Game Over

Chapter 29





I GUESS YOU’VE got to trust your parents know what’s best for you. Even when they’re in the form of the largest land-based predator the Earth’s ever known and are testing your ability to survive by attempting to kill you.

“Daniel,” boomed my tyrannosaur father, knocking down a huge fern tree as he charged after me. “Here are the rules to this little training exercise—” He cut himself short to lunge at me with his wicked six-inch teeth. I barely managed to leap over a moss-covered boulder and out of reach.

“Each time you survive one of my attempts on your life, you earn a catechism question.”

“What kind of reward is that?!” I panted.

My dad was big into what he called his “catechism”—a way of verbally instructing me with hard-core questions on all manner of philosophical and ethical topics.

“And each correctly answered question—” he roared, stubbing one of his big clawed toes on a spiky cycad plant, “will earn you the next level. Complete all the levels, and today’s training will be complete.”

“And if I don’t complete all the levels?”

“You ever wonder what it would be like to get bitten in half?” he said, stopping and snapping his enormous jaws down at me.

I leaped out of the way and took off in a new direction.

“Okay,” he bellowed. “First catechism question: Give me a Japanese proverb on the subject of the difference between wisdom and memory.”

I knew this one: “Knowledge without wisdom is a load of books on the back of an, um, donkey.” Call me crazy, but even if my dad was conjured up by my own mind, I wasn’t fond of using what my mother would call “coarse” language around him.

“I trust you can see how the saying applies to your current situation.”

I didn’t have a chance to think it through right then. Bam! Dad was now back as his usual self, and we were standing in the future—way in the future by the looks of it. We were in some sort of high-tech, robot-operated assembly plant with silver Honda logos all over the place. Laser saws, titanium rivet guns, and ceramic shears were slicing, dicing, puncturing, folding, and hammering large shapes out of metal, carbon fiber, glass, and plastic all around us.

This was clearly a place for machines, not people. The air was stifling hot and smelled of sulfur, but worse than the air was the noise. Deafening is too weak a word. It felt like hammers landing on the sides of my head. It was too loud to do anything, much less think, and I almost didn’t notice Dad leveling the Opus 24/24 at me again.

I leaped backward, landing on a high-speed conveyor belt as the blast ricocheted off a junction box and hit an assembly robot. The poor thing actually seemed to scream as it burst into a thousand pieces.

I smiled triumphantly back at my father.

I couldn’t hear him, but it was easy enough to read his lips: “You only earn a question when you survive!” was what he said.

I rolled over just in time to notice I was being whisked into an enormous laser cutter.

I thought quickly. I knew from my studies that lasers are made of light and therefore will pass harmlessly through anything that’s perfectly clear. I rearranged my molecules to be transparent to visible radiation, and, sure enough, I passed through the machine and emerged on the other side entirely intact—well, except for my book bag, which I’d kind of forgotten to make invisible with the rest of me.

I swiftly hopped off the conveyor belt and flung the flaming thing to the ground before it burned my back. At least my teachers wouldn’t have to hear that the dog ate my homework.

Suddenly, the machines stopped and quiet returned, except for the ringing in my ears. Dad had paused time once again.

“Congratulations,” he said. “You’ve earned yourself another question. Ready?”

I nodded wearily.

“Who said, ‘Success is 99 percent failure’?”

My mind was blank. I was thinking it was somebody Japanese, but—

“Answer the question, Daniel, or if you’d rather, we can play this level again.”

I racked my brains and did a quick search through the virtual Wikipedia I’d installed in my head. “Um,” I said, playing it cool, so Dad didn’t discover I had kind of, sort of, cheated. “Soichiro Honda, the guy who started the manufacturing company.”

“And I trust you see why that, too, is applicable to your current situation.”

“You mean I should assume Number 1’s going to have some serious failures coming soon because he’s had 99 percent successes so far?”

“I’m saying you can profit from your mistakes.”

“Ah,” I said, not following him, but once again not exactly having enough time to speculate. Because now I was standing on what looked to be a near present-day Tokyo street. Judging by the big white-and-orange concrete barriers lining it, it looked like it was closed off for a Grand Prix street-race course.

“Next question,” Dad continued. “What two words did General MacArthur, supreme commander of Japan in the years after World War II, say summed up the history of failure in war?”

This one I knew all too well.

“Too late,” I said.

Dad nodded and was gone.

My ears were still ringing from the car factory, but I detected a sort of roaring, thunder-like sound in the distance. And it was getting louder by the second.