Alex drove straight back to school—the last place Charlie or anyone else expected, straight down to the Tech Lab, where the 3-D printer was working away.
He knew Charlie had tried to call 911 to stop him from hurting himself again, but the Game had intercepted the call, so no one would be bothering Alex. It had kept Vanhi and everyone else at bay, too, so Alex could get back to the lab and finish what the Game had been guiding him through, step by step. Charlie was so sure Alex was going to hurt himself again, but that was the least of it. Alex had tried to do the right thing at the spillway, but coming out on the other side of that failed suicide attempt, having seen the wall come at him, having been ready for death and then cheated at the last second, he had found a clarity settling over him. The Game was right: killing himself was the easy way out. He would not disappear into anonymity, another loser gone and forgotten. He would leave a legacy. People would remember him, like the Friends of the Crypt, and shudder.
He took the new parts off the printer and hid them with the rest, waiting to be assembled. The DMT was kicking in. His suicide attempt had been rash, propelled by a jet fuel of shame and anguish, his dick pick spreading through the school, but it had given him an excuse, a way to bow out without letting the Game know he was scared to go through with the larger plan. But now he was glad Charlie had stopped him. He should be thankful. This way was better. It would leave a mark.
He was in God’s hands now.
Vanhi sat on the edge on the brick wall of the east lawn, her laptop open. The computers in the Tech Lab had locked her out. They kept replaying the kid cradling his shattered cat until she couldn’t stand it. She tried the library, but those terminals blanked out one by one. Finally she grabbed her bag from her locker and logged on through her laptop outside, using a VPN and a mobile hot spot. But once inside the Harvard app, she couldn’t touch it. Everything was submitted, time-stamped. Her beautiful essay and perfect GPA taunted her like models on a catwalk, inaccessible, locked.
She picked up her phone dialed the admissions office.
The phone cut off midring and told her:
You shall not pass!
10 Blaxx!!
She tried again, hitting Redial.
You shall not pass!
1000 Blaxx!!
Her breath caught. She knew four hundred Blaxx was a hate brick through the window. What was a thousand? She thought of Kenny and his attack—a car nearly killed him over eighty-one hundred. She couldn’t stop though. She knew she was being impulsive, frantic, but she had to make things right. She had to start with the application and unwind everything backward toward purity. Forgiveness.
She called again.
It rang twice before going dead.
She braced herself.
You shall not pass!
100000 Blaxx!!
One hundred thousand? A queasy fear spread through her. It had jumped to one hundred thousand? In her haste she’d ignored the power of the multiples. What was she at now? Adding quickly: 101,010?
It was mocking her. She recalled her fight with Charlie.
You want the world to be black or white, ones and zeros.
That fucking twisted AI!
It didn’t just want to step on her—it had to pull the wings off first.
But at some point she realized it didn’t matter. Twenty-six hundred Blaxx had gotten Charlie a minor beating with a bat. Eighty-one hundred nearly got Kenny run down by a car. So what did it matter if it was one hundred thousand or ten million? Dead was dead.
So she dialed again because the only way out was through.
The phone rang and rang, and a sickening thought occurred to her. Were Blaxx transferable? Maybe she wasn’t capped by the limit of her own misery. Maybe the bad mojo could spread to her parents, her friends, to Vik, who never sinned a day in his life?
She was about to hang up when a woman answered, “Harvard College Admissions Office.”
Vanhi’s phone read:
Don’t do it.
Rat = Infinite Blaxx
Free Will!!!?
Free will. Vanhi thought that about.
I am Vanhi, goddess of fire. I can illuminate or I can incinerate.
Closing her eyes, Vanhi said, “I need to report something. Computer hacking in the admissions system.”
After a brief pause the lady said, “Okay,” more calmly than Vanhi would have guessed, as if she’d received this call before. “One moment please.”
The call transferred, a series of clicks then banal music. Vanhi felt a steely resolve. She was proud of herself.
When the man answered, she took him through the whole story, and once it started, it poured out. She told him about the Game, the class rankings, messing with the essays and scores. The man listened patiently, with an occasional “Okay” or “Uh-huh.” He asked Vanhi to repeat a couple things, and she could hear him taking notes in the background. He asked her to spell her name, repeat her address, and give her application ID number.
Finally, when Vanhi was done, the man said, “What I’m going to need you to do next is suck my dick.”
Vanhi froze. She felt all the wind go out of her. She didn’t even answer.
“You got that? Suck my dick. Suck it long and hard. Snitches are bitches and bitches are snitches. Know what happens to rats, fuckwad? Do you know? They get fucked and stuffed! Stuffed and fucked! Wanna get fucked and stuffed, rat?”
“No.”
“Too bad. Too bad. It’s out there, man. You already did it. See? You already fucked yourself. Got it, rat?”
The line clicked dead.
Vanhi stared up and down the long wall in either direction. She was alone, but she didn’t feel like she would be for long.