“Care to expound on that?” Bryson asked.
Sarah looked over at them just as another wave crashed below, buckets of purple water splashing over them. Michael quickly wiped it out of his eyes, eager to hear what she had to say.
She rubbed her face with both hands, then squeezed as much wetness as she could from her hair. “Well,” she said, “I think Kaine is destroying parts of the Sleep. I think he’s marching in and just wiping out the code, ripping it to shreds. And I think it’s all draining into this place.” She waved her arms at the vast ocean around them. “All of this … it’s
literally a dumping ground of code and that purple building-block stuff that holds it all together. If we hadn’t been protected by Agent Weber’s programs, I think we could’ve been in serious trouble.”
“Wait, what do you mean?” Bryson asked. “You think we would’ve been pulled apart and dumped in here as nothing but a bunch of code splices?”
Sarah nodded. “Something like that. I don’t know if Kaine … what’s the word … manifested this ocean like this on purpose, or if it’s just some kind of natural result of what he’s doing. But because of the way we were protected, I think we somehow formed—without meaning to—these islands of rock. Otherwise we might be swimming with the fishes, too. And brain-dead, for all we know, back in our Coffins. Or something else just as bad.”
“That lady we saw,” Michael said. “Back in the town. Dissolving into those blue spark thingies, just like what happened to Ronika. Maybe that would’ve been us, too.” He shivered at the thought.
“How in the name of Gunner Skale did you come up with all this?” Bryson asked Sarah. He seemed genuine, like he believed her. It made Michael realize that he did, too. And he wondered if on some subconscious level he’d created this escape—it made him think back to how he’d instinctively manipulated the code right before Kaine triggered the Mortality Doctrine and sent him into the mind of Jackson Porter.
Sarah saw him thinking and just shrugged, smiling sheepishly. “Sometimes I amaze even myself.”
The three of them didn’t speak for a minute or two, soaking it all in. Michael knew how Sarah had come to the conclusion—when you’d spent countless hours digging through the raw materials of the Sleep, you came to understand its workings on an instinctual level. It made sense. And so did what came next.
“I know what we have to do,” he said.
And then he told them.
The icy chill when they dove back into the churning waters of the purple ocean took Michael’s breath away. He gasped for air as he fought the whitecaps. Bryson and Sarah were right next to him, struggling to stay afloat.
“This better work!” Bryson yelled at him over the roar of the sea.
“You know it will!” Michael shouted back.
Sarah’s lips quivered in the cold. They were almost the same color as the water sloshing about her. “Just remember that we’re not really breathing the air here anyway. It’s all an illusion. Once we’ve … gotten past the hard part we’ll probably feel more at home than we have since we Sank after seeing Weber.”
“The hard part?” Bryson repeated. “Try horrific. I think that’s a better word. It’ll be the worst few seconds of our entire lives.”
Michael smiled, which creased his frozen face in a way that hurt, made him feel like he was about to crumble into shards. But he totally agreed with his friend. What they were about to do went against every human instinct.
Hopefully it wouldn’t kill them.
“Let’s do it,” he said to his friends. “I’m pretty sure it’ll work.” He flashed another grin at that last part.
“Pretty sure, huh?” Bryson asked, not amused.
“Ninety-nine percent.” That was the honest truth. He just hoped that one percent wouldn’t mean the end.
Sarah found his hand underwater and squeezed.
“Okay,” she said. “I was the one giving the pep talk, but I’m actually scared. I don’t know if I can do this.”
“You can,” Michael insisted. “No more talking about it.”
He sucked in a huge breath, then submerged himself, pulling her down with him. Opening his eyes, he felt the sting of salt, but he forced his lids to stay up, telling himself that he was only imagining the substance around him as ocean water. Abruptly the sting disappeared and his vision cleared.
Sarah and Bryson floated before him, eyes closed, cheeks puffed out, hair floating in halos around their heads. Sunlight slanted in shafts through the purple water, illuminating millions upon millions of strings of code—numbers and letters and symbols sewn together. They were everywhere. Like minnows, they darted back and forth and swirled around each other.
Michael and his friends continued to sink, slowly but steadily, the physics of the situation seeming to have vanished now that they’d decided what to do. Down, down they went, arms waving, legs kicking.
Michael reached out, tapped them both. As he did, they each opened their eyes. And then they were all staring at one another. Michael knew that the fear on his face and in his eyes matched what he saw in his friends’. Terror. They were about to do the one thing every human feared, no matter how brave.
Drown.
Michael pointed at his mouth, trying to show them they had to do this. It was now or never. His lungs burned, begging him to take a breath. If they didn’t psych out their bodies soon, they might very well die of asphyxiation.
Sarah nodded, and so did Bryson.
It had been Michael’s idea, so he felt like he had to do it first. Every molecule of his body screamed at him to shoot back to the surface, breathe in that rich air that filled the world above the ocean. But he fought back. With one last, desperate look at his friends, he opened his mouth and let the water rush in, then sucked it down his throat and into his lungs.
There were a few seconds of sheer panic, his chest filled with agony and a wrenching need for air. Spasms riddled his body, and his heart suddenly felt empty and lifeless, slowing down, forgetting how to beat. He twisted left, then right, instinctively sucking again and again at the sea around him, as though if he tried hard enough he could pull in the oxygen from the water like a fish. He saw his friends beginning the process, bubbles of air streaming from their mouths, their eyes wide with fear. Just when Michael thought he might choke, he felt a sudden and sweeping rush of calmness spread through his muscles as his lungs filled with air. His heart was whole again, thumping and thumping, if a little fast.
The transition was instant, nothing like that of a newly surfaced man who’d been close to drowning, and he knew what had happened: his body and mind—safe and sound back in the VNS Coffin—had switched from the state of illusion within the Sleep to normal function. From edge-of-death fantasy to all-systems-okay. As a result, he was no longer submerged in anything like water. The cold, the wet, the ocean pressing down on him, the muted sounds—all gone, replaced by open air. Michael still felt buoyant, as if he were floating, and was still surrounded by lines of code, but he could breathe. And each lungful of air felt like heaven.
Sarah was just a few feet away, and he could see by her ease that she’d completed the transition herself. Bryson came along a few seconds after her, though he was farther away. Together they floated in a surreal world of purple lights and code, in desperate need of someone to splice it all back together.
“That was the worst few seconds of my entire life,” Sarah said. Her voice was a little … off. Almost robotic, like it had been charged with static. “Remind me to never go swimming again.”
Bryson flapped his arms, looking like a deranged oversized bird, but somehow it worked to move him closer to the other two. “I’m gonna have to say that was about a nine on the old sucky scale. I’d rather get eaten by the Lizards of Laos than go through that again.”
“But it worked, right?” Michael asked. He didn’t mean it in an I-told-you-so way. He was just filled with a ridiculous amount of relief that they hadn’t drowned. Of the countless times he’d been virtually killed throughout the years, for some reason this one had felt most real.
“Uh, I guess,” Bryson murmured, gesturing with his hands at the bizarre world around them. “If you call this working. I was kinda hoping for a library or something. At least a chair.”
Sarah spoke in that manner that showed she was doing some seriously deep thinking. “It’s weird, you know? Because of all the programs Weber drenched us in to make sure Kaine couldn’t find us, it was like we were cut off. At least from what we were used to. But then here we are. Code all over the place. It’s almost like normal, when we close our eyes in the
Sleep and access whatever program we’re in.”
“Almost being the key word,” Michael replied. “I hope we can do something with all this. Otherwise Weber will bring us back and all we’ll have to say for ourselves is that we got to go swimming and feel what it’s like to drown. We’ve got nothing on Kaine.”
“How much time has passed, anyway?” Bryson asked.
Sarah pulled up her NetScreen, its glow odd-looking in the world of flying code. She scanned through a few things, then shut it back down.
“We have tons of time before she pulls us back out,” she said. “Like thirteen hours. So what do you guys want to do?”
Michael had no doubts. “There’s only one choice. We need to put some of this code together. If it’s all stuff that was destroyed by Kaine, like that town we were in, then it’ll have traces of him. Or whoever works for him. Or whoever did it for him. Anyway, I think we can work backwards. Maybe even find out where he’s hiding, if we’re lucky.”
Bryson snorted. “You make it sound like we’re going to make sandwiches or something. This is going to be harder than Devils of Destruction, my friend.”
“Yep,” Michael replied. It would be.
“It won’t be that bad,” Sarah said. “We only need our brains for this, guys. Time to put on your big-boy pants and get to work.”
Bryson looked at Michael. “Are we sure she wasn’t the Tangent? One of those pain-in-the-butt sidekick programs in the Ancient Digs of Runeville game? I’m pretty sure she was one of those.”
Michael responded by waving his arms enough to turn himself around, putting his back to his friends. Purple lights shone in front of him, and mysterious figures lurked in the distance, obscured and fuzzy. Lines of code buzzed about him like a million marching caterpillars, ready for him to dissect and put back together. It was programming in a way he’d never done it before, and he was more than a little excited.