According to the science of game theory, individuals tend to make decisions that favor themselves. This might seem ridiculously obvious, but science is full of things that seem ridiculously obvious yet are far more complex than they appear. Take, for instance, Newton’s greatest achievement, the theory of gravity, which boils down to: “All things that fall, fall down.”

And, like the theory of gravity, game theory is not as simple as it seems. First of all, “game” applies to much more than simple pastimes like Little League, or even Major League, baseball. Game theory stretches to encompass politics, economics, biology—even civilization as a whole—and it can sometimes tip the balance in life-or-death decisions.

The game Nick now played held such life-or-death consequences—for both himself and the world. He knew it, and still he played, because when you’re both a game piece and a player, the only way out is through either victory or defeat. Defeat, in Nick’s case, meant a world in which the Accelerati held all of Tesla’s inventions and, most likely, his life in their hands. Neither of those was an acceptable outcome to Nick.

Vince LaRue was also in the game, although somewhat on the fringe. He had a very different perspective on life-or-death decisions. To him, both states were temporary, and both were a nuisance. He often wished there were a third state of being that wasn’t such a royal pain, but electricity was binary in nature, leaving him only two choices: either positive or negative.

Though Vince did not show it, he was actually pleased when Nick called that night. Sure, Nick was indirectly responsible for Vince’s current binary state, but he was also the driving force behind the most interesting chain of events Vince had ever experienced. After all, the world had almost ended. Perhaps it might almost end again! That was definitely worth the ride.

“Vince, I need your help.” It sounded as if his friend on the other end of the phone was pedaling a bicycle uphill, which, in fact, was the case.

“With what?” Vince asked with a yawn—which was solely for dramatic effect, as the battery did not allow him to be tired.

“Breaking and entering,” Nick said.

This surprised Vince, as Nick was not the burglarizing type. But people change. “I’m insulted you assume I know anything about that.”

“Well, do you?”

“Of course, but I’m still insulted.”

Nick quickly summarized the situation. His brother’s team and their parents had gone out for consolation pizza after losing thirty-three to zero. This gave Nick a window of about two hours to retrieve a garage-sale item from one of those family’s homes.

In the end, it didn’t take much to convince Vince to meet him at Beverly Webb’s house, though Vince made it sound like a major imposition. “The sooner we find all this junk,” he said, “the sooner you’ll stop bugging me, and let me get on with my so-called life.” As he hung up, he felt some satisfaction that this was perhaps the only time in history that the expression “so-called life” was entirely accurate.

The sun had already dropped behind Pikes Peak as Vince rode his bike to the address Nick had given him. The shadow of the Rocky Mountains was now reaching out to blanket Colorado Springs in darkness. Vince loved how quickly night came just east of the Rockies. It fell upon the town like a coffin lid, leaving the populace bewildered until their eyes could adjust.

It was already instant night when he arrived at the boxy tract home at the top of a hill. Vince had come prepared for the job, with two pairs of latex gloves, two LED headlamps on rubber straps, and a set of lock-picking tools that he didn’t actually know how to use. He had put them all into the zippered front pocket of the backpack he now always kept slung over his shoulders. The one that held his literal lifeline.

Nick was standing deep in the bushes at the edge of the property, where he wouldn’t be seen by anyone—unless they knew to look for him.

“I thought you might have changed your mind,” he said as Vince coasted to a stop in front of him.

“Should I have?” Vince asked, not the least out of breath from his uphill pedaling—another benefit of battery-operated existence. He walked his bike behind a bush and leaned it against Nick’s before asking the question that had been nagging at him. “So how come we’re breaking in, instead of negotiating for it?”

“It’s complicated,” Nick said, looking away. “Can we just get this over with, please?”

Vince could have pressed, but he didn’t really care why this mission was different. “Did you find a point of entry?”

“Back door, front door, side garage door. They’re all locked.”

“Doors are never truly locked,” Vince said, until he discovered the nasty double-mortise dead bolts in all three doors. “Except for these,” he amended. “Did you ring the bell?”

“Why would I do that?”

Vince rolled his eyes. Was this obvious only to him? “To find out if there’s a canine presence.”

“Wouldn’t a dog already have heard us?”

“You give them too much credit. You can poke around outside a house for an hour, but until you bang on the wall or ring the bell, most dogs won’t care. But once you do, they care way too much.”

The doorbell yielded nothing but silence from inside, which satisfied Vince. He led the way to the kitchen window—the one least likely to be locked.

“I used to break into neighbors’ homes,” Vince admitted. “Not to take anything, but to watch TV. My mom refuses to spring for the good cable stations.”

The window wasn’t wired with an alarm, and it was only barely latched. Together, Nick and Vince gingerly removed the screen. Then Vince used one of the picking tools as a lever to unfasten the latch.

“Easy peasy,” said Vince once they were standing in the kitchen. “And I’ll deny it if you ever tell anyone I said ‘easy peasy.’”

He stopped short when he saw a cat-food bowl on the floor near the sink. “Uh-oh.”

“What is it?”

“They have a cat. Cats don’t seem to like me anymore.”

This sentiment was punctuated, and confirmed, by the loudest hiss Vince had ever heard. He wouldn’t have been surprised to see a mountain lion in the room with them. But it was just a common house cat sitting on top of the refrigerator.

“Boo!” Vince shouted, and the cat did an amazing feline leap, ricocheting off the hanging lampshade and out of the room. With the cat dispatched, Vince carefully pulled his backpack around so he could unzip the outer pocket. He fished out the small headlamps and handed one to Nick. “Here, put this on.” Once the lamps were strapped to their heads and flicked on, Vince asked, “What is it we’re looking for again?”

“A stain remover,” Nick whispered, as if somehow breaking into an empty house required hushed tones.

“What does it look like?” Vince said, in a defiantly full voice.

“I don’t know,” Nick whispered back. “Nothing at the garage sale looked like a stain remover.”

“Then how are we supposed to find it?”

“I’ll know it when I see it,” said Nick, his volume finally matching Vince’s. “In the meantime, look for something old and…Tesla-like.” Which was actually a helpful suggestion. “Let’s fan out and check the whole house.”

“Technically, I don’t think two people can ‘fan,’” Vince pointed out.

“Fine. You take the ground floor and I’ll go upstairs.”

And although Vince didn’t like being told what to do, he agreed, since that would have been his plan anyway. Nick left, and Vince watched his light bob up the stairs. Vince’s first stop was the laundry room just off the kitchen—which apparently was the cat’s panic room, because it stood on the dryer, back arched and fur on end like a Halloween decoration.

“Boo!” said Vince again, and it fled so quickly it appeared to have vaporized.

There was nothing Tesla-like in the laundry room. Just some liquid detergent, bleach, and a few other cleaning supplies.

In the living room he found a retro Lava lamp, but he wasn’t sure whether or not it was old enough to have belonged to Tesla.

Then he saw a tabloid newspaper lying open on the coffee table—the Planetary Times, one of those papers in which invading aliens and/or long-dead celebrities figured in every headline and photo. But the photo that caught Vince’s eye was something very different.

“Nick!” he called. “Come look at this!”

But Nick, upstairs, must have been too far away to hear.

Just then a bright light began to arc across the room. Headlights! A car was pulling into the driveway.

Vince turned sharply and hurried to get Nick, but he didn’t notice the coatrack. The middle hook snagged the wires extending from his backpack, they were yanked off his neck, and, once more, he became a demonstration of Newton’s famous theory.

This time, Vince didn’t even remember to close his eyes before he died.

Nick didn’t see the headlights or hear the car doors open. The only warning he had were their voices as they stepped out of the car.

“I’m gonna hurl!” Seth said.

“I told you not to eat all that pizza,” said his mother as they walked to the front door.

“I’m gonna hurl!” Seth said again.

“I’ll get you some Pepto-Bismol,” said his mother.

Nick bounded down the stairs. “Vince!” he whispered. “Vince—we gotta go now!”

But Vince wasn’t going anywhere. He was, in fact, cadaverously positioned in the absolute worst place at the absolute worst time. He was lying like a doormat just inside the front door.

Which was now opening.

Dead bodies have been found in the strangest of places. Take the case of the Canadian tourist who, after hotel patrons complained of low water pressure, was found floating in a rooftop water tank. Or the poor soul who left this life, but whose body showed up on Google Maps for the world to see. Then there was the case of a TV series about crime-scene investigation—while shooting an episode about finding someone’s mummified remains in an apartment building, the crew found someone’s actual mummified remains in the apartment building where they were filming.

Beverly Webb and her son, Seth, however, were not considering the prospect of finding a dead body in their foyer when they arrived home that night. Seth was beset by the kind of nausea that can only come from eating thirteen pieces of Everything pizza, and Beverly was focused on getting him to the bathroom before he left a mess that she would have to clean.

She pushed the front door…only to find that it wouldn’t open. Something was in the way.

“I’m gonna hurl!” Seth wailed.

Beverly pushed the door again, with all her might. It wouldn’t budge. Did she really need this? What could possibly be worse than having a kid ready to puke and not being able to get in the front door?

Well, perhaps opening the front door and watching your kid puke all over the dead body in your foyer—but luckily for everyone, she didn’t know about that particular dead body.

“It’s happening!” yelled Seth. “It’s happening now.” He turned to the side, but when he saw that he was about to empty the better part of his digestive tract into the garden his mother had recently planted, he ran back to the car, opened a door, and barfed ten or eleven pieces of partially digested pizza all over the backseat, because he figured that leather was easier to clean than flower petals.

Beverly observed him with the sort of numb wonder that one might have while watching a truly bad dance performance. In the realm of all things possible, why would the universe conspire to deliver this?

She went to her son as a mother must, and patted him gently on the back. She tried not to think about the prospect of having her automotive interior cleaned and detailed, and then she remembered that she did, after all, have a stain remover that worked wonders.

“Better now?” she asked.

“No,” Seth told her, but instead of an encore performance, he ran off toward the house and—wonder of wonders—this time the door opened like it had never been blocked.

Seth was not quite finished, but this time he felt he could make it to the bathroom, which was the preferred location for the tossing of tacos. Even when those tacos were pizza. But what he encountered when he got inside the house was not at all what he expected. He saw one teen dragging another out the back door.

They made eye contact.

“Whoa! Who are you?” Seth said, his spasming stomach temporarily forgotten.

The teen hesitated like a raccoon at a trash can, but then he got on with his business. He was gone in an instant, but his face lingered in Seth’s mind. And before he could call out, his stomach rumbled a demand that could not be ignored.

He turned and released the last of his pizza on the kitchen floor, where the family cat had chosen precisely the wrong moment to stand its ground.

Nick had never been happier to see someone be violently ill. Seth had given him the few additional seconds he needed. Nick had dragged Vince to the side yard, but in the dark, even with the faint shimmering of the aurora up above, he couldn’t find where the wires attached, and he didn’t dare turn on the headlamp he was still wearing. But he did know that water conducted electricity, so rather than mess with the tape on Vince’s back, he shoved the two wires right into Vince’s mouth and pushed his jaw closed.

Vince’s eyes, which were already open, instantly ignited with sentience.

“Don’t talk, don’t open your mouth,” Nick said. “Just bite down on those wires until we’re out of here.

Vince growled at him, but he did as he was told.

Nick could see Beverly inside, tending to her son, and from the sounds that were coming from the open kitchen window, it was clear that the kid was not yet in a state where he could tell her what he’d seen. Nick could only hope that Seth wouldn’t be able to identify him.

Nick and Vince got on their bikes and pedaled away, their mission a failure on every level.