When the Vindicators stepped out of the darkroom the next morning, the loudspeaker was summoning Charlie and Peter to Mrs. Morrissey’s office for the second time.
They were bleary-eyed and exhausted. They had all told their parents they were spending the night of each other’s house, and the network of symmetric lies had worked.
Now, propelled by fear and desperation to save Vanhi (If she is alive, she has to be alive), they had coded through the night and their virus was almost ready. It was compiling now, and then Kenny would sneak off to a distant location and start it propagating through the system. By their calculations, it would take hours to burrow and spread and insinuate itself into the guts of the God Game, so that the eggs could hatch in enough places that the sweeper bots that read and reread vast libraries of dead code would, with statistical certainty, find the implanted memory. False memories of predictions past, an act of masturbatory confirmation: What I said, is.
The loudspeaker cracked off, and Charlie and Peter exchanged glances. Why would Morrissey be calling them now? The Game was making its move. They went to their lockers to retrieve their devices. Charlie prayed as he did that a message from Vanhi would be waiting, writing back to his text:
r u ok?
Duh yeah quit being such a pussy
But no text was there. Just a million missed calls from Vanhi’s poor frantic mom.
Peter came by with his backpack over his shoulder. “Ready?”
“Not really.”
They walked down the hall together, toward the Dragon’s Lair. The students they shoved past stared at them. One of them stupidly went “Ooooooo-oooooh” while doing a tsk-tsk with her fingers. All the while, Charlie tried not to look up at the obscene number of posters of himself staring back down at them, as far as he could see down the long corridor.
As they walked, Peter whispered, “It’s not going to work.”
“What?”
“Our virus.”
Charlie shushed him. Even with their devices buried in their backpacks, he was paranoid that everything was being heard.
“It already knows. Of course it knows,” Peter said.
“How? We—”
Peter just smiled sadly. “It will see us coming a mile away.”
“You don’t have enough faith in us.”
“You have too much.”
Charlie had sat next to Peter all night, watching him solve problems in the code, just as he had saved them from hacking omnipotence without omniscience.
“If you’re so sure it’s not going to work, why’d you bother helping us?”
“I don’t know, Charlie. I guess I’m trying to be more like you.” Peter considered that. “It’s not much fun.”
They found themselves outside Morrissey’s door.
“Glasses on,” Peter said. “This is gonna be bad.”