Game Over

Chapter 28





WAIT A SECOND, I thought. Actually, wait a whole bunch of seconds.

Though my recollection is hazy at best, when I was just two—and he was still alive—my father had taught me how it’s possible to dive through the surface of time.

It’s something I recently pulled off while in the grips of a man-eating space anemone that had disguised itself as a van. And of course there was that time I managed to put myself back quite a few centuries, all the way to the time of King Arthur…

Anyhow, I’m not good at explaining the physics of the time-travel process, but suffice it to say it’s pretty taxing. The power to dive through the current, the fabric of the here and now, comes straight out of your emotions. So you’ve got to be really riled up when you do it. Freaked out about something like, oh, say, your father firing the cruelest weapon ever created right at your head.

Even as the Opus 24/24 discharged—a plasma pulse of pure pain erupting from its wicked, sawtooth muzzle—I dove through the space-time continuum and put the entire situation on standby.

It’s pretty intense, really, to have everything in the world suddenly stop and hang in the air like you’re walking around in a museum diorama. Intense, but also a little lonely, and quiet like you wouldn’t believe.

“Very good, Daniel,” my father said stepping back from the still-frozen Opus 24/24. “But what do you do if your opponent is also able to manipulate time?” He walked around the floating weapon, as if to emphasize his point.

“Look, Dad. It’s one thing to give me fighting tips and keep me on my guard and all that, but I need some rest right now. I’ll have you over after I’ve taken a nap, okay?”

“You’re not answering my question, Daniel. Do you know for certain that Number 7 or Number 8 can’t stop time?”

“No. I mean, we know almost nothing about them, but I don’t think—”

“Oh, you don’t think?” he said mockingly, waving his arms and somehow casting us both backward in time, slowly at first, and then faster, faster, faster.

In a blink, we were watching my arrival at the hotel, and then the guest before me, a businessman of some sort, and then back to the one before that, and the one before that and then—bam!—there were soldiers around. American soldiers. And there was some military dude I recognized in khakis smoking a corncob pipe. General Douglas MacArthur? The man who’d been entrusted with Japan’s recovery after World War II and had helped start the nation on one of the world’s most remarkable comebacks of all time.

I could have yelled hello, but then—bam!—the hotel was being built, and we were hovering in the air over the horses and carts of the nineteenth-century construction crew, and then—bam!—we were hovering over the previous building on the site, maybe a hotel too but shorter? and then—bam!—we were back back to when the site was occupied by a small, curved-roof house and there was a big stone castle not far away. Just then the earth started to shake. I looked off in the distance and saw a huge black cloud exploding out of Mount Fuji—it must be the famous eruption of 1707!

Before I could scramble for cover—bam!—we were at a camp of ancient Japanese soldiers armed with wooden spears and polished stone axes, and then—bam!—back to pristine forest. And then—bam!—back to some sort of ice age and we were on a glacier, and then the glacier was gone and there was a grassland, and then a forest with really weird trees, and then—

“This should do,” said my father, looking around at the primitive jungle. “So, Daniel, it’s time you got caught up on your homework. What do you know for a fact about Number 7 and Number 8?”

“They run a video-game company, live in Tokyo, have a son, a really nice apartment, and they like to hunt and eat endangered aliens?”

“So what puts them in the List’s top ten?”

“They’re plotting to decimate the human race by brainwashing kids to become killing machines like the ones in their video games.”

“You mean to go after them, and this is all you know? What’s the rest of their plan? How will they initiate it? How do you know it hasn’t already begun?”

“Well—” I started to say, but I knew he was right. Had I ever been this badly underprepared for anything?

“And how about Number 1?” he asked me. “We’ve heard he’s been in town recently. What have you learned about him after all these years on the same planet with him?”

“You mean other than that he can give a person bad nightmares?”

“What do you know about him in terms of his abilities or physical appearances—”

“Well, he has dreadlocks, red bug eyes, looks like a big giant praying mantis—”

“Always?”

“Well, the List computer says he’s a shape-shifter—”

“So, he could, in theory, look like this?” asked my father, morphing into a twenty-foot-tall carnivorous dinosaur with red bug eyes and dreadlocks.

“Run, Daniel. Run,” he roared.

I didn’t ask. I just did.